Press

Press Quotes

October 6, 2024
[Paola's] use of the human voice as an interpreter of the ethereal is perfectly showcased in “Silent Light”.
August 8, 2016
“Hubble Cantata saw audience members explore the Orion Nebula while a new piece of music played – the latest in a series of experiments between VR technology and classical music”
September 14, 2023
"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."
April 4, 2010
"Radiant … [and] amorously evocative.”
December 7, 2020
Join dozens of musicians from around the world for “Con Alma,” a live performance adapted from the recent album of the same title created by the composers Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera.
December 15, 2014
Prestini’s style weaves folk melodies and field samples with massive choral sections reminiscent of some forgotten Renaissance Mass, all filtered through her own distinctive musical language… the overall effect is engaging and quite moving. The major themes of transformation, immigration and culturally complex, layered ethnicity seem to resonate both on a macro level in the age of globalization, as well as on a micro level in what Prestini calls the search for 'internal geography.'
September 12, 2023
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.
June 24, 2012
“Paola Prestini, and her creative team have high ambitions…[and] common sense about what works onstage: characters you can connect to, music that engages.” ... “The layering of ideas and music knitted together to present something that moves forward with the vitality of the original folk material.”
May 4, 2023
[Prestini’s] setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and beautiful counterpoint.
December 11, 2020
"The Mexican singer Magos Herrera and the New York-based composer Paola Prestini have collaborated on a lovely new album called Con Alma – “With Soul.” The music draws on jazz, chamber music, and Latin song, without ever settling on any one of those things. After all, Herrera is a jazz singer who’s done a whole album with a string quartet, and Prestini is Artistic Director at National Sawdust, a venue that refuses to abide by stylistic boundaries."
June 26, 2013
“Mr. Lubovitch’s new 'As Sleep Befell' made for a better match with Ms. Prestini’s music. At the center of a semicircle of string, wind and percussion players stood the vocalist Helga Davis, a kind of murmuring angel. Six shirtless male dancers were arrayed out in front of her on the ground, tossing and turning handsomely to Ms. Prestini’s atmospherics, as if in a shared dream … [it was] visually arresting.”
January 25, 2021
"As a musical documentary of emotion, Herrera and Prestini gathered more than 30 musicians from three continents for their cross-border album of original works, representing a feat that in itself defines the indefatigable spirit of women today."
May 23, 2016
“But the music…! The Colorado’s soundtrack positively radiates optimism.”
January 9, 2013
“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”
June 22, 2012
“Ms. Prestini – an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished”
October 10, 2017
“The kind of experimentation Prestini has lent to her work will help shape what masterpieces come out of the next 50 years”
August 8, 2016
“The performance itself was full of magic and wonder. Space, of course, is silent: there is no audible music of the spheres. But, Prestini has written some astonishing musical passages that capture a sense of what it might be like to be set adrift in a universe without the limitations of space or time.”
November 29, 2013
“The music was ace.”
August 8, 2016
“A brilliant collaboration. Prestini’s time spent perfecting 30-plus commissioned multidisciplinary works and serving as creative and executive director of Williamsburg’s National Sawdust have only further fortified her with the tact to balance all the voices, mixed media and technology that combine to make The Hubble Cantata such a spectacle…”
December 16, 2021
An evening of evocative music inspired imaginative storytelling at 21c Liederabend Op. Senses at National Sawdust, co-produced and directed by Beth Morrison Projects and Paola Prestini, acclaimed for their work pushing the boundaries of classical performance... Tenor Alex McKissick’s soaring voice brought the evening to a sweeping conclusion in the program’s last two pieces, selections from Prestini’s opera Edward Tulane... it was as if we were being asked to open our hearts to the evening’s experience. With the impressive talent that filled the stage, it would have been impossible not to.
December 21, 2021
The music was excellent... something of an all-star line-up, and all 11 composers on both nights were women. The singers, all recent graduates of the Juilliard School, were equally excellent.
September 30, 2024
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...
December 5, 2023
"In Code, [Prestini] writes uncanny birdcalls for Roomful of Teeth and rippling passages for Pratt"
May 19, 2016
“Some is outright gorgeous. Ms. Prestini’s choral piece for the section “A Padre, a Horse, a Telescope” sets Jesuit sources — including a Hail Mary in Cochimi, an extinct Native American language — to an ethereal blend of Mexican Baroque music and otherworldly ululations.”
August 31, 2023
"An album designed to be relistened to with Talmudic fervor. Prestini delves into the still point of Eliot and Hale's turning world, one that was- as more than a thousand letters would suggest- full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless."
May 19, 2022
"The one hour and 20-minute opera-theater ended to dead silence from a stunned, enraptured audience. Then the applause started, audience members stood up, and the cheering lasted a full four minutes."
May 7, 2025
Though 'Port(al)' was written for young singers, there was nothing toned-down or unsophisticated about it...'Port(al)' is an anti-war requiem
November 22, 2020
"The piece [G-Force], composed as a tribute to the close friend named in the title, is a real mood-spinner and makes full use of each instrument’s voice."
October 1, 2024
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.
August 25, 2023
"Uncanny ... a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano ... Pratt has rediscovered the sweet spot he once enjoyed in the recording studio. [STILLPOINT] makes for one endlessly engaging recording. Let's hope we don't have to wait 12 years for the next one."
June 12, 2021
"Paola Prestini’s neoromantically-tinged triptych Ondine: Variations on a Spell begins with the broodingly impressionistic low-midrange Water Sprite, followed by the Bell Tolls, with a long upward drive from nebulosity to an anthemic, glistening payoff. The finale, Golden Bees follows a series of anthemic, flickering cascades."
August 18, 2021
"[G-Force] opens with long, elegiac string notes, but despite being described as a lamentation of sorts, it quickly becomes frenzied, frenetic and even fun...Prestini shrewdly uses the bounce of [the vibraphone]’s sound to play off the traditional string quartet’s textures."
March 26, 2017
“Prestini’s graceful, lovely composition “The Hotel That Time Forgot”, was an exploration of invented memory”
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."
May 7, 2023
Prestini’s 'Voices' was a joyful and playful sound world that reflected on unification through the human voice. This higher level of awareness that [Prestini] understands wholeheartedly ... empowers others, especially young voices, to share with the world.
August 8, 2016
The Hubble Cantata, composer Paola Prestini’s brilliant collaboration with librettist Royce Vavreck and the Hubble Space Telescope’s lead astrophysicist, Dr. Mario Livio. But in all other arenas, Hubble pushes its classical cosmic themes ever more upward than any orchestral work these ears have ear in a long time, upward and toward the stars. the success of this multi-disciplinary performance lies in its ability to exist as both high art and popular entertainment. And so The Hubble Cantata is a work that knows no parallel, pushing boundaries of technology and presentation that push our city’s relationship with multi-disciplinary performance further into uncharted territory.
December 19, 2021
... National Sawdust reopens to a realm of the senses... an indulgent salon of new songs of nostalgia and reckoning... Paola Prestini's evocative 'Distance to the Market', abetted by Adam Richardson's fine, warm baritone, opened the concert... the evening succeeded on all counts."
September 18, 2019
“Entitled ‘Holes in the Sky’ after a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe, the concert included music by Clara Schumann, Florence Price, Meredith Monk, Nina Simone, Paola Prestini, Joni Mitchell, and others. It proved a fitting celebration of the work – it’s now safe to say the tradition – of women composers.”
November 25, 2013
“Well wrought … upbeat and enthralling.”
June 22, 2018
“The Glass Box” “Prestini’s effects include humming and whistling, with luminous chords underpinning gentle cascades of recitative. As a mother and daughter are reunited at the end, a repeated, unresolved chord adds a note of unease.”
December 2, 2020
"an unstoppable force"
August 2, 2022
As the composer explained before the live premiere, her aim was to embody both conflict and accord in the dialogue between piano and orchestra, while ultimately opting for optimism by embracing an innate “us” in the act of collaboration. That dramatic shift was evident in her musical design, which oscillates between simmering tensions, muscular bursts, and peaceable resolutions.
October 1, 2024
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.
