Halpern's THE INSEPARABLES to Premiere at Shetler Studios this Weekend

Composer and librettist Martin Halpern will premiere his new chamber opera THE INSEPARABLES this weekend at Shetler Studios.  Performances will run June 21-24 at 8 PM, with Sunday's performance at 3 PM.

THE INSEPARABLES centers around the painter Paul Cezanne and the author Emile Zola, who grew up together in Aix en Provence and were close friends there and in Paris. They subsequently became bitterly estranged over a novel Zola wrote about a failed painter, whom Cezanne felt was based on himself.

Martin Halpern has had a productive career as playwright, poet and educator until, in 1994, he retired from his professorship in the Theater Arts Department of Brandeis U to pursue a second career in music composition. Since then, he has earned a Masters degree from the Aaron Copland School of Music and Queens College. His past awards and positions include: Fulbright Scholarship to Rome, 1956-57; Howard Foundation Writing Fellowship, 1962-63; teacher of English and American Literature at U of Ca/Berkeley, 1959-64; teacher of English and American Literature at U of Mass, 1964-65; Brandeis U/Dept. of Theater Arts, 1965-94; ten grants from Meet The Composer, and more. Halpern's chamber operas are often based on great works of literature by Strindberg, Ibsen, W.B. Yeats, and others.

Tickets for Halpern's THE INSEPARABLES are $20 and are available by calling the box office at 718.858.1549.