Today, Composer Paola Prestini is proud to announce her 2025–26 season, with highlights including two symphonic world premieres, an album release and Mexico premiere of her acclaimed processional opera Primero Sueño, a newly reimagined site-specific production of Houses of Zodiac in the Catacombs of The Green-Wood Cemetery presented by Death of Classical, and a performance of her piano concerto Code by superstar pianist Awadagin Pratt with the Dayton Philharmonic.
October 1-3, 2025, Death of Classical presents a new, site-specific performance of Houses of Zodiac, the recording of which was lauded by Strings Magazine as "one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time." The piece will be performed by Jeffrey Zeigler (formerly of the Kronos Quartet) on solo cello, and dancers Georgina Pazcoguin (former New York City Ballet soloist) and Dai Matsuoka (Butoh dance master of Sankai Juku), with poetry reading by the visionary Maria Popova.
October 10-12, 2025, Opera Columbus and Beth Morrision Projects will co-produce her opera The Old Man and the Sea at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The production, which Prestini co-created with librettist Royce Vavrek and director Karmina Šilec, will be conducted by Mila Henry and choreographed by Sidra Bell with on-stage cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, and a cast that includes Armando Contreras, Rodolfo Girón, Yvette Keong, Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, and students from Ohio State’s School of Music.
November 17-21, 2025, following its tenth anniversary season opening of Prestini's opera Silent Light, National Sawdust will hold a first development workshop for a forthcoming 2027 opera coinciding with Sawdust's 11th season opening. The project is a collaboration between the Spoleto Festival USA, Robin Coste Lewis, and Ava DuVernay hosted at National Sawdust with VisionIntoArt in residence. Silent Light, Paola's first full-length work to be performed in the space she co-founded, was directed by Thaddeus Strassberger and premiered to critical acclaim, with Musical America saying, "In a way, Silent Light could almost have been about National Sawdust: its dimensions, its versatility, its history of experimental work. It’s as if Prestini was paying tribute to the venue she has led for the past decade."
November-December, 2025, following its acclaimed premiere at the Met Museum Cloisters, Prestini's processional opera Primero Sueño, co-composed by Prestini and Magos Herrera and co-created with director Louisa Proske, will be released on VIA Records November 12, and be remounted for its Mexican premiere performances in Zócalo y Catedral de Puebla and Cámara de Diputados (Mexican Chamber of Deputies) Mexico City December 5-10, 2025. The New York Times said of the work: "Just as the score mixes the devotional with almost rootsy strands, Herrera’s Sor Juana, the nun in black, sings in an earthy mezzo that complements the heavenly harmonies of the six nuns in white, performed by the German vocal ensemble Sjaella," while the Observer hailed it as "a deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous" and Bachtrack simply called it "timeless and otherwordly."
January 9-10, 2026, the first symphonic world premiere of Prestini's 25-26 season, titled My Brilliant Friend: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, will be performed by the Tucson Symphony led by Music Director Jose Luis Gomez. This orchestral opening piece is inspired by the Italian author Elena Ferrante's novel, My Brilliant Friend. Set in Naples in the 1950s My Brilliant Friend explores themes of female friendship, social class, and personal identity.
February 6-82026, Prestini's radio opera No One is Forgotten will be presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton in three live performances. Co-composed by Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey with a libretto by Winter Miller adapted from her original play, No One Is Forgotten is a groundbreaking opera, fully designed to be delivered to its audience in the form of an immersive operatic radio play, an ‘invisible opera,’ using cutting edge immersive audio technology co-produced, premiered, and recorded by the Dallas Opera. This performance will be conducted by Michelle Rofrano and feature performances by Kathleen Chalfant, Eve Gigliotti, Amelia Workman, and Jeffrey Zeigler. The performances are in collaboration with Princeton's Program in Journalism and generously supported by a Magic Grant for Innovation from Princeton’s Humanities Council.
May 1-2, 2026, Prestini's piano concerto Code will be performed by the Dayton Philharmonic and acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt, for whom the concerto was written. The program pairs Prestini's Code with Jessie Montgomery's piano concerto Rounds. In Pratt's premiere recording, NPR hailed the work as as "uncanny...a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano," VAN praised the piece as "full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless," while Bandcamp highlighted the concerto for "bring[ing] a wholly modern intensity to a running soloistic-ensemble dialogue."
May 21, 2026, The Juilliard Orchestra led by JoAnn Falletta will present the world premiere performance of My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name. The piece – also based on the novel My Brilliant Friend – was commissioned by the Juilliard School and is the second symphonic world premiere of Prestini's season.
