Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers is based on Terrence McNally’s original script for Some Christmas Letters about a family and their struggle to connect. It is a poignant American opera with soaring melodies and heartbreaking musical moments. This intimate, 90-minute chamber opera takes place over three decades during the AIDS crisis. Each section of the opera looks back on the events during a specific December between a famous stage actress mother and her two adult children. As family secrets are made known, resentment grows, and relationships become tested. This profound modern masterpiece has been in the Top Ten most performed North American works since 1991.

New York Stories is composed by Daron Hagen, with a libretto by Hagen and Barbara Grecki. It presents three intimate vignettes based on real people’s experiences living in the big apple. The opera is musically conversational with the first skit being fiery and romantic, following a woman living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, coupled with an Italian immigrant who arrives to do maintenance work, and the romantic moment they share. The second tells the story of an Upper East Side woman getting a surprise visit from her brother. The third depicts a warm, domestic self-portrait of the composer and his spouse as new parents attempting to put their infant son to sleep after a night on the town.

Composed on his honeymoon in 1951, Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti paints an intimate picture of the troubled marriage of a young suburban couple Sam and Dinah, longing for love and the ability to communicate. As we follow their journey through a façade of overcompensation and materialism, Dinah sings one of the most famous mezzo-soprano arias, “What a movie!” depicting the movie Trouble in Tahiti she saw one afternoon. Emerging into a dreamlike sequence in which she immediately feels embarrassed for even conjuring the fantasy, we understand the yearning to escape within all of us.

Signor Deluso is an over the top, one-act opera by composer and librettist Thomas Pasatieri. The opera contains love melodies, musical patter, and confrontations and harmonies of resolution. It is loosely based on Molière’s 1660 comedy Sganarelle, ou Le Cocu imaginaire (Sganarelle or “The Imaginary Cuckold”). Performed in English, this piece resonates with vivacious, over-the-top comedic characters, familial expectations, and exuberant lovers, all leaping to wrong conclusions.