Seventy works, roughly twice the number of any previous year, were submitted to the 2007 VOX selection committee, comprised of five City Opera staff from various departments, including music director George Manahan.
The twelve works chosen include John Zorn's La machine de l'ê_tre, a ten-minute opera for solo soprano inspired by drawings by Antonin Artaud.
VOX 2006 composer Jenny Olivia Johnson returns with a new piece entitled The Endings, which will be performed with an accompanying video. The lineup also includes an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry with music by Robert Aldridge and libretto by Herschel Garfein, and Rio de Sangre, an epic, lyrical tale of a dictator and his wife in a fictional Latin American country with music by Don Davis and a Spanish-language libretto by Kate Gale.
The committee also chose Marc Lowenstein's The Fisher King, a jazz-inflected adaptation of the Robin Williams film about a half-crazed beggar on a mission to find the Holy Grail; and Sergio Cervetti's Elegy for a Prince, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, with a libretto by Elizabeth Esris.
Also on the lineup are Brian Current's comic/mythic Airline Icarus, with a libretto by Anton Piatigorsky about an airplane in flight, and experimental composer Gordon Beeferman's The Rat Land, with a libretto by Charlotte Jackson.
In addition, each selection this year will have a video introduction including an interview with the composer and librettist as well as rehearsal footage.
Admission to all VOX events is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.nycopera.com/about/vox or www.skirballcenter.nyu.edu.