Matthew Aucoin, David T. Little, & Joshua Schmidt Join Met Opera's Met/LCT New Works Program

The Metropolitan Opera has announced the addition of three new composers to its Met/LCT New Works Program. Matthew Aucoin, David T. Little, and Joshua Schmidt, three critically heralded young composers, have signed on to develop new operas through the program, which allows gifted composers and librettists to workshop new material for the opera and music theater stages, using the resources of the Met and Lincoln Center Theater. Nico Muhly's Two Boys, workshopped through the program, will have its North American premiere at the Met on October 21.

The Met also announced additional details for two commissions scheduled for future seasons. Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel, an adaptation of the 1962 Luis Buñuel film that is a co-commission between the Met, the Salzburg Festival, and the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, will feature a libretto by Tom Cairns and premiere at the Met in the 2017-18 season. Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose original Met commission was delayed by the untimely death of his collaborator Anthony Minghella, is at work on a brand-new piece, an adaptation of the Euripides play Iphigenia in Aulis, that will have its premiere at the Met in the 2018-19 season.

The Met will continue its commitment to bringing contemporary classics to its audience when two acclaimed recent works have company premieres. John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman's opera about the murder of a Jewish tourist by Palestinian activists, The Death of Klinghoffer, will have its Met premiere in the 2014-15 season, directed by Tom Morris in a co-production with English National Opera and conducted by David Robertson. The Death of Klinghoffer will join Adams's Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China, both of which had company premieres in recent seasons, in the Met repertory.

Kaija Saariaho's haunting romance L'Amour de Loin, with a libretto by Amin Maalouf, will come to the Met in the 2016-17 season in a new production by Robert Lepage, conducted by Susanna Mälkki in her Met debut. Saariaho will become the first female composer to have her work performed at the Met since Ethel Smyth's Der Wald had its Met premiere in 1903.

"New work is a lifeline to new audiences and therefore vital to the future of our art form," said Met General Manager Peter Gelb. "Through the Met/LCT program, we're providing support for young composers. We're also directly commissioning works for our stage, and we're complementing these efforts by increasing our presentations of new productions and revivals of great modern works that already exist. It's a three-pronged approach to ensure the significant presence of modern opera at the Met."

"Lincoln Center Theater has a long and productive history of developing serious new works for the musical theater and of working with talented up-and-coming composers and lyricists," said Lincoln Center Theater Artistic Director André Bishop. "We are very pleased to be continuing this tradition in our collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera. These three additional works for the ongoing MET/LCT New Works Program are a wonderful bonus."

Each of the three new composers added to the program have achieved renown in recent years. Matthew Aucoin is the youngest assistant conductor in the history of the Met, and is currently at work on his third opera, which has been commissioned by the American Repertory Theater. David T. Little's operas include Dog Days, which premiered in 2012, and a forthcoming commission for the Fort Worth Opera currently titled JFK. Joshua Schmidt won considerable acclaim as the composer of the musical Adding Machine, which had a successful run at the Minetta Lane Theater off-Broadway in 2008. A Minister's Wife, his musical adaptation of Shaw's Candida, was produced by Lincoln Center Theater in 2011. For the Met/LCT program, Schmidt will collaborate with librettist Dick Scanlan, a Tony nominee whose Broadway credits include Thoroughly Modern Millie and Everyday Rapture.

The newly retitled Met/LCT New Works Program, founded in 2006, has provided developmental resources for many composers and librettists over its eight seasons. The program has overseen the creation of several new operas, including Two Boys, the Met-commissionedNico Muhly opera with libretto by Craig Lucas that premiered at the English National Opera in 2011 and comes to the Met later this month. Other artists currently active in the program include Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner, who are expanding their piece A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (originally commissioned as a one-act work by the Glimmerglass Festival) in preparation for a Met/LCT workshop next year. Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage are writing an adaptation of Nottage's play Intimate Apparel, about a turn-of-the-century African-American seamstress, that will be workshopped at the Met when complete. Other new works, by such composers and librettists asScott Wheeler and Romulus Linney; Michael John LaChiusa and Sybille Pearson; Michael Torke, Michael Korie, and Des McAnuff; and Rufus Wainwright were developed through the program, with the Met and Lincoln Center Theater ultimately deciding they would not continue as projects for either venue.

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