The Gotham Chamber Opera is New York City's premier opera company dedicated to the highest quality productions of chamber operas. Founded by Artistic Director Neal Goren in 2000 as the Henry Street Chamber Opera, the company fills a unique niche for New York: it produces intimate operatic works intended for a small space, offering audiences opera that is not a distant spectacle but immediate, involving, and powerful theater.

In the Playhouse at the Abrons Arts Center, an intimate 350-seat theater on the Lower East Side, the company first presented the American premiere of Mozart's Il Sogno di Scipione (1771), staged by Christopher Alden and described by The New York Times as "a propitious debut." Soon after, the company produced a double-bill of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689) together with Darius Milhaud's Les Malheurs d'Orphee (1924), again garnering rave reviews. Two more American premieres followed in November of 2002 with Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu's 1928 Dada opera, Les Larmes du couteau (The Tears of the Knife), and 1935 Hlas Lesa (The voice of the Forest).

After incorporating as an independent 501(c)3 organization in 2003, the newly renamed Gotham Chamber Opera continued its emphasis on overlooked treasures with the American Premiere of Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister's 1935 masterpiece Die schwarze Spinne (The Black Widow), a haunting piece of 20th-century music drama. Its February 2005 production of Handel's Arianna in Creta played to packed theater and rave reviews, and in summer of 2005, the company performed Ottorino Respighi's fantastical La bella dormente nel bosco (Sleeping Beauty in the woods) with puppeteer Basil Twist - a co-production of the Lincoln Center Festival and Spoleto Festival USA in association with the Gotham Chamber Opera. In the spring of 2006, Benjamin Britten's only comedy, Albert Herring, received its first professional staging in New York in more than 30 years, and in winter 2007, Rossini's Il signor Bruschino received its first major professional New York staging in over a half century.

In the 2007-2008 season, the company presented New York City’s first staged production of Astor Piazzolla’s 1968 tango opera Maria de Buenos Aires; Scenes of Gypsy Life, a fully-staged evening of songs cycles of Janacek and Dvorak; and Ariadne Unhinged, Gotham’s own retelling of the Ariadne myth through music of Monteverdi, Haydn, and Schoenberg.

As it has grown, the Gotham Chamber Opera has increasingly involved more of the New York City community with appearances on WNYC, displays at Berdorf Goodman and Prada Soho, an annual collaboration with the Gagosian Gallery, partnerships with Lower East Side restaurants, to name a few. With the help of its supporters, the company continues to increase the scope and scale of it activities to include performances, school residencies, workshops, and free rehearsals, all intended to educate and excite audiences about the unique musical and dramatic possibilities offered by opera in general and chamber opera in particula

Visit Upcoming Productions for information about future offerings from Gotham Chamber Opera.