Summer 2026, Prestini will return to Virtuoso Belcanto as their composer in residence. Throughout the 2025-26 season, VisionIntoArt will hold residence at National Sawdust.
Prestini’s 2025-26 season follows a truly monumental, landmark 2024–25 season, with four operatic world-premieres which received critical acclaim and international media coverage from The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, NPR, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, Opera Magazine, and many more, and which saw her receiving three major awards: the Doris Duke Award, 2025 Composers Now Visionary Award, and a 2025 Creative Capital Award.
Sensorium-Ex had its world premiere performance at the Common Senses Festival in May of 2025. The piece, with a libretto by Brenda Shaughnessy and co-directed by Jerron Herman and Jay Scheib showcased a transformative new AI-driven Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) App, Sensorium AI, developed by VisionIntoArt and Luke DuBois at the NYU Ability Project and is a hallmark example of technology and art coming together to better all. Jeff Lunden shined a light on the technology on an episode of NPR's Morning Edition, where performer Jakob Jordan said, "'When I first heard the sound of my voice come to life, a new realization was born,' he said through the new device. 'Dream the bigger dreams, you know, the ones you dismiss and hide away because they seem impossible.'"
Her site-specific opera Port(al), co-created with Jad Abrumad, Jessica Grindestaff, and Ogemdi Ude and featuring the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, premiered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in May 2025 and PS21 in Chatham in June 2025. Embedded throughout the historical port's story, members of the youth chorus spoke to their relationship to their very own time and place, and their future. The premiere was featured in Vogue and WNYC Radio and received rave reviews, with OperaWire praising how it "wove together historical moments in a beautiful tapestry of unified force designed to intoxicate the mind... the message of this performance will echo along the human journey for generations to come."
Primero Sueño, Prestini's processional opera co-composed with singer Magos Herrera, who also sings the lead role, centered on 17th-century nun and proto-feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was premiered at the Met Cloisters in January 2025. Profiled in The New York Times, the work also received breathless reviews from critics, with The Observer stating that "Primero Sueño is a deeply satisfying blend of styles, one that tends toward the gentle, the mystical and the joyous... a work of great beauty and clarity... this rich, meditative opera succeeds where other operatic treatments of Sor Juana do not," Opera Magazine praising it as "a beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music," and Bachtrack hailing it as "timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City."
Prestini's Silent Light, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, opened the tenth anniversary season of National Sawdust to extraordinary critical coverage. Musical America stated: "in a way, Silent Light could almost have been about National Sawdust: its dimensions, its versatility, its history of experimental work. It’s as if Prestini was paying tribute to the venue she has led for the past decade," Opera Canada echoed how “Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting,” Parterre praised how "The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative," and The Wall Street Journal exclaiming how "by submerging the audience in the daily routines of members of a Mennonite community in Mexico, [Silent Light] invites us to identify with these people and comprehend the deep feelings that lie beneath their oddly placid exteriors."
Today, Composer Paola Prestini is proud to announce her 2025–26 season, with highlights including two symphonic world premieres, an album release and Mexico premiere of her acclaimed processional opera Primero Sueño, a newly reimagined site-specific production of Houses of Zodiac in the Catacombs of The Green-Wood Cemetery presented by Death of Classical, and a performance of her piano concerto Code by superstar pianist Awadagin Pratt with the Dayton Philharmonic.
October 1-3, 2025, Death of Classical presents a new, site-specific performance of Houses of Zodiac, the recording of which was lauded by Strings Magazine as "one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time." The piece will be performed by Jeffrey Zeigler (formerly of the Kronos Quartet) on solo cello, and dancers Georgina Pazcoguin (former New York City Ballet soloist) and Dai Matsuoka (Butoh dance master of Sankai Juku), with poetry reading by the visionary Maria Popova.
October 10-12, 2025, Opera Columbus and Beth Morrision Projects will co-produce her opera The Old Man and the Sea at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The production, which Prestini co-created with librettist Royce Vavrek and director Karmina Šilec, will be conducted by Mila Henry and choreographed by Sidra Bell with on-stage cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, and a cast that includes Armando Contreras, Rodolfo Girón, Yvette Keong, Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, and students from Ohio State’s School of Music.
