After a year of anticipation, Kris Defoort’s new opera was brought to the stage in the fall of 2022.

 

Black Lives Matter, police brutality, rigged elections: these are themes that have remained at the forefront of current affairs over the past year. There are clear parallels to be drawn between the recent history of the US and The Time of Our Singing, which was inspired by the Richard Powers novel of the same name.

 

The work depicts the life of a mixed-race family that is both united and divided by music, against the backdrop of segregation in the post-war United States. In collaboration with the librettist Peter van Kraaij, the conductor Kwamé Ryan, and the stage director Ted Huffman, Kris Defoort conjures an imaginary space in which official history and personal histories intertwine, in which people come together to weave a narrative, and in which jazz and classical music are enriched by one another.

 

‘To my mind, it doesn’t happen often that a contemporary opera is so profoundly rooted in the “now” and yet raises so many universal themes.’ 

— Kris Defoort