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The Guardian
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pierre Audi obituary
Based successively in London, the Netherlands and France, Pierre Audi, who has died suddenly aged 67, was over a period of 45 years the indefatigable procreator of a sizeable body of innovative work, largely centred around the operatic stage. As founder of the Almeida theatre in Islington, London, artistic director of the Dutch National Opera (formerly Netherlands Opera) and latterly of the Aix-en-Provence festival, he relished the charting of unknown territory, passionately believing that art forms, not least that of opera, need to be constantly renovated and challenged. Having acquired the derelict 19th-century building – formally owned by the Salvation Army, and later a toy factory – in Almeida Street, off Upper Street, Audi spearheaded a public campaign to reopen it as a theatre, running it as both a producing company and a receiving house from its opening in 1980 until Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent took over as artistic directors in 1990. Under Audi's stewardship it rapidly established itself as a hotbed of avant-garde activity. The Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music and Performance, held at the theatre and at other local venues, offered the works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman, Michael Finnissy, Lukas Foss and other modernists, performed by artists including Astor Piazzolla, Yvar Mikhashoff and the London Sinfonietta. Spoken theatre, often of a physical nature, was provided by touring companies such as Complicité and Cheek by Jowl, while Peter Brook's Bouffes du Nord company (an inspiration for Audi's project) appeared in 1982. The international dimension was crucial for Audi. Several new operas were commissioned and/or performed there, among them John Casken's Golem, directed by Audi and premiered in 1989, and the festival successfully demonstrated that there was a market for contemporary music and theatre. Audi was barely 30 when he was headhunted by Netherlands Opera in 1988. He had never set foot in the Netherlands and had never directed opera on a large stage. Facing down objections from members of the Dutch cultural establishment, the Netherlands Opera board placed their faith in his reputation for artistic originality and a cosmopolitan perspective, together with the ability to realise such a programme on a relatively modest budget. There he continued to espouse contemporary music, commissioning Alfred Schnittke's Life With an Idiot (1992) and works from Dutch composers such as Louis Andriessen, Michel van der Aa, Guus Janssen and others. The overall programme, however, was broad and eclectic, from Gluck, Mozart and Wagner (he staged the first production of the Ring in the Netherlands) to Schoenberg and Messiaen. Some of the world's leading directors, including Harry Kupfer, Peter Sellars, Peter Stein and Stefan Herheim, were lured to Amsterdam by Audi. In September 2018 he took over the direction of the Aix-en-Provence festival, continuing to foster the principle of a 'dialogue between the arts', combining music, the visual arts and video, with musical theatre and non-theatrical events all part of the mix. Despite the ravages of Covid in 2020, the festival managed to mount the premiere of Kaija Saariaho's opera Innocence, about the psychological aftermath of a school shooting, the following year. Roland Wood (Oedipus) and Susan Bickley (Jocasta) in Thebans, 2014, by Julian Anderson and Frank McGuinness at the London Coliseum. The English National Opera production was directed by Pierre Audi. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian Other significant stagings followed, including, in 2023, George Benjamin's Picture a Day Like This (a co-production with Covent Garden and other houses), Philip Venables/Ted Huffman's The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (a co-production with the Manchester international festival and others) and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera directed by Thomas Ostermeier in collaboration with the Comédie-Française. Pledging to extend the reach of the festival geographically, Audi enabled the director Romeo Castellucci to stage Mahler's Resurrection Symphony as an 'exhumation of a mass grave' in the newly reopened Stadium de Vitrolles – a graffiti-daubed, black concrete box on the outskirts of Marseilles. He also initiated a June festival with free entry, as 'a gift to the city', featuring an open-air concert attracting 5,000 people on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix. Born in Beirut to a Lebanese banker, Raymond Audi, and Andrée Michel Fattal, he went to school in Paris after his family moved to France and then took a degree in Oriental studies at Exeter College, Oxford; he was still only 22 when he founded the Almeida theatre. Losing no time in establishing his credentials as an imaginative, risk-taking impresario, he