Word: valencia
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...opera house, spectacular though it may be, really transform a city best known for its paella and beaches into a top arts center? Can Calatrava's magnificent edifice produce the Bilbao effect - doing for Valencia what Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum did for the industrial Basque city to the north...
...Palau is certainly a worthy effort and just part of Valencia's quest, one that's even bolder than Bilbao's famous gamble. The opera house is the final piece of the immensely popular City of Arts and Sciences, a complex of beautifully integrated white buildings, most designed by Calatrava, that includes a planetarium with IMAX cinema and laser dome, a science museum, a botanical garden and Europe's biggest marine park. "An art museum draws a fairly narrow audience, while the City of Arts and Sciences appeals to a much wider range of people," says Julio...
...Valencia make this high-stakes bet? Status has something to do with it. In a world where opera is still seen as the highest of high culture, a striking new theater immediately heralds grand ambition. "Valencians are trying for something iconic," says Nicholas Payne, director of Opera Europa, the chief organization for professional opera companies and festivals on the Continent. "They're looking at Madrid and Barcelona, and saying, 'We're just as good...
...Whatever its arriviste pretentions, Valencia may also represent a new model for successfully producing opera. A stunning new building worked for Copenhagen, where the Henning Larsen house, with its roof plated with 24-carat gold, is already a destination for both tourists and native aficionados. Oslo is currently completing its own dramatic hall, located at the edge of a fjord, that promises a pristine acoustic environment. The Palau is also taking risks on unusual performances. Classic crowd-pleasers like Don Giovanni and Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle appear in new garb: La Fura dels Baus, the avant-garde theater troupe...
...Valencia's biggest selling point is, quite simply, the talent it has attracted. Classical music legend Lorin Maazel is the opera company's music director and Mehta is its orchestra director, but Helga Schmidt, the former artistic director of London's Royal Opera House, is the Palau's artistic director and its driving force. Once Mehta heard Schmidt was heading Palau, he says, "I was convinced that the artistic quality would be extremely high...