Spotlight Sunday Feature - Nathan Fletcher and Megan Cohen
Welcome back to Spotlight Sunday! This is the second Spotlight Sunday feature during National Opera Week! Thank you to everyone who showed support for opera in your community this week. It's not too late to support your local opera company in Hartford! This week, we are garnering support for our 9th annual New in November Festival. To learn more about how you can help keep innovative, fresh, and affordable opera in Hartford, please visit our fundraiser page in honor of NOW. To purchase tickets for our 9th annual New in November festival, please visit our website.
Today we are honored to introduce our composer / librettist duo for our third New in November opera: A Bridge for Three. We are thrilled to welcome composer, Nathan Fletcher and librettist Megan Cohen to Hartford Opera Theater's 9th annual New in November Festival. We hope you enjoy learning about Nathan, Megan, and what Opera for the 22nd Century means to them.
Nathan Fletcher (b. 1992)
is a New York-based
composer and tenor. Recent compositions: A Bridge for Three (librettist Megan Cohen) for Washington National Opera/Kennedy Center, critically praised as “melodious [and] neo Romantic” (Washington Post) and “gorgeous” (Opera-L); Someone Like Me (L'opera di Facebook) on YouTube (writer-director Adam Taylor), critically praised as a “must see” (Schmopera) and “charming, dirty, irreverent, and a ton of fun!” (Peter Szep, New York Opera Alliance), Audience Favorite and Judges’ Award, July 2018 Iron Mule Short Comedy Film Festival, Brooklyn. Compositions performed at: National Opera Center, New York; 2015 ACDA National Conference, Salt Lake City; Pilch Studio Theatre, Oxford, England; St Mary’s Priory, Abergavenny, Wales. Honorable Mention, 2017 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards (finalist, 2015 & 2016). Tenor at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue; performed with Clarion Choir and Madonna at 2018 Met Gala; has also appeared recently with Ensemble Origo and the Choir of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Editorial Assistant at Boosey & Hawkes, and Company Assistant at the Center for Contemporary Opera, both in New York. B.M. summa cum laude, University of Connecticut; M.M., Mannes/The New School. NathanFletcherMusic.com.
Nathan has some exciting performances coming up! Here's where you can hear his music next:
• Rumspringawakening, another comedic short film/opera collaboration with Adam Taylor, will be released on YouTube early next year.
• This spring, the University of Connecticut Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Paul McShee will perform a new work by Mr. Fletcher.
Here is what Nathan had to say about Opera For the 22nd Century:
I feel that opera will continue to use its combined powers of music, drama and the primal appeal of the human voice to tell stories that resonate deeply with contemporary audiences. The future of opera will be strengthened as new presentation methods—film, the Internet, and unconventional venues—bring the power of opera to the masses. In time, these growing and diversifying audiences will come to see more and more of their own stories represented. And hopefully, as opera itself thrives with the creation of vibrant new works, we will also see long-neglected masterpieces receiving the attention they deserve.
Megan Cohen (b. 1983) is a playwright and opera librettist based in San Francisco, CA. Called "a ruthless innovator" (SF Weekly) and "one insightful and confident woman with a devilish sense of humor" (Huffington Post), she has enjoyed more than one hundred productions, workshops, and readings of her pieces with artistic partners including Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, The Southbank Centre in London, American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and PianoFight in San Francisco, CA. She is currently writing the libretto for feminist rodeo opera Turn and Burn, a Houston Grand Opera HGOco commission set for a world premiere in 2021 with music by her sister, composer Nell Shaw Cohen.
To learn more about Megan, please visit her website or follow her on Social Media: www.megancohen.com Twitter @WayBetterThanTV
Thank you for tuning in to our Opera for the 22nd Century blog during National Opera Week! We hope to see you at our Composer Event on 11/17 and at our 9th annual New in November Festival on 11/18 at Christ Church Cathedral's Cathedral House in downtown Hartford. To purchase tickets, please visit our website New in November 9. In honor of National Opera Week, tell a friend about NIN9 today.
