I believe in new opera. I think it’s vital to the survival of the genre and I like quite a lot of it. Most of what I like has come from European or British composers or John Adams. I love Reimann’s Lear and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur and Sariaaho’s L’Amour de Loin.  I’m equally impressed by Nixon in China and, maybe to a lesser extent, Doctor Atomic.  All of these, it seems to me, lie within the range of idiom of contemporary symphonic or chamber music.  I’ve had much less luck finding contemporary American opera, Adams aside, that I enjoy or even find interesting.  I loathed A Streetcar Named Desire and five minutes of Adamo’s Little Women had me reaching for the barf bucket.  It’s a combination of cloying sentimentality and music that sounds like South Pacific minus the good tunes.  It’s certainly not the sort of music one could imagine hearing at a symphony concert. Am I missing something?  What should I try to see if I want to see intelligent, musically interesting contemporary American opera?