June 20, 2012
“An inquisitively progressive piece.” ... “[baritone Chris Burchett’s] depth and focus is quite beautiful.” ... “This is, I think, what will make us want to see this again and again- we’ll take something completely new from it each time we see it.” ... “Overall, I must and I will see this project in its entirety… it’s a gem.”
September 28, 2024
Prestini has a thrilling knack for the aleatoric, and her vocal writing gives the singers a wide range of expression.
November 8, 2017
“From Paola Prestini we heard a prelude and aria from her opera Gilgamesh. A daring opening, with hard strings biting on a semitone, builds into climbing waves of strings, creating drama and establishing a musical language to use throughout the piece. The vocal part was sung by Jakub Józef Orliński, a promising countertenor with a powerful, direct instrument that can shift between mixed voice and full falsetto without revealing a seam. In this as in all of her work, Prestini shows a strong compositional voice and an arresting focus in her writing: vigorous melodic lines grab the listener, supported by tart harmonies. At this point, she has to be considered a major talent.”
May 19, 2016
“the music — commissioned from five composers and performed by some of the most innovative soundsmiths around — is specifically tailored to the film’s passionate environmental advocacy and carries equal weight with the visual.”
October 7, 2024
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
January 26, 2025
Timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City.
October 10, 2022
Minnesota Opera's 'Edward Tulane' delights with evocative music, dazzling visuals and heart... Prestini's arias and orchestrations are a paradoxical combination of simplicity and complexity. Vocal lines move in unpredictable directions — sometimes barely moving at all— and the composer eschews comforting resolutions in favor of chords that keep you hanging.
May 5, 2023
... the most satisfying work was Paola Prestini’s ‘Voices’. In her beautifully crafted piece, Prestini captured the poignant recollections of beloved voices from childhood that were the first poetry of one’s life. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, without accompaniment or amplification to cloud their sound, expressed those sentiments beautifully.
June 23, 2021
"All the homages extend the legacy, bring it into a piano-centered present day and thereby give pianist Faliks a lengthy set of tone poems and active excitement that shows off her beautiful interpretive skills and brings us to the edge of our seats--or perhaps rather our piano benches!"
December 14, 2023
Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines.
May 16, 2022
Prestini’s music is haunting, playful, strange and joyful, and it was beautifully rendered by the affable and funny Eckert, the Attacca Quartet and the 29-member all-girls choir. Visually and aurally stunning...
March 7, 2017
“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”
August 31, 2017
"[The Phoenix} left one wishing for more...it had a distinct brand of robust lyricism seasoned with witty asides. Violinist Jennifer Choi didn’t spare the Romantic sonorities as she spooled out the piece’s long melodic lines and kissed off the Kreislerian staccato and pizzicato passages."
November 8, 2017
“From her opera “Gilgamesh,” Ms. Prestini drew “Prelude and Aria,” which begins with heaving and ominous intensity and evolves into a plaintive vocal monologue, sung meltingly by the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski.”
Paola is an artistic visionary... there is a kind of energy system that follows her and her work everywhere she goes."
May 13, 2022
“Prestini’s eclectic score, expertly realized by Eckert, the chorus and the Attacca Quartet, ranged from chant-influenced passages to thorny patches of dissonance, moving from background to foreground and back again. At times you forgot there was a score; at other times, like that accordion melody, it was unforgettable... The whole presentation was so innocent, so imaginative, so nurturing, so charming, so beautiful, that my cynical, post-Covid sensibility tried to resist. But we all have our place in the universe, in the present moment, and perhaps beyond. As the Magician discovered, and we along with him, resistance is futile.”
June 28, 2021
"a grand peroration of bell-tolling chords and octaves"
June 4, 2014
The evening was kicked off by composer, mover and shaker Paola Prestini, a curator of the annual River to River festival and creative director of the Brooklyn-based Original Music Workshop.
May 15, 2017
“The Hubble Cantata, is a more than a piece of music. It is a new kind of collaboration: a nexus of art and science.”
June 29, 2023
Prestini surfaces those messy emotions in music of candid vulnerability
October 2, 2024
A mourning hymn “There’s a city of light ’mid the stars,” set with jarringly dissonant intervals, was followed by a hypnotic choral echo of “White linens,” an aria sung by Esther’s mother, as the women washed and laid out the body. The resolution of the story seemed almost beside the point, and the clock—which Johan stopped when he first left the house after breakfast—was started again, implying that life goes on.
September 12, 2016
“An enchanted exploration of the eternal mysteries….[Prestini’s] atmospheric but tuneful music for “Gilgamesh” inhabited an indie-opera rainforest of its own…”
October 8, 2022
Edward Tulane was a strong season-opener for this company, marking its forty-ninth premiere. Whether this is an opera primarily for children or for adults can be—and probably will be—debated. It can, of course, be both.
May 23, 2016
“A soundtrack at its most pure, this live score imparted a more resonant sensation than just film or concert alone; the whole evening brought together both sight and sound at the height of their powers.”
January 29, 2025
A deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous.
September 12, 2016
“It sparkles, both literally and figuratively…Her melodies entice and speak of a modern, yet accessible flare…it holds its intensity with valor through its end.”
August 28, 2016
“Expansive-beyond-imagination images from the Hubble Space Telescope arrived in 360-degree virtual reality amid a new piece by Paola Prestini titled Hubble Cantata this month at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park… the resulting vistas proved the sky was anything but the limit.”
November 10, 2014
Next is Listen, Quiet by Paola Prestini, an unexpectedly catchy track featuring Jason Treuting of So Percussion. It’s not so much music for solo cello as it is a fantastically quirky percussion piece with a cello narrator. An expert welder of elements, Prestini cuts in recordings of women’s voices in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of The Books’ Lemon of Pink album.
August 13, 2016
“Crescendos, beauty, drama…It astounded me, this feeling of floating above Earth, and tears began to emerge from my cardboard goggles.”
November 1, 2013
“Hubble Cantata … a work of extraordinary beauty.”
March 21, 2023
This evening was just the healing many of us are seeking —the healing power of soulful art and engaging creative activism.
April 1, 2025
A beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music, combined with improvisatory passages, drones, jazz harmonic structures and live electronics.
August 11, 2016
“Prestini’s music…vividly shimmering and raging with the emotional temperatures of characters as suggested in Vavrek’s libretto, and generally conjuring up an authentically cosmic atmosphere with its trembling strings, ethereal wind lines, and luminous glockenspiel.”
October 8, 2022
Prestini writes wonderfully for the chorus, whether it be Christmas carols in a Victorian style for a small ensemble or wordless choruses in two scenes in Act I. There is so much genuine wit in Campbell’s text—his sixth libretto for Minnesota—and there is such variety in Prestini’s expressive score—that we hop onboard the ride and develop an affection for Edward...
February 5, 2025
This work is everything dreamed and imagined, produced and performed with utmost care, consciousness and soul. “Primero Sueño” lights the way forward for all.
January 16, 2016
“exuberant…an extreme expression of female agency.”
October 1, 2017
"The final section features Prestini at her best, as she conjures a frightening Matrix dystopia in which the human mind is converted into artificial intelligence. A mesmerizing haze of sound builds up, layering humming choir, whistling electronics and a rumbling, Ligeti-like cluster chord in the instrumental ensemble that slowly shifts and intensifies, punctuated by radio interceptions of static and a woman’s voice”
June 27, 2012
“A sweeping social portrait of southern Italy.” … ”the songs and choral settings are painted in the bright hues and varied rhythms of folk exotica." ... “Their video counterparts in an artful film.”
May 4, 2025
...exceptionally well written...Prestini is unafraid to take risks concerning the magnitude or moving parts of a production, and those risks certainly paid off for an inspiring performance of 'Port(al)'
July 6, 2019
“How does one direct so that the opera breathes with its own artistic life and not the life of a movie put onto stage? …The answers came from an at-once pellucid and oftentimes deeply emotional score by Paola Prestini, set to Vavrek’s bang-on minimalist libretto…”
November 25, 2020
"New York composer Paola Prestini and Mexico-based singer-songwriter Magos Herrera (plus a crew of musicians) used the lockdown to collaborate at a distance, and the result is a melancholy but uplifting quasi-cantata full of bird calls, phone calls, and calls across frozen borders."