November 17-21, 2025, following its tenth anniversary season opening of Prestini's opera Silent Light, National Sawdust will hold a first development workshop for a forthcoming 2027 opera coinciding with Sawdust's 11th season opening. The project is a collaboration between the Spoleto Festival USA, Robin Coste Lewis, and Ava DuVernay hosted at National Sawdust with VisionIntoArt in residence. Silent Light, Paola's first full-length work to be performed in the space she co-founded, was directed by Thaddeus Strassberger and premiered to critical acclaim, with Musical America saying, "In a way, Silent Light could almost have been about National Sawdust: its dimensions, its versatility, its history of experimental work. It’s as if Prestini was paying tribute to the venue she has led for the past decade."
November-December, 2025, following its acclaimed premiere at the Met Museum Cloisters, Prestini's processional opera Primero Sueño, co-composed by Prestini and Magos Herrera and co-created with director Louisa Proske, will be released on VIA Records November 12, and be remounted for its Mexican premiere performances in Zócalo y Catedral de Puebla and Cámara de Diputados (Mexican Chamber of Deputies) Mexico City December 5-10, 2025. The New York Times said of the work: "Just as the score mixes the devotional with almost rootsy strands, Herrera’s Sor Juana, the nun in black, sings in an earthy mezzo that complements the heavenly harmonies of the six nuns in white, performed by the German vocal ensemble Sjaella," while the Observer hailed it as "a deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous" and Bachtrack simply called it "timeless and otherwordly."
January 9-10, 2026, the first symphonic world premiere of Prestini's 25-26 season, titled My Brilliant Friend: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, will be performed by the Tucson Symphony led by Music Director Jose Luis Gomez. This orchestral opening piece is inspired by the Italian author Elena Ferrante's novel, My Brilliant Friend. Set in Naples in the 1950s My Brilliant Friend explores themes of female friendship, social class, and personal identity.
February 6-82026, Prestini's radio opera No One is Forgotten will be presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton in three live performances. Co-composed by Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey with a libretto by Winter Miller adapted from her original play, No One Is Forgotten is a groundbreaking opera, fully designed to be delivered to its audience in the form of an immersive operatic radio play, an ‘invisible opera,’ using cutting edge immersive audio technology co-produced, premiered, and recorded by the Dallas Opera. This performance will be conducted by Michelle Rofrano and feature performances by Kathleen Chalfant, Eve Gigliotti, Amelia Workman, and Jeffrey Zeigler. The performances are in collaboration with Princeton's Program in Journalism and generously supported by a Magic Grant for Innovation from Princeton’s Humanities Council.
May 1-2, 2026, Prestini's piano concerto Code will be performed by the Dayton Philharmonic and acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt, for whom the concerto was written. The program pairs Prestini's Code with Jessie Montgomery's piano concerto Rounds. In Pratt's premiere recording, NPR hailed the work as as "uncanny...a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano," VAN praised the piece as "full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless," while Bandcamp highlighted the concerto for "bring[ing] a wholly modern intensity to a running soloistic-ensemble dialogue."
May 21, 2026, The Juilliard Orchestra led by JoAnn Falletta will present the world premiere performance of My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name. The piece – also based on the novel My Brilliant Friend – was commissioned by the Juilliard School and is the second symphonic world premiere of Prestini's season.
Summer 2026, Prestini will return to Virtuoso Belcanto as their composer in residence. Throughout the 2025-26 season, VisionIntoArt will hold residence at National Sawdust.
Prestini’s 2025-26 season follows a truly monumental, landmark 2024–25 season, with four operatic world-premieres which received critical acclaim and international media coverage from The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, NPR, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, Opera Magazine, and many more, and which saw her receiving three major awards: the Doris Duke Award, 2025 Composers Now Visionary Award, and a 2025 Creative Capital Award.
Sensorium-Ex had its world premiere performance at the Common Senses Festival in May of 2025. The piece, with a libretto by Brenda Shaughnessy and co-directed by Jerron Herman and Jay Scheib showcased a transformative new AI-driven Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) App, Sensorium AI, developed by VisionIntoArt and Luke DuBois at the NYU Ability Project and is a hallmark example of technology and art coming together to better all. Jeff Lunden shined a light on the technology on an episode of NPR's Morning Edition, where performer Jakob Jordan said, "'When I first heard the sound of my voice come to life, a new realization was born,' he said through the new device. 'Dream the bigger dreams, you know, the ones you dismiss and hide away because they seem impossible.'"
