Fort Worth Opera will present the company’s fourth annual, critically-acclaimed new works series, Frontiers, funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Held during the final week of the 2016 FWOpera Festival, these selected pieces will be presented in two separate showcases of four works each in the intimate Kahn auditorium of the Kimbell Art Museum. Featuring 20-minute excerpts of each selected piece, these brand-new operas will be sung by artists from the 2016 FWOpera Festival with piano accompaniment.

Tickets for the showcases are $10, and can be ordered by calling FWOpera’s Customer Service team at 877-396-7372. 

Now entering its fourth season, Frontiers has established itself as a pioneering leader in seeking out the best and brightest new voices in the opera industry, with a specific eye toward identifying exceptional works for future production in FWOpera's alternative venue series, Opera Unbound.

THE OPERAS

• In Guy Barash’s opera, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins, based on the play by Nick Flynn, four strangers meet on a New York City sidewalk during a blackout. Exploring the tenuous membrane that separates comfortable everyday existence from the desperate margins of society, Barash and Flynn portray an urban dystopia unnervingly similar to our own world while poignantly tapping into the loneliness and peril of city life.
• The Rat Land chronicles the disintegration of a troubled and eccentric family. The plot centers on their adolescent daughter Karen, coming of age as best she can amidst a post-Cold War American Grotesque. Caught between her nightmarish home life and a near-psychotic fantasy world of her own devising, she faces grown-up problems of violence, isolation, madness, and death. With The Rat Land, composer Gordon Beeferman and librettist Charlotte Jackson have created a unique chamber opera that is not a melodrama, but tragi-comedy: pity and fear are leavened by a healthy dose of graveyard humor.
• Steal a Pencil for Me, composed by Gerald Cohen with a libretto by Deborah Brevoort, is a full-length opera about one the Holocaust’s most unusual love stories—between Jaap Polak, a Dutch accountant, and Ina Soep, the daughter of a wealthy diamond manufacturer—who fell in love in the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Based on their love letters, which were published in a book of the same title, Steal a Pencil for Me is about the indestructibility of the life spirit and the power of humankind to survive adversity. The opera dramatizes intimate concerns and private dramas alongside the epic horrors of the Holocaust.
• Inspired by a recent French news item, The Beach, by Andrew Gerle and Royce Vavrek, follows gold-digger Adele and her frustrating marriage to elderly William, whom she expected to die years ago but lives on despite his dementia. Adele and her lover Jean-Luc finally shut William in the laundry room and feed him stale pastries while they live on his money, convincing him he's actually at a fancy beach resort. William's childhood sweetheart soon begins to suspect foul play, but it is Jean-Luc's pre-teen daughter who finally calls the authorities and releases William, who knows nothing of what's truly been going on and begs everyone to return him to his “resort.”
• Diana Vreeland, composed by Mikael Karlsson with libretto by Royce Vavrek, is an opera in 15 anecdotes that celebrates the exaggerated personality of the ‘Empress of Fashion.’ Known for wielding her influence while working at Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, Diana was famously mad about the odder sides of people, the embellishment of history, and the posterior of Jack Nicholson. Using music theater and contemporary ballet, the opera paints a surreal portrait of the icon who demanded “never be boring!”
• Written by Andrew McManus, Killing the Goat is an operatic adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo. This visceral work of historical fiction tells the tale of Urania Cabral, a Dominican woman who returns to her native Santo Domingo to confront trauma she suffered as a teenager at the hands of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic prior to his assassination in 1961. As Urania searches for solace and catharsis from her ailing father, a former official in the regime, there are flashbacks to the dictator himself, to an official who conspired to assassinate him, and to the traumatic event that has haunted her for 35 years.
• Empty the House is a 60 minute chamber opera, composed by Rene Orth in collaboration with librettist Mark Campbell, which explores the complex nature of forgiveness between a mother and her two grown children. The opera will receive its staged premiere in January 2016 with the Curtis Opera Theater.
• Set in New York City in 1985, Legendary is an opera written by Joseph Rubenstein and Jason Kim about double lives and destructive desires set in the glory days of New York City’s underground drag culture.  Based on a true story, famed drag performer Dee Legendary embarks on a passionate love affair with Officer John, whose fascination with Dee takes an unexpected and dangerous turn.