Global InformationAmerican Opera Project information
The American Opera Project (AOP)[1] is a professional opera company based in Brooklyn, New York City, and is a member of Opera America, the Fort Greene Association, the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance, and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./NY). The company's primary mission is to develop and present new operatic and music theatre works and has gained a reputation for the "rarefied range" of the projects it fosters (Opera News, Dec 2008). AOP was founded in 1988 by Grethe Barrett Holby who served as Artistic Director of AOP from 1988 until 2001, at which point Charles Jarden became the company's Executive Director and Steven Osgood the company's Artistic Director. Steven Osgood left the post of Artistic Director in 2008 to pursue conducting full-time but remains the Artistic Director for AOP's "Composers & the Voice" program.
AOP's year-long writing fellowship, "Composers & the Voice" was created in 2002 to bring emerging operatic composers and librettists together with singers, directors, and other artists to create a series of pieces exploring the potential of theatre and the voice. Past and present mentors for the program include Mark Adamo, Mark Campbell, John Corigliano, Tan Dun, Daron Hagen, Jake Heggie, Libby Larsen, John Musto, Tobias Picker, Kaija Saariaho, and Stephen Schwartz. Past participants include Clint Borzoni, David Claman, Conrad Cummings, Randall Eng, Renée Favand, Vivian Fung, Kristin Kuster, Hannah Lash, Gilda Lyons, Robert Paterson, Jack Perla, Zach Redler & Sara Cooper, and Daniel Sonenberg.
Amongst the venues and festivals where AOP productions have appeared are the Lincoln Center Festival, BAM's Next Wave Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, Symphony Space, Irondale Center, Philadelphia's Annenberg Center, Pittsburgh Opera, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, London's Royal Opera House, Berlin's Stükke Theater, Aleksander Fredro Teatr in Poland, the Trondheim Chamber Music Festival in Norway, and the Ensemble Theater am Petersplatz in Vienna. It has also given many out-of-doors performances sponsored by the City of New York Department of Parks and Recreation. AOP won a 2005 Encore award from the Arts & Business Council of New York for its innovative work.[2]
- ^ "AOP". AOP. Retrieved 2022-09-26.
- ^ "American Opera Projects". Operaprojects.org. Archived from the original on 2014-07-27. Retrieved 2014-08-23.