By Georgia Rowe

It’s been years in the making, but West Edge Opera is finally presenting the world premiere of “Dolores” — and the opera’s namesake, the renowned activist and labor leader Dolores Huerta, will be in the audience to experience her story on an operatic scale.

A West Edge Opera commission created by composer Nicolás Lell Benavides and librettist Marella Martin Koch, this new work traces the remarkable life of Huerta, who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, coined the phrase “Sí se puede” (Yes we can), and has been a lifelong champion for workers’ rights. The West Edge production is directed by Octavio Cardenas and conducted by music director Mary Chun.

Watch clip on NBC Bay Area, featuring mezzo-soprano Kelly Guerra singing the role of Dolores.

By Charlise Tiee

“West Edge Opera gave the world premiere of Nicolás Lell Benavides' Dolores yesterday in Oakland. Set in 1968, the opera is about labor leader Dolores Huerta during the Delano Grape Strike. The piece is timely, moving, and, at times quite funny.

The music has a lot of interesting textures, and Maestra Mary Chun kept everyone together. There was a particularly lovely viola solo near the end of Act I with the title character singing alone. The pacing is good, everything moves at a fine clip.”

By Andrew Gilbert for KQED.

A New Dolores Huerta Opera Brings a Labor Struggle to the Stage

A landmark labor struggle might seem like difficult terrain to explore in an opera, but Long Beach-based composer Nicolás Lell Benavides knew that he had a riveting tale to tell in Dolores.

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On today’s episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer Nicolás Lell Benavides.

Nicolás is a 2024–25 Guggenheim Fellow whose music has been commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, West Edge Opera, and many more. His work spans opera, orchestral, and chamber music, often drawing on cultural history, folk storytelling, and regional memory. Upcoming projects include Dolores, an opera about civil rights icon Dolores Huerta premiering in 2025, as well as new commissions for Eighth Blackbird, the LA Phil, and an album with Friction Quartet and mezzo-soprano Melinda Martinez Becker.

In this conversation, Nicolás reflects on why his music is rooted in curiosity and dialogue rather than autobiography. He shares stories of writing about cottonwoods and irrigation, sage grouse and New Mexican Catholic folk figures — and how that exploration connects to his own family and heritage. He also speaks candidly about the opera process, the challenge of revision, and how working with brilliant collaborators has helped him embrace humility, growth, and a sense of purpose in the work.

By Tom Jacobs (cross post with SF Chronicle)

The nation is tense, and California’s Central Valley farm fields have become an unlikely flash point. The workers — mostly immigrants — who harvest the fruits and vegetables that feed much of the country are scared and angry. They labor to the point of physical exhaustion for low pay. Protests against these conditions are organized and soon gain widespread support.

This may sound like a dispatch from the front lines of 2025, a year that’s been marked by the Trump administration’s immigration raids and arrests across the state’s agricultural industry. But it’s also the historical backdrop for Dolores Huerta, who in the mid-1960s spearheaded a nationwide boycott of table grapes in solidarity with striking farmworkers. Alongside fellow labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong, she played an integral role in the era’s civil rights movement.

By Joshua Kosman (On a Pacific Aisle)

At a time when the political situation in the United States can seem intractably hopeless, perhaps we could all use a bit of uplift. Or at any rate, we could use a reminder that although things have looked bleak before, some visionaries seized the moment to forge a popular resistance even in the face of daunting obstacles. And that at least one of those people still walks among us!

Dolores, a new opera by composer Nicolás Lell Benavides and librettist Marella Martin Koch that’s scheduled for its world premiere next month with West Edge Opera, promises something along these lines. It’s a musical and theatrical portrait of Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, helped spearhead the Central Valley strikes of the 1960s and ’70s, and coined (or at least popularized) the slogan “¡Sí, se puede!”

Read more…

By Janis Haashe for East Bay Magazine (cross posted with East Bay Express)

At 95, Dolores Huerta could rest on her laurels with no reproaches. Labor leader, tireless fighter for immigrant rights and civil rights, as well as feminist, Huerta has continued her work for decades. 

But, said Nicolás Lell Benavides, composer of the new opera, Dolores, Huerta knows there is always more to do. The fight for justice is ongoing. And even when a life-altering tragedy occurs, Huerta does not give up, but finds a way to persevere…

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.

