Catapult Opera, Talea Ensemble & Neal Goren
Biography Catapult Opera, Talea Ensemble & Neal Goren
Catapult
is a community of artists, producers, business leaders, and opera lovers with a passion for the stage and a shared goal: Creating high-quality, transformative, and lasting opera experiences. From our base in New York City, we collaborate with artists, musicians, and composers from across musical genres and throughout the world.
From its inception, opera was conceived as the ultimate multi-media art from—enticing the ear, the eye, the intellect, and the heart equally. At Catapult, we are reinvigorating that tradition by engaging in new visual and digital media with the goal of delivering the emotional vitality of the classically trained voice, supported by a range of both unconventional and traditional instrumentation, and complemented by arresting visuals. Catapult is paving uncharted pathways in this new hybrid medium by creating an original body of work of uncompromising production quality and fresh ideas for delivery to both traditional and non-traditional audiences around the world.
Catapult Opera accomplishes this goal by providing grants to performers, musicians, and multimedia artists outside the classical realm to create short digital works at the intersection of their chosen genre and opera. These new works are sparking a global conversation about what opera can be in today’s world that is influencing the art form’s continued development in our current time and inspire future generations. As we look to the future of opera, we also engage with its past to find rare gems and overlooked masterpieces, producing live performances to expand the canon of accepted composers and librettists and bring a welcome freshness to the world’s opera houses.
Beyond the stage, we are committed to promoting a robust, sustainable future for opera by lifting up aspiring artists to reach for the highest artistic standards, and proliferating them across the opera community. This commitment includes interviews with influential leaders in the world of opera on topics such as artistry, personal and professional development, and marketability. Additionally, Catapult produces behind-the-scenes interviews with luminaries in the field of opera to deepen audience’s knowledge and appreciation of opera and its inner workings.
The question that animates all of this is: “What is opera?”
At Catapult, we are working to play a pivotal part in that question’s ever-evolving answer for today and for decades to come.
Talea Ensemble
The Talea Ensemble’s mission is to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life with vibrant performances that remain in the audience’s imagination long after a concert.
Recipients of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Talea has brought to life at least 80 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008, including bold and inventive productions combining music and other genres such as theater and visual art. Highlights from Talea’s most recent performance seasons have included world premieres by Wang Lu, Tyshawn Sorey, Sarah Hennies, Natacha Diels, Anthony Cheung, Agata Zubel, Mark Applebaum, Sanae Ishida, and more, as well as numerous US and New York premieres.
Engagements include performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Warsaw Autumn Festival, Wien Modern, Vancouver New Music, Time of Music Finland, TIME:SPANS, NY Philharmonic Artist Spotlight Series, and many more. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the Kairos, Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels, and been broadcast on ORF (Austria), HRF (Germany), and WQXR’s Q2.
Talea assumes an ongoing role in supporting a new generation of composers, and has undertaken residencies in music departments around the country. Since 2020, Talea has targeted support to early career composers through the growing Talea Access Project, which includes a commissioning program and a composer recording workshop.
Neal Goren
was the founder and Artistic Director of Gotham Chamber Opera, which popularized and legitimized the formerly ignored genre of chamber opera, which has now attained respect equal to the pillars of the operatic repertoire. In its fifteen years of existence, Goren conducted all of Gotham’s 27 productions, which included the world premieres by Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters and Lembit Beecher’s I have no stories to tell you; and the U.S. stage premieres of works by Kaija Saariaho, Toshio Hosokowa, Bohuslav Martinu, and Xavier Montsalvatge.
Gotham’s productions often featured unexpected elements, such as site-specific presentations in locales thematically related to the operas, such as Cavalli’s Eliogabalo presented in The Box, a louche Manhattan night club; Haydn’s Il mondo della luna, presented in the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History; and Daniel Catan’s La hija de Rappaccini, presented in the Rose Garden of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and the Greystone Manor Gardens in Beverly Hills, CA. Other Gotham productions were staged by directors best known for their work in other artistic genres, such as choreographers Mark Morris, Karole Armitage, David Parsons, and Luca Veggetti; Broadway directors Moisès Kaufman and Rebecca Taichman, and puppeteer Basil Twist. Other Gotham productions featured sets by internationally celebrated visual artists Georg Baselitz and Vera Lutter.
Goren’s other conducting credits include Die Zauberflöte for New York City Opera and the Trentino Festival (Italy), Dark Sisters by Nico Muhly (European premiere) for the Trentino Festival and Opera Philadelphia; Transformations by Conrad Susa, for San Francisco Opera Center; Mila by Eli Marshall (world premiere) for the Asia Society of Hong Kong with additional performances in New York and San Francisco; Anaïs Nin and Odysseus’ Women by Louis Andriessen (U.S. premiere) for Center for Contemporary Opera and Le Nozze di Figaro, La clemenza di Tito, and Cendrillon for the Trentino Festival.
A much sought-after recital accompanist, Goren was a protégé of Geoffrey Parsons and has concertized extensively with Leontyne Price, Kathleen Battle, Hei-Kyung Hong, Harolyn Blackwell, Hakan Hagegard, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Aprile Millo, Joyce DiDonato, and Hermann Prey, among others. He is an Associate Professor at Mannes College, The New School for Music, where has served on the faculty since 1991. He is a frequent judge of national and international vocal and composers’ competitions and is a frequent featured guest on the Metropolitan Opera quiz.
A celebrated writer and lecturer on opera topics, his highly-acclaimed book, Beyond the Aria, was published by Rowman & Littlefied (formerly Amadeus Press) in 2020. He has written about music and architecture for Yale Constructs Magazine and about music and art for Air Mail.