Her site-specific opera Port(al), co-created with Jad Abrumad, Jessica Grindestaff, and Ogemdi Ude and featuring the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, premiered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in May 2025 and PS21 in Chatham in June 2025. Embedded throughout the historical port's story, members of the youth chorus spoke to their relationship to their very own time and place, and their future. The premiere was featured in Vogue and WNYC Radio and received rave reviews, with OperaWire praising how it "wove together historical moments in a beautiful tapestry of unified force designed to intoxicate the mind... the message of this performance will echo along the human journey for generations to come."
Primero Sueño, Prestini's processional opera co-composed with singer Magos Herrera, who also sings the lead role, centered on 17th-century nun and proto-feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was premiered at the Met Cloisters in January 2025. Profiled in The New York Times, the work also received breathless reviews from critics, with The Observer stating that "Primero Sueño is a deeply satisfying blend of styles, one that tends toward the gentle, the mystical and the joyous... a work of great beauty and clarity... this rich, meditative opera succeeds where other operatic treatments of Sor Juana do not," Opera Magazine praising it as "a beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music," and Bachtrack hailing it as "timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City."
Prestini's Silent Light, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, opened the tenth anniversary season of National Sawdust to extraordinary critical coverage. Musical America stated: "in a way, Silent Light could almost have been about National Sawdust: its dimensions, its versatility, its history of experimental work. It’s as if Prestini was paying tribute to the venue she has led for the past decade," Opera Canada echoed how “Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting,” Parterre praised how "The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative," and The Wall Street Journal exclaiming how "by submerging the audience in the daily routines of members of a Mennonite community in Mexico, [Silent Light] invites us to identify with these people and comprehend the deep feelings that lie beneath their oddly placid exteriors."
Today, Composer Paola Prestini is proud to announce her 2025–26 season, with highlights including two symphonic world premieres, an album release and Mexico premiere of her acclaimed processional opera Primero Sueño, a newly reimagined site-specific production of Houses of Zodiac in the Catacombs of The Green-Wood Cemetery presented by Death of Classical, and a performance of her piano concerto Code by superstar pianist Awadagin Pratt with the Dayton Philharmonic.
October 1-3, 2025, Death of Classical presents a new, site-specific performance of Houses of Zodiac, the recording of which was lauded by Strings Magazine as "one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time." The piece will be performed by Jeffrey Zeigler (formerly of the Kronos Quartet) on solo cello, and dancers Georgina Pazcoguin (former New York City Ballet soloist) and Dai Matsuoka (Butoh dance master of Sankai Juku), with poetry reading by the visionary Maria Popova.
October 10-12, 2025, Opera Columbus and Beth Morrision Projects will co-produce her opera The Old Man and the Sea at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The production, which Prestini co-created with librettist Royce Vavrek and director Karmina Šilec, will be conducted by Mila Henry and choreographed by Sidra Bell with on-stage cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, and a cast that includes Armando Contreras, Rodolfo Girón, Yvette Keong, Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, and students from Ohio State’s School of Music.
November 17-21, 2025, following its tenth anniversary season opening of Prestini's opera Silent Light, National Sawdust will hold a first development workshop for a forthcoming 2027 opera coinciding with Sawdust's 11th season opening. The project is a collaboration between the Spoleto Festival USA, Robin Coste Lewis, and Ava DuVernay hosted at National Sawdust with VisionIntoArt in residence. Silent Light, Paola's first full-length work to be performed in the space she co-founded, was directed by Thaddeus Strassberger and premiered to critical acclaim, with Musical America saying, "In a way, Silent Light could almost have been about National Sawdust: its dimensions, its versatility, its history of experimental work. It’s as if Prestini was paying tribute to the venue she has led for the past decade."
November-December, 2025, following its acclaimed premiere at the Met Museum Cloisters, Prestini's processional opera Primero Sueño, co-composed by Prestini and Magos Herrera and co-created with director Louisa Proske, will be released on VIA Records November 12, and be remounted for its Mexican premiere performances in Zócalo y Catedral de Puebla and Cámara de Diputados (Mexican Chamber of Deputies) Mexico City December 5-10, 2025. The New York Times said of the work: "Just as the score mixes the devotional with almost rootsy strands, Herrera’s Sor Juana, the nun in black, sings in an earthy mezzo that complements the heavenly harmonies of the six nuns in white, performed by the German vocal ensemble Sjaella," while the Observer hailed it as "a deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous" and Bachtrack simply called it "timeless and otherwordly."
January 9-10, 2026, the first symphonic world premiere of Prestini's 25-26 season, titled My Brilliant Friend: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, will be performed by the Tucson Symphony led by Music Director Jose Luis Gomez. This orchestral opening piece is inspired by the Italian author Elena Ferrante's novel, My Brilliant Friend. Set in Naples in the 1950s My Brilliant Friend explores themes of female friendship, social class, and personal identity.
