ROMULUS, AN OPERA IN ONE ACT

Excerpt of review in Fanfare Magazine, by Robert Carl:

"The story is a gentle farce, featuring two
absent-minded bachelors, one a philosopher (Wolf), the other an
astronomer (Celestus), their housekeeper Martha (Celestus’s sister), and
a bumbling busybody of a mayor (Babelhausen). The appearance of a baby
in a basket upsets their household, and suspicions of paternity almost
wreck their carefully constructed relationships, until something of a
deus ex machina
revelation (albeit well-enough prepared) allows
everything to be corrected, and the characters can move to a higher
level of love and maturity.

Karchin’s music is distinguished by the
aforementioned harmonic clarity, and is enhanced by a truly glittering
orchestration, which gets great variety and sonority from an 11-piece
chamber orchestra. It sparkles, but it never gets precious in its
beauty. The vocal writing is similarly direct and clear. Like most
composers of his taste and generation, Karchin doesn’t tend to write
set-piece arias that might be stand-alone songs, but neither does he
write the sort of gray perpetual recitative that makes so much
contemporary opera dreary. The music crackles along, and the text
setting always seems appropriate to the quickly changing action. It’s an
interpretive approach that reflects a close, moment-by-moment reading
of the thoughts and emotions of the characters. It also is quite
wonderful vocally (and this also is a result of excellent performers)..."