A Whispered Opera Requests Your Close-Up Attention

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times reviews Artist-in-Residence David Lang's "The Whisper Opera," which opened at the N.Y.U. Skirball Center last week. Tommasini writes, "Mr. Lang’s aim in this 65-minute piece, he explains in a program note, was to write something so quiet and personal that the audience would need to be right next to the performers to hear anything at all. A few years after its New York premiere in 2013 at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, “the whisper opera” felt even more eerily intimate in this revival."