Gotham Chamber Opera Announces 2012/2013 Season

Gotham Chamber Opera announces its 2012-2013 season of three productions, featuring two site-specific works. The season begins with GOTHAM @ LPR: ORIENTALE on October 1 and 3, 2012 at (Le) Poisson Rouge and continues with the New York Premiere of Francesco Cavalli's ELIOGABALO(1667) from March 15-29, 2013 at The Box, staged by James Marvel. The season will conclude in June with a production of Daniel Catán's 1988 opera, LA HIJA DE RAPPACCINI (Rappaccini's Daughter), in site-specific venues.

GOTHAM @ LPR: ORIENTALE
Austin McCormick, stage director; Neal Goren, music director
October 1 and 3, 2012 at 8pm, (le) poisson rouge, 158 Bleecker St, NYC
Doors open at 7pm
Tickets are $25 for table seating, $15 for standing room, and are available at www.lepoissonrouge.com or 212.505.FISH (3474).
Gotham Chamber Opera presents an evening of music at the intersection of East and West.
GOTHAM @ LPR: ORIENTALE will include Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, along with music by Rameau, Lully, Szymanowski, Delibes, Schumann, Bizet, John Hadfield, and traditional Armenian music. The artists of Gotham Chamber Opera will be joined by a baroque instrumental ensemble, the dancers of Company XIV, the flute-harp-percussion trio MAYA, Grant Herreid (theorbo and guitar) and Nina Stern (chalumeau and recorder). The cast will include Jennifer Rivera, Maeve Höglund, Michael Kelly, and Zachary Altman.

ELIOGABALO
Music by Francesco Cavalli, Libretto by Aurelio Aureli
James Marvel, director; Grant Herreid, music director; Neal Goren, associate music director
Gala Opening Night on March 15, 2013 at 7:30pm
March 19, 21, 23, 26, 29, 2013 at 8pm, The Box, 189 Chrystie Street
Tickets will go on sale on October 1, 2012 at www.ticketcentral.com, 212-279-4200.
Opera is full of courtesans and lechers and, in the 20th century, outright acts of perversion. (Salome, anyone?) But you have to go back almost 350 years for the work with the most depraved protagonist of all: Eliogabalo, by Francesco Cavalli. Based on the life of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, who reigned from 218 to 222, the opera tells the story of a man who even today remains notorious for his sexual appetites, his appointment of an all-female senate, and his well-deserved assassination. Cavalli (1602-1676) died without ever seeing a performance of the opera, which was written for the Venice festival of 1668 but withdrawn and replaced by another on the same subject. Cavalli's original was rediscovered in 1998 and received its world premiere in 2004 at La Monnaie in Brussels. This March, Gotham Chamber Opera presents Eliogabalo - staged by James Marvel and produced in cooperation with Randy Weiner (Sleep No More) - in one of New York's most decadent nightspots: The Box, on the Lower East Side. Check your morals at the door; this production is unrated! Starring Christopher Ainslie as Eliogabalo, the cast will also include Micaëla Oesta, Susannah Biller, Maeve Höglund, Emily Righter, Daryl Freedman, Randall Scotting, John Easterlin, and Brandon Cedel.

LA HIJA DE RAPPACCINI (Rappaccini's Daughter)
Music by Daniel Catàn, Directed by Rebecca Taichman, Conducted by Neal Goren
June 2013, Venue TBA
Tickets will go on sale on January 1, 2013 at www.ticketcentral.com, 212-279-4200.
Power and corruption, seen from an entirely different point of view, are key themes in the second offering of Gotham's 2012-13 season: Daniel Catán's 1988 opera La hija de Rappaccini (Rappaccini's Daughter). With a libretto by the Mexican Nobelist Ocatvio Paz, based on the classic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the opera tells of a doctor who seeks to protect and control his daughter by keeping her locked in a garden where he is experimenting with poisonous plants. She is immune to them, but a carrier of their danger; when a young student falls in love with her, he is faced with the knowledge that pursuing that love will surely lead to his death. The Mexican-born Catán (1949-2011) composed in a neo-Romantic style, with long melodic lines, Debussy-like harmonies, and rich orchestrations. Though clearly contemporary, La hija de Rappaccini is as appealing as Puccini and Mozart. Also appealing are the contemporary resonances of the 160-year-old story. "An ideal can be made to serve the most horrific and inhumane causes," Catán wrote of his opera. "The 20th century has provided us with more examples than we would ever want." La hija de Rappaccini takes place at that intersection of beauty and danger - so what better place to hear it than in Gotham Chamber Opera's site-specific performances this June under the stars in a New York garden?

Gotham Chamber Opera, now on its 11th season, is the nation's leading opera company dedicated to the highest quality productions of chamber operas rarely performed today. Its mission is to produce vibrant, fully-staged productions of works from the Baroque era to the present that are intended for intimate venues. As the only company committed solely to producing chamber opera, Gotham has a unique brand that is recognized nationally.

Founded by conductor and Artistic Director Neal Goren, Gotham Chamber Opera debuted in 2001 as Henry Street Chamber Opera, with the American premiere of Mozart's Il sogno di Scipione and, in subsequent seasons, produced such works as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Milhaud's Les Malheurs d'Orphee, Bohuslav Martinu's Les Larmes du Couteau and Hlas Lesa, Heinrich Sutermeister's Die schwarze Spinne, Handel's Arianna in Creta, Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring, and Rossini's Il Signor Bruschino. The company renamed itself Gotham Chamber opera and became an independent 501(c) 3 organization in 2003.

In its first ten years, Gotham Chamber Opera has produced eighteen operas, including seven American premieres, two New York City premieres and two world premieres. Gotham Chamber Opera has partnered with notable New York and US institutions, including Lincoln Center Festival and Spoleto USA for the 2005 production of Respighi's La bella dormente nel bosco; the Morgan Library and Museum for an evening of song cycles by Janá?ek and Dvo?ák, Scenes of Gypsy Life, in 2008; and the American Museum of Natural History and the American Repertory Theater for 2010's production of Hadyn's Il mondo della luna, which featured lunar exploration video, developed by the Museum and NASA, and broadcast on the Hayden Planetarium's 180-degree dome.

Gotham Chamber Opera has earned a reputation for showcasing outstanding young singers alongside established professional and world-class directors and choreographers such as Mark Morris (the 2009 production of Hadyn's L'isola disabitata), David Parsons (the New York stage premiere of Astor Piazzola's tango opera, María di Buenos Aires), Karole Armitage (the world premiere of Ariadne Unhinged), Basil Twist (La bella), Christopher Alden (Scipione and Arianna in Creta), and Diane Paulus (Il mondo). In October 2010, Gotham Chamber Opera partnered with director Moisés Kaufmann and his company, Tectonic Theater Project, to co-produce the first United States stage performances of Xavier Montsalvatge's El Gato con Botas at the New Victory Theater. For the 2011-2012 season, Gotham Chamber Opera celebrated its tenth anniversary with the world premiere of Dark Sisters, by composer Nico Muhly, and a revival of Gotham's first production, Mozart's Il sogno di Scipione (1772).

For more information, visit www.gothamchamberopera.org.