He spoke to me from his California home.ĭK: Given that you’re all of a composer, conductor, poet, pianist, educator, that’s an awful lot of things to combine. Aucoin agrees, describing the role as “a tailor-made suit” and himself as “a kid in a candy shop”.
A year into the residency, Koelsch views the appointment as “a perfect marriage, which continues to pay off for both parties”. The subsequent negotiations proceeded remarkably smoothly, as did Koelsch’s discussions with LA Opera’s artistic leaders Plácido Domingo and James Conlon. This was the perspective of an artist that was not represented in any other artist that I knew as working in the world today.”įaced with that response, Aucoin’s youth was an irrelevance. And I thought as storytelling went, it was a very idiosyncratic and interesting take on a familiar figure that was to my mind sui generis. “Aesthetically, his set of influences was clear, but his variations on those themes, where he might be going as an artist, the exploration of variations on those influences was very clear, so it wasn't derivative and yet you knew that he understood the foundation elements of operatic composition. Not only was Koelsch deeply emotionally moved by the piece, but he was convinced that what he had in front of him was an authentically unique voice. Koelsch flew to Boston to hear the piece, and was bowled over: “I knew instantaneously that this was the kind of artist that needed to be part of the LA Opera family and that he represented a perspective that we didn't currently have inside our glittering and substantial masthead”. Koelsch had been tipped off about Aucoin’s work when Boston’s American Repertory Theater commissioned his opera Crossing, an exploration of the poet Walt Whitman, one of the giants in the American literary canon. But what really raised eyebrows was Aucoin’s age: just 25 years old. Firstly, the scope of Aucoin’s duties was to be exceptionally broad: composing operas, conducting both classic and contemporary works on LA Opera’s main stage as well as its smaller venues, engaging in educational and community engagement projects as well as leading whole new initiatives.
The announcement was remarkable for two reasons. In early 2016, LA Opera’s CEO Christopher Koelsch announced that Matthew Aucoin was to be appointed Artist in Residence for a three year term, starting in October of that year.
0 kommentar(er)