seized the opportunity to gravitate further towards his first love, opera, in Amsterdam. At Netherlands Opera he enjoyed a fruitful power-sharing arrangement with the administrative director, Truze Lodder, who established a tough financial discipline for the company. Despite its gleaming new home in the Muziektheater, the company was, when Audi took over, labouring under a huge deficit and a crisis of credibility, being described as a 'shambles' by critics. Over the course of his remarkably long career with the company (he remained there for 30 years), Audi, along with Lodder, raised its status to an exemplary level, his defiantly progressive tendencies and hunger for innovation earning him respect and support from the public. There too he was able to develop his own career as an opera director, both in Amsterdam and worldwide. His visual aesthetic tended towards the spare and the abstract. In his Ring with the designer George Tsypin (1999), traditional props were frequently abandoned, replaced by symbolic elements, such as chains dangling from the ceiling in the first scene of Das Rheingold, foreshadowing the slavery that capitalistic acquisition brings in its wake. The already broad stage of the Musiektheater was extended, sweeping round to encircle the orchestra, which became part of the set, reaching right down into the audience space. Some seats were closely adjacent to the action; other audience members sat in 'adventure seats', suspended on gantries high above the stage, the aim being to draw in spectators, in the manner of Greek drama. The incipient brutalism of his austere style reached its nadir in the provocative, grotesquely sexualised Flower Maidens' costumes in the 2018 Munich Parsifal, designed by Georg Baselitz. But Audi was also capable of spectacular effects, as in his production of Monteverdi's Orfeo (1997), with the waters of the Styx bursting into flames as Orfeo crosses it: a stunning evocation of Pluto's infernal kingdom. Concurrently with the post at Netherlands Opera, Audi held the artistic directorship of the Holland festival (2004–14), where works in multiple genres were presented in conjunction with such artists as William Kentridge, Tacita Dean and Ryoji Ikeda, and by directors including Sam Mendes and Ivo Van Hove. In 2014 he directed the world premiere of Julian Anderson's Thebans (with a libretto by Frank McGuinness) at English National Opera. He also founded the interdisciplinary Opera Forward festival in 2015, in the same year taking over the artistic direction of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where he commissioned work across various art forms. He is survived by his wife, Marieke Peters, and his children, Alexander and Sophia, his brother, Paul, and sister, Sherine. Pierre Audi, impresario and opera director, born 9 November 1957; died 3 May 2025
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67
Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario whose transformation of a derelict London lecture hall into the cutting-edge Almeida Theater was the opening act in a long career as one of the world's most eminent performing arts leaders, died on Friday night in Beijing. He was 67. His death, while he was in China for meetings related to future productions, was announced on social media by Rachida Dati, the minister of culture in France, where Mr. Audi had been the director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival since 2018. Mr. Audi was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, which opened in 1980 and swiftly became a center of experimental theater and music. He spent 30 years as the leader of the Dutch National Opera, and for part of that time was also in charge of the Holland Festival. For the past decade, he had been the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. All along, he continued working as a director at theaters around the world. Last year, when the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels cut ties with Romeo Castellucci halfway through his new production of Wagner's four-opera 'Ring,' the company turned to Mr. Audi as one of the few artists with the knowledge, experience and cool head to take over such an epic undertaking at short notice. 'He profoundly renewed the language of opera,' Ms. Dati wrote in her announcement, 'through his rigor, his freedom and his singular vision.' Pierre Raymond Audi was born on Nov. 9, 1957, in Beirut, Lebanon, to Andrée (Fattal) Audi and Raymond Audi. His father worked for the family bank, which was founded in the mid-19th century. Mr. Audi was raised in Paris and in Beirut, where he started a cinema club at school and invited directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jacques Tati to speak. In a 2016 interview with The New York Times, he spoke about the formative influence of Middle Eastern storytelling traditions on his work. 'Coming from the place I come from, a story is the start of everything,' he said. 