Stranger Love, a Six-Hour Opera by Dylan Mattingly ’14 and Thomas Bartscherer, Goes On for One “Euphoric” Night Only, Writes the New York Times

The New York Times profiled the “singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera” Stranger Love and its collaborators, composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. The Times also reviewed the opera, naming it a Critic's Pick, calling it “an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small.”

Stranger Love premiered on Saturday, May 20, 2023—its only planned performance at the time of writing. Writer Zachary Woolfe tracked the project from its envisioning 11 years ago to its final incarnation: a six-hour, three-act production to be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Contemporaneous, which Mattingly cofounded with David Bloom ’13 as an undergraduate at Bard, will play, with Bloom conducting. Whether Stranger Love will have a future performance after this weekend is unclear, though “Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.” Regardless, Mattingly and Bartscherer are at work on their next collaboration, the ambitiously titled “History of Life.”

Post Date: 05-16-2023