I do not believe a word or a note of all this. It reeks of an adventitious, sentimental inauthenticity that tries to exploit our predilection for an opera singer couple, our preference for peace over war and sympathy for the conscripted of all nations, and above all our willingness to suspend disbelief in a preposterous heroine. The phoniness would remain even if every action represented could be historically verified. I wonder if Puts himself believed any of it. He’s written a couple of orchestral sequences that register some effect, though the one depicting a battle is just a professionally assembled collection of more sound effects, and the one evoking a dawn belongs in a nice ’50s Technicolor movie. Elsewhere, he slogs through the same voice-setting chores that frustrated Gordon and Thomas, and to no better purpose. If Act 2 suddenly rises to a transcendent musical level, I shall stand chastised. I know of no opera of which that is true, but I suppose there’s always a first time. Among the principal voices, the strong lyric tenor and stylistic/linguistic skills of Miles Mykkanen (Nikolaus) and the good bass-baritone of Troy Cook (Father Palmer) stand out in Act 1, and Karin Wolverton copes well enough with her assignment as Anna.

I have also heard the first of the two CDs in:

Kate Soper: Ipsa dixit (libretto by the composer, based on several literary/philosophical sources. Kate Soper, soprano/speaker, with members of the Wet Ink Ensemble (Erin Lesser, flute; Ian Antonio, percussion; Josh Modney, violin). New World Records 80805-2.

In this case, I haven’t yet heard the recording’s second half not because of a defect in the CD or a lack of curiosity, but because Ipsa dixit is not an opera, and would not seem to have any ambitions as a repertory piece of any sort. But, though I might have been better off hearing one of Soper’s works that evidently can be classed as chamber opera, Ipsa dixit is the one I’ve heard about most often, first in a 2017 New Yorker review by Alex Ross, to which there is a link on the composer’s Wikipedia entry. It’s a theatre piece of a sort—a monodrama, we could call it, though in some sections it does resemble what Steve Smith, author of the informative booklet notes, cites as a concession to how it can be received, i. e., “a TED talk, one in which dogmatic proclamations are accompanied by dutifully illustrative musical figurations.”  And it represents one direction musical language is being pushed on opera’s intellectual fringe.

Ipsa dixit ^(I) has been assembled and expanded from previously freestanding segments, so that, in this first half, arguments from Aristotle (Poetics and Rhetoric) and a chorus from Oedipus Rex are juggled with reflections of Lydia Davis’ authorship. The texts are all wonderful. In performance, Soper and her collaborators augment spoken and sung passages with instrumental interventions, often of a violent sort. The harmonic idiom is freewheeling, the vocal line jagged and full of intervallic leaps and usages that appear to challenge classical convention, but are in fact well within the limits imposed by the laws of registration, resonance, and respiration common to Western vocalities. She’s got two or three kinds of trills, keeps her voice stable while yanking it about, brings in some chest in the lower range, and once in a while allows a pretty timbre to sneak into the midrange at a moderate dynamic. She employs straight tone much of the time;^(II) when it’s at forte, especially in the higher range, it’s painful to listen to. The voice appears strong, but we can’t tell that for certain, since even when live, she sings with a mike. So she’s on top of all her skills, but how would she not be? Obviously, she wouldn’t write anything for herself she didn’t feel she could do. Her spoken recitation possesses the virtues of good understanding and clarity. It doesn’t try for elevated tone; it’s just a midlevel American idiom that will, for instance, let “evil” slip by as “evul.” Unpretentious, but not the ultimate in eloquence. A couple of online video clips, one from Ipsa dixit, show physical presentation that, considered as acting, I’d rate as that of an earnest amateur with something urgent to impart, trying to ensure that we get it. But then, acting isn’t what she’s doing, exactly.