A thirteen-year-old boy is stabbed, a sixteen-year-old boy taken into custody. “Even senseless crimes makes sense,” pronounces Detective Inspector Anne Strawson. So when the analogue logic of CCTV fails, she sets out into the chaotic chatter of cyberspace, searching for the digital solution to a crime of a technological age. Unfortunately, in Nico Muhly’s debut [...]
Nico Muhly had one humble aim for his first opera. He wanted to create an episode of Prime Suspect, he told me last week. “A grand opera that functions as a good night’s entertainment.” There’s no doubt he’s achieved that. Two Boys, receiving its world premiere last night at the English National Opera, is as [...]
A few months ago it was the Royal Opera who were ruffling musical feathers with their wonderfully outrageous assessment of modern mores and contemporary malaise as seen through the bizarre life of Anna Nicole Smith. Now it’s the English National Opera’s turn, with a dark and undoubtedly controversial probe into the cyberworld and the murkier [...]
LONDON — The Internet is a vast repository of music, but has it created any of note? The speak-singing of “You’ve got mail”? The jangle of an instant message? They don’t really cut it as art. Enter the young composer Nico Muhly’s opera “Two Boys,” which had its world premiere at the English National Opera [...]
You would have had to be deaf and blind — or perhaps just a very wise monkey — not to have been aware that a young American composer called Nico Muhly was about to open at the English National Opera in London last night with a work called Two Boys. Since late last year, it [...]
Nico Muhly’s first opera may have its origins in a true story from Manchester in 2003, but, as presented in Craig Lucas’s libretto, Two Boys seems far removed from any kind of hard-edged reality. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but being trialled by English National Opera, the opera unfolds the whole rather [...]
Nico Muhly’s opera Two Boys, an exploration of the internet’s impact on communications as depicted in the tragic story of two teenagers, opened at English National Opera on Friday. The story, loosely based on real events which took place in a Northern British industrial city, sees two boys become intertwined in a dark web world [...]
A teenage stabbing, internet chatrooms and cybersexual predators: Nico Muhly’s Two Boys has all the ingredients of social malaise that promise to make a copybook opera for our times. For those who believe opera should engage with contemporary issues, Muhly’s work, to a libretto by Craig Lucas, ticks most of the boxes. Loosely based on [...]
Reality blurred by fantasy, teen sexuality, Internet chatrooms, a murky murder plot — it’s not a new HBO drama, it’s the disquieting and absorbing first opera from composer Nico Muhly. The John Adams-esque minimalism-meets-romanticism score of “Two Boys” has immediate appeal, rare in new opera, but for all the smart handling of contempo themes, the [...]
LONDON: Based on a true story: A teenager stabs a younger boy outside a shopping mall in an English suburb. A lonely detective unravels a series of fake identities and Internet intrigues, gradually obsessing more and more over the case. The latest HBO crime drama? CSI: Manchester? Not quite. It’s the young composer Nico Muhly’s [...]