'Through 20th-century music, I discovered the chaos, which is the other side. I think my life is about working a path through those contradictions.' He was educated at the University of Oxford, where he directed a production of Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens' in 1977. A few years before, Mr. Audi had led a group that purchased an early-19th-century building in the Islington neighborhood of London that, over its varied history, had housed a display of Egyptian mummies and served as a music hall, a Salvation Army facility and a factory that made carnival novelties. By the time Mr. Audi discovered it, it had fallen into disrepair. But he saw its potential as a performance venue, and he led a fund-raising effort to renovate it and reopen it as a theater with a few hundred seats. (He would later link his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.) Through the 1980s, the Almeida developed a hip reputation, with homegrown and touring productions that offered early boosts to the careers of now-prominent artists like Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Phelim McDermott, Deborah Warner and Simon McBurney. The Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music became renowned as a presenter of new and commissioned operas. During his tenure at the Dutch National Opera, beginning in 1988, the house also became a hotbed of commissions and progressive stagings, including collaborations with visual artists like Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz. There, Mr. Audi directed the Netherlands' first full production of the 'Ring' and a cycle of Monteverdi's operas. 'The thing about Pierre was, it wasn't going to be traditional, old-fashioned opera,' said the opera administrator Matthew Epstein, who advised Mr. Audi during that early period. 'It was the expanding of the repertoire both backward — toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for — and forward, toward so much contemporary opera.' Mr. Audi is survived by his wife, the artist Marieke Peeters; his children, Alexander and Sophia; his brother, Paul Audi; and his sister, Sherine Audi. In Aix-en-Provence, Mr. Audi was able to present just one season before the pandemic hit. In 2020, when the festival's performances were canceled, he managed to hold rehearsals for 'Innocence,' a new work by Kaija Saariaho, with just a piano. And he was able to shift the premiere seamlessly to 2021. His true gift was as a presenter, guiding works to the stage like 'Innocence,' widely acclaimed as one of the finest operas of the 21st century. Mr. Audi's own stagings tended to look timeless and stylized. They could feel a tad bland, but they also had an appealing modesty, showcasing the music and performers while his own work receded into the background. When he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2010, with Verdi's 'Attila,' a collaboration with the fashion designer Miuccia Prada and the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times that the production was 'not entirely successful, and sometimes weird' but was 'intriguing and full of resonant imagery.' Mr. Audi had a flair for the kind of event-driven presenting that reigns at festivals like Aix and raw spaces like the Armory, where he hosted longtime collaborators like William Kentridge and Peter Sellars; wrapped seating around the New York Philharmonic for a performance of Saariaho pieces; and brought spectacles like Claus Guth's 2023 staging of Schubert songs, which filled the Drill Hall with field-hospital beds. In 2019 in Amsterdam, he put on a three-day bonanza of chunks from Karlheinz Stockhausen's 29-hour, seven-opera cycle, 'Licht,' including Stockhausen's most notorious invention: a string quartet playing in helicopters. Last year, he brought to the Armory a smaller (and helicopter-free) selection, a surprisingly elegant, restrained show of lighting effects and immersive sound. In 2022, a half-century after he stumbled on the building that became the Almeida, Mr. Audi opened another new-old venue, for the Aix Festival: the Stadium de Vitrolles, a massive, graffiti-strewn black concrete box built in the 1990s that had been sitting abandoned on a Provençal hilltop for more than two decades. 'I saw the height of it,' he said, 'and I immediately looked at the real estate being very similar to the Armory.' Mr. Audi took a risk, planning the first production in the stadium without knowing whether its renovation would be ready in time, and without conducting an acoustic test in the space. But 'Resurrection,' Mr. Castellucci's staging of Mahler's Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave, was both sober and thrilling, the kind of music theater you couldn't find anywhere else. Mr. Audi didn't rest on his laurels after that. As always, he tried something different. In 2023, he presented a trio of films accompanying Stravinsky's epochal early ballets, played live with orchestra. 'The important thing,' he said soon after 'Resurrection' opened, 'is not to imitate what we did this year.'
