Press
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Press Reviews
Jennifer Griffith artfully weaves together a wonderful tapestry of musical passion and humor — she's a kindred spirit to Richard Strauss, unafraid of wanton borrowing — and with an uncanny mastery of operatic tradition. And frankly, she has the ability to write with the range, intensity, passion — and balanced moodshifts of a Strauss. This little vignette shows mastery of craft and is intensely funny. Mark Greenfest
of the New Music Connoisseur
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| Griffith pairs a seductively-attired (dominatrix) singer/speaker with a chamber orchestra, each member of which, at one laugh-inducing point, sings two lines of "We Are the World," when international policy is invoked in the spoken text. Sample a few lines: "Have you been naughty again? Do I have to punish you for taking advantage of that--employee? Drop you pants and come to your mistress you bad little boy!," and you might get the drift. The whole piece is whimsical, dreamlike indeed, and it certainly more than kept my attention. At times, I couldn't help being swept up by a gentle yet indescribable wave of nostagia. --New Music Connoisseur
And also what is now my own personal, all-time favorite opera plot, real or imagined: a professional dominatrix "pausing between clients to muse about a U.S. president, her hopes and dreams about him." --Molly Sheridan, New York Press, (full text) |
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| (click on cd to hear clips or buy) Griffith has a pure, yet expressive voice, and a sure sense of pitch that allows her to follow Elson’s melodies to unexpected destinations, at several lovely moments even to a tone a lower than the place to which more conventional musical syntax might have sent them. The disarming quality of Griffith’s voice heard in counterpoint with the knowing sensuality of Elson’s saxophone compound and enrich some of Wolff’s brilliantly ironic lines, as in the title track’s evocation of his neighborhood in Lower Manhattan at “Mott and Broome”: “From the murder at the sweat shop / To the murder at the drug drop" ----2009 Counterpunch
"I've no
idea what she writes about, but I do enjoy looking like I couldn't
care less on a nice rug..."--Sebastian (LeTendre Times)
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Presented as part of American Opera Projects' 