October 1, 2024
A richly ambiguous, provocative, and heady experience.
July 1, 2021
"In [Jarful of Bees] mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti brings rich sound to the rangy, soaring vocal lines and to Royce Vavrek’s compact text."
March 26, 2017
“The Hotel That Time Forgot”… Prestini’s music conveys the surreal visuals through gently repetitive figures, disparately overlapping lines and swooshing, sliding harmonies.”
November 6, 2015
“magnificent drumming…a successful experiment…pitched towards the ecstatic sense of wonder in the natural world…a showcase for lovely and refined music making by composers and performers alike.”
February 15, 2024
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.
November 20, 2023
"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."
October 12, 2017
‘…the works ability to evoke sheer vastness of what lies beyond our experience.”
August 8, 2023
Prestini is a deft composer and surefooted dramatically... Touching, elegant music.
June 27, 2022
Paola Prestini, is a composer who expresses a certain part of the contemporary American scene, the one that is…post everything. Very elegant writing [that] pays homage to the American biologist Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the US environmental movement.
January 13, 2013
“Spellbinding music…”
May 13, 2025
The musical composition 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!
September 28, 2023
"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."
May 9, 2022
"... the body is the soul-- it is more plainly evident than ever that regulatory control of the mind, of the soul, of consciousness itself. This is what visionary composer and National Sawdust founder Paola Prestini explores with elegance and enchantment in her piece 'Biking Through Time', which I had the pleasure of seeing performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus."
April 21, 2016
“Luminously involving music”
February 13, 2020
Prestini’s Thrush Song incorporated the words of author and environmentalist Rachel Carson delivered both by Carson on tape and soprano Lucy Dhegrae, who proved a strong dramatic interpreter on top of her talents as a singer. Prestini played voice against strings, with percussion, to craft an exceptionally literate work. Thematic lines built in a coherent progression, phrases making paragraphs, resounding in a remarkable disruption. Prestini didn’t just give voice to another American heroine, but also to the birds that woman strived to save.
October 8, 2024
Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting.

Press Quotes

June 28, 2021
"a grand peroration of bell-tolling chords and octaves"
May 23, 2016
“But the music…! The Colorado’s soundtrack positively radiates optimism.”
December 7, 2020
Join dozens of musicians from around the world for “Con Alma,” a live performance adapted from the recent album of the same title created by the composers Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera.
March 27, 2023
Paola Prestini’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is an opera of layers. Voices evolve into otherworldly soundscapes as cello and percussion deliver a call-and-response that tugs on our ears like receding waves underfoot. Characters meld into one another as their roles collide and coalesce. Themes cascade together even as they bridge disparate musical motifs ... layers flowed into a swirling gyre of fate, dreams and emotion worthy of the dark blue depths they plumb.
August 8, 2016
“A brilliant collaboration. Prestini’s time spent perfecting 30-plus commissioned multidisciplinary works and serving as creative and executive director of Williamsburg’s National Sawdust have only further fortified her with the tact to balance all the voices, mixed media and technology that combine to make The Hubble Cantata such a spectacle…”
June 27, 2012
“A sweeping social portrait of southern Italy.” … ”the songs and choral settings are painted in the bright hues and varied rhythms of folk exotica." ... “Their video counterparts in an artful film.”
January 13, 2013
“Spellbinding music…”
December 5, 2023
"In Code, [Prestini] writes uncanny birdcalls for Roomful of Teeth and rippling passages for Pratt"
August 31, 2023
"An album designed to be relistened to with Talmudic fervor. Prestini delves into the still point of Eliot and Hale's turning world, one that was- as more than a thousand letters would suggest- full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless."
March 7, 2017
“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”
September 28, 2024
Prestini has a thrilling knack for the aleatoric, and her vocal writing gives the singers a wide range of expression.
September 14, 2023
"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."
August 8, 2016
“Hubble Cantata saw audience members explore the Orion Nebula while a new piece of music played – the latest in a series of experiments between VR technology and classical music”
May 13, 2025
The musical composition 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!
November 22, 2020
"The piece [G-Force], composed as a tribute to the close friend named in the title, is a real mood-spinner and makes full use of each instrument’s voice."
February 15, 2024
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.
November 20, 2023
"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."
May 15, 2017
“The Hubble Cantata, is a more than a piece of music. It is a new kind of collaboration: a nexus of art and science.”
June 26, 2013
“Mr. Lubovitch’s new 'As Sleep Befell' made for a better match with Ms. Prestini’s music. At the center of a semicircle of string, wind and percussion players stood the vocalist Helga Davis, a kind of murmuring angel. Six shirtless male dancers were arrayed out in front of her on the ground, tossing and turning handsomely to Ms. Prestini’s atmospherics, as if in a shared dream … [it was] visually arresting.”
October 1, 2024
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.
May 19, 2016
“the music — commissioned from five composers and performed by some of the most innovative soundsmiths around — is specifically tailored to the film’s passionate environmental advocacy and carries equal weight with the visual.”
September 30, 2024
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...
October 10, 2022
Minnesota Opera's 'Edward Tulane' delights with evocative music, dazzling visuals and heart... Prestini's arias and orchestrations are a paradoxical combination of simplicity and complexity. Vocal lines move in unpredictable directions — sometimes barely moving at all— and the composer eschews comforting resolutions in favor of chords that keep you hanging.
June 12, 2021
"Paola Prestini’s neoromantically-tinged triptych Ondine: Variations on a Spell begins with the broodingly impressionistic low-midrange Water Sprite, followed by the Bell Tolls, with a long upward drive from nebulosity to an anthemic, glistening payoff. The finale, Golden Bees follows a series of anthemic, flickering cascades."
July 1, 2021
"In [Jarful of Bees] mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti brings rich sound to the rangy, soaring vocal lines and to Royce Vavrek’s compact text."
September 12, 2016
“An enchanted exploration of the eternal mysteries….[Prestini’s] atmospheric but tuneful music for “Gilgamesh” inhabited an indie-opera rainforest of its own…”
May 23, 2016
“A soundtrack at its most pure, this live score imparted a more resonant sensation than just film or concert alone; the whole evening brought together both sight and sound at the height of their powers.”
December 15, 2014
Prestini’s style weaves folk melodies and field samples with massive choral sections reminiscent of some forgotten Renaissance Mass, all filtered through her own distinctive musical language… the overall effect is engaging and quite moving. The major themes of transformation, immigration and culturally complex, layered ethnicity seem to resonate both on a macro level in the age of globalization, as well as on a micro level in what Prestini calls the search for 'internal geography.'
October 10, 2017
“The kind of experimentation Prestini has lent to her work will help shape what masterpieces come out of the next 50 years”
April 9, 2023
I don't think that the audience present could have been more receptive to the performance… To say it was "genre-defying" would be an understatement …thrilling, entertaining and moving all at once … [Con Alma] uses music in creating a shared experience--showing that even when we are physically alone, we can have a common experience with others.
January 16, 2016
“exuberant…an extreme expression of female agency.”
April 21, 2016
“Luminously involving music”
November 10, 2014
Next is Listen, Quiet by Paola Prestini, an unexpectedly catchy track featuring Jason Treuting of So Percussion. It’s not so much music for solo cello as it is a fantastically quirky percussion piece with a cello narrator. An expert welder of elements, Prestini cuts in recordings of women’s voices in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of The Books’ Lemon of Pink album.
May 4, 2023
[Prestini’s] setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and beautiful counterpoint.
June 24, 2012
“Paola Prestini, and her creative team have high ambitions…[and] common sense about what works onstage: characters you can connect to, music that engages.” ... “The layering of ideas and music knitted together to present something that moves forward with the vitality of the original folk material.”
August 18, 2021
"[G-Force] opens with long, elegiac string notes, but despite being described as a lamentation of sorts, it quickly becomes frenzied, frenetic and even fun...Prestini shrewdly uses the bounce of [the vibraphone]’s sound to play off the traditional string quartet’s textures."
