Met, English National Opera Collaborate For New Productions

Doctor Atomic will premiere in New York on 13 October, 2008 - marking the first time an opera by Adams will be performed at the Met - and then appear at ENO in February 2009. The Golijov and Minghella commission will be work-shopped by ENO and is tentatively scheduled to premiere at ENO in 2010 and at the Met during the 2011-12 season.

“Our collaboration with ENO increases the potential for artistic success. The combined resources of our companies and schedules allow for greater artistic preparation and development that these new works demand,” said Met General Manager Peter Gelb. “In the case of Doctor Atomic, I believe that this monumental work by John Adams is of such merit that it deserves a production created uniquely for our two stages.”

ENO Artistic Director John Berry said, “ENO is delighted to be continuing its close artistic partnership with the Metropolitan Opera on these challenging projects. Our recent critical and public success with Philip Glass's Satyagraha and previously with John Adams's Nixon in China demonstrates an increasing audience appetite for innovative, contemporary work. To be involved in the creation of a new opera by Golijov and Minghella is a thrilling prospect.”

Argentinean-American composer Osvaldo Golijov will write the music for the new opera commissioned by the Met and co-produced by ENO. Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella, who made his Met debut in 2006 directing an acclaimed staging of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, first seen at ENO in 2005, will write the libretto and direct the production. The Met first announced Golijov’s commission in February 2006 as part of the company’s renewed efforts to commission operas from contemporary composers, present modern masterpieces alongside the classic repertory, and provide a venue for artists to nurture their work.

Ms. Woolcock, who directed the 2002 film version of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer for Channel 4, makes her opera directing debut with the new production of Doctor Atomic. Improbable’s Julian Crouch, who makes his Met debut in 2008 as associate director and designer of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, will design the sets. Tony Award-winning designer Catherine Zuber, who made her Met debut last season with the company’s new production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, will design the costumes and Tony Award-winning artist Brian MacDevitt will be the lighting designer. Alan Gilbert, the newly appointed Music Director Designate of the New York Philharmonic, will make his Met debut conducting the new production. At ENO, the conductor will be Lawrence Renes in his UK opera debut. Gerald Finley will sing the role of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer in both New York and London, reprising his acclaimed portrayal of the title role.

These Met-ENO co-productions are the third and fourth collaborations between the two companies, following Anthony Minghella’s celebrated production of Madam Butterfly that opened the Met’s 2006-07 season, and Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, which opened in London to critical praise in April 2007 and became ENO’s best-selling contemporary work in more than 20 years. Satyagraha premieres at the Met on 11 April, 2008.

The world premiere of Doctor Atomic took place on 1 October, 2005 at the San Francisco Opera. John Adams’s third opera, Doctor Atomic, focuses on the events leading to the first atomic bomb test explosion in the New Mexico desert. The libretto, adapted by Peter Sellars from original documents, memoirs, interviews and other contemporary sources, portrays the conflicting interests and emotions of the individuals involved in the Manhattan Project, particularly those of the scientist in charge, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The San Francisco Chronicle noted after the premiere that Doctor Atomic “stands as a major addition to the operatic repertory of this new century.” The Times of London concurred: “Adams has created a beautiful, provocative work that refreshes the repertoire.”

About Osvaldo Golijov and Anthony Minghella

Osvaldo Golijov is recognized as one of the world’s leading contemporary composers. The recording of the premiere of his composition, La Pasión según San Marcos, which was commissioned by the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, received a Grammy nomination in 2002. His opera Ainadamar, which premiered at Tanglewood in 2005 and at London’s Barbican Arts Centre in 2006, received two Grammy Awards for Best Opera Recording and Best Classical Contemporary Composition. Golijov has collaborated for many years with the Kronos Quartet and the St. Lawrence String Quartet and also with soprano Dawn Upshaw, for whom he has composed numerous works, including the Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, Ainadamar, the cycle Ayre, and a number of arrangements of popular songs. Golijov has recently been named composer-in-residence for the 2007 Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center and is co-composer-in-residence, together with Mark-Anthony Turnage, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the next two seasons.

Anthony Minghella’s writing for stage, television, and radio includes Whale Music, A Little Like Drowning, Made in Bangkok, What If It’s Raining?, Cigarettes and Chocolate, Hang Up, Inspector Morse, and The Storyteller. As a writer and director for film, his work includes Truly Madly Deeply, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain and Breaking and Entering. He has won numerous film awards, including the Academy Award for Best Director in 1996 for The English Patient. He was awarded the CBE in 2001 and has been Chairman of the British Film Institute since 2003. He made his opera debut with English National Opera, directing Madam Butterfly. Minghella is currently working on a film adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, to premiere in 2008.

About the Creators of Doctor Atomic

One of the most critically acclaimed and popular American composers of his generation, John Adams has written in a variety of musical forms, including chamber music, film scores, choral works, tape and electronic pieces, piano pieces, orchestral music, and dramatic works for the stage. His stage works comprise four operas: Nixon in China, first performed in Houston in 1987; The Death of Klinghoffer, which premiered in Brussels in 1991; Doctor Atomic; and A Flowering Tree, based on a folk tale from southern India, which premiered in Vienna in 2006. In addition, he composed a “songplay” in 1995, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and a multi-lingual retelling of the Nativity story, El Niño, written for the celebration of the millenium. His combination of minimalist techniques, rich sonorities and dramatic power has made his works among the most successful by a living composer. Former New Yorker critic Andrew Porter once wrote that Adams is the creator of a “flexible new language capable of producing large-scale works that are both attractive and strongly fashioned. His is a music whose highly polished resonant sound is wonderful.”

A leading director of theatre, opera, and television for more than twenty-five years, Peter Sellars adapted the Doctor Atomic libretto from original sources. He has worked frequently with John Adams, directing many of his world premieres and adapting the libretto for Adams’s A Flowering Tree from south Indian folktales and poems. He has staged more than 100 productions in theatres, opera houses and festivals around the world, including many notable productions of 20th-century operas as well as innovative productions of traditional repertory.

About the Production Team for Doctor Atomic

British director Penny Woolcock received a special jury prize at the Brussels European Film Festival for her first feature film, the 2002 film version of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer; her long-form music video from the film earned her a Grammy Award nomination. Her more recent directorial credits include the films The Principles of Lust (2003) and Mischief Night (2006) and she is widely recognised for her innovative documentaries and television dramas.

Julian Crouch makes his Met debut in the 2007-08 season as associate director and set designer of the Met’s co-production with ENO of Satyagraha. He is a co-founder of Improbable, whose inventive productions have received international acclaim, including the award-winning Shockheaded Peter, which opened to critical and popular success in London and New York. Crouch’s sets for Doctor Atomic will incorporate original designs by video artists Fifty Nine Productions Ltd.

Three-time Tony Award-winning costume designer Catherine Zuber made her Met debut in the 2006-07 season with the hit production of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia directed by Bartlett Sher. Her costume design credits include productions at Lincoln Center Theater, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, the Guthrie Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Houston Grand Opera and Glimmerglass Opera, among others. Ms. Zuber won Tony Awards for her costumes for Coast of Utopia, Part One: Voyage in 2007 (for which she also won a Drama Desk Award); for Awake and Sing! in 2006; and for The Light in the Piazza in 2005.

Tony Award-winning lighting designer Brian MacDevitt has created the lighting for numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions and also for major regional theatre and dance companies around the country. He won the Tony Award, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia: Part I, Voyage, and Tony Awards for the Broadway productions of The Pillowman and Into the Woods. Upcoming productions include Cymbeline with Lincoln Center Theater and A Catered Affair on Broadway. -- www.eno.org