When my press invite came for the Book of Mountains and Seas, the collaboration between Chinese born contemporary composer Huang Ruo, the vocal ensemble Ars Nova Copenhagen, and master puppeteer and production designer Basil Twist, I was in.
The opera’s radical vision lay in its enormous scale, which encompassed a hundred-strong community chorus taken from the ranks of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Master Voices.
Though barely a week old, 2019 has already provided New Yorkers with an essential, breathtaking music drama focusing on two women struggling for their very survival.
New York City Opera has officially launched its “renaissance” at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater last night with a production of Puccini’s Tosca that should please a lot of older, conservative audiences, if not the adventurous operagoers that City Opera courted in the past.
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