August 8, 2023
Prestini is a deft composer and surefooted dramatically... Touching, elegant music.
December 21, 2021
The music was excellent... something of an all-star line-up, and all 11 composers on both nights were women. The singers, all recent graduates of the Juilliard School, were equally excellent.
June 10, 2022
[A] groundbreaking, experimental production... a fantastical, complex, dream-like work... 'Houses of Zodiac' left me feeling moved in a new and profound way.
March 26, 2017
“Prestini’s graceful, lovely composition “The Hotel That Time Forgot”, was an exploration of invented memory”
December 16, 2021
An evening of evocative music inspired imaginative storytelling at 21c Liederabend Op. Senses at National Sawdust, co-produced and directed by Beth Morrison Projects and Paola Prestini, acclaimed for their work pushing the boundaries of classical performance... Tenor Alex McKissick’s soaring voice brought the evening to a sweeping conclusion in the program’s last two pieces, selections from Prestini’s opera Edward Tulane... it was as if we were being asked to open our hearts to the evening’s experience. With the impressive talent that filled the stage, it would have been impossible not to.
June 20, 2012
“An inquisitively progressive piece.” ... “[baritone Chris Burchett’s] depth and focus is quite beautiful.” ... “This is, I think, what will make us want to see this again and again- we’ll take something completely new from it each time we see it.” ... “Overall, I must and I will see this project in its entirety… it’s a gem.”
February 5, 2025
This work is everything dreamed and imagined, produced and performed with utmost care, consciousness and soul. “Primero Sueño” lights the way forward for all.
October 12, 2017
‘…the works ability to evoke sheer vastness of what lies beyond our experience.”
October 8, 2022
Prestini writes wonderfully for the chorus, whether it be Christmas carols in a Victorian style for a small ensemble or wordless choruses in two scenes in Act I. There is so much genuine wit in Campbell’s text—his sixth libretto for Minnesota—and there is such variety in Prestini’s expressive score—that we hop onboard the ride and develop an affection for Edward...
May 4, 2025
...exceptionally well written...Prestini is unafraid to take risks concerning the magnitude or moving parts of a production, and those risks certainly paid off for an inspiring performance of 'Port(al)'
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."
May 7, 2025
Though 'Port(al)' was written for young singers, there was nothing toned-down or unsophisticated about it...'Port(al)' is an anti-war requiem
February 13, 2020
Prestini’s Thrush Song incorporated the words of author and environmentalist Rachel Carson delivered both by Carson on tape and soprano Lucy Dhegrae, who proved a strong dramatic interpreter on top of her talents as a singer. Prestini played voice against strings, with percussion, to craft an exceptionally literate work. Thematic lines built in a coherent progression, phrases making paragraphs, resounding in a remarkable disruption. Prestini didn’t just give voice to another American heroine, but also to the birds that woman strived to save.
July 6, 2019
“How does one direct so that the opera breathes with its own artistic life and not the life of a movie put onto stage? …The answers came from an at-once pellucid and oftentimes deeply emotional score by Paola Prestini, set to Vavrek’s bang-on minimalist libretto…”
October 1, 2017
"The final section features Prestini at her best, as she conjures a frightening Matrix dystopia in which the human mind is converted into artificial intelligence. A mesmerizing haze of sound builds up, layering humming choir, whistling electronics and a rumbling, Ligeti-like cluster chord in the instrumental ensemble that slowly shifts and intensifies, punctuated by radio interceptions of static and a woman’s voice”
November 1, 2013
“Hubble Cantata … a work of extraordinary beauty.”
March 26, 2017
“The Hotel That Time Forgot”… Prestini’s music conveys the surreal visuals through gently repetitive figures, disparately overlapping lines and swooshing, sliding harmonies.”
August 25, 2023
"Uncanny ... a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano ... Pratt has rediscovered the sweet spot he once enjoyed in the recording studio. [STILLPOINT] makes for one endlessly engaging recording. Let's hope we don't have to wait 12 years for the next one."
August 13, 2016
“Crescendos, beauty, drama…It astounded me, this feeling of floating above Earth, and tears began to emerge from my cardboard goggles.”
August 31, 2017
"[The Phoenix} left one wishing for more...it had a distinct brand of robust lyricism seasoned with witty asides. Violinist Jennifer Choi didn’t spare the Romantic sonorities as she spooled out the piece’s long melodic lines and kissed off the Kreislerian staccato and pizzicato passages."
May 19, 2016
“Some is outright gorgeous. Ms. Prestini’s choral piece for the section “A Padre, a Horse, a Telescope” sets Jesuit sources — including a Hail Mary in Cochimi, an extinct Native American language — to an ethereal blend of Mexican Baroque music and otherworldly ululations.”
November 1, 2021
"One of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time...On the album, Prestini’s gorgeous and mysterious, hypnotically complex compositions, performed by Zeigler with daredevil intensity and a kind of surgical 'mad doctor' precision.""
June 27, 2022
Paola Prestini, is a composer who expresses a certain part of the contemporary American scene, the one that is…post everything. Very elegant writing [that] pays homage to the American biologist Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the US environmental movement.
December 13, 2023
"One of the year's most satisfying releases"
October 7, 2024
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
June 23, 2021
"All the homages extend the legacy, bring it into a piano-centered present day and thereby give pianist Faliks a lengthy set of tone poems and active excitement that shows off her beautiful interpretive skills and brings us to the edge of our seats--or perhaps rather our piano benches!"
October 1, 2024
A richly ambiguous, provocative, and heady experience.
August 11, 2016
“Prestini’s music…vividly shimmering and raging with the emotional temperatures of characters as suggested in Vavrek’s libretto, and generally conjuring up an authentically cosmic atmosphere with its trembling strings, ethereal wind lines, and luminous glockenspiel.”
November 18, 2022
Prestini examined further how we, as a world, must do better by seeing the truth that is our current reality. A crisis. She brought front and center the fragility of life and the impermanence of all existence.
September 28, 2023
"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."
May 13, 2022
“Prestini’s eclectic score, expertly realized by Eckert, the chorus and the Attacca Quartet, ranged from chant-influenced passages to thorny patches of dissonance, moving from background to foreground and back again. At times you forgot there was a score; at other times, like that accordion melody, it was unforgettable... The whole presentation was so innocent, so imaginative, so nurturing, so charming, so beautiful, that my cynical, post-Covid sensibility tried to resist. But we all have our place in the universe, in the present moment, and perhaps beyond. As the Magician discovered, and we along with him, resistance is futile.”
June 22, 2012
“Ms. Prestini – an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished”
May 11, 2015
Rhapsodic
September 12, 2023
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.
December 11, 2020
"The Mexican singer Magos Herrera and the New York-based composer Paola Prestini have collaborated on a lovely new album called Con Alma – “With Soul.” The music draws on jazz, chamber music, and Latin song, without ever settling on any one of those things. After all, Herrera is a jazz singer who’s done a whole album with a string quartet, and Prestini is Artistic Director at National Sawdust, a venue that refuses to abide by stylistic boundaries."
June 22, 2018
“The Glass Box” “Prestini’s effects include humming and whistling, with luminous chords underpinning gentle cascades of recitative. As a mother and daughter are reunited at the end, a repeated, unresolved chord adds a note of unease.”
December 19, 2021
... National Sawdust reopens to a realm of the senses... an indulgent salon of new songs of nostalgia and reckoning... Paola Prestini's evocative 'Distance to the Market', abetted by Adam Richardson's fine, warm baritone, opened the concert... the evening succeeded on all counts."
November 29, 2013
“The music was ace.”
October 8, 2022
Edward Tulane was a strong season-opener for this company, marking its forty-ninth premiere. Whether this is an opera primarily for children or for adults can be—and probably will be—debated. It can, of course, be both.
January 25, 2021
"As a musical documentary of emotion, Herrera and Prestini gathered more than 30 musicians from three continents for their cross-border album of original works, representing a feat that in itself defines the indefatigable spirit of women today."
