Director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator of composer John Adams's, was awarded an Opera News Award in a ceremony at the Plaza Hotel in New York City last night. Sellars has directed the world premiere performances of all of Adams's operas and unforgettable performances by Dawn Upshaw, Rokia Traoré, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. "Peter Sellars has created a body of work that will transcend epoch and place, style and fad," says Opera News. "It will be esteemed as timeless, because it will still find a way to speak directly to audiences even after our time has run out."
Director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator of composer John Adams's, was awarded an Opera News Award in a ceremony at the Plaza Hotel in New York City last night that also brought awards to baritones Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Peter Mattei and sopranos Anja Silja and Karita Mattila. Sellars was presented the award by bass-baritone Eric Owens, who was featured in Adams' two most recent opera collaborations with Sellars, Dr. Atomic (2005) and A Flowering Tree (2006). Sellars, who has directed the world premiere performances of all of Adams's operas—which also includes Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky, and the Nativity oratorio El Niño—created the libretto for Doctor Atomic and joined Adams in doing so for A Flowering Tree. Peter Sellars' extensive directorial career also includes unforgettable performances with Dawn Upshaw, Rokia Traoré, and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, among many others.
"[T]here's likely no one so inspired or exuberantly creative as Sellars directing opera at the moment," writes Opera News contributor Adam Wasserman in a feature in appreciation of Sellars.
"Few artists have the ability to draw truly meaningful connections between their present circumstances and the great artworks of the past; fewer still are honest and perspicacious enough to create something that can anticipate the memories of audiences in the future," writes Wasserman. "In making himself an artist whose preoccupations and concerns grapple with nothing less than the fate of humanity, Peter Sellars has created a body of work that will transcend epoch and place, style and fad. It will be esteemed as timeless, because it will still find a way to speak directly to audiences even after our time has run out."
Read more at operanews.com.
You can find coverage of last night's event from the Associated Press via the Wall Street Journal at wsj.com.
Desdemona, Sellars recent collaboration with Rokia Traoré and author Toni Morrison inspired by the character in Shakespeare's Othello, will be presented at the Barbican this July as part of the World Shakespeare Festival and the London 2012 Festival / Cultural Olympiad. For details, go to festival.london2012.com.
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