February 6-82026, Prestini's radio opera No One is Forgotten will be presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton in three live performances. Co-composed by Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey with a libretto by Winter Miller adapted from her original play, No One Is Forgotten is a groundbreaking opera, fully designed to be delivered to its audience in the form of an immersive operatic radio play, an ‘invisible opera,’ using cutting edge immersive audio technology co-produced, premiered, and recorded by the Dallas Opera. This performance will be conducted by Michelle Rofrano and feature performances by Kathleen Chalfant, Eve Gigliotti, Amelia Workman, and Jeffrey Zeigler. The performances are in collaboration with Princeton's Program in Journalism and generously supported by a Magic Grant for Innovation from Princeton’s Humanities Council.
May 1-2, 2026, Prestini's piano concerto Code will be performed by the Dayton Philharmonic and acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt, for whom the concerto was written. The program pairs Prestini's Code with Jessie Montgomery's piano concerto Rounds. In Pratt's premiere recording, NPR hailed the work as as "uncanny...a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano," VAN praised the piece as "full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless," while Bandcamp highlighted the concerto for "bring[ing] a wholly modern intensity to a running soloistic-ensemble dialogue."
May 21, 2026, The Juilliard Orchestra led by JoAnn Falletta will present the world premiere performance of My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name. The piece – also based on the novel My Brilliant Friend – was commissioned by the Juilliard School and is the second symphonic world premiere of Prestini's season.
Summer 2026, Prestini will return to Virtuoso Belcanto as their composer in residence. Throughout the 2025-26 season, VisionIntoArt will hold residence at National Sawdust.
Prestini’s 2025-26 season follows a truly monumental, landmark 2024–25 season, with four operatic world-premieres which received critical acclaim and international media coverage from The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, NPR, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, Opera Magazine, and many more, and which saw her receiving three major awards: the Doris Duke Award, 2025 Composers Now Visionary Award, and a 2025 Creative Capital Award.
Sensorium-Ex had its world premiere performance at the Common Senses Festival in May of 2025. The piece, with a libretto by Brenda Shaughnessy and co-directed by Jerron Herman and Jay Scheib showcased a transformative new AI-driven Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) App, Sensorium AI, developed by VisionIntoArt and Luke DuBois at the NYU Ability Project and is a hallmark example of technology and art coming together to better all. Jeff Lunden shined a light on the technology on an episode of NPR's Morning Edition, where performer Jakob Jordan said, "'When I first heard the sound of my voice come to life, a new realization was born,' he said through the new device. 'Dream the bigger dreams, you know, the ones you dismiss and hide away because they seem impossible.'"
Her site-specific opera Port(al), co-created with Jad Abrumad, Jessica Grindestaff, and Ogemdi Ude and featuring the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, premiered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in May 2025 and PS21 in Chatham in June 2025. Embedded throughout the historical port's story, members of the youth chorus spoke to their relationship to their very own time and place, and their future. The premiere was featured in Vogue and WNYC Radio and received rave reviews, with OperaWire praising how it "wove together historical moments in a beautiful tapestry of unified force designed to intoxicate the mind... the message of this performance will echo along the human journey for generations to come."
Primero Sueño, Prestini's processional opera co-composed with singer Magos Herrera, who also sings the lead role, centered on 17th-century nun and proto-feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was premiered at the Met Cloisters in January 2025. Profiled in The New York Times, the work also received breathless reviews from critics, with The Observer stating that "Primero Sueño is a deeply satisfying blend of styles, one that tends toward the gentle, the mystical and the joyous... a work of great beauty and clarity... this rich, meditative opera succeeds where other operatic treatments of Sor Juana do not," Opera Magazine praising it as "a beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music," and Bachtrack hailing it as "timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City."
Prestini's Silent Light, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, opened the tenth anniversary season of National Sawdust to extraordinary critical coverage. Musical America stated: "in a way, Silent Light could almost have been about National Sawdust: its dimensions, its versatility, its history of experimental work. It’s as if Prestini was paying tribute to the venue she has led for the past decade," Opera Canada echoed how “Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting,” Parterre praised how "The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative," and The Wall Street Journal exclaiming how "by submerging the audience in the daily routines of members of a Mennonite community in Mexico, [Silent Light] invites us to identify with these people and comprehend the deep feelings that lie beneath their oddly placid exteriors."