November 25, 2020
"New York composer Paola Prestini and Mexico-based singer-songwriter Magos Herrera (plus a crew of musicians) used the lockdown to collaborate at a distance, and the result is a melancholy but uplifting quasi-cantata full of bird calls, phone calls, and calls across frozen borders."
August 21, 2023
Paola Prestini’s Code is spectral and crystalline...
December 14, 2023
Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines.
March 21, 2023
This evening was just the healing many of us are seeking —the healing power of soulful art and engaging creative activism.
December 14, 2023
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.
August 8, 2016
The Hubble Cantata, composer Paola Prestini’s brilliant collaboration with librettist Royce Vavreck and the Hubble Space Telescope’s lead astrophysicist, Dr. Mario Livio. But in all other arenas, Hubble pushes its classical cosmic themes ever more upward than any orchestral work these ears have ear in a long time, upward and toward the stars. the success of this multi-disciplinary performance lies in its ability to exist as both high art and popular entertainment. And so The Hubble Cantata is a work that knows no parallel, pushing boundaries of technology and presentation that push our city’s relationship with multi-disciplinary performance further into uncharted territory.
January 29, 2025
A deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous.
August 2, 2022
As the composer explained before the live premiere, her aim was to embody both conflict and accord in the dialogue between piano and orchestra, while ultimately opting for optimism by embracing an innate “us” in the act of collaboration. That dramatic shift was evident in her musical design, which oscillates between simmering tensions, muscular bursts, and peaceable resolutions.
August 28, 2016
“Expansive-beyond-imagination images from the Hubble Space Telescope arrived in 360-degree virtual reality amid a new piece by Paola Prestini titled Hubble Cantata this month at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park… the resulting vistas proved the sky was anything but the limit.”
May 9, 2022
"... the body is the soul-- it is more plainly evident than ever that regulatory control of the mind, of the soul, of consciousness itself. This is what visionary composer and National Sawdust founder Paola Prestini explores with elegance and enchantment in her piece 'Biking Through Time', which I had the pleasure of seeing performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus."
April 1, 2025
A beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music, combined with improvisatory passages, drones, jazz harmonic structures and live electronics.
October 2, 2024
A mourning hymn “There’s a city of light ’mid the stars,” set with jarringly dissonant intervals, was followed by a hypnotic choral echo of “White linens,” an aria sung by Esther’s mother, as the women washed and laid out the body. The resolution of the story seemed almost beside the point, and the clock—which Johan stopped when he first left the house after breakfast—was started again, implying that life goes on.
August 10, 2016
"It was a thundering opus”
Paola is an artistic visionary... there is a kind of energy system that follows her and her work everywhere she goes."
November 6, 2015
“magnificent drumming…a successful experiment…pitched towards the ecstatic sense of wonder in the natural world…a showcase for lovely and refined music making by composers and performers alike.”
November 8, 2017
“From her opera “Gilgamesh,” Ms. Prestini drew “Prelude and Aria,” which begins with heaving and ominous intensity and evolves into a plaintive vocal monologue, sung meltingly by the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski.”
June 4, 2014
The evening was kicked off by composer, mover and shaker Paola Prestini, a curator of the annual River to River festival and creative director of the Brooklyn-based Original Music Workshop.
February 7, 2016
“Paola Prestini invited listeners into her sensually saturated dreams…soloists Tim Fain, violin, and Maya Beiser, cello, performed the two captivating concertos of Prestini’s ‘Labyrinth,’ surrounded by a phantasmagoria of visual projections.”
May 5, 2023
... the most satisfying work was Paola Prestini’s ‘Voices’. In her beautifully crafted piece, Prestini captured the poignant recollections of beloved voices from childhood that were the first poetry of one’s life. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, without accompaniment or amplification to cloud their sound, expressed those sentiments beautifully.
August 8, 2016
“The performance itself was full of magic and wonder. Space, of course, is silent: there is no audible music of the spheres. But, Prestini has written some astonishing musical passages that capture a sense of what it might be like to be set adrift in a universe without the limitations of space or time.”
July 1, 2021
"This edition of 21c Liederabend bodes incredibly well for the future of art song. All the featured artists are people to look out for. Additionally, since this program is available online, anyone with an internet connection can view it. In that regard, it is truly the ultimate Schubertiades."
January 9, 2013
“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”
October 1, 2024
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.
November 8, 2017
“From Paola Prestini we heard a prelude and aria from her opera Gilgamesh. A daring opening, with hard strings biting on a semitone, builds into climbing waves of strings, creating drama and establishing a musical language to use throughout the piece. The vocal part was sung by Jakub Józef Orliński, a promising countertenor with a powerful, direct instrument that can shift between mixed voice and full falsetto without revealing a seam. In this as in all of her work, Prestini shows a strong compositional voice and an arresting focus in her writing: vigorous melodic lines grab the listener, supported by tart harmonies. At this point, she has to be considered a major talent.”

Press Quotes

May 11, 2015
Rhapsodic
December 14, 2023
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.
December 15, 2014
Prestini’s style weaves folk melodies and field samples with massive choral sections reminiscent of some forgotten Renaissance Mass, all filtered through her own distinctive musical language… the overall effect is engaging and quite moving. The major themes of transformation, immigration and culturally complex, layered ethnicity seem to resonate both on a macro level in the age of globalization, as well as on a micro level in what Prestini calls the search for 'internal geography.'
November 8, 2017
“From her opera “Gilgamesh,” Ms. Prestini drew “Prelude and Aria,” which begins with heaving and ominous intensity and evolves into a plaintive vocal monologue, sung meltingly by the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski.”
June 27, 2022
Paola Prestini, is a composer who expresses a certain part of the contemporary American scene, the one that is…post everything. Very elegant writing [that] pays homage to the American biologist Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the US environmental movement.
November 10, 2014
Next is Listen, Quiet by Paola Prestini, an unexpectedly catchy track featuring Jason Treuting of So Percussion. It’s not so much music for solo cello as it is a fantastically quirky percussion piece with a cello narrator. An expert welder of elements, Prestini cuts in recordings of women’s voices in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of The Books’ Lemon of Pink album.
July 6, 2019
“How does one direct so that the opera breathes with its own artistic life and not the life of a movie put onto stage? …The answers came from an at-once pellucid and oftentimes deeply emotional score by Paola Prestini, set to Vavrek’s bang-on minimalist libretto…”
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."
October 8, 2024
Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting.
May 15, 2017
“The Hubble Cantata, is a more than a piece of music. It is a new kind of collaboration: a nexus of art and science.”
December 16, 2021
An evening of evocative music inspired imaginative storytelling at 21c Liederabend Op. Senses at National Sawdust, co-produced and directed by Beth Morrison Projects and Paola Prestini, acclaimed for their work pushing the boundaries of classical performance... Tenor Alex McKissick’s soaring voice brought the evening to a sweeping conclusion in the program’s last two pieces, selections from Prestini’s opera Edward Tulane... it was as if we were being asked to open our hearts to the evening’s experience. With the impressive talent that filled the stage, it would have been impossible not to.
May 4, 2023
[Prestini’s] setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and beautiful counterpoint.
December 5, 2023
"In Code, [Prestini] writes uncanny birdcalls for Roomful of Teeth and rippling passages for Pratt"
November 8, 2017
“From Paola Prestini we heard a prelude and aria from her opera Gilgamesh. A daring opening, with hard strings biting on a semitone, builds into climbing waves of strings, creating drama and establishing a musical language to use throughout the piece. The vocal part was sung by Jakub Józef Orliński, a promising countertenor with a powerful, direct instrument that can shift between mixed voice and full falsetto without revealing a seam. In this as in all of her work, Prestini shows a strong compositional voice and an arresting focus in her writing: vigorous melodic lines grab the listener, supported by tart harmonies. At this point, she has to be considered a major talent.”
May 19, 2016
“the music — commissioned from five composers and performed by some of the most innovative soundsmiths around — is specifically tailored to the film’s passionate environmental advocacy and carries equal weight with the visual.”
March 21, 2023
This evening was just the healing many of us are seeking —the healing power of soulful art and engaging creative activism.
