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Company premiere: Paola Prestini's The Hubble Cantata
A cosmic collision of science and art on a novel scale
The Off Grand series continued to explore nonstandard approaches to music and drama in a range of venues. The season’s offerings included two collaborations with the pathbreaking Beth Morrison Projects. First up was Paolo Prestini’s mesmerizing The Hubble Cantata at the Ford Theatres, which incorporated Eliza McNitt’s virtual reality film Fistful of Stars. The performance featured soloists Nathan Gunn and Jessica Rivera along with the LA Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
Royce Vavrek is a Canada-born, Brooklyn-based librettist and lyricist.
He has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker), a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (New York Times) and “one of the most celebrated and sought after librettists in the world” (CBC Radio).
His opera Angel’s Bone with composer Du Yun was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music. With composer Missy Mazzoli he wrote Song from the Uproar, premiered by Beth Morrison Projects in 2012, and subsequently seen in multiple presentations around the country, including at REDCAT through LA Opera's Off Grand initiative in 2015. Their second opera, an adaptation of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, premiered at Opera Philadelphia to critical acclaim in 2016. The work won the 2017 Music Critics Association of North America award for Best New Opera. Their next opera, an adaptation of Karen Russell’s short story "Proving Up,” was commissioned by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and The Miller Theatre, to be presented by the three institutions in 2018. They are currently developing a grand opera for a future season at Opera Philadelphia.
His collaboration with composer David T. Little led Heidi Waleson of the Wall Street Journal to proclaim them “one of the most exciting composer-librettist teams working in opera today.” In 2016 they premiered their first grand opera, JFK, at Fort Worth Opera, a co-commission with American Lyric Theater and Opéra de Montréal that was called “ravishing” (Opera News), earning a ten-star review in Opera Now magazine. This followed the success of their first opera, Dog Days, which received its world premiere in 2012 at Peak Performances @ Montclair, in a production co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and directed by Robert Woodruff. The work was celebrated as the Classical Music Event of the year by Time Out New York and a standout opera of recent decades by The New York Times. LA Opera Off Grand presented the West Coast premiere of Dog Days at REDCAT in 2015. Little and Vavrek are currently developing an original work for the Metropolitan Opera through the Met/LCT commissioning program.
Royce has also worked extensively with composer Paola Prestini, first on the song cycle Yoani, inspired by the blog posts of Yoani Sanchez, and then on The Hubble Cantata, a virtual reality oratorio produced by VisionIntoArt/National Sawdust in association with Beth Morrison Projects. The latter work, called "a thundering opus" by Hyperallergic has been presented by BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!, Kennedy Center and LA Opera, and was preserved in a studio recording released by National Sawdust Tracks. They are currently working on a number of new projects including an operatic adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea with director Robert Wilson; The Glass Box for the Young People's Chorus of New York; and an adaptation of Carlos Reygadas' film Silent Light with Thaddeus Strassberger. They will also workshop Film Stills, a project for mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti that dramatizes four of Cindy Sherman's iconic photographs through musical monologues composed by Paola, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly and Du Yun. Royce and Paola's collaboration can be further heard on the AIDS Quilt Songbook: Sing for Hope recording, where their song "Union," as sung by Isabel Leonard, is featured.
In 2014 Royce premiered 27, his first collaboration with composer Ricky Ian Gordon, at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Created for renowned mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, the work brought to life Gertrude Stein’s famous salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris. The opera was subsequently presented by Pittsburgh Opera and MasterVoices at New York City Center, and will next be seen at Michigan Opera Theater. In 2017 their adaptation of Gail Rock’s Christmas classic The House Without a Christmas Tree for Houston Grand Opera was premiered to critical acclaim. Other recent and upcoming projects include Strip Mall with Matt Marks for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Diana Vreeland with Mikael Karlsson for VisionIntoArt; Midwestern Gothic with Josh Schmidt for Signature Theatre, Virginia; Naamah’s Ark with Marisa Michelson for MasterVoices; O Columbia with Gregory Spears for HGOco; and Knoxville: Summer of 2015 with Ellen Reid for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and National Sawdust. (RoyceVavrek.com)
From: South Bend, Indiana. LA Opera: Belcore in The Elixir of Love (2009, debut); Figaro in The Barber of Seville (2009); soloist in The Hubble Cantata (2017). He will return in In Our Daughter's Eyes (2022).
