THE NEWS. Photo by Marco Borggreve
«The "New York edition" of THE NEWS, a reality pop opera by Dutch avant-pop composer Jacob Ter Veldhuis (JacobTV), will premiere at the Met on Friday, April 17, and based on the video clips, images, and trailer that JacobTV has been sending the Met Museum Presents team, we are officially excited! Sure to be a wildly inventive concert experience, THE NEWS—which will also be performed on Saturday, April 18—incorporates speech grooves, live music, and nonfiction footage from a variety of media outlets.»
Inspired by the nature of twenty-first-century media, which the composer refers to as "infotainment," JacobTV has imaginatively transformed contemporary news into a timeless opera. Led by two singing "anchors" (mezzo soprano Nora Fischer and rhythm vocalist Loire), news bits are infused with relevant pop-culture references, which are all blended with blues, jazz, rock, classical, and world music performed by a nine-piece ensemble, Fulcrum Point New Music Project, led by artistic director Stephen Burns. The brainchild of JacobTV, this new edition of THE NEWS will transform the stage and atmosphere of the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium into a hyper-active newsroom filled with visual and auditory explosions of cultural references.
Two movements from THE NEWS, performed live in Chicago on May 4, 2012
Previous editions of THE NEWS have been performed in Chicago and Los Angeles (in 2012 and 2014, respectively), as well as internationally, but as an ever-evolving, multimedia performance experience, this version of the work will be unlike any that came before.
THE NEWS. Photo by Marco Borggreve
Also, on the evening of Tuesday, April 14, there will be a conversation about the state of media today. Are We Consuming the News—or Is It Consuming Us? will include the award-winning broadcast journalist Ann Curry (@AnnCurry); Mark S. Luckie (@marksluckie), manager of journalism and news at Twitter; Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (@sharmeenochinoy), Oscar-winning documentarian of Saving Face; and Sree Sreenivasan (@sree), Chief Digital Officer of the Met, who spent twenty-one years as a professor of journalism at Columbia University.
To purchase tickets to THE NEWS, or any other Met Museum Presents event, visit www.metmuseum.org/tickets; call 212-570-3949; or stop by the Great Hall Box Office, open Monday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m.