About this event
Discover two exciting new American operas in this ninety minute showcase of live music presented by Houston Grand Opera and Brooklyn’s The American Opera Project. The evening will also feature the announcement of this year’s recipient of the Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, presented by OPERA America.

Tickets are available on Eventbrite page : https://www.eventbrite.com/e/opera-america-new-works-presentation-letters-and-another-city-tickets-325998750037

ABOUT THE WORKS

The American Opera Project presents
Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voices from the Great War

Kirsten Volness, composer
Kate Holland and Susan Werbe, librettists
Kate Bergstrom, director

Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voices from the Great War is a chamber opera that gives voice to women’s experiences during WWI. The libretto is drawn from the writings of the women themselves — poetry, memoirs, journals, letters, novels — presenting a vital and intimate perspective on the war.

Women, like men who fought in the Great War, were profoundly affected by the 20th century’s first global conflict. They volunteered for war work, serving behind the front lines as nurses and ambulance drivers. They worked in munitions factories and on farms, taking the places of men who were fighting. Women artists and photographers recorded the home front and the frontlines. Women emerged from the war forever changed. They had lost lovers, brothers, fathers, friends. The world they had known had disappeared; they had to fashion a new world from the ruins of the old.

By weaving these writings together, Letters illuminates the inner lives of these women from a century ago and enables today’s audiences to connect deeply with their experiences.

Houston Grand Opera presents
Another City

Jeremy Howard Beck, composer
Stephanie Fleischmann, librettist

This moving exploration of homelessness in Houston, created in response to in-depth interviews and conversations, presents the collective voices of a city in search of the meaning of home. Kaleidoscopic and immersive, Another City’s web of intersecting stories chronicles a single day and night in the lives of those experiencing homelessness and those working to help however they can. As housing is lost, gained, and carried as memory, the opera asks: How do we bridge the chasm between the city we can see and the one we can’t — a city which is all around us but invisible, hiding in plain sight?

Part of the OPERA America New Works Featured Presentations, which offer a glimpse into works-in-progress and recent premieres. The New Works Featured Presentations are generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.