Project

Pärt / O'Regan
featuring

L'abbé Agathon (operatic world premiere)
Music by Arvo Pärt
Performed by Lauren Flanigan
Directed by Sophie Calle
English translation by Cori Ellison
Film installation by Sophie Calle
Featuring AOP string ensemble
J. David Jackson, conductor

After the Rain and Liturgy
(two pas de deux dances)
Based on Spiegel im Spiegel
and Fratres by Arvo Pärt
Performed by Wendy Whelan, Albert Evans and Sébastien Marcovici
Choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon

The Wanton Sublime (excerpts from AOP-commissioned and developing opera)
Music by Tarik O’Regan
Libretto by Anna Rabinowitz, based on her book
Featuring AOP string ensemble
J. David Jackson, conductor

About Part/O'Regan:

Pärt / O'Regan is an evening three stream-lined music-theatre works featuring celebrated composers Arvo Pärt and Tarik O’Regan.

The program features Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's L'abbé Agathon in an operatic version commissioned by AOP. L'abbé Agathon, originally composed for soprano Barbara Hendricks and the Ensemble de Violoncelles de Beauvais has been transformed by AOP, with Pärt's supervision, into a chamber opera with a commissioned English translation by Cori Ellison and re-imagined by French visual artist Sophie Calle, with a film installation by Ms. Calle. AOP’s commissioning fund is comprised in part from a grant from the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation. The monodrama L'abbé Agathon marks the first completed opera in a series of monodrama projects that AOP will produce throughout 2009, entitled The Peter Jay Sharp Solo Project.

The program also includes a preview of music from AOP-Artistic Partner and current Grammy nominee (best classical and best choral album Threshold of the Night) Tarik O’Regan. AOP has commissioned O’Regan to set poet Anna Rabinowitz’s book-length poem The Wanton Sublime.

The program also boasts dancers from the New York City Ballet, Wendy Whelan, Albert Evans and Sébastien Marcovici, in choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's Liturgy set to Pärt's Fratres and After the Rain set to Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel.

About the Artists

Arvo Pärt (composer)
Arvo Pärt was born in 1935 in Paide, Estonia. After studies with Heino Eller’s composition class in Tallinn, he worked from 1958 to 1967 as a sound engineer for Estonian Radio. In 1980 he emigrated with his family to Vienna and then, one year later, travelled on a DAAD scholarship to Berlin, where he has lived ever since. As one of the most radical representatives of the so-called ‘Soviet Avant-garde’, Pärt’s work passed through a profound evolutionary process. His first creative period began with neo-classical piano music. Then followed ten years in which he made his own individual use of the most important compositional techniques of the avant-garde: dodecaphony, composition with sound masses, aleatoricism, collage technique. Nekrolog (1960), the first piece of dodecaphonic music written in Estonia, and Perpetuum mobile (1963) gained the composer his first recognition by the West. In his collage works ‘avant-garde’ and ‘early’ music confront each other boldly and irreconcilably, a confrontation which attains its most extreme expression in his last collage piece Credo (1968). But by this time all the compositional devices Pärt had employed to date had lost all their former fascination and begun to seem pointless to him. The search for his own voice drove him into a withdrawal from creative work lasting nearly eight years, during which he engaged with the study of Gregorian Chant, the Notre Dame school and classical vocal polyphony. In 1976 music emerged from this silence – the little piano piece Für Alina. It is obvious that with this work Pärt had discovered his own path. The new compositional principle used here for the first time, which he called tintinnabuli (Latin for ‘little bells’), has defined his work right up to today. The ‘tintinnabuli principle’ does not strive towards a progressive inrease in complexity, but rather towards an extreme reduction of sound materials and a limitation to the essential.

Tarik O'Regan (composer)
Born in London in 1978, two-time British Composer Award winner Tarik O'Regan was educated at Oxford University, completing his postgraduate studies at Cambridge. His 2008 recording for the Harmonia Mundi label, Threshold of Night, debuted at #10 in the American Billboard® chart and received two GRAMMY® nominations (Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance). Prior releases include Scattered Rhymes, also on Harmonia Mundi, and his 2006 debut disc, VOICES.

