In May 2000, Opera America honored Encompass and Founding Artistic Director Nancy Rhodes for "25 Years of Dynamic Leadership." Well-known Pianist and Conductor Mara Waldman is the Music Director/Conductor of Encompass, and Thomas Carlo Bo, William Boswell, Norman Carey, Glen Cortese, Nicholas DeMaison, Jack Gaughan, Kenneth Hamrick, Paulette Haupt, Charles Prince, Mark Shapiro, Julian Wachner, Sybille Werner, David Wolfson, and John Yaffe (who served as Music Director/Conductor for 13 seasons) have conducted productions with Encompass.

Internationally, for The Holland Festival, Encompass New Opera Theatre premiered Eccentrics, Outcasts, and Visionaries: A Century of American Opera and Song in Amsterdam, and toured four cities in the Netherlands.

Dedicated to introducing American musicals abroad, Rhodes staged Bernstein's West Side Story in 2004 and Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate in 2007 at the Albanian National Opera in the capital city of Tirana. These were the first American musicals ever staged in the history of the country and were filmed for National Albanian Television.

Encompass presented a double bill (titled Approaching Infinity) of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison's A Full Moon in March, based on a play by W.B. Yeats, paired with the New York premiere of composer Hans Werner Henze's The End of a World, libretto by Wolfgang Hildesheimer and translated by Wesley Balk, for its 2003 season.

In February 2004, Encompass premiered Seymour Barab's comic opera A Perfect Plan, freely adapted from a play by W.S. Gilbert, as a co-production with After Dinner Opera, in sold-out performances at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Symphony Space.

New Composers - New Visions

The leitmotif providing the impetus for developing a series of new musical works is Paradigm Shifts: Breaking through Barriers. Guided by this theme, Encompass has commissioned and is developing new operas which explore the outer reaches of science and human potential as witnessed in leading visionaries of the 20th and 21st centuries - artists, writers, inventors, and physicists.

The first of these new works premiered in June 2005 with A Gertrude Stein Musical Trilogy which explored the vision, genius and wit of Gertrude Stein in music. The trilogy featured Ned Rorem's Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters and Virgil Thomson's Capital Capitals, both operas with texts by Stein herself; and the world premire of Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, a new jazz opera with music by William Banfield and story and text by poet Karen LaLonde Alenier.

In June 2008, Encompass composer Philip Hagemann teamed up with George Bernard Shaw to musicalize two of his most fascinating plays which explore literary inspiration and passion - The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Passion, Poison and Petrifaction. This witty double-bill, Shaw Sings!, with singers and orchestra, played to sold-out performances at Symphony Space.

Encompass seeks musical pathways connecting art, science, music, philosophy, ecology and cosmology, to bring a deeper awareness of the inter-connected, multi-dimensional aspects of our existence.

On May 12, 2007 and May 6, 2006, at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Encompass presented staged highlights from The Theory of Everything, a new opera exploring science, spirituality and indigenous cosmology, music by John David Earnest and libretto by Nancy Rhodes in New York City Opera’s VOX: On the Edge program. In Season 2009-2010, Encompass presented three concert readings of The Theory of Everything on November 12 at The South Oxford Space, November 14 at Elebash Hall under the auspices of the Science & Arts Series at CUNY, and December 9 at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space.

Season 2010-2011 featured workshop readings of The Theory of Everything with performances for the Science & Arts Series at CUNY, at Symphony Space, and at The Theosophical Society's National Conference in Wheaton, Illinois. In May 2011, Encompass produced the world premiere of Evan Mack's Angel of the Amazon at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in the Jerome Robbins Theater for thirteen performances. Angel of the Amazon is a compelling new opera about the life and work of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun who devoted forty years to helping the indigenous people of Brazil gain land rights and build sustainable communities. In 2005, she was martyred at the hands of the destroyers of the Amazonian rainforest.

Season 2011-12, Encompass was featured in Gertrude Stein’s Paris at Symphony Space with performances of SINGING STEIN: THREE SISTERS WHO ARE NOT SISTERS by Ned Rorem and CAPITAL CAPITALS by Virgil Thomson, both with lyrics by Gertrude Stein. Season 2012-13, Page to Stage, New American Opera Previews staged highlights from DEIRDRE, a new opera by Sameer Ramchandran, based on a Celtic tale by William Butler Yeats. MUSIC FOR THE SOUL AND MIND featured songs and scenes of six composer-lyricists, four singers, and violinist Stephanie Chase.

Season 2014-15 opened with the New York premiere of A Wake or a Wedding, a free-wheeling comedy composer by Richard Pearson Thomas at the Baruch Performing Arts Center.

Season 2015-16 featured The Astronauts Tale by composer Charles Fussell and librettist Jack Larson at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM Fisher. Page to Stage featured scenes from BLOOD OF ANGELS by Richard Pearson Thomas, a new opera about the early Civil Rights Movement.

Encompass produced the World Premiere of ANNA CHRISTIE in 2018, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Eugene O’Neill, with music by Edward Thomas and libretto by Joseph Masteroff. Broadway Records released the Encompass production on CD (their first full-length opera) and it reached #6 on the Billboard charts for Classical albums in Season 2019. Encompass Young Artists program featured a production of Menotti’s THE CONSUL, performed in the Hudson River Museum Amphitheatre.

In March of 2019, Encompass produced Paradigm Shifts: Music and Film Festival, a two-week education and outreach program featuring 55 performers, 14 independent films, and 14 musical events celebrating true stories of courageous change-makers from around the world who are working to preserve our Planet. Dedicated to bridging indigenous cultures, women's wisdom and environmental science, each film was paired with a variety of vocalists, musicians, and dancers performing jazz, gospel, classical, folk, African, Tibetan, Ukrainian, and Native American music.

Featured in NEW AMERICAN OPERA PREVIEWS, From Page to Stage, was BLOOD OF ANGELS by Richard Pearson Thomas, a new opera dramatizing the political life of George C. Wallace set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement.

In November 2022, Encompass brought Angel of the Amazon to The Sheen Center for eight powerful performances. We were honored to be joined by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the same order that Sister Dorothy Stang was part of. Following one of the performances, Encompass held a talkback between the artists and the audience. In 2023, Encompass took Angel of the Amazon, On Tour to Hingham, Massachusetts. We performed in their 800 seat theater for students of Emmanuel College as well as four Catholic high schools.

Our Musical Salute Galas!

In a night celebrating the magic of music across jazz, cabaret, Broadway, and film, we have had the privilege of honoring amazing artists like…

Sheldon Harnick, John Kander, Charles Strouse, Jerry Herman, Jerry Bock, Maury Yeston, David Shire, Richard Maltby Jr., John Weidman, Marvin Hamlisch, Alan Menken, Joel Grey, Jeanine Tesori, Barbara Cook, Lee Adams, Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, Terrence McNally, Christine Ebersole, Laura Benanti, Bartlett Sher, Estelle Parsons, Chita Rivera, Danny Burstein, Marilyn Maye, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman!