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Soprano Mrs. Green sings the ballad The Cruel Mother while actors and mime perform an English mummers’ play. The two strands remain self-contained until the final tableau, when Father Christmas completes Mrs. Green’s story and she briefly enters the mummers’ playing area.
At Christmas in Camelot, the Green Knight challenges a knight to behead him and receive the same blow a year later. Gawain accepts, beheads him, and travels north to the Green Chapel. At Bertilak’s home, he agrees to exchange whatever he gains each day for the host’s hunt. Lady de Hautdesert kisses him three days running and gives him a protective sash, which he hides. The Green Knight wounds Gawain slightly, explaining that the three blows reflect Gawain’s honesty and his concealment of the sash. Gawain returns to Camelot angry at the court’s assumption that he has been heroic.
Orpheus leads Eurydice out of the underworld under Hades’s condition that he not look back at her. Near the end of the corridor, he turns to make sure she is following, condemning her to return to the underworld. In a series of arias, Eurydice retreats down the corridor while Orpheus is left to return alone to the living world.
A man outside a house and a woman inside watch and wait; he posts a letter as she swats a fly. Their scene repeats in increasingly complex variations, revealing their meeting at Lerna and the myth of Zeus’s seduction of Io, whom he changed into a heifer to hide from Hera. Hera’s gadfly drove Io across the world. In the present, the woman refuses the man and clings to domestic routine, while the ancient gods and the man continue to intrude, stripping away her settled life.
A character called Ghost, representing the audience, invites Christ and his disciples to supper. The opera juxtaposes old and new, Jewish and Christian perspectives to question the Last Supper story’s meaning in a modern context, ending in the Garden of Olives.
The opera explores contradictory versions of the Orpheus myth through simultaneous events and repeated events that are predicted, remembered, or replayed. Orpheus and Eurydice fall in love and marry, but she dies and he journeys to the Underworld. He returns believing she follows him, then dies in several retellings of the myth. The work ends as the Orpheus myth decays.
Ariadne meets Theseus among the young people sent to Crete as sacrifices to the Minotaur. She consults the Snake Priestess and gives Theseus a ball of twine to trace his way through the labyrinth. The Minotaur gains speech in dreams but kills the Innocents. Theseus confronts and kills him; as he dies, the Minotaur laments being neither fully human nor fully beast.
In the World of Shadows, the dead can revisit moments from their past. King Kong hears Pearl through a mirror and becomes infatuated with her; with Orpheus’s help he journeys toward the living world, survives a series of trials, and contacts Pearl, but the two cannot touch.
A chamber opera based on a supernatural folk tale about two shepherds, their sheep, and the Devil. Its subtitle is A Mechanical Pastoral, and the title derives from a traditional sheep-counting system.
Soprano Mrs. Green sings the ballad The Cruel Mother while actors and mime perform an English mummers’ play. The two strands remain self-contained until the final tableau, when Father Christmas completes Mrs. Green’s story and she briefly enters the mummers’ playing area.
At Christmas in Camelot, the Green Knight challenges a knight to behead him and receive the same blow a year later. Gawain accepts, beheads him, and travels north to the Green Chapel. At Bertilak’s home, he agrees to exchange whatever he gains each day for the host’s hunt. Lady de Hautdesert kisses him three days running and gives him a protective sash, which he hides. The Green Knight wounds Gawain slightly, explaining that the three blows reflect Gawain’s honesty and his concealment of the sash. Gawain returns to Camelot angry at the court’s assumption that he has been heroic.
Orpheus leads Eurydice out of the underworld under Hades’s condition that he not look back at her. Near the end of the corridor, he turns to make sure she is following, condemning her to return to the underworld. In a series of arias, Eurydice retreats down the corridor while Orpheus is left to return alone to the living world.
A man outside a house and a woman inside watch and wait; he posts a letter as she swats a fly. Their scene repeats in increasingly complex variations, revealing their meeting at Lerna and the myth of Zeus’s seduction of Io, whom he changed into a heifer to hide from Hera. Hera’s gadfly drove Io across the world. In the present, the woman refuses the man and clings to domestic routine, while the ancient gods and the man continue to intrude, stripping away her settled life.
A character called Ghost, representing the audience, invites Christ and his disciples to supper. The opera juxtaposes old and new, Jewish and Christian perspectives to question the Last Supper story’s meaning in a modern context, ending in the Garden of Olives.
The opera explores contradictory versions of the Orpheus myth through simultaneous events and repeated events that are predicted, remembered, or replayed. Orpheus and Eurydice fall in love and marry, but she dies and he journeys to the Underworld. He returns believing she follows him, then dies in several retellings of the myth. The work ends as the Orpheus myth decays.
Ariadne meets Theseus among the young people sent to Crete as sacrifices to the Minotaur. She consults the Snake Priestess and gives Theseus a ball of twine to trace his way through the labyrinth. The Minotaur gains speech in dreams but kills the Innocents. Theseus confronts and kills him; as he dies, the Minotaur laments being neither fully human nor fully beast.
In the World of Shadows, the dead can revisit moments from their past. King Kong hears Pearl through a mirror and becomes infatuated with her; with Orpheus’s help he journeys toward the living world, survives a series of trials, and contacts Pearl, but the two cannot touch.
A chamber opera based on a supernatural folk tale about two shepherds, their sheep, and the Devil. Its subtitle is A Mechanical Pastoral, and the title derives from a traditional sheep-counting system.