Fort Worth Opera Festival will present Frontiers, the company’s pioneering new works showcase. Six to eight composers and librettists will be in residence at the Festival during the last week, and their unpublished works will be presented in 20-minute performances sung by artists of the Festival, accompanied by piano.

The Operas

• Savitri & Sam: Composer John Mills Cockell and librettist Ken Gass’s opera Savitri & Sam was inspired by the true story of Savitri, a 17-year old high school student living in a remote Punjabi community of northern British Columbia. After her secret relationship with Sam, an 18-year old aboriginal boy of Haisla heritage is exposed she is tragically stabbed to death by her father. The story is all the more poignant because of the intense idyllic love of the young couple, who seemed so ideally suited for one another, despite their different cultural heritages.
• Mabel’s Call: After Mabel abandons her life in 1910s New York as an international icon of the avant-garde, she reinvents herself in the remote desert village of Taos, New Mexico. Inspired by the life of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mabel’s Call by Brooklyn-based composer-librettist Nell Shaw Cohen follows a fiercely unconventional woman chasing utopia and romance in the Southwest.
• Hagar and Ishmael: In William David Cooper’s grand Biblical opera Hagar and Ishmael, Egyptian handmaid Hagar encounters an angel after she flees Abraham’s camp, who tells her an incredible prophecy about her son Ishmael. Sixteen years later, Ishmael learns that newborn Isaac will be Abraham’s successor, and tries to kill him. Exiled and desperate in the desert, Hagar and Ishmael find faith, freedom and a marvelous destiny.
• Companionship: Recovering from a nervous breakdown, aspiring baker Leslie Sinclair finally reaches the end of her obsessive quest to bake the perfect baguette when the 207,345th one suddenly comes to life. Companionship, by composer-librettist Rachel Peters, mirrors our contemporary world, where what we consume becomes all-consuming. Adapted from the short story by Arthur Phillips.
• Domestic: This work by composer-librettist Ben Stevenson is a set of two one-act operas exploring the ways that people interact when no one is watching. Act One - An Enigma - is about how people end a relationship, while Act Two - percs. - is about the hope that others can offer when things seem hopeless.
• Fordlandia: This work by composer William Susman and librettist Stuart Rojstaczer is a family drama about the struggle between Henry Ford and his son, Edsel, over the leadership and future of Ford Motor Company. Henry’s inability to relinquish the control of his company to a son he loves dearly destroys Edsel emotionally and physically. The tragedy between father and son is only mitigated by the strength and actions of their wives.