NEW CHAMBER MUSIC
ABHANDENGEKOMMEN
OPERAS IN DEVELOPMENT
Please click on the picture to see a one-sheet.
“I am lost to the world.”
Two people meet in a support group for the dead. They are struggling with the knowledge that they are very much alive, while the world around them believes that they are dead, and would prefer that they stay that way. They come to understand that in order to move on with their lives, they must accept their deaths.
“To the destruction of what is."
“My verses are like dynamite.”
An enigmatic French anarchist dies when the bomb he is carrying explodes prematurely; his presumed target, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich - the international standard of time and space on the planet. Told through non-linear, tales which intersect and mirror each other in simultaneous - and parallel - times and spaces, this piece examines the ripple effect of actions both attempted and accomplished.
For more than two years, Curt Bloch and two other adults hid in a crawlspace in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. During his captivity, he produced 95 issues of a satirical magazine, replete with collage, poem and song ridiculing the Third Reich and its collaborators. The drama of Bloch's reality intertwine with a flashy cabaret which presents his biting satire as a fearless defense against annihilation.
“It's my debut!
And I am FREAKING OUT!”
Wracked with stage fright over her operatic debut, a singer desperately tries to stop the performance so she won’t have to sing her show-ending aria. In her attempts to stop the opera, she pleads with the composer, the conductor and orchestra, the stage manager and crew, even the prompter and the supertitles operator, all of whom push the opera to its inevitable conclusion.
"We came for wisdom, leaving with truths beyond our knowing."
As their visit to the manger ends, the three Wise Men are warned in a dream not to return to King Herod. They decide to travel back to their own countries taking less-traveled roads. Along the way, they are confronted with the questions of how they are to express the wonder they have witnessed without putting it in danger.
"Before the cock crows on the last night of the third year..."
The first architect of the Cologne Cathedral is determined to complete the building in record time; the Devil thinks what the world needs, is not another cathedral. They make a wager - finish the cathedral before the devil builds a waterway from Trier - the price: the architect's soul! Are a clever wife, a protective dog, and a trainable rooster enough to help Gerhard win the bet?