RTÉ News
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Irish Composer Michael Gallen wins world's top new opera prize
Irish composer Michael Gallen has been awarded the 2025 FEDORA Opera Prize, the world's largest award for new opera, for his work The Curing Line. Presented at a ceremony at the Vienna State Opera on Saturday April 26th, the prize of €100,000 is the world's largest award for opera. Awarded bi-annually for the best new opera in Europe, the winner is selected by an international jury of leading opera producers including the directors of the Paris Opera, Dutch National Opera, Danish National Theatre and the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and presented in partnership with Opera Europa, which represents over 170 opera houses and festivals across 43 countries. The Curing Line, co-directed by Gallen and American choreographer Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern, explores themes of healing, cultural loss, and environmental collapse. Drawing on ethnographic research into Ireland's folk healing traditions, the opera tells the story of a woman who inherits a life-saving ancestral power but loses her ability to use it. The work aims to question the separation between humans and the natural world, and what is lost in that divide. New Irish opera "The Curing Line" was awarded the prestigious FEDORA Opera Prize at a special ceremony in Vienna at the weekend. Congratulations to Michael Gallen and everyone at the Straymaker company for their brilliant achievement @dfatirl @FEDORA_Platform — Embassy of Ireland, Vienna (@IrlEmbVienna) April 28, 2025 Jury Chair Birgitta Svendén praised the opera as a "deeply immersive and multisensory" experience that "resonates with the audience of tomorrow." Fedora President Stéphane Argyropoulos added that the project "redefines the operatic genre by fusing tradition with multimedia innovation." Speaking at the ceremony, Michael Gallen said that "...for our independent, artist-led work to be selected as the winner of the award gives us a huge rush of affirmation that will carry us forward not just with this project but with all of our future plans and ambitions" Originally from Monaghan and now based in County Mayo, Gallen has earned acclaim for blending contemporary classical music with multidisciplinary performance. His 2021 opera Elsewhere was also nominated for the FEDORA Prize. The Curing Line, featuring a bilingual libretto by Gallen and poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin, is slated to premiere at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2026 before embarking on an international tour.
New York Times
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Opera Has a Sustainability Problem. One Company Wants to Fix It.
Opera is an art form made of other art forms: music, theater, dance, visual art, film. It brings together performers, creative teams and audiences from around the world for what, at its finest, is a glorious but ephemeral experience. Imagine, then, the carbon footprint for this grandest of performing arts. It's not just about the globalized nature of opera today. If companies want to go green, they have to think beyond plane tickets to how productions are made, what materials are used in costumes and sets, and how the theater operates. They have to think about what food they serve, what dishes they use, and whether water comes from glass or plastic bottles. They even have to think about how audience members, often thousands at a time, travel to and from performances. In an age of tighter budgets and rising expenses, it can be difficult for houses to know where to start. But the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam is setting an example with the great leaps it has made in recent years toward sustainability. The dream, distant for now, is carbon neutrality; the reality may still be a work in progress, yet changes have been adopted with remarkable speed. Under the banner of its Green Deal program, the opera house has brought sustainability to virtually every corner of its operation. This year, it even updated its contracts for creative teams to include a commitment that their productions use at least 50 percent recycled material. 'If an artist says, 'Sorry, but I'm not interested in your Green Deal,' that's fine,' said Sophie de Lint, who has been the director of the Dutch National Opera since 2018. 'We shake hands and move on. But that hasn't happened. People are actually really open and want to go there.' The Dutch National Opera, to be clear, has the advantage of its Green Deal efforts being backed by generous state funding, as well as the luxury of operating in the Netherlands, a country where sustainability is woven into daily life. It would be a much more difficult undertaking in the United States, where climate change is comparatively politicized and financially starved opera companies barely have the structural wiggle room to get rid of their plastic Champagne flutes. De Lint, who was the artistic director of the Zurich Opera House in Switzerland before moving to Amsterdam, said that the city's culture is 'why I came to work here.' 'It's a country where you don't think about what was better before,' she added. 