part remarkable in that it "supports the singers on the stage, its overlapping lines and syllables weaving around them, amplifying their characters and conflicts, sometimes echoing their words (or even their thoughts), or supplying atmosphere. The voicestra gives the opera an added human dimension ...." Albany Records released the CD of A Midsummer Night's Dream — opera a cappella in 2014. The Recorded A Cappella Review Board reviewed the work, noting that Slaying the Dragon, Ching's fact-based 2012 opera, explores intolerance and redemption, and was inspired by the 1990s true story Not by the Sword by Kathryn Watterson. The two-act opera's libretto is by Ellen Frankel, and it was premiered in June 2012 by Philadelphia's Center City Opera Theater, which commissioned the work. The opera is the story of a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon whose life is transformed by the friendship and kindness of a local rabbi and his wife. The man renounces his Klan association and begins to speak out publicly for tolerance; his terminal illness eventually incapacitates him and he moves into the rabbi's home, converting to Judaism before dying. The score balances the dark themes of bigotry and intolerance with an eclectic variety of ethnic music including Yiddish folk songs, Vietnamese children’s songs, Jewish sacred music, Aryan rock, Broadway scores, gospel music, and country-western tunes. 2013–present Speed Dating Tonight!, a comic opera in one act, was commissioned and premiered in 2013 by the Janiec Opera of the Brevard Music Center. Ching supplied his own libretto for the piece, and the opera for up to 45 singers or more can be adapted for varying numbers of singers, voice types, gender ratios, and length of time, by cutting, re-ordering, or transposing the keys of the vignettes. Additional 2013–2014 production venues included Amarillo Opera, Southern Utah University, Ithaca College, University of Central Florida, Microsopic Opera (Pittsburgh), Poor Richard's Opera (Philadelphia), and elsewhere, and it has been cited as "the most-performed American opera within a year of its premiere". Ching next composed and wrote the libretto for the opera Alice Ryley, a fact-based ghost story based on the title character (also spelled Alice Riley), a woman who was hanged in Savannah, Georgia, in the 1730s. The opera was commissioned by the Sherrill Milnes VOICE Programs, via the Savannah VOICE Festival, in October 2014, and premiered on Halloween Eve, October 30, 2015. In 2017 he premiered Anna Hunter, the Spirit of