Last night was the first performance of "The Love of Three Kings", performed by the Bleecker Street Opera Company at 45 Bleecker Street. My friend and frequent collaborator, Paul Haas, is music director for the group and asked me to re-arrange/reduce/re-orchestrate (whatever you'd like to call it) the score to accommodate a 1-on-a-part sort of orchestra. 4 winds, 4 brass, percussion, keyboard, 5 strings. This was an incredibly daunting task for me as I've never dealt with so much music in one project – so many black dots and lines. But now I understand why younger composers often worked as copyists. I learned a great deal about Montemezzi's orchestration and his language, and his particular use of the late-Romantic opera orchestra. The original forces are huge – it's an incredibly difficult work for the players – and there's a kind of weight going on all of the time. The work is often compared to Pelléas, and without a doubt there are several Debussian things in the score, but I'd have to say that it felt more like Wagner. Of course, with such a small orchestra, I bet it leans back to Debussy in the audience's ear. How ironic that two of the most diametrically opposed composers (at least in our historians' judgement) emerge as the most obvious influences. Read the NYT review.

I'm thrilled to be involved with this company as they do great work in apprenticeship and outreach and are family relations with their famed predecessor, Amato Opera. Check them out here. I wish them the greatest of luck, and I'm looking forward to attending the performance soon.

On another note: "Oh, the timing." (I say this often.) It's my firm belief that timing is everything. I mean this in broad strokes, and more aligned with personal development... but if God is in the details, it seems that karma is in the timing. I was sort of raised in an opera house. Both my parents sing opera in Milwaukee, and I spent a good deal of my youth in dressing rooms with my mother at the Florentine Opera and elsewhere. After studying voice for a long long time, I stopped singing Classical music right around the time of my Master's degree and just started up again – it's been almost 8 years. I've been hungry to write an opera for the last 2 years or so, and have been taking up old ideas and searching for new ones, and the floodgates just sort of opened. Within a month of taking up the voice again, I was hired by Naropa University to conduct the Chorus, I was commissioned by Donald Nally (Chorusmaster at the Lyric Opera), I've met numerous collaborators, 2 librettists, and several opera singers with similar desires as my own, and then I get this job re-orchestrating an opera. Timing, timing, timing. I suppose I'm supposed to do this. And in typical fashion, it's unlikely that I'll ever sing in an opera in New York City, but I've already gotten involved somehow.