'It's about what could be better tomorrow.' Kenza Koutchoukali, a 36-year-old Dutch director who is staging the premiere of 'Oum' at the company's Opera Forward Festival this year, said that the urgency of fighting climate change is 'something that everyone my age is aware of.' The Dutch National Opera took an early step toward sustainability in 2019, when it received local certificates for the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, better known as BREEAM. Similar to LEED certification in the United States, it requires things like installing solar panels, finding green methods of waste disposal and implementing programs to promote biodiversity. The opera house, for example, built boxes for bird nests, and gardens to attract and nurture local insects. But that was just the start. The pandemic, de Lint said, helped opera companies see that entrenched habits could change quickly. In 2021, she hired a sustainability coordinator, Julie Fuchs (who, in a running joke and slight source of confusion, shares her name with the soprano Julie Fuchs). De Lint likes to refer to her as a coach because, rather than dictate changes, 'she so brilliantly coaches all of us.' Fuchs got to work developing a way to calculate the carbon footprint of everything that goes into a performance at the opera house. In 2022, she discovered that the biggest sources of emissions were audience members and refreshments at the theater's bars. It's difficult to move the needle on audience habits outside the theater: whether they commute by car, train, bike or even plane. But the Dutch National Opera was able to quickly change how it operated internally. The company, Fuchs said, bases its policies on the Paris Agreement, the international climate treaty that was signed in 2016 and aims to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Much of Fuchs's job has involved collecting data, which guides many of her targets for the opera house. For example, she found a way to determine whether going paperless in the office would be just as harmful as printing everything because of its reliance on cloud storage. (It's not.) Through calculations like that, the company has arrived at changes throughout the building. It began offering only vegetarian options for food. Even bitterballen, the traditional Dutch snack of stew croquettes, are now made with mushrooms instead of beef. At one banquet with high-level donors, diners were deep into their meal before they realized, and asked why, there were no fish or meat dishes. 'They ended up eating all the bread,' de Lint said. 'It was a reminder that you really need to communicate, but it also takes some time to change habits.' The theater's bar doesn't use any disposable dishes, and there isn't a plastic bottle in sight. Inside and out, the building is outfitted with LED lights. And for staff, air travel has been drastically reduced. 'Now I have no points,' Bob Brandsen, the house's technical director, said playfully. Directors also travel less than they used to. Ideally, they do what they can by video call, then come to Amsterdam for a long stretch before opening night. It's more complicated for singers, some of whom are used to leaving town on days off, often to visit family. That could limit the artists wanting to appear at the house; some are known to balance their work with caregiving or needing to be close to their children. 'Amsterdam is a hyper-international, multicultural city, and I want us to remain an international opera house,' de Lint said. 'But we have to try to do this in the most responsible way, and again, you must have this conversation with artists, as early as possible.' It is also crucial to discuss sustainability efforts with creative teams early, even before they sign their contracts to take on a production. To help them reuse materials, Fuchs has worked to create a database of props, costumes and more that the Dutch National Opera keeps in storage. The Green Deal also provides artists with a pyramid-shaped diagram of building materials. At the top is the worst sustainability offender: aluminum. (One suggested replacement is steel, which is less harmfully extracted and can also be recycled.) Near the bottom is wood, a renewable resource, and even better is something generic from another production that can simply be used again. De Lint said the Green Deal has also affected how a season is planned, with a move toward what she called 'short-term programming.' If a project doesn't seem to be working out, if artistic vision and sustainability goals appear irreconcilable, 'we can be a bit radical and say 'No, we are not doing this anymore.'' 'It's tough,' she said, 'but it's important.' There is no exact template for how the house's policies work. Approaches are as varied as the repertoire, from a new chamber opera to Puccini's enormous 'Il Trittico,' directed by Barrie Kosky last season. At any rate, the company learns more with each production. 