— Oussama Zahr, The New Yorker
Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek's chamber opera Proving Up is the newest recording in the PENTATONE label's "American Opera Series."
Proving Up, Mazzoli's third operatic collaboration with librettist Vavrek, is adapted from a poignant and darkly surreal short story of the same name by Karen Russell. This chamber opera, for a cast of 6 singers and 13 instrumentalists, follows a post-Civil War family's grueling pursuit of the American Dream during Nebraska's land rush. The Washington Post described it as "harrowing…powerful…a true opera of our time." Commissioned and premiered in 2018 by the Washington National Opera, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and Opera Omaha, upcoming productions are scheduled to be staged in the US and Canada.
Mazzoli and Vavrek are currently at work on their fourth opera, The Listeners, a collaboration with playwright Jordan Tannahill to be directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. It was commissioned by the Norwegian National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The premiere recording of Proving Up is available on disc or via download and stream.
Reviews
"An excellent new recording reveals the lacerating power of Mazzoli's writing, with Christopher Rountree conducting the International Contemporary Ensemble and the cast of Opera Omaha's 2018 production of the piece. The score, which includes harmonicas and acoustic guitars, sidesteps genre shtick to create modern musical landscapes that feel eerily unwelcoming, bright, and dry, but the wonderfully specific vocal writing embraces a certain classicism in its differentiation of the characters. In an American frontier littered with broken promises, Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek ask us to see those who failed and were forgotten."
— Oussama Zahr, The New Yorker
The New York Times Best Classical Music in 2018
"Brooding on the impossibility of the American dream, Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek's tense, creepy new opera, which came to the Miller Theater at Columbia University in September, 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 contemporary. And Ms. Mazzoli's score, for just a dozen or so players, is a landscape of shimmering aridity."
Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
Peruse the score, the piano vocal score, and the libretto
Watch the PENTATONE trailer
Listen to the album