O’Regan divides his time between New York City and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts, having previously held the Fulbright Chester Schirmer Fellowship in Music Composition at Columbia University and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard. His compositions have been performed internationally by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Los Angeles Master Chorale. He is currently working on an operatic version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in development with American Opera Projects in New York and OperaGenesis at the Royal Opera House, London. www.tarikoregan.com

Sophie Calle (director / visual artist - L'Abbé Agathon)
In her conceptual and poetic works, Sophie Calle consciously conceals the borders between art and life, fiction and reality, and between the private and public. With self-established behavioral instructions and rituals, she transforms her daily life with a series of performances, usually executed as a combination of texts and photographs. She acts as the pursuer (La Suite Venétienne [The Venetien Suite], 1983), as the voyeur (Les Dormeurs [The Sleepers], 1980; L’Hôtel, 1981 [published 1984 as a book]), or places herself directly under observation (The Shadow, 1981; 20 Years later, 2001). In the case of her photographs, which operate as pieces of evidence for heightening the authenticity of told stories, Calle experiments with different forms of photographic documentation: street photography, scene-of-the-crime photography, reproduction work connected with scientific research, archival specimen photography, and the imagery of automatic surveillance cameras. In spite of this collection of photographic circumstantial evidence, the stories are ambivalent, and texts and images alternatingly refer to one another while the status of their reality remains uncertain.

Lauren Flanigan (soprano - L'Abbé Agathon)
Named by TIME Magazine as "the thinking man's diva" and awarded by ACSAP and the Center for Contemporary Opera for her commitment to performing the works of living composers, Lauren Flanigan has established herself as a unique musical presence in the world today. She has been featured on "Live from Lincoln Center" in telecasts of I Lombardi (opposite Luciano Pavarotti), The Richard Tucker Gala, Lizzie Borden and Central Park, which was written for her. She has performed at many of the worlds leading opera houses including La Scala, Teatro San Carlo, Bayerische Staatsoper, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, the New York City Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera. Recordings include: Symphony No. 6 Plutonian Ode written for her by Philip Glass, The Cabildo, Merrymount, Peter Ibbetson, Die Liebe der Danae, Sun Cantata, Frau Margot and Monologues, written for her by Thomas Pasatieri. DVD’s include Nabucco, The Ghosts of Versailles, and the motion picture Death to Smoochy where she appears as the Ice Skating Opera Diva. Upcoming: Antony & Cleopatra and Rienzi at Carnegie Hall and the world premiere of Séance on a Wet Afternoon by Stephen Schwartz.

Caroline Worra (soprano - The Woven Child)
Caroline Worra has performed with New York City Opera and Glimmerglass Opera for 6 seasons and has just joined the roster of the Metropolitan Opera. She was nominated for a Grammy for The Best Opera Recording for The Mines of Sulphur and her recording of The Greater Good was just released. She will be making another recording of a World Premiere Cantata, Blizzard Voices, in Omaha next year. Other highlights include Amy (Little Women) - NYCO/Glimmerglass, Donna Elvira - NYCO, Donna Anna and Musetta - Connecticut Grand, Arianna - Gotham Chamber, The Merry Widow and Micaela - Opera Memphis, Semele - Long Beach, Curly's Wife - Kansas City, Adina - Cedar Rapids, The Countess - Chattanooga, Anne Trulove - Teatro Massimo Bellini (Sicily), and two U.S. Tours with Western Opera Theatre as Violetta and Rosalinda. Future Engagements include Mrs. Naidoo (cover) in Satyagraha - The Met, Constance in Dialogues - Kentucky, and Marguerite in Faust -  Opera Memphis. www.carolineworra.com

Read TIme Out NY's recent feature on Caroline Worra!

Jan 11-12, 2009
WORLD PREMIERE
in partnership with Works & Process at the Guggenheim
Peter B. Lewis Theatre
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY
Featuring AOP string ensemble
J. David Jackson, conductor

Tickets and info...