Yuval Sharon

Yuval Sharon is an American opera and theater director from Naperville, Illinois, based in Los Angeles. In 2017, he won the MacArthur Genius Grant.

Early life and education

Sharon was born in 1979 in Chicago[1] to two Israeli parents. He earned a B.A. in 2001 from the University of California, Berkeley[2] studying English and dramatic arts, before spending a year in Berlin. Seeing Wozzeck as a college student and his time in Berlin both led him towards opera.[3]

Sharon then lived in New York, where he founded a theater company called Theater Faction and worked at the New York City Opera, directing its VOX program from 2006 to 2009, before moving to Los Angeles. He found Los Angeles to be the ideal home for experimental work in opera and founded The Industry to put on innovative productions.[4]

Career

Sharon continues to serve as artistic director of The Industry in Los Angeles, dedicated to new and experimental opera. Notable productions include Hopscotch, an opera staged in 24 moving vehicles;[5] Christopher Cerrone's Invisible Cities, based on the Italo Calvino novel and staged in Union Station (Los Angeles),[6] and Anne LeBaron's Crescent City, set in a mythical town loosely based on New Orleans.[7] Sharon has also done two performance installations: Terry Riley's In C at the Hammer Museum and Nimbus at Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 2012 Sharon was Associate Director of the world premiere of Stockhausen's Mittwoch aus Licht with Graham Vick for the London 2012 Cultural Olympics.

Sharon is currently artist-collaborator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his projects will include an original setting of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, with music by Annie Gosfield, performed both inside and outside the concert hall simultaneously in Fall 2017, and a staging of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with Gustavo Dudamel in Spring 2018.[8]

Sharon also directed John Cage's Song Books at the San Francisco Symphony and Carnegie Hall with Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, and Jessye Norman. Recent productions include Péter Eötvös's Tri sestry (Three Sisters) at the Vienna State Opera, a new performance edition of Lou Harrison's Young Caesar at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Pelléas et Mélisande at the Cleveland Orchestra. His production of Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, originally produced at the Cleveland Orchestra, will be the first fully staged opera ever presented in Vienna's historic Musikverein in October 2017. Sharon will also be the first American director at the Bayreuth Festival in 2018.[3]

Awards

References
  1. Foundation for Contemporary Arts – Yuval Sharon
  2. "Yuval Sharon". MacArthur Foundation.
  3. Allen, David (20 July 2017). "Opera's Disrupter in Residence, Heading to Bayreuth". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
  4. Rosenberg, Jeremy (17 May 2012). "Yuval Sharon: L.A.'s Culture Brought and Kept Him Here". KCET. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
  5. "The Industry presents Hopscotch: a mobile opera for 24 cars". Hopscotch Opera. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
  6. Farber, Jim (22 September 2016). "Harmonic Convergence: Yuval Sharon, The Industry, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Join Forces". San Francisco Classical Voice. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
  7. "Crescent City". The Industry. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
  8. "Yuval Sharon". Los Angeles Philharmonic. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
  9. "Grants to Artists, Performance Art/Theater 2017". Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Retrieved 12 September 2017.

Further reading
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