“Raw, Funny, surreal, and disarmingly human, Chunky in Heat is an experiment gone delightfully right.”
Opera News
“[One of the] the strongest modern opera I’ve heard. Everything about this production is so uniformly superb it’s hard to single out an individual for praise.”
“Never has an opera dared me to like it as much as Chunky in Heat.”
“Mesmerizing music, staging, and lyricism”
“Six different composers set Homes’s dark comedy to music, compounding its strangeness.”
“The creators of this amazing little opera—so zany, so crazy, so touching—couldn’t have hoped for better.”
Operawire Interview with librettist A.M. Homes
“Welch’s music is stirring, urgent and pulsating. He has imbued his jazzy score with a perfect degree of exoticism that grows from memory rather than harsh reality. This is a sophisticated composition with a strong sense of place, built on solid musical values.”
Schmopera
Full Review
“Pauline never let anything stop her from doing what she envisioned.”
VAN
Full Interview
“The Nubian Word for Flowers, rendered with evident love and sincerity on the part of the instrumentalists and vocalists, was stunning from beginning to end, swirling us into Oliveros’s sound world like milk in coffee.”
I Care If You Listen
Full Review
“In an experimental setting, we can define our goals differently: did our new opera successfully challenge the cliches in opera? Did we convert any listeners, or broaden their minds about opera? Did we do something unprecedented in opera and pull it off musically and dramatically?”
Schmopera
Full Interview
“Endearingly idiosyncratic”
New York Times
Full Review
“Experiments in Opera has proven once again that the so-called “indie” opera companies in New York City can be cultural icons by showcasing innovative, well-written pieces performed by impressive musicians in an intimate space.”
I Care If You Listen
Full Review
“The tone varied from comic to unsettling, and reflected a consistent contemporary sensibility. Subjects included the foibles and pitfalls of modern life, contemporary history, and shadings of insanity—something for everyone.”
New York Classical Review
Full Review
“Alternately quirky, strange, hilarious, and bizarre, these short sketches delighted and intrigued.”
The Theater Times
Full Review
“EiO composers doesn’t rely solely on thorny compositional techniques to make their points. Spoken word, synth loops, chamber-music noise, and a wry sense of humor all figure into their compositional styles.”
The New Yorker
Full Preview
“inventive stories, concepts, musical scores and imagery”
The New York Times
Full Review
“We believe in the Shakespearean world, in a nutshell. That the scale of opera can work at any length: narrative arc or a fragment of a narrative arc.”
The New Yorker
Full Article
“Experiments in Opera really believes strongly in is this sort of collective activity. It represents this idea that many people working together—talking about their work together, sharing their work, investing in work together—is a really powerful thing. As far as art-making in the 21st century goes, it feels like a much more sustainable and viable way of making art.”
NEA Arts Works Blog
Full Interview
“It’s not a traditional opera – it’s more like weird little operettas”
Rolling Stone
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“Experiments in Opera seeks to insure the continued development of music-drama, overturning preconceptions and avoiding textbook moves.”
Pitchfork
Full Review
“What makes Experiments in Opera’s Sisyphus notable is how entertaining it is; what makes it unusual is how the three composers went about making it.”
New York Classical Review
Full Review
“[Sisyphus is] a daring experiment for three talented composers. Fortunately it is also a highly interesting one to experience.”
Stage Buddy
Full Review
“EiO has quickly become a vital part of the subculture, testing boundaries and changing the way we think of opera as a genre.”
New Criterion
Full Review
“Before you claim opera is dead, take a look at some of the most avant-garde players in the game today””
Huffington Post
Full Story
“An Operatic Monster Mash”
New York Times
Full Story
“[Experiments in Opera] is telling stories that are not being told in other places…Exploring what opera means.”
Wall Street Journal
Full Story
“An innovative opera venture”
The New York Times
Full Review
“As for the fungibility of the New Shorts operas, only time, that most wayward of arbiters, will tell which ones have legs. Their variety and consistently high quality impressed me, though, and the audience’s enthusiasm never flagged during a program of pithy works that added up to an epic-length evening.”
Marion Lignana Rosenberg on WQXR’s Operavore Blog
Full Review
“[New Shorts] is a genuinely experimental impulse, allowed to set off impulsively in all directions.”
Rick Burkhardt on CultureBot
Full Preview of New Shorts on CultureBot
“The works in New Shorts clearly demonstrated that the program’s composers, vocalists, and musicians are talented, fearless, and congenial. Seeing their works brought to fruition will be gratifying; seeing them in preview was a gift.”
David St.-Lascaux on Brooklyn Rail
Full Review
“[‘Happiness is the Problem’] kept the energy hovering at 11 consistently, fusing the stilettoed coloratura of Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” with Glass at his most hyper-caffeinated; you’re left gasping at the end for a reprieve, while admiring the psychological underpinnings of Cady’s work.”
– Olivia Giovetti on WQXR’s Opravore Blog
Full Review of Spring Series on Opravore
“[While] Cady emphasizes his desire to present works that someone would readily identify as genuine ‘opera,’ all three artists [Matthew Welch, Jason Cady and Aaron Siegel] are united in an active effort to resist bottling up one notion of opera as one Authoritative and Unequivocal Thing. According to Siegel, choosing not to explicitly define opera enables the trio to ‘raise more questions.'”
– Daniel J. Kushner, The Huffington Post
Full Preview
Collective Interview with Experiements in Opera Composers on ‘I Care If You Listen’
Preview of the Spring Series on Feast of Music Blog
Preview of the Spring Series on ClassicalTV
“Experiments in Opera, illustrates perfectly the bootstraps gumption of New York’s musical community. Like VOX, this program offers excerpts from multiple works in various styles; the initial outing covers the jazz-punk vivacity of Matthew Welch’s Borges and the Other; Jason Cady’s bubbly, brainy Happiness Is the Problem; Aaron Siegel’s shimmering Brother Brother; and George Aperghis’s Sextour: l’origine des especes. That last work, a provocative gloss on writings by Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould, seems ideally suited to an evening that’s all about evolution.”
– Steve Smith in TimeOut New York
Full Preview
Jason Cady on East Village Radio sharing excerpts of his opera “Happiness is the Problem”
Review of Matthew Welch’s opera “Borges and the Other” on Megs New Music Blog
The Founders of Hotel Elefant discuss their work and ‘New Shorts’ on The Box is Empty