The annual BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn series of outdoor shows at Prospect Park doesn’t usually include opera, and it’s not usually associated with science, either. But on August 6, loungers on the grassy bandshell knoll will get both at The Hubble Cantata, a new performance combining an orchestra, a hundred-member choir, and two Metropolitan Opera star singers with astrophysics, virtual reality, and 3-D sound.
The piece began four years ago. Maine music foundation Bay Chamber Concerts commissioned composer Paola Prestini to write a piece about the Hubble, with scientific input from the telescope’s lead astrophysicist, Mario Livio. Prestini and librettist Royce Vavrek created a story where a human couple’s relationship is mirrored in the life cycle of a star, from birth in a nebula to death in a supernova. “It becomes this piece about searching, and the unknown, and trying to find somebody in this infinite vastness,” says Vavrek. The story ends when the woman floats into the sky to join the stars.