“Last April, NOVA Chamber Music Series presented the world premiere of a work that incorporated the sounds of the mating rituals of the greater-sage grouse and sharp-tailed grouse. Commissioned by the Fry Street Quartet, whose members serve collectively as music director for the series, Lek by Nicolás Lell Benavides, was a delightful, witty, appealing  on-the-spot audio documentary, with plenty of live music and birdsong…”

Read more at Utah Review

A Crescendo of Achievements

Nicolás Lell Benavides ’10 shares how his Santa Clara experience and passion for composition led to the creation of his largest project to date: “Dolores.”

By Francesca D’Urzo

https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/fall-2023/a-crescendo-of-achievements/

Based on a New Mexican morality tale about a poor woodcutter whose greed gets the best of him when he defies “Lady Death,” Nicolás Lell Benavides’s Doña Sebastiana made an entrancing impression in its commissioned premiere. As it moved from layered sliding harmonies to brooding and pungent passages and sweet bird sounds, the story the composer had described in charming opening remarks took shape in a listener’s imagination.

Lightly percussive touches (the cellists slapping the bodies of their instruments) and a wittily abrupt ending made for an evocative, effectively concise work of musical storytelling. It all happened in eight minutes. The orchestra… gave a warm and responsive reading under Music Director Daniel Hope on lead violin.

-Steven Winn, SFCV

With operatic flourish, activist Dolores Huerta and younger cousin receive USC doctorates on same day

COMMENCEMENT: Hers is an honorary degree; his is a doctorate of musical arts. The conferral is a prelude to an operatic interpretation of Huerta’s remarkable life, which the composer calls “a microcosm of loss and perseverance.”

(Excerpt, from Les Roka)

The Libby Gardner Hall audience for NOVA Chamber Music Series’ Connect with the West received the full ASMR sound treatment of the mating rituals of the greater-sage grouse and sharp-tailed grouse in the outstanding world premiere of Lek by Nicolás Lell Benavides. Commissioned by the Fry Street Quartet, whose members serve collectively as music director for the series, Lek was thoroughly entertaining as it was enlightening.

Benavides scored the work for string quartet and electronics featuring edited recordings of these ‘thirsty’ bird species in the midst of their own natural club for hooking up. The composer recorded the birds in Utah last year. The result was a delightful, witty, appealing  on-the-spot audio documentary, with plenty of live music and birdsong.

Nicolás Lell Benavides is a Nuevomexicano who now lives and works in California and, like Chuaqui and Frank, has a creative identity that comprises many layers.  

“It has been forever interesting,” Benavides says, when asked about his family’s history. “They had one foot in Latin America and one foot in the U.S.,” he adds. His family history includes many fascinating elements. His grandfather, as a teenager, hitchhiked to Oakland, California, saying “good riddance” to Albuquerque (only to return later) and was drafted into the Korean War. His grandfather epitomized the loose-fitting zoot suits, the unique Spanglish dialect of the Pachuco culture, and the music and steps of the Mambo, Rumba and Cha Cha dance styles.

There was a lot of music in his family’s household when he was growing up. With an accordionist in the home, Benavides heard traditional corridos and rancheras, along with jazz and funk, folk and pop songs. He was in a progressive rock band but in high school, he could not differentiate Mozart from Beethoven. The transforming experience came in his senior year of high school when he heard the Albuquerque Youth Symphony perform Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. 

Recuerdos: Orchestra of St. Luke's plays Benavides

Friday, February 24, 10 am

The closing piece of St. Luke's concert in 2022 was Nicolas Lell Benavides' Recyclate, a piece inspired by Hovor II, which is a 15-foot by 15-foot “tapestry” created by El Anatsui, a Ghanian artist living in Nigeria. El Anatsui is particularly intrigued by recycled materials, and this monumental work served as a basis for Recyclate. 

Librettist Marella Martin Koch and I were featured in an article in East Bay Magazine about our newest opera, “Dolores”, commissioned through West Edge Opera.

“At the grand old age of 33, Nicolas Lell Benavides seemed the most capable of the Frank Academy graduates. His “El Correcaminos” (“The Roadrunner”) explored his New Mexican heritage. The second movement, excitingly performed by the Calder Quartet, was inspired by the Mexican (and Spanish) settlers. Beginning with slapping the instruments, the accumulating rhythms became a gritty Spanish-tinged dance played on the strings.”