... borrows snatches of Puccini tunes and weaves them into his own conservative-eclectic idiom, tossing in bits of American pop ... for merry measure. The vocal writing is expert, the orchestration light enough to allow the singers to project the text clearly. Buoso is charming and unpretentious ...." Opera News noted that Ching uses "a more modern musical mode, yet avoiding excessive atonality. The score subtly introduces brief tongue-in-cheek quotations from other works, ranging from Mozart to Sondheim, plus one unmistakable interjection of Shostakovich." The work has been performed throughout the U.S. as an ideal pairing with Gianni Schicchi, the most popular of Puccini's three Il trittico one-act operas. Ching also supplied his own libretto to his one-act opera Faith, based on the short story of the same title by award-winning science-fiction author James Patrick Kelly. The opera follows the story of the titular character, a divorced and depressed woman who meets a man via a personal ad, discovers he talks to plants, and begins to fall in love again. Kelly said of the opera, "You get good reviews, you win an award, but there's no feeling quite so wonderful as having another artist interpret your work supremely well. There are giant chunks of narrative [Ching] just set to music which is different ... for opera ... much more colloquial and approachable. This man transformed my piece into something equally, if not more, wonderful." The opera was commissioned by OperaFest of New Hampshire, and premiered there in April 1999, with subsequent performances in September 1999 at the Vital Theatre in New York City and elsewhere, including Chicago in 2000. 2000–2012 Ching's three-act opera Corps of Discovery, his third collaboration with Hugh Moffatt, was commissioned by the University of Missouri for the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The principal roles are Lewis; Clark; Sacagawea; interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau; York, a slave and full member of the corps; George Shannon; and John Potts, a German-born older member of the corps. Act 1 of the opera was performed in 2002 at Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall and at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The full work had its world premiere in May 2003. In addition to full productions at the University of Missouri, Opera Memphis, Opera America's 2003 convention, Washington State University, University of Idaho, and elsewhere, Ching also toured the piece with Fargo-Moorhead Opera, using a piano and