Snapshot 2022 to Showcase Five New Operas

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s Snapshot program presented by West Edge Opera. This is the annual supplement to the West Edge summer season, which presents a showcase for new and developing works from West Coast composers and librettists. The production is a partnership between West Edge and the Earplay new music ensemble, which provides instrumental accompaniment that offers richer accounts of the scenes being showcased than a single piano can afford. This season’s program will showcase five operas as follows:

1. Jean Ahn is both composer and librettist of Remembrance, depicting the haunting memories of a Korean boy who has lost both his mother and his sister in the Korean War.
2. Gabrielle Rosse is both composer and librettist of Christina Doesn’t Need Saving, a contemporary depiction of a fifteen-year-old girl, estranged from her home, who seeks love and community in an uncertain environment of drugs and predation.
3. The Dark Horse take a bold move in providing an operatic treatment of biography. The subject is Enzo Ferrari, who began his career competing in Italian motor racing. He would then go on to supervise the design and construction of new cars, both for racing and for more mundane driving experiences. He died in 1988, but his name is still firmly associated with high-quality automobiles. Scott DeTurk has created a libretto around the Ferrari biography, and the music for that libretto is being composed by Cesar Cancino.
4. Michael Kaulkin is both composer and librettist of Lilith, an operatic treatment of the novel of the same name by J. R. Salamanca, which was published in 1961 and later made into a film starring Warren Beatty. The novel is set in a mental institution where a veteran of World War II (Beatty in the film) is recovering. The title character (Jean Seberg in the film) is a seductive, artistic, schizophrenic patient in the same institution; and the veteran becomes dangerously obsessed with her.
5. The School for Girls who Lost Everything in the Fire is the latest partnership of composer Ryan Suleiman with librettist Cristina Friès, and it amounts to a surreal coming-of-age story about three homeless girls held hostage after a terrible fire.

This program will be given two performances, at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 9, and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 10. As in the past, the performances will take place in the Diane and Tad Taube Atrium Theater, which is located on the fourth floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. All tickets are being sold for $40. They may be purchased in advance online from a Tix event page. For both performances there will also be “Underwriter” tickets available for $200, which provide reserved seating in the front row.