New Works Forum 2020

Concert Performance:
Enjoy excerpts from three new North American works presented by Spoleto Festival USA, The American Opera Project and Music-Theatre Group, with special performances by Opera Cowgirls.

Omar, Music and Libretto by Rhiannon Giddens; Music Co-composed by Michael Abels
Presented by Spoletto Festival USA
In 1807, a 37-year-old scholar living in West Africa is captured and sold as a slave in Charleston, South Carolina. Omar Ibn Said's life and Muslim faith, recorded in his autobiography from 1831, are remembered and retold in this compelling new American opera.

Marymere by Matthew Schickele
Presented by American Opera Projects, Inc.
This chamber opera in progress tells the true frontier story of an unusual couple who move from NYC to Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 1888 and become involved in a series of mysterious deaths.

HATUEY:  Memory of Fire by Frank London and Elise Thoron
Presented by Music-Theatre Group, is a Cuban-Yiddish opera set in a Havana nightclub in 1931. Oscar, a Jewish writer who escaped the pogroms to make a new home in Cuba, falls in love with Tinima, a singer and revolutionary of Taino descent. As Oscar pens an epic poem about Cuba’s legendary 16th century freedom fighter, Hatuey, Tinima draws him into her fight against the Machado regime.