Work of the Week - Gerald Barry: The Importance of Being Earnest

My favorite living composer, Irish composer Gerald Barry, finds the hilarious musical equivalent for Oscar Wilde's perfect absurdist paradoxes in his riotously outrageous and funny new setting of The Importance of Being Earnest. (Thomas Adès)

Gerald Barry's fifth opera, The Importance of Being Earnest will receive its world premiere on 7th April at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles performed by the LA Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Thomas Adès. Jointly commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Barbican Centre, London, the full length opera in 3 acts with its star cast featuring Gordon Gietz, Hila Plitmann, Katalin Károlyi, Hilary Summers, Stephen Richardson and Joshua Bloom is sure to give the audience an explosive evening.

Creating the libretto from Oscar Wilde’s extraordinary play himself, Gerald Barry describes his approach:

I know of nothing like The Importance of Being Earnest – though perhaps it shares a subversion with Alice in Wonderland. The text revels in anarchy, and a delight (Irish) in the absurd – to the point of ecstasy. The structure of the play is so strong, it stands even in my heavily cut version. If you didn’t know the original, you wouldn’t know anything was missing. It remains untamed.

Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest will be presented on both 7th and 8th April in Los Angles and then in London the following year on 26th April 2012.

• Gerald Barry - profile
• Los Angeles Philharmonic