August 8, 2016
“A brilliant collaboration. Prestini’s time spent perfecting 30-plus commissioned multidisciplinary works and serving as creative and executive director of Williamsburg’s National Sawdust have only further fortified her with the tact to balance all the voices, mixed media and technology that combine to make The Hubble Cantata such a spectacle…”
May 23, 2016
“A soundtrack at its most pure, this live score imparted a more resonant sensation than just film or concert alone; the whole evening brought together both sight and sound at the height of their powers.”
February 7, 2016
“Paola Prestini invited listeners into her sensually saturated dreams…soloists Tim Fain, violin, and Maya Beiser, cello, performed the two captivating concertos of Prestini’s ‘Labyrinth,’ surrounded by a phantasmagoria of visual projections.”
September 12, 2023
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.
March 26, 2017
“The Hotel That Time Forgot”… Prestini’s music conveys the surreal visuals through gently repetitive figures, disparately overlapping lines and swooshing, sliding harmonies.”
October 2, 2024
A mourning hymn “There’s a city of light ’mid the stars,” set with jarringly dissonant intervals, was followed by a hypnotic choral echo of “White linens,” an aria sung by Esther’s mother, as the women washed and laid out the body. The resolution of the story seemed almost beside the point, and the clock—which Johan stopped when he first left the house after breakfast—was started again, implying that life goes on.
October 1, 2017
"The final section features Prestini at her best, as she conjures a frightening Matrix dystopia in which the human mind is converted into artificial intelligence. A mesmerizing haze of sound builds up, layering humming choir, whistling electronics and a rumbling, Ligeti-like cluster chord in the instrumental ensemble that slowly shifts and intensifies, punctuated by radio interceptions of static and a woman’s voice”
April 21, 2016
“Luminously involving music”
May 5, 2023
... the most satisfying work was Paola Prestini’s ‘Voices’. In her beautifully crafted piece, Prestini captured the poignant recollections of beloved voices from childhood that were the first poetry of one’s life. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, without accompaniment or amplification to cloud their sound, expressed those sentiments beautifully.
October 1, 2024
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.
June 20, 2012
“An inquisitively progressive piece.” ... “[baritone Chris Burchett’s] depth and focus is quite beautiful.” ... “This is, I think, what will make us want to see this again and again- we’ll take something completely new from it each time we see it.” ... “Overall, I must and I will see this project in its entirety… it’s a gem.”
March 27, 2023
Paola Prestini’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is an opera of layers. Voices evolve into otherworldly soundscapes as cello and percussion deliver a call-and-response that tugs on our ears like receding waves underfoot. Characters meld into one another as their roles collide and coalesce. Themes cascade together even as they bridge disparate musical motifs ... layers flowed into a swirling gyre of fate, dreams and emotion worthy of the dark blue depths they plumb.
December 7, 2020
Join dozens of musicians from around the world for “Con Alma,” a live performance adapted from the recent album of the same title created by the composers Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera.
August 8, 2016
“Hubble Cantata saw audience members explore the Orion Nebula while a new piece of music played – the latest in a series of experiments between VR technology and classical music”
June 23, 2021
"All the homages extend the legacy, bring it into a piano-centered present day and thereby give pianist Faliks a lengthy set of tone poems and active excitement that shows off her beautiful interpretive skills and brings us to the edge of our seats--or perhaps rather our piano benches!"
September 14, 2023
"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."
October 12, 2017
‘…the works ability to evoke sheer vastness of what lies beyond our experience.”
August 13, 2016
“Crescendos, beauty, drama…It astounded me, this feeling of floating above Earth, and tears began to emerge from my cardboard goggles.”
April 1, 2025
A beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music, combined with improvisatory passages, drones, jazz harmonic structures and live electronics.
January 25, 2021
"As a musical documentary of emotion, Herrera and Prestini gathered more than 30 musicians from three continents for their cross-border album of original works, representing a feat that in itself defines the indefatigable spirit of women today."
August 28, 2016
“Expansive-beyond-imagination images from the Hubble Space Telescope arrived in 360-degree virtual reality amid a new piece by Paola Prestini titled Hubble Cantata this month at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park… the resulting vistas proved the sky was anything but the limit.”
August 25, 2023
"Uncanny ... a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano ... Pratt has rediscovered the sweet spot he once enjoyed in the recording studio. [STILLPOINT] makes for one endlessly engaging recording. Let's hope we don't have to wait 12 years for the next one."
May 7, 2025
Though 'Port(al)' was written for young singers, there was nothing toned-down or unsophisticated about it...'Port(al)' is an anti-war requiem
January 26, 2025
Timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City.
August 31, 2023
"An album designed to be relistened to with Talmudic fervor. Prestini delves into the still point of Eliot and Hale's turning world, one that was- as more than a thousand letters would suggest- full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless."
August 2, 2022
As the composer explained before the live premiere, her aim was to embody both conflict and accord in the dialogue between piano and orchestra, while ultimately opting for optimism by embracing an innate “us” in the act of collaboration. That dramatic shift was evident in her musical design, which oscillates between simmering tensions, muscular bursts, and peaceable resolutions.
December 11, 2020
"The Mexican singer Magos Herrera and the New York-based composer Paola Prestini have collaborated on a lovely new album called Con Alma – “With Soul.” The music draws on jazz, chamber music, and Latin song, without ever settling on any one of those things. After all, Herrera is a jazz singer who’s done a whole album with a string quartet, and Prestini is Artistic Director at National Sawdust, a venue that refuses to abide by stylistic boundaries."
November 29, 2013
“The music was ace.”
October 1, 2024
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.
September 30, 2024
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...
January 9, 2013
“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”
October 6, 2024
[Paola's] use of the human voice as an interpreter of the ethereal is perfectly showcased in “Silent Light”.
February 15, 2024
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.
November 1, 2021
"One of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time...On the album, Prestini’s gorgeous and mysterious, hypnotically complex compositions, performed by Zeigler with daredevil intensity and a kind of surgical 'mad doctor' precision.""
July 1, 2021
"In [Jarful of Bees] mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti brings rich sound to the rangy, soaring vocal lines and to Royce Vavrek’s compact text."
December 19, 2021
... National Sawdust reopens to a realm of the senses... an indulgent salon of new songs of nostalgia and reckoning... Paola Prestini's evocative 'Distance to the Market', abetted by Adam Richardson's fine, warm baritone, opened the concert... the evening succeeded on all counts."
November 1, 2013
“Hubble Cantata … a work of extraordinary beauty.”
June 22, 2012
“Ms. Prestini – an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished”
September 12, 2016
“It sparkles, both literally and figuratively…Her melodies entice and speak of a modern, yet accessible flare…it holds its intensity with valor through its end.”
August 10, 2016
"It was a thundering opus”
May 19, 2016
“Some is outright gorgeous. Ms. Prestini’s choral piece for the section “A Padre, a Horse, a Telescope” sets Jesuit sources — including a Hail Mary in Cochimi, an extinct Native American language — to an ethereal blend of Mexican Baroque music and otherworldly ululations.”
August 8, 2023
Prestini is a deft composer and surefooted dramatically... Touching, elegant music.
October 7, 2024
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
August 18, 2021
"[G-Force] opens with long, elegiac string notes, but despite being described as a lamentation of sorts, it quickly becomes frenzied, frenetic and even fun...Prestini shrewdly uses the bounce of [the vibraphone]’s sound to play off the traditional string quartet’s textures."
April 4, 2010
"Radiant … [and] amorously evocative.”
December 2, 2020
"an unstoppable force"
November 20, 2023
"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."
January 29, 2025
A deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous.
June 28, 2021
"a grand peroration of bell-tolling chords and octaves"
March 7, 2017
“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”
December 13, 2023
"One of the year's most satisfying releases"
August 11, 2016
“Prestini’s music…vividly shimmering and raging with the emotional temperatures of characters as suggested in Vavrek’s libretto, and generally conjuring up an authentically cosmic atmosphere with its trembling strings, ethereal wind lines, and luminous glockenspiel.”
June 10, 2022
[A] groundbreaking, experimental production... a fantastical, complex, dream-like work... 'Houses of Zodiac' left me feeling moved in a new and profound way.
