Composer Paola Prestini's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA to Make World Premiere in November

Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) and Arizona State University Gammage will present the world premiere of composer Paola Prestini's The Old Man and The Sea, the first operatic adaptation of the novel the Hemingway estate has ever approved. The work will be presented at the ASU Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium on November 4, 2023, and will tour to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Carolina Performing Arts Center on February 10, 2024, with further performances to be announced.

The work, created by Prestini, director Karmina Šilec and librettist Royce Vavrek, follows the final fever dream of famed author Ernest Hemingway in his last days as he reflects on portraits of his life mixed with images from his masterpiece work The Old Man and The Sea; one of the most important books of 20th century American literature. Šilec's multi-layered interpretation of the story explores the journey from the individual to society, interpolating Hemingway's narrative with themes and images of Ecology, Capitalism and industrial exploitation, religious iconography, Colonialism, and more, while also incorporating Vavrek's poeticized elements like Hemingway's love of baseball and Joe DiMaggio, his deeply intimate letters to Marlene Dietrich, and more.

The cast includes the seminal characters Santiago and Manolin from Hemingway's novel, and amplifies the tale with the introduction of bar owner La Mar, as well as the Virgen del Cobre, a goddess in the Afro-Caribbean faith Santería who was found floating on a wooden board off the coast of eastern Cuba in 1628. 

The opera is written for percussion, electronics, and cello, performed by Jeffrey Zeigler and conducted by Mila Henry, with Armando Contreras as Hemingway/Santagio in Arizona and Nathan Gunn in North Carolina, Measha Brueggergosman as La Mar, countertenor Rodolfo Girón as Manolin, and soprano Yvette Keong playing the role of La Virgen del Cobre. The piece also features the Grammy-winning Phoenix Chorale, who bear witness to the drama of Hemingway's existential questions unfolding onstage - mixing cocktails, playing out a Joe DiMaggio fantasy, and teasing out the intimacy that crackles through Hemingway's famed letters with Marlene Dietrich. The creative team is joined by scenographer Dorian Šilec Petek and artistic collaborators Sidra Bell and Sarah Chiesa. 

The production also marks the continuation of Karmina Šilec's U.S. work, following her production Toxic Psalms, which The New York Times hailed as “rabidly talented” at its 2015 presentation for the PROTOTYPE Festival, a project of Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, and the opera BABA: The Life and Death Of Stana, premiered early 2023 in San Francisco. Beth Morrison is also creative producer on The Old Man and the Sea and her company BMP is the producer of this work in association with VisionIntoArt (VIA). The opera was developed at MASS MoCA, and was co-commissioned by Arizona State University Gammage, Carolina Performing Arts, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Illinois.

Performance Details: 

The Old Man and The Sea (World Premiere & Tour)
November 4, 2023 at ASU Gammage
February 10, 2024 at Carolina Performing Arts
Composer: Paola Prestini
Director/Costume design: Karmina Šilec
Librettist: Royce Vavrek
Co-Producer: Beth Morrison Projects and VisionIntoArt
Music Director: Mila Henry
Associate Director/Scenographer: Dorian Šilec Petek
Artistic Collaborators: Sidra Bell and Sarah Chiesa
Light Design: Andrej Hajdinjak
Sound Design: Garth MacAleavey

Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and The Sea is an opera by Paola Prestini, Karmina Šilec, and Royce Vavrek that presents a dual track of storytelling by combining the Hemingway novel with original portraits of quotidian life to create a look at aging, legacy and our relationship to oceans. The work includes longtime collaborator and muse of Prestini, Jeffrey Zeigler as the featured cellist. Bringing to life the seminal characters of the novel are international star baritone Nathan Gunn as Santiago/Hemingway in North Carolina, and Armando Contreras in Arizona, Measha Brueggergosman as La Mar, Rodolfo Giron as Manolin, and Yvette Keong as La Virgen Cobre included as the wife, recast as La Virgen del Cobre, a goddess in Santería, the Afro-Caribbean faith, who was found floating on a wooden board off the coast of eastern Cuba in 1628. Themes of baseball, ecology, religion, and economy paint a conflict between progress and tradition, craft passion and exploitation, ultimately shedding contemporary perspectives on this timeless tale.

Lead commissioning support for The Old Man and the Sea was provided by ASU Gammage in association with Joan Cremin. Commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina, VisionIntoArt, Krannert Center of Performing Arts, and Jill & Bill Steinberg.

