Thank you for making our 2016-2017 season one to remember!
In December at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center we launched Story Binge II featuring five new operatic works by composers Jason Cady, Roddy Bottum, Lainie Fefferman, Nick Hallett, and Matthew Welch. The sold-out audience delighted in stories with subjects that ranged from an AIDS Ride for Life, a sci-fi love triangle, women in the Bible, and a composer’s unsettling behavior on social media, to an opera singer’s experience in a Filipino internment camp during WWII. All of this in just one night!
This year, as always, it was the exceptional composers and musicians with whom we worked that inspired critics to compliment the “wry sense of humor ” (New Yorker) that pervades our “engaging, thoughtful, and playful works” (The Theatre Times). We thrive to be “enterprising and imaginative,” and it is our mission to showcase the vocal talents of our “talented and enthusiastic” singers (New York Classical Review).
The season ended on a high note with Flash Operas, in partnership with Symphony Space in Manhattan. This program featured six newly commissioned 15-minute operas based on inventive flash-fiction stories by Jack Handey, A. M. Homes, Patricia Marx, Andrew McCuaig, Peter Mehlman, and Keith Scribner. The stories addressed the unlikely subjects of neurotic parents, tollbooth workers, a freeloading fundraiser, a loveable idiot, a left-out loser, and Nelson Mandela. The 3-show run was a huge success.
Our 2017-2018 season will be just as innovative. With a showcase of new works at Roulette in Brooklyn highlighting our partnership with the International Contemporary Ensemble, we will celebrate the life and legacy of the late electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros by presenting her new American opera, The Nubian Word for Flowers. Additionally the new season will unveil our six-episode podcast opera Buick City, 1 AM and our full production of And Here We Are, the new shadow puppet opera from EiO co-founder Matthew Welch.
We want to thank all of our Experiments in Opera friends who have made generous contributions throughout the year. It is because of you we have the opportunity to entertain, challenge, and excite our audiences.
For those of you who have not yet contributed, please consider a gift to help us close out our fiscal year, which ends on June 30.
Many, many thanks for making our work possible!
Best wishes,
