Town Hall is set to present the New York premiere of Laura Kaminsky and Kimberly Reed’s “Hometown to the World” on Nov. 5, 2022.

The new opera stars Blythe Gaissert, Cecilia Duarte, and Michael Kelly. Tania León conducts Sybarite 5 and a chorus featuring over 100 public high school students from LaGuardia/Music & Art and Repertory Company High School for Theatre Arts,

The opera is sung in English, Spanish, Yiddish, and Hebrew and is set in Postville, Iowa, in 2008, following the aftermath of the U.S.’s largest workplace Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid.

Santa Fe Opera showcased the opera, as did Hawai’i Opera Theatre, where it had its digital world premiere.

“I think that we are artists, but we’re people first, and we’re moved by the world we live in, and we’re upset by the world where we live in. I can try to have some impact on the world through my art, so I want to make art about the issues that I care about and my hope for the world to be a better place and to seek understanding and shed light on these things. I think one of the things that’s important is that working in an abstract form such as music is that it can be so direct in impacting one’s emotions,” Kaminsky told OperaWire in an interview ahead of the digital premiere.