About Paola Prestini

Composer Paola Prestini has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, and scientists in large - scale multimedia works that chart her interest in extra - musical themes ranging from the cosmos to the environment. She has created, written and produced large scale projects such as the world's largest and first communal VR opera, The Hubble Cantata, and the eco - documentary currently on PBS, The Colorado. Her collaboration Con Alma was featured at the United Nations at the world's largest gender conference, showcasing the power of women in the digital age. Her work has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Opera, Los Angeles Opera, San Diego Opera, The Barbican Centre, Bellas Artes, and at the Festival Dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy.

Throughout her career, Prestini has crossed genres, brought together different disciplines, and shattered glass ceilings. She was the first woman in the Minnesota Opera's New Works Initiative with her grand opera Edward Tulane. Her upcoming chamber opera Sensorium Ex, produced by Beth Morrison Projects with libretto by Brenda Shaughnessy and choreography by Jerron Herman, examines the intersection of artificial intelligence and disability, using non-verbal or non-typical patterns of speech to explore the fundamental questions of what it means to have voice, and what it means to be fully and essentially human. The development of the musical work for Sensorium Ex is supported by EMPAC, Washington National Opera, the Shed and the Kennedy Center and the AI is being developed by the NYU School of Engineering and the Ability Project. Her new opera theater work Old Man and the Sea, with Karmina Šilec and Royce Vavrek, featuring Rodolfo Girón, Nathan Gunn and Jeffrey Zeigler was developed at MASS MoCA and is commissioned and will be premiered by Carolina Performing Arts and Arizona State University. Future collaborations include a choral installation, Port City, with Jad Abumrad, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Jessica Grindstaff, a chamber work about the proto-feminist Sor Juana with Magos Herrera and the vocal group Sjaella, and new operas with poet Robin Coste Lewis, and puppeteer/writer and director Julian Crouch. Prestini is also a longtime collaborator with creative producer Beth Morrison Projects.

Prestini is the co-founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn-based arts institution and incubator National Sawdust, where she serves in a strategic and vision-based role. As part of her commitment to equity for the next generation of artists, she started the Hildegard Commission for emerging women and marginalized composers, and the Blueprint Fellowship for emerging composers and women mentors at the Juilliard School. She was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Institute Film Music Program Fellow, has been in residence at the Park Avenue Armory and MASS MoCA. Prestini is also the Co - Founder of VisionIntoArt, a non - profit new music and interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City that incubates deep process interdisciplinary and impact work. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School and resides in Brooklyn with her husband, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and her son, the yo-yo/rubix master, Tommaso.

About Beth Morrison Projects

Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) is one of the foremost creators and producers of new opera-theatre and music theatre, with a fierce commitment to leading the industry into the future, cultivating a new generation of talent, and telling the stories of our time.

Founded by “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) Beth Morrison, who was honored as one of Musical America's Artists of the Year/Agents of Change in 2020 and a Kennedy Center Next50 in 2022, BMP has grown into “a driving force behind America's thriving opera scene” (Financial Times), with Opera News declaring that the company, “more than any other… has helped propel the art form into the twenty-first century.”

Operating across the US and internationally, with offices in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, BMP's unique model offers living composers the support, guidance, and freedom to experiment, allowing them to create singularly innovative and impactful projects. Since forming in 2006, the company has commissioned, developed, produced and toured over 60 works in 14 countries around the world, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning chamber operas Angel's Bone and p r i s m.

In 2013, BMP co-founded the PROTOTYPE Festival with HERE Arts Center, which has been called “utterly essential” (The New York Times), “indispensable” (The New Yorker), and “one of the world's top festivals of contemporary opera and theater” (Associated Press). https://www.bethmorrisonprojects.org

About Karmina Šilec

Karmina Šilec has brought freshness and originality to the world of music and theatre. As a theatre director, conductor, set and costume designer and composer she has projects with various companies, drama and opera houses, festivals and ensembles worldwide. She has developed unique artistic concept choregie – new music theatre, which focuses on the creation process that brings the musical notion of composing to the theatrical aspects of performing and staging. She is artistic director of world renown Carmina Slovenica and of Newmusic theatre Choregie.

Each new project signed by Karmina Šilec is an expedition into the field of the unknown and the unexplored. Her projects are provocative, daring; her ideas break taboos, those of the society as well as of music. Šilec does not shy away from politically charged material. Her diverse range demonstrates a broad range of thematic concerns that are driven by the need to respond to current social and political transformations. Her works are loci for debate, contestation and provocation. She foregrounds stories, situations and issues that are all too often overlooked, suppressed, or ignored and tries to contribute to the acceptance of the Otherness, to integrate the marginalized, transform and heal. In a creative process Šilec is interested in the things that do not only have an unambiguous meaning. Different elements (movement, music, word, the visual) are merged into an emancipated composition and the fusion gives various semantic directions. She created a whole range of conceptual, stylistically and thematically perfected projects, among them, BABA, Threnos (for the Throat), Toxic Psalms, Evergreen, Fauvel, Placebo, Vampirabile, Scivias, Spixody, Who would think that the snow falls, Vertical thoughts, Stripsody, CS Light, From Time Immemorial..., Rusalki, Pleading for words, etc. The dimensions of these projects surface in multi-disciplinary stage performances which logically complement the musical tissue and permeate with the basic elements of the concept of Choregie.

