WHO WE ARE

 

 

“Sung in English – Felt in Italian!”

 

Long Leaf Opera is a collaborative process between outstanding vocalists, artistic and technical staffs, instrumentalists, composers, and librettists. We produce and cultivate fully staged operas originally written in English and specifically highlight American composers. As out founders said in 1998, “Someone has to do this. If not us, who?”

 

The Pulitzer Prize winning composer, Ned Rorem, once said that in the United States, you hear opera sung in every language but English. That is changing slowly, but English language and/or American works remain extremely rare on professional stages. Our native composers spend years of their lives working on operas that seldom see a performance. With your help, Long Leaf opera is committed to changing that, one exciting season at a time.

 

These seasons, generously sprinkled with world and regional premiers and commissions, are not dusty museums filled with works from Eighteenth and Nineteench Century European opera houses, reflecting a distinctive European sound. There is certainly nothing wrong with such works; they are glorious and should be preserved. But our inspiration at Long Leaf is drawn from Copland, Bernstein, Weill, Still, Menotti, Floyd, and Moore, to name a few. We are also inspired by composers of this generation and have commissioned or premiered new works from Feigin, Beck, Carter, and Heggie. Our seasons remind us that all music was new once and that many of the works we now revere were once considered unmusical and shocking.

 

Our seasons are also presented in an informal atmosphere that helps make a somewhat daunting art form less so. Our audiences, whom we want to entertain, stimulate, and inspire, are invited to dress casually. Ticket prices are kept as low as possible, and we make ever effort to remember that no commitment to the arts is worthwhile if there is no one there to hear or see it.

 

Finally, we stress that every ticket, every contribution made to our organization, no matter the size, goes to ensure that our living composers will have a home to learn their craft and to create their own classics for generations yet to come.