Austin Lyric Opera: Breaking Glass

Waiting for the Barbarians at the Erfurt Theater

After launching his tenure at Austin Lyric Opera with a few seasons of Old World standbys, new artistic director Richard Buckley is setting sail for new territory in a major way. For ALO's 20th season next year, he's lined up the company's first American premiere, and it's grand: Waiting for the Barbarians, the most recent opera by Philip Glass – so new that it premiered only last month. The work, adapted from the 1982 Booker Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, was commissioned by the Erfurt Theater in Erfurt, Germany, where the conclusion of the premiere performance was followed by a 15-minute standing ovation. That production runs through October, with a second production set for Het Muziektheater Amsterdam in Amsterdam next September. Then in January 2007, it breaks into North America with the help of ALO.

Glass has long been a welcome, warmly received presence in Austin – he makes one of his almost annual pilgrimages here next week to present his symphonic work Orion, commissioned for the 2004 Athens Cultural Olympiad – but the composer has said that he didn't expect the city to be in any rush to produce Barbarians. The story's tale of an oppressive government that manufactures a war with a nomadic tribe to further its own empire-building ends can easily be read as a comment on U.S. foreign policy under the current administration, and given that this is Bush's back yard, well … "We were very surprised by the invitation," Glass told Germany's DPA news agency. "But Austin isn't Texas," he added.

With the premiere 15 months away, waiting for Waiting for the Barbarians will be tough, but you can distract yourself this weekend with ALO's 2005-2006 season opener, Il Trovatore. The run up to this production of Verdi's durable drama was more than usually stormy, as in rained on by Katrina. ALO had planned to rent its set from New Orleans Opera, but once Katrina blew through, it wound up under 18 feet of water. Finding a replacement set that would fit the Bass stage and the production concept proved maddening (one ideal candidate was waterlogged by a malcontent sprinkler system), so Buckley, stage director Josemaria Condemi, and lighting designer David Nancarrow concocted their own, utilizing a basic platform, lighting, projections, and a curtain to suggest locales. Ingenuity and persistence prevailed, the ALO ship sets sail on schedule.

Il Trovatore runs Oct. 7-10, Friday, Saturday, and Monday, 7:30pm, Sunday, 3pm, at Bass Concert Hall. For more information, call 472-5992 or visit www.austinlyricopera.org.

Orion will be performed Friday, Oct. 14, 8pm, at Bass Concert Hall. For more information, call 477-6060 or visit www.utpac.org.