COC's Nightingale heads to New York

The Canadian Opera Company will take its groundbreaking production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City next March.

It will be the U.S. premiere of the opera, created by Quebec director Robert Lepage, the COC said in a press release on Thursday.

Lepage's unusual staging called on singers to perform standing in water and used Vietnamese water puppets and small boats to enhance the story.

The opera, set to the music of Igor Stravinsky, will be conducted by COC music director Johannes Debus in its U.S. premiere atBAM's Howard Gilman Opera House.

The production will bereprised for four performancesin partnership with BAM, which also staged Lepage's Bluebeard's Castle/Erwartung with the COC in 1993.

BAM has a long association with Lepage and his Ex-Machina productions, having staged recent works such as Lipsynch and Elsinore.

The Nightingale and Other Short Fables opened in Toronto in October 2009 to great acclaim, and the COC added an extra performance to accommodate the overwhelming demand for tickets.The production then travelled to the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in July 2010 and is currently being performed at the Opra National de Lyon in Lyon, France.

Based on a Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale, with a libretto written by Stepan Mitussov in 1914, The Nightingale stars soprano Olga Peretyatko andGerman tenor Lothar Odinius.