By Paul Bodine

Benavides’ powerful, dramatically savvy score and Marella Martin Koch’s searing libretto transfigured what could have been a polemical exercise into a radically moving experience. From its opening doom chord to its skillful writing for clarinet, strings, and piano, Benavides’ score strikes a masterful balance between economical restraint and emotive force. Only rarely letting the subject’s political dimension intrude, Koch deploys humor (‘You look the same – terrible’), family back stories, suspense, and plain old good writing (‘a life that looks but no longer feels like yours’) to create a three-dimensional portrait of unconquerable sibling love.

House lights up, a standing ovation and several audience members’ teary eyes confirmed ‘Tres Minutos’ hit its mark.

By Stephen Smoliar

Ultimately, the climax of the opera is when viewers can experience how the siblings make the most of the short time allotted to them. Mind you, Koch’s libretto provides the observer with a rich account of both personalities. Thus, when they finally meet, that observer can appreciate not just the climax but also the frustration of the descent from that climax.

As the opera concludes, the attentive viewer will come away recognizing that there are (and may never be) any simple (or even viable) solutions to a situation in which a family is divided by a border that separates two decidedly different countries.