Her ensembles and projects have been performed on stages and festivals of the highest esteem, such as the Ruhrtriennale (DE), Prototype Festival NYC (USA), Festival d'Automne á Paris (FR), Holland Festival (NL), Moscow Easter Festival (RU), ISCM – World Music Days, Dresdner Musikfestspiele (DE), Golden Mask (RU), Melbourne Festival (AU), Operadagen Rotterdam (NL), RadialSystem Berlin (DE), Auditorium, Rome (IT), Steierischer Herbst (AT), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space (JP), St. Petersburg Philharmonic Hall (RU), Teatro Colon (AR), Esplanade (SG), Polyfollia (FR), Theatre Basel (CH), Hong Kong Cultural Centre (HK), Teresa Carreño Theater (VE), Z Space (USA), etc., as well they were broadcasted by EBU (European Broadcasting Union) and Eurovision.

Among her awards and distinctions are: Music Theatre Now international award 2021; Music Theatre Now award in the category Music Beyond Opera (by the International Theatre Institute), 2008; The Sterija Award for original theatre music, SRB 2018; International Robert Edler Prize, for exceptional contribution to the world choir movement, DE 2004; Europe Theatre Prize - Theatrical Realities (EPTR) nomination, 2017; Golden Mask Theatre Award (together with Heiner Goebbels and Carmina Slovenica), RU 2012; Carpe Vitam − Open Mind Stockholm award, SE 2005 ; The Prešeren Award; highest Slovenian award for achievements in art, SI 2000; The main Ford Award for the preservation of natural and cultural heritage; Harvard University / Radcliffe Institute for advanced study Fellowship, USA, 2018; Hewlett Foundation 50 Arts Commission, 2018 recipient for theatre, music theatre and spoken word; STIAS Institute for advanced study artist in residence, Stellenbosch University, ZA, 2022; Teatarfest award for the most experimental theatre work, BA 2009; Con tempus - Platform for contemporary art award, AT 2012; more than 20 highest international awards at international competitions and others.

As a writer Karmina Šilec has published BABA: Catalog and Colossal Balkan fiction (fiction/essays, Publishing Sanje (SI), 2021), Nolite tacere – Translated in music (essays, Carmina Slovenica (SI), 2013), DERT endemic songs (poems, Carmina Slovenica (SI), 2021). As a conductor she has more than 20 CD and several DVD's published.

About VisionIntoArt

VisionIntoArt, “always intriguing and frequently beguiling”, is a multimedia production company that “facilitates flamboyant, confounding and enticing collaborations” (New York Times). VIA creates and commissions works that involve various disciplines, presented around the world for the general audience, and forged from the most exciting emerging and established artists living today, as well as interdisciplinary experts including scientists and conservationists. Incubating, producing, and disseminating, VIA projects often bridge impact, community building and scientific inquiry, with the belief that collaboration sustains artistic innovation and promotes a healthier society. 
 
VIA's works range from the Hubble Cantata - the largest communal VR operatic event - to multiplatform works like The Colorado, now viewable on PBS. VIA productions have been seen at Lincoln Center, the Barbican Centre, HIFA in Zimbabwe, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center, and through residencies at MASS MoCA and The Park Avenue Armory.

The company's projects include world premieres and tours of work including Con Alma at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and at The United Nations for the world's largest equity conference presented by Death of Classical in partnership with Carnegie Hall; Houses of Zodiac at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, CA, and a live Butoh, Ballet, and cello work with film installation presented as part of The Broad's special exhibition Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, also seen at the 2022 Romaeuropa Festival in Rome, Italy, and Bang on a Can's 2023 LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA; Archive of Desire presented as part of the Onassis Foundation's 2023 New York City-wide festival and international tour, and the forthcoming opera project Sensorium Ex, which cultivates community-centered practices, most recently presented as part of UnMute ArtsAbility Festival in Cape Town (Africa's premier disability-led inclusive arts festival), with upcoming engagements including collaborations with The REACH and Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center.

To post a comment, you must register and login.