News
Klaipėda State Music Theatre opens a call for proposals for stage directors and creative team members for the production of Philip Glass’s opera The Voyage
The Klaipėda State Music Theatre opens a call for proposals for stage directors and their creative teams. Selected candidates will be given a unique opportunity to direct the first premiere in the newly opened theatre – Philip Glass’s opera The Voyage – with the team of collaborating artists of his or her choice. With this opera production, the theatre will launch its 38th season in the fall 2024 and inaugurate its new Grand Hall equipped with the state-of-the-art audiovisual, lighting and stage facilities.
The Klaipėda State Music Theatre is the largest professional performing arts institution in western and northern Lithuania. In the beginning of 2024, the theatre plans to return to its renovated building, which will be the first theatre building in Lithuania to be built since Lithuania regained independence in 1990. To celebrate this special event the Klaipėda State Music Theatre endeavours to embark on a project that has never been undertaken in Lithuania before: to stage an opera by the living legend of American minimalist music.
Philip Glass, who turned 86 this year, is hailed as one of the most influential composers of our time. He has composed 23 operas to date, but none of them has ever been performed in Lithuania before. This project will not only open a new space for the musical theatre in Klaipėda, but also, hopefully, initiate the production history of Glass’s operas in Lithuania.
The Voyage is an opera in three acts, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to and discovery of the Americas. The world premiere of the opera took place on the exact date of the anniversary, 12 October 1992. The Metropolitan Opera (USA) gave its European premiere on 6 October 2002 and the first European production was mounted at the Landestheater Linz (Austria) in October 2002. The libretto for this opera was written in English, Latin and Spanish by David Henry Hwang, based on the composer’s own story.
The opera, which, in composer’s words, “is about discoveries and the people who make them – those intrepid souls, who from the beginning of human history, have willingly, even gladly, left the world of the familiar and secure to plunge, often recklessly, into an unknown future,” echoes the history of the Klaipėda State Music Theatre. For many decades, the theatre wandered without an identity, changing names and forms of existence, settling in various spaces, without a building suitable for its activities, and surviving only thanks to the people driven by their ideas and dreams. Thus, one could hardly find a work more suitable than The Voyage to launch the Klaipėda State Music Theatre into the next stage of its journey in its new home.
For more information on the terms and conditions of the competition, please follow this link.
