Congratulations to MOBY-DICK...and, get ready for AMELIA on Twitter!

As Seattle Opera enters the final countdown to Saturday night's world premiere of Amelia, we'd like to congratulate composer Jake Heggie, the Dallas Opera, and everyone involved in this week's other new American world premiere opera: Moby-Dick, which set sail Friday night. In an informative review, Wayne Lee Gay wrote about "a fine score, performed by an ensemble of great singers and instrumentalists," including Seattle favorites Ben Heppner, Morgan Smith, and Robert Orth.

Morgan Smith, who plays Starbuck in Moby-Dick, made his Seattle Opera debut in our 2001 Billy Budd, as did Wesley Rogers, who will create the role of The Officer in Amelia. (Photo of Billy Budd by Chris Bennion.)

Also in the news: Bernard Jacobson of the Seattle Times writes of Amelia, "The plot...while complex, is vividly emotional enough to grip an audience, and Hagen's music, too, is approachable in the extreme. He writes lyrically, exploiting the resources of tonal harmony to intense expressive effect and giving the voices — including in this production the superb ones of Kate Lindsey, William Burden, Nathan Gunn and Jane Eaglen — time and space to soar."

And get ready, everyone, for the Twitter Countdown to Amelia! Starting tomorrow morning at 9 am, we'll be tweeting the entire libretto, line by line, on a dedicated Twitter account. Go to twitter.com/AmeliaLibretto and sign up to read the libretto as it gets tweeted over the course of the week. We'll give you just enough time between tweets for you to imagine, if you were the composer, how you'd set that line to music!