'Basically,' Brandsen said, 'we're making prototypes every time.' A notable case was Ellen Reid's 'The Shell Trial,' which premiered at the Opera Forward Festival last year. As a work about climate change, it also aspired to be as close to carbon-neutral as possible. But it hit a snag when the creative team decided it wanted fire and ice in the production. Fuchs said a simple solution would have been to say no. Instead, she began to research the carbon footprint of using gas to light a fire onstage. The company could purchase 'green' gas, but it would have to be shipped from Belgium. Then she found that it would not be much of a problem to use the local gas, but to minimize emissions the amount would have to be reduced. The artists agreed to cut it by 50 percent, which satisfied them as well as Fuchs's goals. 'We try to do this for every project,' de Lint said. 'I'm not saying it always succeeds, but we are really trying.' For the Opera Forward Festival this year, the house challenged itself to present three productions, all premieres, on its main stage using sustainable methods. It began on March 14 with 'We Are the Lucky Ones,' for eight singers and a large orchestra, and continued the next week with 'Oum' and 'Codes,' an immense work conceived by the director Gregory Caers. There were signs of the Green Deal throughout. Both 'We Are the Lucky Ones' and 'Oum' were performed on a shallow stage, and designed with the kind of portability that could allow them to be assembled and struck quickly, but also to travel widely, whether to an opera house or a concert hall. Koutchoukali said that because of the guidelines, she knew to avoid materials like silk in the costumes and scenic design for 'Oum.' That opera's score, by Bushra El-Turk, wasn't printed until it was in its most final form. But, she said, it wasn't a problem. 'That's the goal, right?' she added. 'With a leading opera house like this, you let it become part of the work, and eventually it becomes the culture.' Caers was hoping for a similar cultural shift with 'Codes,' which is performed by a cast of about 170 singing and dancing students projecting sheer energy from a bare stage. 'Of course, we have an ecologic way of building a performance, but there's more,' he said. 'When we gather and talk about this, we create a dialogue with these youngsters that, maybe, they take to their kitchen tables at home. And slowly these waves begin to change the world a little bit.' For all the optimism at the Dutch National Opera, people there acknowledge that a lot of work remains, along with an open question about how other houses can adopt their own version of the Green Deal. Fuchs went straight from an interview in Amsterdam to Barcelona, Spain (by train of course), to share her findings at the latest Opera Europa conference. And through co-productions, the company's peers will naturally take on its practices. 'This work is easier with others next to you,' Fuchs said. 'We all know that it's going to take years, that we're at the bottom of a mountain that we need to climb. But we just need to start.'
New York Times
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘We Are the Lucky Ones' Gives Voice to a Generation
Theaters are never truly dark. In between performances, a simple floor lamp is placed onstage and switched on. It's called a ghost light, and depending on whom you ask, it's either a practical safety measure or a way to ward off spirits. Some say it actually welcomes them. As audience members entered the auditorium of the Dutch National Opera on Friday for the world premiere of 'We Are the Lucky Ones,' they were greeted by a ghost light that, true to its history, was open to interpretation. For one, it was a signal of artifice. 'We Are the Lucky Ones' may be a moving work of music theater, but it is, ultimately, theater: a space for storytelling and reflection. The ghost light, though, also had a hint of the supernatural, summoning eight singers to an uncanny, purgatorial space so they could share their secrets, regrets and worries for the future. Their stories are, for the most part, true. 'We Are the Lucky Ones,' with music by Philip Venables and a libretto by Ted Huffman and Nina Segal, is based on interviews with about 80 people born between 1940 and 1949, distilled into a headlong rush through time. What emerges, in an opera as compact and overwhelming as 'Wozzeck,' is a portrait of a generation told with compassion, wisdom and artfulness. You can imagine a version of this story as an indictment of the age group that, as one character admits, 'made a mess of things.' But while opera thrives on simplicity, with love blossoming over the few minutes of an aria, 'We Are the Lucky Ones' is anything but simple. Venables and Huffman, who are emerging as one of the great opera partnerships today, have previously created works of layered meaning: 'Denis & Katya' (2019) raised complicated questions about the internet and storytelling; 'The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions' (2023), about history and community. Here, working with Segal, a playwright, on her first opera, they focus on a specific age group, but more than that they are interested in the middle class. The interviews were limited to countries in Western Europe and Scandinavia, as well as the United States. Places, in other words, that enjoyed a golden age of plenty in the aftermath of World War II. The creators, indebted to the literature of Annie Ernaux and Karl Ove Knausgaard, aspire to broad history through personal stories. It's an