The brash young composer Nico Muhly – much to the surprise of many but probably not to himself – turned out to be right. When his opera Dark Sisters was premiered in New York City in November, many believed the ever prolific Muhly (yes, even more prolific than his longtime employer Philip Glass) had rushed [...]
Is there a similarity between polygamy and same-sex marriage? Is there a common cause among the advocates of both of those controversial life styles? This opera raises that possibility, then drops the subject. It is a missed opportunity. Dark Sisters is a co-commission (and co-production) from the Opera Company of Philadelphia, Gotham Chamber Opera and [...]
Composer Nico Muhly is just 30, but has already has three film scores under his belt, numerous commissions with orchestras, has scored ballets for hotter than hot choreographer Benjamin Millepied. Muhly even composed a cantata to Shrunk and White’s grammar bible “The Elements of Style.” The New York based composer, who is no slouch in [...]
The plight of women trapped in plural marriage—one husband with multiple wives—glowed like a firebrand on the Perelman Theater stage on Sunday. Opera Company of Philadelphia’s Dark Sisters, in co-production with Gotham Chamber Opera and the Music- Theatre Group, is OCP’s final offering of the 2011-12 season. With every artistic touch, everyspecial effect, the chamber [...]
Nico Muhly’s new opera about women in a Mormon polygamist sect, Dark Sisters, opens with a poetic a cappella tableau: five women in nightgowns stand on the red sands of the desert, calling out to their children who have been taken from them by the government. A stormy sky swirls overhead (ironically – and perhaps [...]
A thirteen-year-old boy is stabbed, a sixteen-year-old boy taken into custody. “Even senseless crimes makes sense,” pronounces Detective Inspector Anne Strawson. So when the analogue logic of CCTV fails, she sets out into the chaotic chatter of cyberspace, searching for the digital solution to a crime of a technological age. Unfortunately, in Nico Muhly’s debut [...]
Nico Muhly had one humble aim for his first opera. He wanted to create an episode of Prime Suspect, he told me last week. “A grand opera that functions as a good night’s entertainment.” There’s no doubt he’s achieved that. Two Boys, receiving its world premiere last night at the English National Opera, is as [...]
A few months ago it was the Royal Opera who were ruffling musical feathers with their wonderfully outrageous assessment of modern mores and contemporary malaise as seen through the bizarre life of Anna Nicole Smith. Now it’s the English National Opera’s turn, with a dark and undoubtedly controversial probe into the cyberworld and the murkier [...]
LONDON — The Internet is a vast repository of music, but has it created any of note? The speak-singing of “You’ve got mail”? The jangle of an instant message? They don’t really cut it as art. Enter the young composer Nico Muhly’s opera “Two Boys,” which had its world premiere at the English National Opera [...]
You would have had to be deaf and blind — or perhaps just a very wise monkey — not to have been aware that a young American composer called Nico Muhly was about to open at the English National Opera in London last night with a work called Two Boys. Since late last year, it [...]