Randall Eng

MasterVoices has announced details of the celebrated chorus’ 82nd season, celebrating the power of the human voice to unite, inspire and connect since 1941.

MasterVoices will conclude its 2022-23 season on May 3 at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium with a concert staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Iolanthe, directed and conducted by Ted Sperling.

​​​​​​​ Cerise Jacobs and her activist opera company, White Snake Projects (WSP), present the world premiere of Fractured Mosaics, an operatic response to anti-Asian racism (March 30; April 1 & 3). Comprising four scenes – bound together by musical interludes – of Asian Americans establishing themselves in the United States, Fractured Mosaics features music by Nilo Alcala, Randall Eng, Benjamin Kono, and Liliya Ugay, and texts by their writing partners – Deepali Gupta, Monique Truong, Cerise Lim Jacobs, and Sokunthary Svay.

MasterVoices continues its eclectic 2022-23 season on March 23 at Central Synagogue with Ted Sperling leading O How Good, a performance of Jewish sacred music. The program includes two beloved works of traditional Jewish liturgy set by master composers – Ernest Bloch's Sacred Service and Kurt Weill's Kiddush – as well as the world premiere of And the Sun Goes Up, a new work by Israeli-American composer Daniel Rein, commissioned by MasterVoices.  

OPERA America, the national service organization for opera, has welcomed a new class of six board members that includes creators, administrators, artist managers, and opera company trustees. They join the Board of Directors under the ongoing leadership of Chair Carol F. Henry, esteemed philanthropist and founding trustee of Los Angeles Opera.

MasterVoices has announced details of the chorus’ 81st season, celebrating the power of the human voice to unite, inspire and connect since 1941. The 2022-23 season opens on October 25 at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center with Mr. Sperling leading a concert staging of Bizet’s Carmen in its original Opéra Comique version.

Thanks to a recently announced $750k grant from the Mellon Foundation, Cerise Jacobs and her activist opera company, White Snake Projects (WSP), have announced their first complete season of performances in 2022-23. Kicking off the season is Cosmic Cowboy, a poli sci-fi opera composed by award-winning MIT faculty member and former Guggenheim Fellow Elena Ruehr that blends ancient history and fantasy to discuss the subject of colonization.

The American Opera Project announces Losing Control, a live performance of eleven fifteen-minute World Premiere operas, performed at 7:30pm on May 26 and 27, 2022 at NYU's Black Box Theater in NY, NY.

Ucross's spring session is in full swing. From February 7 through June 3, 56 artists from a variety of disciplines will be in residence at the historic 20,000-acre ranch in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming. 

OPERA America has announced the inaugural participants of the IDEA Opera Residencies (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) program, a new initiative that provides New York City-based composers and librettists of color an opportunity to explore opera as an expressive medium. The program is supported by the Katherine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund of The Scherman Foundation.

OPERA America has announced the inaugural participants of the IDEA Opera Residencies (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) program, a new initiative that provides New  York City-based composers and librettists of color an opportunity to explore opera as an expressive medium.  The program is supported by the Katherine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund of The Scherman Foundation. 

MasterVoices, led by Artistic Director Ted Sperling, continues its 2019-20 season on January 10 and 11 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice with the New York premiere of Iron & Coal, Jeremy Schonfeld's multimedia rock-opera about his family's experience in the Holocaust and its aftermath. Along with MasterVoices, joining Schonfeld onstage will be distinguished theater artist Rinde Eckert, tenor Daniel Rowan, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and the New York-based contemporary music ensemble, Contemporaneous.

Four half-hour long mini-operas inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a watershed moment in LGBTQ civil rights, will have their world premiere at NYU's Shubert Theatre on May 18, 2019 and within the modern-day Stonewall Inn itself on May 19 and 20. The mini-opera performances will conclude NYU's Stonewall at 50 Series, a collection of panels, performances, events, and discussions commemorating the riots and their legacy.

Composer Heidi Rodewald, known for her collaborations with Stew on Passing Strange and The Total Bent, strikes out on her own in The Good Swimmer, a "pop requiem" that addresses issues of war, heroism, sacrifice, loss, and idealism. The moody, multi-layered song-cycle for guitar, bass, piano, trumpet, woodwinds, strings, drums, and vocals is performed by a nine-piece band led by singer David Driver. Set in the early days of the Vietnam War among a group of lifeguards, Donna Di Novelli's lyrics are a radical recontextualization of found texts, including a defunct lifesaving manual. A cast of young singers in their teens and early 20s at the start of their professional careers-Jeremy Weiss, Sophia Byrd, Naseer Sleets, Joey LaPlante, Luke Bob Robinson, Papa Holt, and Kennedy Kanagawa-vividly conveys the sense of young people being thrust into a historical moment they have no control of. Their shattering experience brings the audience to a galvanizing realization: we truly honor our fallen soldiers only when we defy the political drumbeat of a senseless war.  

What's left to say about Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"--that milestone of 20th century feminist art now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum--that hasn't already been said? Actually, quite a bit, according to the students from the Opera Lab of NYU Tisch Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (GMTWP), who have taken a handful of the pieces and used them--and the work as a whole--as inspiration for a series of short operas, under the guidance of the Lab's co-directors, Randall Eng and Sam Helfrich.

The Dinner Party Operas, a showcase of eleven original mini-operas inspired by Judy Chicago's iconic feminist installation The Dinner Party, a multi-media work housed in the Brooklyn Museum, will be presented this May in New York City by the NYU Tisch Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (GMTWP), the Brooklyn Museum, the NYU Tisch Department of Design for Stage & Film and American Opera Projects (AOP). Six of the operas will be performed on Wednesday, May 23 at 7:30 p.m. at NYU Tisch's GMTWP Black Box Theatre, located in Manhattan at 715 Broadway, between Washington and Waverly places, on the second floor. The remaining five operas will be performed on Sunday, May 27 at 2:00 p.m. at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238. Each under 15-minutes long, the operas were written and composed by students in the NYU Tisch GMTWP Opera Lab and will be performed by professional opera singers with piano accompaniment. The Dinner Party Operas is free with advance registration (May 23) or museum admission (May 27) and open to the public. To reserve tickets for the May 23 performance at NYU, email tisch.ipa@nyu.edu. Complete info at www.aopopera.org.

The new opera Florida with music by Randall Eng and libretto by Donna Di Novelli, premiered last week at Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street. With its heavy handed melodrama and awkwardly balanced narrative, Sunday's matinee plodded along (well over Urban Arias' usual 90-minute-or-less promise) before concluding rather lukewarmly. This said, the production was not without its merits.

MasterVoices presents Our America a unique program taking audiences on a journey through the contributions immigrants have made to the tapestry of American music on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. at the Great Hall at The Cooper Union. Conceived by MasterVoices Artistic Director Ted Sperling, the program spans multiple genres and centuries, ranging from arrangements of the spirituals Gospel Train, Wayfaring Stranger, I've Been in the Storm So Long, and Ain't That Good News ; Irving Berlin's Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, and Let Me Sing and I'm Happy, ; selections by Victor Herbert, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein, and Gershwin; and new works by Jerusalem native and BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop member Daniel Rein and award-winning Chinese American composer Randall Eng.

Phoenix Theatre of Indianapolis announces the Indiana premiere of The Golem of Havana, which opens June 22, 2017 on the Livia and Steve Russell Stage. This production runs through July 16, 2017, with Bryan Fonseca serving as director.

Phoenix Theatre of Indianapolis announces the Indiana premiere of The Golem of Havana, which opens June 22, 2017 on the Livia and Steve Russell Stage. This production runs through July 16, 2017, with Bryan Fonseca serving as director.