Nathan Gunn has made a reputation as one of the most exciting and versatile baritones performing today. He has sung leading lyric baritone roles and appeared in several world premieres in many of the most renowned opera houses of the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Paris Opera and Bavarian State Opera.
Also a distinguished concert performer, Mr. Gunn appears regularly with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, and has been presented in recitals in new York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Toronto, London and Brussels.
His growing discography includes Billy Budd (Virgin Classics) which won the 2010 Grammy Award, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Allegro (Sony Masterworks Broadway), The Barber of Seville (Sony Classics) and his solo albums Just Before Sunrise (Sony/BMG Masterworks) and American Anthem (EMI). He also starred in the Metropolitan Opera's HD broadcasts of The Magic Flute and The Merry Widow.
Mr. Gunn recently ventured outside the standard opera repertoire with performances of the title role in Sweeney Todd at the Houston Grand Opera, Camelot and Carousel with the New York Philharmonic (both broadcast on PBS's Great Performances) and Showboat at Carnegie Hall and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
He is the director of the American Repertoire Council at the Opera Company of Philadelphia and is also a professor of voice at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and general director of the Lyric Theater @ Illinois.
Beth Morrison is the Creative Producer of Beth Morrison Projects.
She is an opera and theater producer, singer, and voice teacher with bachelor and master of music degrees and a master of fine arts in theater management/producing from the Yale School of Drama, as well as many years of experience in the development of new opera and theater works. She first cultivated her extensive experience in arts administration at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute where she served as administrative director for four years. Beth served a founding tenure as the Producer for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre from 2009-2011, as well as Producer for New York City Opera’s VOX: Contemporary American Opera Lab from 2010-2011.
Beth Morrison Projects is the realization of Beth‘s vision, which stems from a deep commitment to nurturing composers and other artists and fostering the development of new opera and other new music-theater works. Established in 2006, Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) identifies and supports the work of emerging and established living composers and their multi-media collaborators through the commission, development, production and touring of their works, which take the form of contemporary music-theater, opera-theater, and multi-media concert works. BMP has established itself as a composers’ producer and The New York Times said, “The production of new [opera] works in the city still falls mostly to the tireless Beth Morrison and her Beth Morrison Projects…”
Garth MacAleavey specializes in concert amplification and sound design for both traditional and experimental music performance.
He cut his teeth (or ears) as an engineer on the New York City contemporary music scene (le Poisson Rouge, VIA, BMP, MATA). An avid musician since his youth, Garth was strongly influenced by his time as a student of avant garde percussion at UCSC under the tutelage of Willie Winant. Coupled with the music department’s emphasis on contemporary and experimental music, this set him on the path he is on today. He is technical director for National Sawdust. Recent credits include the sound design for “FLEXN” with Peter Sellars at the Park Avenue Armory, engineering Jeff Zeigler/Andy Akiho/Roger Bonair-Agard at the Prospect Park Bandshell for Celebrate Brooklyn and mixing Alarm Will Sound with Dance Heginbotham in Seoul, Korea. He has worked with Kronos Quartet, Philip Glass Ensemble, Terry and Gyan Riley, David T. Little, Steve Reich, Paul Simon, Atoms for Peace, Erykah Badu, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and many more. He was the sound engineer for Dog Days, presented by LA Opera at REDCAT in 2016. After that work's 2012 premiere as part of the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University, the New York Times wrote: “Unseen but felt: the sound engineering, by Garth MacAleavey, is aggressive, and at times bombastic, in ways that complement the work. Amplified voices grow strident at peaks. The opera’s ending comes awash in electric distortion.”
Lighting
Christopher Kuhl
Christopher Kuhl
Lighting
Video Engineer
Shay Willard
Shay Willard
Video Engineer
Production made possible by generous support from Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.
Presented at the Ford Theatres in association with LA Opera and produced by Beth Morrison Projects and National Sawdust.
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