Photo: Ruth Walz/Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival just wrapped up three performances of John Adams's 2006 opera A Flowering Tree this week to generally positive but usually caveated reviews.
Lincoln Center was a co-commissioner of the work, and this was its New York première, but New York being New York, mention of the U.S. fully-staged première production by Brian Dickie's intrepid Chicago Opera Theater -- also conducted by Adams himself -- have disappeared from press on and reviews of the opera.
Similarly, the late University of Chicago poet, scholar, and translator A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), whose version of and commentary on a South Indian tale inspired the work's creators and is their basis for the opera, too seems to have been left out of reports, despite both being atop the Mostly Mozart credits list and mentioned explicitly several times in Sarah Cahill's fine program notes to the new production.
So while I would not be a bit surprised to know that what folks at the Rose Theater saw this week came together more than they did in Chicago -- what with Sellars again at the helm as he had been at the world première in Vienna in 2006 and with the addition/involvement of three extraordinary dancer-choreographers to this production -- I thought that it would be worthwhile to re-post my May 16, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times and View from Here review again here.
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