Kiarostami, poet of silence, switches to opera with Mozart debut at ENO
Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and actor Fiona Shaw are to make their English National Opera directorial debuts, in a new season that will seek to refresh the artform by bringing in fresh names from outside the opera world.The healthy clutch of new ventures - 10 fresh productions next season - comes on the back of attendance this season averaging 82%, and a predicted surplus against budget of £1m. It is the healthiest set of figures for a decade at ENO, which six years ago was fighting bankruptcy. Kiarostami, director of Taste of Cherry and Through the Olive Trees, will direct the Mozart comedy Così fan tutte - something of a departure, perhaps, for a man whose masterpiece concerns a suicidal man driving around the labour markets of Tehran to find a man to dig his grave.
"I've admired his work for a long time," said ENO artistic director John Berry. "He has always said that with films, he will work with whatever constraints he has to, and he is aware of the limitations of opera. He's very good at directing intense relationships between people in his films, which I think will be perfect for Così. I think it's a good idea that he didn't choose a big chorus piece as his first opera."Shaw, most recently seen on the London stage buried from the neck down in Beckett's Happy Days at the National Theatre, will direct Ralph Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Sea, his one-act opera based on JM Synge's play. Set in the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, the drama centres on Maurya, who has lost eight men of her family to the implacable sea. Other firsts for the company next season include a libretto translation by Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot. Hall will translate and adapt Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, to be directed in a double bill with Cavalleria rusticana by Richard Jones. Asked whether Hall's Pagliacci would be as fruity as his Billy Elliot, music director Ed Gardner said: "He doesn't want to see expletive after expletive on our surtitles, so he's already taking reams of them out." Hall refers in the new season programme to the opera's "low exclamations and filthy curses".Berry said it was sometimes a struggle to persuade theatre and film directors to work in opera - notwithstanding the success of, for example, the late Anthony Minghella's production of Madam Butterfly. "They can see opera as conservative; and on the whole in London it is quite conservative. If you go to Berlin, Amsterdam, or Paris, it is much less so. "One first-time opera director has said that going into opera is like going into a gated community - and you are likely to be mugged on the way. If the director does not have inner confidence, then you are in trouble. The film industry is tough, but some film directors don't believe how tough and savage the opera world is."Another figure from the film world who will make her operatic stage debut is Penny Woolcock, whose film for Channel 4 of John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer won multiple awards. She will take on Adams's latest work, Doctor Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer's development of the atom bomb. The new production will be made in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, New York; the opera itself was first seen in San Francisco in 2005.The company will also premiere L'Amour de loin, a major new work by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho with a libretto by the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf. Gardner said that ENO was fully intending to stage new works from British composers: Julian Anderson, he said, was under commission from ENO. That work, he said, "will be staged when Julian has finished writing it". A new, as yet unnamed work based on Purcell's Dido and Aeneas will be devised by director Katie Mitchell; it will be produced in the Young Vic, where ENO is currently staging a sell-out run of Olga Neuwirth's Lost Highway, based on the David Lynch film, and Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy, which opens on Saturday.The death of Minghella has meant the cancelling of various plans: he was to have directed a new Eugene Onegin in the 2008-9 season. Looking further ahead, he was also due to create a new staging of Bach's St Matthew Passion, and direct a new opera with composer Osvaldo Golijov, the libretto of which he was also to write.As a tribute to Minghella, ENO will revive his Madam Butterfly production next season.The company also made £7m from selling workshops in Stepney, in the East End of London. The expense of moving to new premises and of "restructuring" (losing 60 jobs from the company) accounted for £2.5m of that, but ENO now has what it calls a "buffer zone" of reserves. Much of the prop and set making formerly carried out in the old workshops will now be outsourced.HighlightsCavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci Richard Jones directs, Sean O'Brien and Lee Hall provide the words. SeptemberPartenope Christopher Alden directs, Rosemary Joshua, John Mark Ainsley and Christine Rice sing. OctoberBoris Godunov Edward Gardner conducts; Tim Albery directs. NovemberRiders to the Sea Fiona Shaw's opera-directing debut. NovemberDoctor Atomic First chance in the UK to see John Adams's latest opera.Untitled A yet-to-be-named work based on Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, created by Katie Mitchell and team in the Young Vic Theatre. April 2009Peter Grimes New production by David Alden of Britten's masterpiece. Edward Gardner conducts. May 2009Così fan tutte What will Abbas Kiarostami come up with? May 2009
