Reviews: Scalia/Ginsburg is ‘enchanting,’ ‘a perfect…jewel’ at Glimmerglass

Derrick Wang’s comic opera Scalia/Ginsburg received its second production on August 4 and 13, 2017, in a revised version at The Glimmerglass Festival.

Opera Today calls Scalia/Ginsburg “a perfect…jewel”:

[A]n enchanting 60-minute opera…musicalized with heart [and] levity…. [W]hen called upon to bring his own important voice to the fore, [composer and librettist Derrick] Wang proves highly adept at crafting exceedingly attractive phrases that really take wing, buoyed by a harmonic palette that progress[es] inevitably and agreeably. His angular writing for the more contentious exchanges remains vocally grateful and pungently accented with well-used dissonances.… 

[I]t is always a treat to discover an accomplished new work by a living composer. Mr. Wang is young, he is talented, and if Scalia/Ginsburg is any indication, he will give us many more enjoyable evenings in the opera house before he is done.”

The Wall Street Journal praises Scalia/Ginsburg’s “musical wit”:

Also engaging was a revised version of ‘Scalia/Ginsburg’ by Derrick Wang, which explores the friendship of those two legally opposed and opera-loving Supreme Court Justices. Mr. Wang’s score plays cleverly with musical jokes—the conservative Justice Scalia’s utterances are appropriately Puccini-esque; Justice Ginsburg’s run the gamut from Purcell to Mozart to the blues. Tenor William Burden (Scalia), mezzo Mary Beth Nelson (Ginsburg) and Brent Michael Smith (the Commentator, who sets the plot in motion) were equal to its musical wit.

Reviews of the world premiere production at the Castleton Festival can be found here.