PROVING UP PROVES ITSELF
The debut recording of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s acclaimed 2018 chamber opera, Proving Up, is available starting today on Pentatone. The 80-minute album features the original Opera Omaha cast recording of director James Darrah’s production, as premiered in the company’s first annual ONE Festival in April 2018, with the amazing Christopher Rountree (of Wild Up fame) conducting. The piece is Mazzoli’s third operatic collaboration with Vavrek, and is adapted from an eponymous, surreal short story by Karen Russell that follows a post-Civil War family’s grueling pursuit of the American Dream during Nebraska’s land rush. Co-commissioned by the Washington National Opera, by Opera Omaha, and by Miller Theatre at Columbia University and first produced at the Kennedy Center during the 2017-18 Season.
“Brooding on the impossibility of the American dream, Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s tense, creepy new opera shows the fracturing of a homestead family suffering on the brutal Nebraska plains. The setting is the middle of the 19th century, but the lessons ’” about prosperity, virility, patriotism and cycles of violence ’” are crushingly contemporry. And Ms. Mazzoli’s score, for just a dozen or so players, is a landscape of shimmering aridity.” — The New York Times
available at Amazon or Pentatone
| ALBUM INFORMATION TRACK LISTING 1. Prologue (Uncle Sam’s Farm) Total playing time: 79.48 Proving Up (2018) Miles Zegner Michael Slattery (tenor) International Contemporary Ensemble: Clarinet & Bass Clarinet Curt Miller |