Flight (opera)
Flight is an English opera in three acts, with music by Jonathan Dove and libretto by April De Angelis. The work was commissioned by Glyndebourne Opera and premiered on 24 September 1998 by Glyndebourne Touring Opera. After its large success, the work had its professional world premiere at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in a production by Richard Jones on their mainstage in 1999 and was revived in August 2005. The first US performance was at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on 8 June 2003 in a production directed by Colin Graham. Additional productions have been seen in The Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. The first Australian production was at the Adelaide Festival Theatre on 3 March 2006, which won a 2006 Helpmann Award.
De Angelis took part of the inspiration for the plot from the true-life story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, for several years, unable to exit the airport terminal. (Some of the same real events surrounding Nasseri were later used in the story for the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, independently conceived after the opera.)
Dove has also arranged music from Flight into an orchestral "Airport Suite" for concert performances. This suite was first performed in Warwick in 2006.
British Youth Opera performed a fully staged version in September 2008. The U.S. West Coast premiere took place with a new production at the University of California, Los Angeles' Freud Playhouse in April 2010.
Read more about Flight (opera): Characters, Plot, Recording
Famous quotes containing the word flight:
“In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)