Fairouz Opera Premiere Will Open the Prototype Festival

The world premiere of Mohammed Fairouz's “Sumeida's Song,” an opera based on the Egyptian playwright Tawfiq El-Hakim's “Song of Death,” will be directed by David Herskovits, and conducted by Steven Osgood, with a cast that includes Rachel Calloway, Dan Kempson, Edwin Vega and Amelia Watkins. The show is to open the first Protoype: Opera/Theater/Now festival, which runs Jan. 9-18 in New York.

The performances are at Here, a theater at 145 Sixth Ave. in TriBeCa that has fostered avant-garde and genre-mixing opera in recent seasons, as well as at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University and the 3LD Art and Technology Center. The festival is a co-production of the Here Arts Center and Beth Morrison Projects.

Mr. Fairouz's opera is about a young Egyptian who refuses to take part in a multigenerational feud and tries to pull his village into modernity, with tragic results. Though a recording of Mr. Fairouz's opera has just been released (on Bridge Records), it has not yet had a full staging.

David T. Little's “Soldier Songs,” a multimedia work based on interviews with veterans of five wars, will have its New York premiere in a production directed by Yuval Sharon, with the baritone Christopher Burchett as the Soldier, and Todd Reynolds conducting the Newspeak Ensemble at the Schimmel Center.

The Dutch ensemble 33 1/3 Collective will present the North American premiere of “Bluebeard,” a work based on the same story as Bartok's “Bluebeard's Castle,” with a recorded soundscape by Michael de Roo, vocal lines sung by Ilse van de Kasteelen and video by Douwe Dijkstra, Coen Huisman and Jules van Hulst, at the 3LD Arts and Technology Center.

The festival also includes a series of multimedia concerts by Timur and the Dime Museum, a Los Angeles ensemble that calls itself a “dark glam band” and produces a theatrical blend of pop, opera and vaudeville, as well as a workshop performance of “Aging Magician,” an opera with music by Paola Prestini and a text by Rinde Eckert. Mr. Eckert will perform the work with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.