Beth Morrison News

Los Angeles Philharmonic Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel and Creative Chair for Jazz Herbie Hancock will bring together distinguished artists and guests for Power to the People!, a multidimensional vision of music and social change, May 29 through June 10, 2022.

Hoff-Barthelson Music School's Annual Contemporary Music Festival, The Music of Our Time, takes place Monday, May 9, 2022, through Sunday, May 15, 2022, and will include a world premiere commissioned by the School. Composer Juhi Bansal's “To the Night” for cello quintet will be performed at the Festival's culminating concert on Sunday, May 15, 2022, at 7:00 pm.

 Portland Opera’s 2022/23 season will feature the cultural touchstone Carmen; Thumbprint, a powerful new opera inspired by the story of Mukhtar Mai, a trailblazing Pakistani human rights activist; the company’s first production of the iconic and magical Dvořák opera Rusalka and more.

San Diego Opera's 2021-2022 will close with the West Coast Premiere of Aging Magician a hybrid opera/theatre piece that combines singing, choral work, puppetry, and performance art to create an incredibly unique theatrical experience. Originally scheduled for our 2019-2020 season, and postponed because of COVID-19, San Diego Opera is delighted to finally be able to reschedule this opera for this season.

New York City Opera will present Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's thrilling double bill, The Seven Deadly Sins & Mahagonny Songspiel, for the first time ever told as one story, a tragic fable for today.

Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, this time--and it couldn’t have been further away from the last I experienced, Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, if it tried. BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS is the work of composer/librettist Huang Ruo (music influenced by Chinese folk melody, Western avant-garde and other styles, but unlike anything else you’ve heard) and director/designer puppeteer Basil Twist (a MacArthur “genius grant” winner in 2015). The four tales included in the piece, which Huang describes as “abstract and eternal,” kept the audience in its thrall for 80 minutes.

LA Opera will present the world premiere of In Our Daughter's Eyes, by composer Du Yun and librettist Michael Joseph McQuilken, from April 13 through 17, 2022, at REDCAT. The monodrama was created for and with baritone Nathan Gunn, who portrays a father-to-be striving to become a man his daughter would be proud of.

San Diego Opera's 2021 2022 will close with the West Coast Premiere of Aging Magician a hybrid opera/theatre piece that combines singing, choral work, puppetry, and performance art to create an incredibly unique theatrical experience.

Following a two-year, pandemic-induced hiatus, the annual 12-day gathering for opera lovers returns in September with its fourth iteration, O22, featuring live opera performances at multiple venues in Philadelphia as well as a series of film screenings and a panel discussion that explores whether the industry's recent foray into cinematic production was a temporary blip or a game-changer for the art form.

Debuting in 2017,  Opera Philadelphia’s annual, season-opening Festival O immediately garnered audience and  critical acclaim, proving to be “a hotbed of operatic innovation” (New York Times) and  “one of the most enjoyable additions to the fall calendar in years” (Washington Post).  Following a two-year, pandemic-induced hiatus, the annual 12-day gathering for opera lovers returns in September with its fourth iteration, O22, featuring live opera performances at  multiple venues in Philadelphia as well as a series of film screenings and a panel discussion that  explores whether the industry’s recent foray into cinematic production was a temporary blip or a  game-changer for the art form. 

How might a story be told without language? Visionary composer Paola Prestini teams up with the poet Brenda Shaughnessy – who has a non-verbal son – and choreographer Jerron Herman to create a new multi-sensory opera and impact project challenging the notion of what voice can be.

San Diego Opera's 2021-2022 will close with the West Coast Premiere of Aging Magician a hybrid opera/theatre piece that combines singing, choral work, puppetry, and performance art to create an incredibly unique theatrical experience. Originally scheduled for our 2019-2020 season, and postponed because of COVID-19, San Diego Opera is delighted to finally be able to reschedule this opera for this season.

Beth Morrison Projects has been awarded a $485,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development of BMP: Producer Academy. Growing from BMP's mission of cultivating the next generation of artists and arts administrators, BMP:

On Wednesday, March 30, 2022 at 6:30pm, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will present Composers in Focus, a digital event celebrating Armenian-American composer and documentarian Mary Kouyoumdjian.

OPERA America has announced the recipients of the 2022 Repertoire Development Grants: American Lyric Theater (New York, NY); Beth Morrison Projects (New York, NY); Houston Grand Opera (Houston, TX); Lyric Opera of Chicago (Chicago, IL); MassOpera (Salem, MA); Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (St. Louis, MO); Pensacola Opera (Pensacola, FL) and OperaDelaware (Wilmington, DE); and Virginia Opera (Norfolk, VA). A total of $225,000 was awarded to eight projects (see below) by these nine companies.

St. Ann’s Warehouse and Beth Morrison Projects, in association with PROTOTYPE: Opera | Theatre | Now and Trinity Church Wall Street, today announced that the sonically rich and visually arresting Book of Mountains & Seas will make its U.S. premiere this March 15-20.

Music Director James Conlon will conduct three mainstage productions and Colombian-American conductor Lina González-Granados will make her company debut as Resident Conductor, the first Latina to hold a high-ranking conducting position with a major U.S. opera company. 

Beth Morrison, founder of Beth Morrison Projects and co-Founding Director of the PROTOTYPE Festival has been selected to be a Next 50 honoree in The John F. Kennedy's Center for Performing Arts Next 50 initiative.

An elementary–aged rapper, an award–winning composer, and a dancer defying the stigmas of cerebral palsy, come together in the Kennedy Center Next 50, a new cultural leadership initiative.

Today, the directors of the PROTOTYPE Festival, alongside partners St. Ann's Warehouse, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and Abrons Arts Center, announced the difficult decision to postpone this year's tenth anniversary festival to January of 2023, due to the current surge in COVID cases and the resulting safety risks, as well as logistical challenges including artist and staff illnesses, travel complications, and more. The Festival was scheduled to run January 7-16, 2022.