Christopher Alden (director)
Christopher Alden (born 1949 in New York) is an American theater and opera director. He is the twin brother of
Early life
Alden and his identical twin David came from a show business family. Their father was the playwright
Christopher studied theater at the
Directing career
In 1982,
Alden continued a long and fruitful collaboration with Long Beach Opera that yielded some unconventional settings of Claudio Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea, Orfeo and The Return of Ulysses; Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia; Jacques Offenbach's La Vie parisienne and Bluebeard and the world premiere of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie's Hopper’s Wife.
In the early '90s, he began a similarly long relationship with the
He made his debut with
Alden has worked with several major and regional American opera companies, including Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Dallas Opera and Los Angeles Opera. He created the world premiere production of Anthony Davis' Tania at Philadelphia's American Music Theater Festival in 1992. He mounted Jonathan Dove's reduced versions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre for the Eos Orchestra of New York in 2002-2004. For the Spoleto Festival USA, he produced the American premiere of Gluck's L'Ile de Merlin in 2007.
His work in Europe has encompassed assignments at Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera (where he directed the world premiere of David Horne's Friend of the People), English National Opera (staging The Makropulos Case with Charles Mackerras in 2006). He and British director David Pountney co-directed Eight Little Greats, an acclaimed series of eight short operas for Opera North in 2005. Alden has also worked at the Opéra Comique in Paris (where he presented a triple bill of Georges Bizet's Djamileh, Le docteur Miracle and Don Procopio), Cologne Opera, Opera Zuid in The Netherlands as well as in Bilbao, Antwerp, Mannheim, Karlsruhe and Geneva.
Modernist Vision
As an opera director, Christopher Alden is known for his use of contemporary imagery and, on occasion, a minimalist visual style, though never as spare as his contemporary Robert Wilson. He likened his own 1984 production of Coronation of Poppea to "a new wave rock video"[4] and has frequently expressed his desire to connect the inner world of opera theater to the modern sensibility of a younger audience. He has an eye for bold theatrical gestures that are often dramatically effective but sometimes considered crass. His use of overt sexuality, brutal violence and over-the-top, satirical humor has soured his relationship with conservative patrons (most notably, a critically derided Rigoletto production for Chicago Lyric that the company declared un-"revivable").[5]
Though some opera audiences may be put off by his art, it is never Alden’s aim to shock for the sake of shock value. Rather, his approach to stagecraft — with its anachronistic cultural symbols, blood-and-guts characterizations and eye-catching visuals — is driven by a desire to reveal how powerfully opera stories can resonate with modern experience. Alden has said that "however fascinating the era in which an opera was composed may be, I have a primary responsibility to the world we live in now."[1]
References
- ^ a b Rupert Christiansen (2007-02-08). "Will Orfeo go to the Disco?". Telegraph. Retrieved 2016-05-28.
- ^ Stephen Moss (2006-05-26). "Twin Powers". The Guardian. Retrieved 2016-05-28.
- ^ Martin Bernheimer (26 September 1983). "Death in Venice: Graceful, Fluid". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Donna Perlmutter (14 November 1984). "Baroque Opera as a Rock Video". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Neil Fisher (12 May 2006). "Iconoclast or Evil Twin?". The Times (London).
External links
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