This week Kuhn engages in conversation with Yuval Sharon, founder and co-Artistic Director of The Industry in Los Angeles and currently the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director of Detroit Opera. Sharon has amassed an unconventional body of work that expands the operatic form, and he is probably the most productive person I know. In the 2023–24 season alone, Sharon will present a new site-specific production of John Cage’s Europeras 3&4 (1991) staged with Detroit Opera in the historic Gem Theatre in March 2024; a revival of his Cleveland Orchestra production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, staged with Detroit Opera in May 2024; and his cult classic Die Zauberflöte at Staatsoper Berlin throughout the season.

Sharon made his debut with Detroit Opera in 2020 with Twilight: Gods, an innovative adaptation of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung staged in the Detroit Opera House Parking Center and, with Lyric Opera of Chicago, at the Millennium Lakeside Parking Garage. Since then, he has directed a number of acclaimed productions with the company, including Puccini’s La bohème, presented in reverse order in the Detroit Opera House, and The Valkyries—an adaptation of Act III of Die Walküre, first staged with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Hollywood Bowl, which used green screen technology and projection screens to bring Wagner’s proto-cinematic vision to life in real time.

Beyond his own productions, Sharon’s artistic guidance has transformed the company into a premier destination for progressive opera in the United States. Highlights from his tenure as Artistic Director include a major revival of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, directed by Robert O’Hara in a co-production with Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Metropolitan Opera, Opera Omaha, and Seattle Opera; and its first international co-production, Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, directed by Deborah Colker, with Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera, and The Metropolitan Opera.

With The Industry, Sharon has directed and produced new operas in moving vehicles, operating train stations, Hollywood sound stages, and various “non-spaces” such as warehouses, parking lots, and escalator corridors. Between 2016–2019, Sharon was the first Artist-Collaborator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, creating nine projects that included newly commissioned works, site-specific installations, and performances outside the hall. His residency also included a splendid production of John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 (1985-1987) in the SONY Sound Studio in Studio City, and it culminated in a new production of Meredith Monk’s opera ATLAS, making him the first director Monk entrusted with her work.

Kuhn first met Yuval Sharon in John Cage’s Centennial Year, 2012, when he was engaged by Michael Tilson Thomas to direct a newly staged version of Cage’s Song Books (1970), first for the San Francisco Symphony, and later, in February 2013, for the New World Symphony in Miami, the latter in a marvelous festival conceived by MTT entitled “Making the Right Choices.” Yuval’s stellar cast for Song Books included none other than Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Jessye Norman, as well as Michael Tilson Thomas himself.

Now we are readying ourselves for Sharon’s Europeras 3 & 4, Cage's second opera, this time mounted in Detroit’s historic Gem Theater, March 8, 9, and 10. Yuval describes this work as “made entirely of recycled materials – arias that everyone is familiar with, classics from European repertoire.” “The only catch,” he continues, “is that they’re all performed at the same time. Through chance operations, singers will perform arias that they select, while pianists play transcriptions of different operas, and phonographs are playing different recordings. The result is something new and original: an exhilarating, bewildering, wonderful work. There are many experiences happening simultaneously, more similar to an installation, or like when you came to the Michigan Theater to see Bliss in 2021 – it does not have to adhere to our standard ideas of narrative or experience. It can be so many different things: a true collage of things we know and love.”

"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!