Missy Mazzoli Performs Song From The Uproar At The Kitchen 2/24-25, 3/1-3

On Friday, February 24, Missy Mazzoli's multimedia opera Song from the Uproar, created in collaboration with filmmaker Stephen Taylor, librettist Royce Vavrek, and director Gia Forakis, receives its world premiere at The Kitchen in New York City, opening a run of five performances: February 24 + 25 (Friday - Saturday), and March 1 – 3 (Thursday – Saturday).

Produced by Beth Morrison Projects, this fully-staged premiere production follows sold-out workshop performances at Galapagos Art Space, New York City Opera's Vox, and Bard College. Rising Mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer stars, with acclaimed chamber group NOW Ensemble and a vocal quintet consisting of Celine Mogielnicki, Amelia Watkins, Kate Maroney, Peter Stewart, and Tomas Cruz. Steven Osgood conducts. Performances start at 8 pm each evening; tickets are $15, available at www.thekitchen.org.

About Missy Mazzoli: "Missy Mazzoli has gained notice as one of the leading compositional voices of NYC's indie-classical scene. Five years in the making, Song from the Uproar is her most ambitious work to date, the first installment in a trilogy of multimedia operas. Mazzoli's richly-textured music deftly balances lyricism and unease, with twisting harmonies and steady yet elusive rhythms. A sure sense of dramatic pacing is wedded to expressive, idiomatic vocal writing."

About the show: "Vavrek and Mazzoli's libretto is based on the journals of the fiercely independent explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), who left her native Switzerland and adopted a nomadic and unfettered existence in the lonely and hostile landscapes of North Africa. Dressing as a man, she traveled widely through the deserts and mountains on horseback, documenting her travels extensively in journals and short stories. She became fluent in Arabic, converted to Islam, and later joined a secret Sufi brotherhood, fighting against French colonial rule in her adopted country of Algeria."

"In 1901 Eberhardt fell in love with Slimene Ehnni, an Algerian soldier, and they began a chaotic relationship marked by dramatic fights, long separations, and passionate reunions. At age 27, having survived illnesses, deportations, heartbreak, and even an attempt on her life, she drowned in a flash flood in the desert. Pages from the journals that make up much of the libretto were pulled from the wreckage of this flood."

"Each of the opera's fourteen sections detail a significant event in Eberhardt's life, including the tragic deaths of her parents and brother, her travels, and her own sudden death. Stephen Taylor's haunting films, made entirely from repurposed archival footage from the early 20th century, form the basis for simultaneous multi-channel video projections designed by S. Katy Tucker, transporting the audience into the narrative. Pre-recorded and electronic voices interplay with the live sounds of NOW Ensemble and the voices of Abigail Fischer and the chorus. Scenic design is by Zane Pihlstrom, the costumes are by Alixa Englund, and Scott Bolman designed the lighting."

Says Missy Mazzoli, "In 2004, within hours of picking up a copy of her journals in a Boston bookstore, I officially became obsessed with Isabelle Eberhardt's strange and moving life story. Within two weeks I had read everything she had ever written and nearly everything written about her, but despite my compulsive reading habits, I still had more questions than answers.

"I was struck by the universal themes of her story – how much her struggles, her questions, her passions, mirrored those of women throughout the 20th and 21st century. Isabelle made a great effort to define herself as an independent woman under extreme circumstances. She dressed as a man, seeing this as the only way to move freely and live the life of her choice. She let herself fall deeply in love but struggled to maintain her independent lifestyle.

"I knew immediately that I wanted to create a large-scale work about Isabelle, and I knew that I wanted it to be more of a personal response to her life than a detailed retelling of her story. I needed to start answering my own questions, imagining how she felt, filling in the spaces between journal entries and exploring the universality that make her story so vibrant and relevant to me over one hundred years after her death. In 2007, three years after discovering Isabelle, I began work on the libretto for Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, pulling phrases and ideas from her journals and creating singable texts that, over the following year, I set to music. Working in response to my score, Stephen Taylor started to create films using archival footage from the early 20th century, generating a collection of images that went beyond a mere depiction of Isabelle's story to reflect the emotional themes of each section. Early in 2009 Steve and I began our collaboration with director Gia Forakis, who worked with us to stage the workshop, and along with librettist Royce Vavrek helped us develop the fully realized production for the world premiere in 2012.

"I wrote this work for NOW Ensemble and Abigail Fischer, musicians whose virtuosic technique and adventurous spirit made them an ideal choice for what I envisioned." A CD of Song from the Uproar is scheduled to be released on the New Amsterdam label in Fall 2012.

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