After Life, Tom Cipullo’s modern opera, investigates the role of art in a distressed world, and asks heavy questions about an artist’s obligation in confronting...

After Life, Tom Cipullo’s modern opera, investigates the role of art in a distressed world, and asks heavy questions about an artist’s obligation in confronting humanity in all of its good and bad parts. David Mason wrote the libretto for the work, which imagines a meeting between Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein as ghosts, who show their brilliance and flaws. In Sleep the World Is Yours, a song cycle by Lori Laitman, sets three lovely poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who sadly would perish in a Nazi camp at the young age of 18.

Reviews:

Cipullo weaves David Mason’s ingenious, rhapsodic libretto into an absorbing, often lively, occasionally desultory narrative told in words and music that is translucently scored and makes full use of the five-member ensemble’s colours, astonishingly vocal at times in their effect.

– Gramophone

The coupling of the two works makes perfect sense thematically and stylistically. Both are well worth hearing and well performed, very good examples of some of the significant tonal modern work being made right now in the US.

_Gapplegate Classical/Modern Music Review