June 4, 2014
The evening was kicked off by composer, mover and shaker Paola Prestini, a curator of the annual River to River festival and creative director of the Brooklyn-based Original Music Workshop.
May 19, 2022
"The one hour and 20-minute opera-theater ended to dead silence from a stunned, enraptured audience. Then the applause started, audience members stood up, and the cheering lasted a full four minutes."
May 4, 2025
...exceptionally well written...Prestini is unafraid to take risks concerning the magnitude or moving parts of a production, and those risks certainly paid off for an inspiring performance of 'Port(al)'
February 5, 2025
This work is everything dreamed and imagined, produced and performed with utmost care, consciousness and soul. “Primero Sueño” lights the way forward for all.
December 21, 2021
The music was excellent... something of an all-star line-up, and all 11 composers on both nights were women. The singers, all recent graduates of the Juilliard School, were equally excellent.
November 18, 2022
Prestini examined further how we, as a world, must do better by seeing the truth that is our current reality. A crisis. She brought front and center the fragility of life and the impermanence of all existence.
November 25, 2013
“Well wrought … upbeat and enthralling.”
May 16, 2022
Prestini’s music is haunting, playful, strange and joyful, and it was beautifully rendered by the affable and funny Eckert, the Attacca Quartet and the 29-member all-girls choir. Visually and aurally stunning...
July 1, 2021
"This edition of 21c Liederabend bodes incredibly well for the future of art song. All the featured artists are people to look out for. Additionally, since this program is available online, anyone with an internet connection can view it. In that regard, it is truly the ultimate Schubertiades."
April 9, 2023
I don't think that the audience present could have been more receptive to the performance… To say it was "genre-defying" would be an understatement …thrilling, entertaining and moving all at once … [Con Alma] uses music in creating a shared experience--showing that even when we are physically alone, we can have a common experience with others.
September 28, 2024
Prestini has a thrilling knack for the aleatoric, and her vocal writing gives the singers a wide range of expression.
January 16, 2016
“exuberant…an extreme expression of female agency.”
September 18, 2019
“Entitled ‘Holes in the Sky’ after a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe, the concert included music by Clara Schumann, Florence Price, Meredith Monk, Nina Simone, Paola Prestini, Joni Mitchell, and others. It proved a fitting celebration of the work – it’s now safe to say the tradition – of women composers.”
June 26, 2013
“Mr. Lubovitch’s new 'As Sleep Befell' made for a better match with Ms. Prestini’s music. At the center of a semicircle of string, wind and percussion players stood the vocalist Helga Davis, a kind of murmuring angel. Six shirtless male dancers were arrayed out in front of her on the ground, tossing and turning handsomely to Ms. Prestini’s atmospherics, as if in a shared dream … [it was] visually arresting.”
September 12, 2016
“An enchanted exploration of the eternal mysteries….[Prestini’s] atmospheric but tuneful music for “Gilgamesh” inhabited an indie-opera rainforest of its own…”
August 8, 2016
The Hubble Cantata, composer Paola Prestini’s brilliant collaboration with librettist Royce Vavreck and the Hubble Space Telescope’s lead astrophysicist, Dr. Mario Livio. But in all other arenas, Hubble pushes its classical cosmic themes ever more upward than any orchestral work these ears have ear in a long time, upward and toward the stars. the success of this multi-disciplinary performance lies in its ability to exist as both high art and popular entertainment. And so The Hubble Cantata is a work that knows no parallel, pushing boundaries of technology and presentation that push our city’s relationship with multi-disciplinary performance further into uncharted territory.
August 8, 2016
“The performance itself was full of magic and wonder. Space, of course, is silent: there is no audible music of the spheres. But, Prestini has written some astonishing musical passages that capture a sense of what it might be like to be set adrift in a universe without the limitations of space or time.”
October 10, 2022
Minnesota Opera's 'Edward Tulane' delights with evocative music, dazzling visuals and heart... Prestini's arias and orchestrations are a paradoxical combination of simplicity and complexity. Vocal lines move in unpredictable directions — sometimes barely moving at all— and the composer eschews comforting resolutions in favor of chords that keep you hanging.
August 21, 2023
Paola Prestini’s Code is spectral and crystalline...
January 13, 2013
“Spellbinding music…”
August 31, 2017
"[The Phoenix} left one wishing for more...it had a distinct brand of robust lyricism seasoned with witty asides. Violinist Jennifer Choi didn’t spare the Romantic sonorities as she spooled out the piece’s long melodic lines and kissed off the Kreislerian staccato and pizzicato passages."
May 9, 2022
"... the body is the soul-- it is more plainly evident than ever that regulatory control of the mind, of the soul, of consciousness itself. This is what visionary composer and National Sawdust founder Paola Prestini explores with elegance and enchantment in her piece 'Biking Through Time', which I had the pleasure of seeing performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus."
December 14, 2023
Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines.
February 13, 2020
Prestini’s Thrush Song incorporated the words of author and environmentalist Rachel Carson delivered both by Carson on tape and soprano Lucy Dhegrae, who proved a strong dramatic interpreter on top of her talents as a singer. Prestini played voice against strings, with percussion, to craft an exceptionally literate work. Thematic lines built in a coherent progression, phrases making paragraphs, resounding in a remarkable disruption. Prestini didn’t just give voice to another American heroine, but also to the birds that woman strived to save.
October 8, 2022
Prestini writes wonderfully for the chorus, whether it be Christmas carols in a Victorian style for a small ensemble or wordless choruses in two scenes in Act I. There is so much genuine wit in Campbell’s text—his sixth libretto for Minnesota—and there is such variety in Prestini’s expressive score—that we hop onboard the ride and develop an affection for Edward...
June 24, 2012
“Paola Prestini, and her creative team have high ambitions…[and] common sense about what works onstage: characters you can connect to, music that engages.” ... “The layering of ideas and music knitted together to present something that moves forward with the vitality of the original folk material.”
June 12, 2021
"Paola Prestini’s neoromantically-tinged triptych Ondine: Variations on a Spell begins with the broodingly impressionistic low-midrange Water Sprite, followed by the Bell Tolls, with a long upward drive from nebulosity to an anthemic, glistening payoff. The finale, Golden Bees follows a series of anthemic, flickering cascades."
May 23, 2016
“But the music…! The Colorado’s soundtrack positively radiates optimism.”
March 26, 2017
“Prestini’s graceful, lovely composition “The Hotel That Time Forgot”, was an exploration of invented memory”
May 7, 2023
Prestini’s 'Voices' was a joyful and playful sound world that reflected on unification through the human voice. This higher level of awareness that [Prestini] understands wholeheartedly ... empowers others, especially young voices, to share with the world.
November 25, 2020
"New York composer Paola Prestini and Mexico-based singer-songwriter Magos Herrera (plus a crew of musicians) used the lockdown to collaborate at a distance, and the result is a melancholy but uplifting quasi-cantata full of bird calls, phone calls, and calls across frozen borders."

Press Quotes

November 22, 2020
"The piece [G-Force], composed as a tribute to the close friend named in the title, is a real mood-spinner and makes full use of each instrument’s voice."
April 4, 2010
"Radiant … [and] amorously evocative.”
January 29, 2025
A deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous.
August 21, 2023
Paola Prestini’s Code is spectral and crystalline...
August 8, 2016
“Hubble Cantata saw audience members explore the Orion Nebula while a new piece of music played – the latest in a series of experiments between VR technology and classical music”
November 10, 2014
Next is Listen, Quiet by Paola Prestini, an unexpectedly catchy track featuring Jason Treuting of So Percussion. It’s not so much music for solo cello as it is a fantastically quirky percussion piece with a cello narrator. An expert welder of elements, Prestini cuts in recordings of women’s voices in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of The Books’ Lemon of Pink album.
