Tynan Davis, mezzo soprano, recently performed the role of Rita the Rat with Opera San Antonio. Other favorite gigs include a month-long tour with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, a brief moment on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon as an operatic zombie, and regular performances in Texas with Austin's Conspirare and San Antonio's SOLI Chamber Ensemble. The 2015 season includes Salome (a slave) with Opera San Antonio, the world premiere of Nico Muhly's How Little You Are with Conspirare and the San Antonio Symphony's Young People's Concert: Link Up: The Orchestra Sings!, Aikiko Fugimoto conducting. Tynan is a volunteer artist with Sing For Hope and an alumna of the Children's Chorus of San Antonio.
Boston's Jordan Hall was host to a concert version of Tobias Picker's 1998 setting of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox on December 7. A good-sized crowd from very young to older folks had assembled to hear Gil Rose lead his two ensembles, Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera, in a costumed semi-staged performance of this "family opera". Picker prefers to use this term to describe his morality tale, fearing that "children's opera" is a term frightened with an assumption of "dumbing-down".