Bill Viola does opera

While the art world descends upon Miami for the annual group liver workout known as Art Basel Miami Beach, the most interesting contemporary art event of the season will begin in Los Angeles. (No, not the incredible $30 King Tut show. Yuck.) Bill Viola does opera. From Diane Haithman in last Sunday's LA Times:

"The love story of Tristan and Isolde is not like a scenario of a Hollywood film or something; it's an idea," muses Gerard Mortier, new artistic director of the Paris Opera, in a telephone interview. "It's not about two persons, it's mythologic." Focusing on the love between two people is not "Tristan und Isolde," Mortier says. "It's 'Romeo and Juliet.' It's ..." -- and here he elongates the word with appropriate disdain -- "Hollywood."

That's why Mortier and his collaborators -- stage director Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- are looking to Viola to take the staging of "Tristan und Isolde" to that mythic level in a new co-production of the opera by the Paris Opera and the Philharmonic.

Mortier calls Viola's video images simply "the pictures," and he hasn't seen them yet -- but he believes that Viola's gift for creating images that reflect inner emotion rather than simply recording action will give audiences insights into the psychology of the characters impossible through conventional staging.

Viola's work will receive its world premiere beginning Friday at Walt Disney Concert Hall in the "Tristan Project." The complete "Tristan und Isolde" opera, with Viola's videos, will receive a fully staged production at the Paris Opera in April, with Salonen conducting the Paris Opera Orchestra.

In Los Angeles, it's called the "Tristan Project" because each of the opera's three acts will be presented separately, in a semistaged performance, over three nights. The cast includes American tenor Clifton Forbis and American soprano Christine Brewer, who appeared with the Philharmonic in January in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Each evening, the Philharmonic will also play a complementary piece of music influenced by "Tristan und Isolde": Act 1 (Dec. 3 and Dec. 10) will include Berg's Lyric Suite; Act 2 (Dec. 4 and 11) will be complemented by Debussy's Suite from "Pelleas and Melisande"; and the third act (Dec. 5 and 12) will also have the West Coast premiere of Kaija Saariaho's "Cinq reflets." Supertitles will be projected not on Viola's screens but on the wood walls inside the hall at various strategic locations.

Viola, 53, calls opera "the first multimedia art form" -- and relishes the opportunity to transcend the confines of traditional staging through creative use of the camera. His job is not, he insists, to turn the story of "Tristan" into a music video but to reflect the inner state of the characters the way Wagner does with the music.

Related: BillViola.com, LAPhil.org.

Not related: Posting will be sporadic (at best) for the rest of the week because the art world is in Miami. I did a snarky three-part preview of ABMB last year. Strangely, most of it works as a preview for this year. Scroll down a screen or two when you click on the link.