Town Hall Presents NY Premiere Of Laura Kaminsky And Kimberly Reed's Opera HOMETOWN TO THE WORLD

The Town Hall continues its 2022/23 concert series spotlighting women composers who have shaped American culture with the New York premiere of composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist Kimberly Reed's searing new chamber opera Hometown to the World on Saturday, November 5 (8 pm). Tickets start at $52, available at thetownhall.org.

This concert staging of Hometown to the World will be conducted by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León and directed by Kristine McIntyre. Mezzo-sopranos Cecilia Duarte and Blythe Gaissert, and baritone Michael Kelly will be joined by the adventurous ensemble Sybarite 5 and a chorus comprised of 100+ public high school students from LaGuardia/Music & Art and Repertory Company High School for Theatre Arts, which is located in the Town Hall building.

Sung in English, Spanish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, the opera is set in Postville, Iowa in 2008 following the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's massive raid on North America's biggest kosher meat processing plant. Families were destroyed, the meatpacking plant was forced to close, and Postville's ability to function was decimated. The opera brings together three characters from the different communities affected by the raid - Linda Morales, a Guatemalan woman whose undocumented husband and son were deported but who remained to care for her U.S.-born baby; Abraham Fleischman, a gay Hasidic Jew, who, banished from his family, seeks refuge in Morales' home; and Country Commissioner Larsen, an American of Scandinavian descent, who despairs at the town's downfall and who has come to question everything. The result is a complex tale that ends with a message of hope and equity.

Hometown to the World will be presented in association with Santa Fe Opera, where it premiered in December 2021 as one of the company's inaugural Opera For All Voices commissions.

Tempest-tossed for chorus offers a fragment from Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus, as video footage or still photos depicting the ICE Raid are projected. In Ag Days, Linda Larsen, the county commissioner, is at a desk, frantically organizing the details for the town's Agricultural Days parade and celebration, "the biggest two days of the year." Su Casa finds Abraham Fleischman, who was shunned by his family for being gay, seeking refuge in the home of Linda Morales, who is wary but welcomes him to keep her promise to a rescue organization at St. Bridget's church to open her home to strangers.

In Wide World Web, Fleischman explores his new room, which belonged to Morales' deported son of a similar age, and sings of the amazing world he discovered the first time he saw the internet, which was forbidden in his cloistered Hasidic household. Larsen welcomes community members to a meeting of the Postville Response Coalition, but fear and xenophobia overtake the restive crowd, which screams that Postville is in a "state of emergency."

Walking home together in Anklet, Ringlet, Morales and Fleischman assess the impact of the meeting, bonding with each other despite their cultural differences, because they are both "outsiders" in Postville. In Cans of Corn, Morales visits the food bank at St. Bridget's church because she's not allowed to work for a living, and receives canned goods from Larsen, who is doing a shift. Morales questions whether Larsen's motivations are more selfish than magnanimous and encourages her to use her political power wisely, then Fleischman joins them as they all sing about seeing the world through the eyes of others. However, the disparate circumstances of Morales and Fleischman allow for the underlying tensions in the community and between them to rise to the surface and they argue in Blood, ending with each hurling at the other the insult "you are the illegals!"

In Carne Barata, Morales, her heart breaking at the loss of her family, sings an aria in despair, "look where we are. They make us fight..." She comes to a moment of strength with the recognition that "America is impossible without us." Through her reasoned plea, she and Fleischman overcome their fear-based animosities and arrive at a place of hope. World-wide Welcome offers another expansive choral refrain from The New Colossus, and a caution: "the more borders we create, the lesser our world will be."

Inspired by the chorus in the previous scene, Morales and Fleischman seek to Repair the World, as the two take sanctuary in their respective religious traditions. They are joined by Larsen, and the three come together in a shared prayer, Tikkun Olam, based on the Hebrew language and ethics at the root of their faiths.

Town Hall's women composer series continues on Friday, January 20, as the Grammy-winning Gospel singer, songwriter, record producer, musician, and evangelist Dr. Elbernita "Twinkie" Clark, makes her Town Hall debut in a program of her compositions curated in partnership with composer/producer/arranger Damien Sneed, who serves as musical director. In this rare appearance in a secular setting, Clark will play the B3 Hammond organ and perform her own compositions, both solo and with special guests such as her sister Karen Clark Sheard.

On Saturday, February 25, legendary singer-songwriter Judy Collins will perform all of the songs on her classic album Wildflowers in concert with the Harlem Chamber Players, conducted by Tania León.

Tickets are now on sale at thetownhall.org.