impossible task in the 100 minutes of their opera, but by homing in on the middle class, they connect the dots of shared experience while also exploring how a generation shaped and became entwined with modern capitalism. Huffman and Segal's libretto moves quickly through over 60 scenes, some just seconds long, performed by a cast of eight singers who inhabit a wide variety of characters, regardless of gender or race. When they come together, it is most often to express a common experience: buying a house, going on vacation, dying. Along the way, the creators of 'We Are the Lucky Ones' push the boundaries of opera, and not because it calls on its performers to speak with actorly skill. With 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' used for the curtain call and exit music, you get the impression that orthodoxy isn't the point. But this work, while plotless, is undoubtedly operatic in the way it elevates everyday life to the realm of poetry, expressed in a graceful balance of head and heart. Beginning in 1940 and ending in the present, the opera reflects on historical events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and Y2K, as well as the signposts of life itself: Characters are born, become parents, fall in love with someone else in midlife or lose a spouse, wonder why their knees no longer work. They also worry about work and politics, about climate and the possibility that they wasted their lives on anxiety and self-loathing. The libretto is plain-spoken, but, like a Broadway lyric by Sheldon Harnick, sings because of its simplicity. Speaking, singing and dancing for nearly the entire running time, the cast gets more than the usual workout. (Same for the orchestra, the Residentie Orkest, grandly characterful under the baton of Bassem Akiki.) Still, 'We Are the Lucky Ones' came off as well rehearsed on Friday, to the point that no one appeared uncomfortable. The tenor Miles Mykkanen impressively tapped through a glib monologue about being 83 and not having to think about the future; earlier, the bass Alex Rosen had also danced without effort. Helena Rasker had a rich contralto, but also a comic touch in conveying the frustration of a woman whose children don't want to inherit her furniture. The baritone Germán Olvera delivered perhaps the bleakest speech, in which his character wondered whether 'most people, even young people, would choose to live as comfortably as possible within a broken system, rather than try to build something new.' With scene-stealing sounds, the tenor Frederick Ballentine and the soprano Jacquelyn Stucker were most memorable in vocal solos, while the soprano Claron McFadden and the mezzo-soprano Nina van Essen were just as captivating for their delicacy. Huffman also directed and designed the production (in addition to designing the gala-attire costumes with Sonoko Kamimura), which looks like vaudeville in the bardo. With almost no set, 'We Are the Lucky Ones' unfolds in front of the theater's fire curtain and around the orchestra pit. It's so minimal, it could travel easily not only to other opera houses, but also to concert halls around the world. The performers tape sheets of paper to the wall to build a screen for nostalgic photos and videos, by Nadja Sofie Eller and Tobias Staab, that resemble home movies but are eerily generated by A.I. It's one of the many ways that Huffman's production maintains an unsettling atmosphere. Bertrand Couderc lights the performers from below, lending them a campfire spookiness and the otherworldliness of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Occasionally, singers put on a variety show number with a mask or a prop; they also pick up microphones as if in a cabaret act. Some of that takes its cue from Venables's patchwork score, which matches the opera's timeline with a Hollywood waltz, a dreamy Disney harp or a big-band swing. With so many dance rhythms, it all begins to take on the feel of a danse macabre. He moves freely among genres, keeping the music at a slight distance from the stories onstage, such as a complaint about a cleaning lady sung like a tango out of a show by Kurt Weill. As in the A.I. footage, there is an uncanniness to his music: 'Happy Birthday' and 'Auld Lang Syne' through a carnival whirl. But Venables also writes with representational sound. There is a funny inhale and exhale gesture in a passage about getting high, an Alma Mater-style chorus for describing reunions and the brassily grand chords that Dvorak would use for American wonder. Like the best of opera, 'We Are the Lucky Ones' often says two things at once, between the libretto and the score. The cast comes together, for example, to sing about the happiness of getting older with health and money intact over pounding, ever-higher piano chords; the music feels as if it could collapse under its own weight. In a way, it does by the end of the opera. The music shrinks, lonely and suspended, mirroring decline and death, the ultimate shared experience. Characters discuss how it happens and with whom, if anyone. We have followed them for eight decades, as they changed the world and were left behind as it continued changing without them. All that remains, when they go, is an account ledger: the value of a life.
