Brooklyn Performance Added For AOP Monodramas May 12

Two new operatic monodramas featuring two iconic mothers will receive their first public concert readings a day after Mother's Day. Nora, In the Great Outdoors, music by Daniel Felsenfeld and libretto by Will Eno, continues the final scene of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House moments after Nora abandons her family; and The Wanton Sublime, music by Tarik O'Regan and libretto by Anna Rabinowitz, explores the mythic and human aspects of Mary, mother of Jesus. The evening will feature performances by soprano Caroline Worra (The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Boston Lyric, Glimmerglass) with music direction by Mila Henry. Both one-act operas have been commissioned by the Brooklyn-based opera development company AMERICAN OPERA PROJECTS (AOP) and will be presented by the organization at The Players (16 Gramercy Park South) on Monday, May 9 at 8pm in New York City and feature a panel discussion with the artists. Tickets are $20; $15 advance, and $10 for Players club members. A second performance will take place on Thursday, May 12, at 8 pm at South Oxford Space (138 South Oxford Street) in Brooklyn, NY. Tickets and more info are available at www.operaprojects.org.

Brooklyn-based Daniel Felsenfeld, who in addition to his compositional work is the author of eight books, was part of New York City Opera's VOX 2004 with his opera Summer and All it Brings. His works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Bargemusic, The Kitchen, and NewGallery Concert Series, and can be found on the Endeavor and Koch imprints. Will Eno's The Flu Season won the Oppenheimer Award for the best New York debut by an American playwright in 2004, and his play Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His play Middletown premiered at New York City's Vineyard Theatre in 2010 and will appear at Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2011.

Tarik O'Regan, a Grammy nominee and two-time British Composer Award winner, was first introduced to AOP through his operatic version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to be premiered in 2011 by the Royal Opera House, London. Award-winning poet Anna Rabinowitz based the The Wanton Sublime on her poetry volume of the same name, entitled "The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders." She previously collaborated with AOP when her acrostic poem "Darkling" was transformed into an experimental, multi-media opera theater work of the same name.

Excerpts from The Wanton Sublime were previously performed at the Guggenheim Museum and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ. Audiences in Fort Greene, Brooklyn were given a sneak-peak of Nora, In The Great Outdoors this past February at South Oxford Space.

The AOP Operatic Monodrama Series is a new initiative that aims to champion an operatic form that has been largely overlooked-- the one-act for solo voice. AOP will be commissioning and developing new monodramas by American composers, existing works newly translated/adapted into staged works in English, and reductions of existing monodrama scores to make them more viable for today's audiences and performable in a variety of locations. Projects: The Abbot Agathon, by Arvo Pärt, commissioned English version by Cori Ellison, first production Jan 2009 in partnership with Works and Process at the Guggenheim; AbSynth featuring composers Caleb Burhans, Florent Ghys, Kevin McFarland, Nico Muhly, Andrew Staniland and Stephen Andrew Taylor, first workshop production at Galapagos Art Space, April, 2010; Our Basic Nature, by John Glover and Kelley Rourke, first workshop at Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, December, 2010; ; Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Mohammed Fairouz and David Shapiro, first workshop at South Oxford Space, March, 2011.

"AOP's unique commitment to the vital role of 'workshopping' new opera cannot be underestimated," says composer Tarik O'Regan. "The valuable insights given to composer, librettist and other members of the creative team both point forward to a new form of opera development and hark back to the 'golden age' of opera in the 18th and 19th centuries, where the process of trying out new material and ongoing revision in the early stages of an opera's life was not only commonplace, but vital."

The Players has long been considered a downtown theatrical institution since it was founded by the stage-actor Edwin Booth in 1888 to continue its traditions of social discourse between all the artistic disciplines, for both artists and patrons alike. American Opera Projects, Inc. (AOP) is a driving force behind the revitalization of contemporary opera and musical theater in the United States through its exclusive devotion to creating, developing, and presenting new American opera and music theatre projects.

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