Aging Magician

February 24, 2017

Paola Prestini & Rinde Eckert featuring Rinde Eckert, Attacca Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus

AGING MAGICIAN is an epic new opera-theater work that tells the story of Harold, an aging clockmaker near the end of his unusual life. A string quartet and Brooklyn Youth Chorus help Harold uncover his legacy as the New Victory stage is transformed into a living, breathing instrument. Creators Julian Crouch (Shockheaded Peter, New Vic 1999), Rinde Eckert, Paola Prestini, Mark Stewart and the Attacca Quartet bring together the worlds of music, theater, puppetry, instrument making and scenic design to paint this poignant allegory on time, youth and the peculiar magic of ordinary life, or perhaps, the ordinary magic of a peculiar life.

Track Listing

1) Prologue
2) Who Is That on the Table?
3) Emergency Room
4) Careening
5) The Shop and Time
6) Coney Island Memory
7) Next Stop, Bergen Street
8) This Is Not a Dream
9) Next Stop, Church Avenue
10) My Mother's Faith
11) Lacrimosa
12) Neptune Prelude
13) Next Stop, Neptune
14) Aquarium Prelude
15) Next Stop, Aquarium
16) Gateway to the Stars
17) Harold's Song
18) The Parts of a Heart / Clock
19) Coney Island Prelude
20) Last Stop, Coney Island
21) Epilogue

“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”
“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”
"In the poignant, entrancing “Aging Magician...the rich artistic elements of come together powerfully. The music is crucial, by turns pensive and fidgety, solemnly harmonic and skittishly diffuse...the choral writing is ethereal, unfolding in long-spun lines and chantlike phrases."

Album info

Release date:
February 24, 2017

“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”

Broadway World

“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”

WQXR

"In the poignant, entrancing “Aging Magician...the rich artistic elements of come together powerfully. The music is crucial, by turns pensive and fidgety, solemnly harmonic and skittishly diffuse...the choral writing is ethereal, unfolding in long-spun lines and chantlike phrases."

New York Times

February 24, 2017

Aging Magician

February 24, 2017

Aging Magician

Paola Prestini & Rinde Eckert featuring Rinde Eckert, Attacca Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus

Press Quotes

January 9, 2013
“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”
April 8, 2011
"In the poignant, entrancing “Aging Magician...the rich artistic elements of come together powerfully. The music is crucial, by turns pensive and fidgety, solemnly harmonic and skittishly diffuse...the choral writing is ethereal, unfolding in long-spun lines and chantlike phrases."
March 7, 2017
“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”