A richly ambiguous, provocative, and heady experience.

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.

Prestini’s score moves seamlessly between environmental sound and music, combining some jazz and country influences with an otherwise highly contemporary musical language... a sexy, sinister number dominated by grooving drums and trombone was both surprising and memorable. Her chorus work is highly compelling… contemporary harmonies meet hymns in beautiful, surprising ways.

Throughout the 90-minute opera, Prestini utilizes the small orchestra with precision to support the libretto … the writing for the chorus is spectacular, borrowing the note-against-note harmonizing of the Mennonite hymn-singing tradition, but flavored with emotional tinges of dissonance...

Prestini has a thrilling knack for the aleatoric, and her vocal writing gives the singers a wide range of expression.

Heroism and love are themes that have run through opera for centuries, but never one with a story such as this. Commissioned and produced by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects with funding from The Ford Foundation, Sensorium Ex is the epitome of what opera is not. It is centered on the use of the human voice beyond language in opera through the incorporation of non-speaking and non-typical patterns of speech. Artificial intelligence is being used to expand their possibilities. ‍Compelling stories, impassioned creative teams and break-through technology, however, do not make for an opera. It is an elusive synergy that is impossible to verbalize and can only be experienced. Mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy and pianist Forrest Eimold provided the latter with a spellbinding performance of ‘Birdsong’ from Sensorium Ex.

It is time to revisit everything you know about the opera, because it is a brave new world, and this new opera presentation of The Old Man and the Sea, is a game-changer.

In 2015, Prestini co-founded National Sawdust, one of the few New York cultural institutions led by women. An incubator for a wide variety of experimental music, the Brooklyn venue models what an equitable classical music environment actually sounds like.

Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines.

"One of the year's most satisfying releases"

"In Code, [Prestini] writes uncanny birdcalls for Roomful of Teeth and rippling passages for Pratt"

"Paola Prestini’s Code provided the most dramatic cadenza for the pianist... with trills expanding into double trills in octaves and money-note arpeggios… golden dawn with raindrop glisses… ending where it began in near silence."

"Seething passages and beatific states ... Give the commissioning pianist Awadagin Pratt points for good taste: The half-dozen voices featured on this album all earn their time."

"The fiery runs of glassy piano colliding with upper register strings on Paola Prestini's 'Code' brings a wholly modern intensity to a running soloistic-ensemble dialogue until the voices of Roomful of Teeth enter with full-bodied drama."

A fairy-tale opera with hidden depth... distinctive, with genuinely touching moments... a mystical atmosphere in which both lightness and darkness loom. Even when all seems right at the end and triangles jangle jubilantly, joy and dazzle are punctuated by a note of discord that seems to question the possibility of happiness ever after.