Gérard Mortier, the New York City Opera‘s incoming general manager and artistic director, is closing the New York State Theater down next season for much-needed remodeling. As a result, the company will not perform staged opera again until the fall of 2009, when Mortier’s first season will consist of six twentieth-century operas, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice, Olivier Messiaen’s St. Francis of Assisi, and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. Rarely in the history of American opera has the director of a company taken a bigger pair of chances.
Is City Opera’s new boss visionary or crazy–or both? I’m not sure I can answer that one just yet, but I’ll be taking a preliminary stab at the question in my next “Sightings” column, which appears in the “Weekend Journal” section of today’s Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy this morning and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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