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Mannes Opera’s 2023-2024 season opens on November 17 & 18 with Mermaid in the Jar and L'Enfant et les Sortilèges: Fantaisie lyrique en deux parties. This event is open to the public and free with registration.


Mannes Opera announces a season of contemporary American operas, including works by composers on the forefront of today’s opera scene: Kate Soper, Rachel J. Peters, Mark Adamo and John Adams. 


Sirens, mermaids, war, love and earthquakes: these stories center on myth and archetype and examine the human condition through the exploration of ideas both human and mythic. This groundbreaking season displays the virtuosity, thrill and innovation that marks the current explosion of new American work and explores the myths, archetypes, events and trends that inform our zeitgeist. 

 
WE START WITH -


Two fantastical stories - written 100 years apart - about the imaginative power of children ~


Mermaid in the Jar, the first short chamber opera in the Peters and Vavrek’s Wild Beast of the Bungalow triptych (Mermaid in the Jar, Prairie Dogs, and Fine and Dandy), takes place entirely within an eleven-year-old girl’s bedroom as she overhears her parents’ volatile conversations. After the Girl captures a Mermaid, she is forced to confront what it means to care for others and to be cared for herself. 


Amidst the contemporary works is one French opera, the much loved L'enfant et les sortilèges: Fantaisie lyrique en deux parties (The Child and the Spells: A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts). Written almost 100 years ago by the writer Collete and composer Maurice Ravel, L’Enfant et les sortilèges also explores the world of a discontented child and their vivid imaginary landscape.  After a bout of bad behavior, the items in the Child’s nursery come to life to chastise, terrorize, and teach the Child the value of compassion. 

 

Opera in Concert ~

L'ENFANT ET LES SORTILÈGES 

music by Ravel, libretto by Collette

MERMAID IN THE JAR 

music by Rachel J. Peters, libretto by Royce Vavrek

based on a short story by Sheila Heti

a collaboration between Mannes Opera & Mannes Orchestra

conductor - Christopher Allen
director - Rose Freeman


Cast:

MERMAID IN THE JAR

Yohji Daquio

Brianna Dulock

Yu Shi

Dalis de la Mothe

Grace Bernard


L'ENFANT ET LES SORTILÈGES

Claire Coven

Marcella Astore

Enes Pektas

Yixuan Li

Haojie jiang

Pedro Barros

Dallas Saxer

Haojin Mo

Maia Suwanameera

Melissa Hartman

Ping Gu

Himanshu Barot

Colin Safley

Marcella Astore

Yu Shi

Young Il Jeon

Brianna Dulock

Luna Park

Patricia Williams

Angela Shon

Claire Dai

Dmitri Mironov

and

Grace Bernard

Yu Shi

Hansol Oh

Qin Li

Yui Lee

Catherine McClure

Eliza Goldsteen

Christina Draper

Tiffany Ye

Josh Bowden

Haoming (Tim) Xia

Kore Adachi

Junze Gong

Julian Bailey

Allen Pearcy Galeana


Performances:

November 17th & 18th, 2023 at 7:30pm

John L. Tishman Auditorium at 63 Fifth Avenue, NYC


MANNES OPERA

Under the leadership of Managing Artistic Director Emma Griffin, Mannes Opera is a training program with a curiosity for the new and a devotion to craft for operatic artists. As part of the College of Performing Arts, the program uses the medium of opera to innovate, improvise, and create, and offers young artists extensive performance practice and opportunities.  Our program offers young artists a flexible and strong vocal technique, intensive investigation of classical repertoire,  exposure to the wealth of new forms and material in new opera, and extensive performance practice with classes and a variety of on-stage experience; we foster a well-defined sense of self with a curiosity for the new and a devotion to craft. 

 
The program engages with the rich tradition of classical repertoire as a lens with which to better understand today’s world and trains students to be professional artists with agency and control over what they do and how they do it. Mannes Opera draws on the best opera and theater makers that NYC has to offer. 


Join Mannes Opera for our 23/24 season of contemporary American opera and explore the myths, archetypes, trends and zeitgeists that inform our time.

Presented by the College of Performing Arts at The New School.

Cost

Free

Rachel J. Peters (Composer) writes primarily operas that sound like musicals/musicals that sound like operas, including: Lesson Plan (On Site Opera, Caramoor), Companionship (Virginia Arts Festival, Fort Worth Opera), Rootabaga Country (Sarasota Opera), Sketchbook for Ollie (Lyric Opera of Kansas City); No Ladies in the Lady’s Book (Utah Opera) Staggerwing (Opera Kansas), and Men I’m Not Married To (Cleveland Opera Theater) with Lisa DeSpain; Steve (Boston Opera Collaborative). She received a 2022 OPERA America Female Composer Discovery Grant for Manor of Speaking: Blythely Oratonio's Glam-Operetta Reenactment of Oscar Wilde's 1882 Tour Across the Barely United States with Kevin Thomas Townley, Jr., the first wholly original work for Stephanie Blythe’s drag tenor alter ego. Concert works: Concert works include Ethel Smyth Plays Golf in Limbo (Semperoper Dresden) and If You Can Prove That I Should Set You Free (Albany Symphony), which was also featured in the 2020 Mannes Sounds Festival. She is a proud alumna of New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, American Opera Project, John Duffy Institute for New Opera, and residencies at Yaddo, Millay Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson, and more. Premiering soon: Welcome to the Madness with Leanna Kirchoff (Opera Steamboat) and a new opera with Royce, Three Amputators (Arctic Chamber Music Festival). She holds a double B.A. from Brandeis University and an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Rachel originally hails from St. Louis and now lives in Brooklyn, a borough with an exceptionally high concentration of opera composers.

Royce Vavrek (Librettist) is a Canada-born, Brooklyn-based librettist and lyricist who has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker) a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (The New York Times), and “one of the most celebrated and sought after librettists in the world” (CBC Radio). His opera “Angel’s Bone” with composer Du Yun was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

 

His work has been presented at or performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, New York City Opera, The Kitchen, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, Opera America, American Lyric Theater, Beth Morrison Projects, Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Peak Performances @ Montclair, among others. His recent commissions include operas for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Fort Worth Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Houston Grand Opera and the Prototype Festival, along with a musical for Signature Theater. Vavrek's filmmaking credits include From Sky and Soil, which was created as part of the Corus Young Filmmakers Initiative for broadcast on the W Network, through a prize administered by the Canadian Film and Television Production Association.

 

Royce is co-Artistic Director of The Coterie, an opera-theatre company founded with Tony-nominee Lauren Worsham. He holds a BFA in Filmmaking and Creative Writing from Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal and an MFA from the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at New York University. He is an alum of American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program.