It’s been talked about for months. The 28-year old composer Nico Muhly has been at work on a new opera with playwright Craig Lucas for the Met. The project is one of several pieces in development but not yet scheduled for debut by playwrights/composer teams. On Thursday, the Met committed to the piece for the 2013-14 season. It will be co-produced by the English National Opera in London where it premieres next June. Titled “Two Boys,” the opera recounts the story of a youth who uses the internet to hire out his own murder.
Read the Times story here: “Muhly and Lucas’s Opera First Met-Lincoln Center Project”
The opera won’t be the first from Lucas, by the way, who’s films include Prelude to a Kiss (1992) and The Dying Gaul (2005). ”Orpheus in Love” and “Breedlove” are two operas written with Gerald Busby.
Meanwhile, Muhly has been spending time in London. He posted to his blog about the difficulty in getting mobile phone service, his favorite neighborhoods, and hearing consecutive nights of the British Sinfonia perform a new work of his on tour:
“I’m also excited because the performance in Amsterdam contained one of the most professional trainwrecks I’ve ever witnessed. Something happened — somebody came in early, somebody mis-cued, somebody wasn’t paying attention in the back — and it came dangerously close to falling apart. I like it though: the adrenaline focuses everything that happens immediately afterwards and you end up with a shimmering, taut remainder of the piece.”
And once again he seems to be the darling of the media and to present himself with plenty of camp. Here’s Michael White reviewing for The Telegraph:
Sunday was Nico Muhly. And if you don’t know who he is, neither did I, really, beyond a vague understanding that he was the current boy-wonder of American new music and someone to investigate. I’d heard and liked his score for the film The Reader. I knew he’d written something for the choir of Clare College, Cambridge. And I knew there was a buzz about him that some of my colleagues in the British music establishment dismissed as hype. That was it.
So when last night, he bounced onto the Roundhouse stage cross-dressed in what might have been a Nicole Fahri frock – exuberantly camp and introducing himself, the Britten Sinfonia, and his work through a microphone like the compere of a Christopher Street drag show – I was slightly taken aback. Things don’t happen that way at the Wigmore Hall.
You go Nico.
And on the other hand, I was happy to see that in a profile in the Times, “Nico Muhly: a prodigious composer on the loose,” even darling Nico can take a bad picture.
The Times story by Neil Fisher also prompts this solemn vow: As a journalist I promise to never lead a profile story with a description of how I sat down with an interview subject at a restaurant. This may prevent me from ever getting an assignment from Details or Out (where every profile seems to start that way), but so be it.
