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Gotham Chamber Opera is the nation’s foremost opera company dedicated to producing rarely-performed chamber operas from the Baroque era to the present. 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 small spaces, 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) and Darius Milhaud’s Les Malheurs d’Orphee (1924), garnering rave reviews. Two more American premieres followed in November of 2002 with Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s 1928 Dada opera, Les Larmes du couteau (The Tears of the Knife), and his 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. Gotham’s February 2005 production of Handel’s Arianna in Creta played to packed houses and drew rave reviews; that summer, in a co-production with the Lincoln Center Festival and Spoleto Festival USA, the company performed Ottorino Respighi’s fantastical La bella dormente nel bosco (Sleeping Beauty in the Woods), featuring the puppetry of Basil Twist. 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 the winter of 2007, Rossini’s Il signor Bruschino received its first major professional New York staging in more than half a 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 song cycles by Janáček and Dvořák; and Ariadne Unhinged, Gotham’s own retelling of the Ariadne myth through the music of Monteverdi, Haydn, and Schoenberg. And in 2009, Mark Morris directed the U.S. stage premiere of Haydn’s L’isola disabitata. Gotham presented Haydn’s Il mondo della luna at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in 2010. This high-tech production, staged by Diane Paulus, featured NASA-generated moon travel projections on the Planetarium’s 360-degree dome.  Most recently, Gotham's critically-acclaimed production of Montsalvatge's El gato con botas (Puss in Boots), directed by Moisés Kaufman, featuring puppetry by London's Blind Summit Theatre, was presented at The New Victory Theater.

As it has grown, Gotham Chamber Opera has increasingly involved more of the New York City community, with appearances on WNYC, displays at Bergdorf Goodman and Prada Soho, annual collaborations with the Gagosian Gallery, and performances in various Manhattan venues. With the help of its supporters, the company continues to increase the scope and scale of its activities to include school residencies, workshops, and free rehearsals, all intended to inspire audiences with the unique musical and dramatic possibilities of opera in general and chamber opera in particular.