August 8, 2016
The Hubble Cantata, composer Paola Prestini’s brilliant collaboration with librettist Royce Vavreck and the Hubble Space Telescope’s lead astrophysicist, Dr. Mario Livio. But in all other arenas, Hubble pushes its classical cosmic themes ever more upward than any orchestral work these ears have ear in a long time, upward and toward the stars. the success of this multi-disciplinary performance lies in its ability to exist as both high art and popular entertainment. And so The Hubble Cantata is a work that knows no parallel, pushing boundaries of technology and presentation that push our city’s relationship with multi-disciplinary performance further into uncharted territory.
June 22, 2012
“Ms. Prestini – an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished”
April 9, 2023
I don't think that the audience present could have been more receptive to the performance… To say it was "genre-defying" would be an understatement …thrilling, entertaining and moving all at once … [Con Alma] uses music in creating a shared experience--showing that even when we are physically alone, we can have a common experience with others.
August 18, 2021
"[G-Force] opens with long, elegiac string notes, but despite being described as a lamentation of sorts, it quickly becomes frenzied, frenetic and even fun...Prestini shrewdly uses the bounce of [the vibraphone]’s sound to play off the traditional string quartet’s textures."
January 25, 2021
"As a musical documentary of emotion, Herrera and Prestini gathered more than 30 musicians from three continents for their cross-border album of original works, representing a feat that in itself defines the indefatigable spirit of women today."
March 27, 2023
Paola Prestini’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is an opera of layers. Voices evolve into otherworldly soundscapes as cello and percussion deliver a call-and-response that tugs on our ears like receding waves underfoot. Characters meld into one another as their roles collide and coalesce. Themes cascade together even as they bridge disparate musical motifs ... layers flowed into a swirling gyre of fate, dreams and emotion worthy of the dark blue depths they plumb.
August 13, 2016
“Crescendos, beauty, drama…It astounded me, this feeling of floating above Earth, and tears began to emerge from my cardboard goggles.”
December 21, 2021
The music was excellent... something of an all-star line-up, and all 11 composers on both nights were women. The singers, all recent graduates of the Juilliard School, were equally excellent.
November 29, 2013
“The music was ace.”
May 11, 2015
Rhapsodic
October 1, 2024
A richly ambiguous, provocative, and heady experience.
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."
August 8, 2023
Prestini is a deft composer and surefooted dramatically... Touching, elegant music.
December 19, 2021
... National Sawdust reopens to a realm of the senses... an indulgent salon of new songs of nostalgia and reckoning... Paola Prestini's evocative 'Distance to the Market', abetted by Adam Richardson's fine, warm baritone, opened the concert... the evening succeeded on all counts."
December 2, 2020
"an unstoppable force"
November 6, 2015
“magnificent drumming…a successful experiment…pitched towards the ecstatic sense of wonder in the natural world…a showcase for lovely and refined music making by composers and performers alike.”
September 12, 2016
“An enchanted exploration of the eternal mysteries….[Prestini’s] atmospheric but tuneful music for “Gilgamesh” inhabited an indie-opera rainforest of its own…”
May 23, 2016
“A soundtrack at its most pure, this live score imparted a more resonant sensation than just film or concert alone; the whole evening brought together both sight and sound at the height of their powers.”
May 13, 2022
“Prestini’s eclectic score, expertly realized by Eckert, the chorus and the Attacca Quartet, ranged from chant-influenced passages to thorny patches of dissonance, moving from background to foreground and back again. At times you forgot there was a score; at other times, like that accordion melody, it was unforgettable... The whole presentation was so innocent, so imaginative, so nurturing, so charming, so beautiful, that my cynical, post-Covid sensibility tried to resist. But we all have our place in the universe, in the present moment, and perhaps beyond. As the Magician discovered, and we along with him, resistance is futile.”
May 19, 2022
"The one hour and 20-minute opera-theater ended to dead silence from a stunned, enraptured audience. Then the applause started, audience members stood up, and the cheering lasted a full four minutes."
October 8, 2022
Prestini writes wonderfully for the chorus, whether it be Christmas carols in a Victorian style for a small ensemble or wordless choruses in two scenes in Act I. There is so much genuine wit in Campbell’s text—his sixth libretto for Minnesota—and there is such variety in Prestini’s expressive score—that we hop onboard the ride and develop an affection for Edward...
February 7, 2016
“Paola Prestini invited listeners into her sensually saturated dreams…soloists Tim Fain, violin, and Maya Beiser, cello, performed the two captivating concertos of Prestini’s ‘Labyrinth,’ surrounded by a phantasmagoria of visual projections.”
February 5, 2025
This work is everything dreamed and imagined, produced and performed with utmost care, consciousness and soul. “Primero Sueño” lights the way forward for all.
January 16, 2016
“exuberant…an extreme expression of female agency.”
August 31, 2023
"An album designed to be relistened to with Talmudic fervor. Prestini delves into the still point of Eliot and Hale's turning world, one that was- as more than a thousand letters would suggest- full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless."
January 13, 2013
“Spellbinding music…”
December 14, 2023
Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines.
December 7, 2020
Join dozens of musicians from around the world for “Con Alma,” a live performance adapted from the recent album of the same title created by the composers Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera.
October 1, 2024
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.
September 18, 2019
“Entitled ‘Holes in the Sky’ after a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe, the concert included music by Clara Schumann, Florence Price, Meredith Monk, Nina Simone, Paola Prestini, Joni Mitchell, and others. It proved a fitting celebration of the work – it’s now safe to say the tradition – of women composers.”
May 19, 2016
“the music — commissioned from five composers and performed by some of the most innovative soundsmiths around — is specifically tailored to the film’s passionate environmental advocacy and carries equal weight with the visual.”
October 1, 2024
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.
April 1, 2025
A beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music, combined with improvisatory passages, drones, jazz harmonic structures and live electronics.
May 4, 2025
...exceptionally well written...Prestini is unafraid to take risks concerning the magnitude or moving parts of a production, and those risks certainly paid off for an inspiring performance of 'Port(al)'
December 14, 2023
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.
May 13, 2025
The musical composition 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!
August 8, 2016
“A brilliant collaboration. Prestini’s time spent perfecting 30-plus commissioned multidisciplinary works and serving as creative and executive director of Williamsburg’s National Sawdust have only further fortified her with the tact to balance all the voices, mixed media and technology that combine to make The Hubble Cantata such a spectacle…”
May 4, 2023
[Prestini’s] setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and beautiful counterpoint.
March 21, 2023
This evening was just the healing many of us are seeking —the healing power of soulful art and engaging creative activism.
May 5, 2023
... the most satisfying work was Paola Prestini’s ‘Voices’. In her beautifully crafted piece, Prestini captured the poignant recollections of beloved voices from childhood that were the first poetry of one’s life. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, without accompaniment or amplification to cloud their sound, expressed those sentiments beautifully.
June 10, 2022
[A] groundbreaking, experimental production... a fantastical, complex, dream-like work... 'Houses of Zodiac' left me feeling moved in a new and profound way.
May 23, 2016
“But the music…! The Colorado’s soundtrack positively radiates optimism.”
June 20, 2012
“An inquisitively progressive piece.” ... “[baritone Chris Burchett’s] depth and focus is quite beautiful.” ... “This is, I think, what will make us want to see this again and again- we’ll take something completely new from it each time we see it.” ... “Overall, I must and I will see this project in its entirety… it’s a gem.”
November 1, 2013
“Hubble Cantata … a work of extraordinary beauty.”
August 8, 2016
“The performance itself was full of magic and wonder. Space, of course, is silent: there is no audible music of the spheres. But, Prestini has written some astonishing musical passages that capture a sense of what it might be like to be set adrift in a universe without the limitations of space or time.”
December 11, 2020
"The Mexican singer Magos Herrera and the New York-based composer Paola Prestini have collaborated on a lovely new album called Con Alma – “With Soul.” The music draws on jazz, chamber music, and Latin song, without ever settling on any one of those things. After all, Herrera is a jazz singer who’s done a whole album with a string quartet, and Prestini is Artistic Director at National Sawdust, a venue that refuses to abide by stylistic boundaries."
November 8, 2017
“From Paola Prestini we heard a prelude and aria from her opera Gilgamesh. A daring opening, with hard strings biting on a semitone, builds into climbing waves of strings, creating drama and establishing a musical language to use throughout the piece. The vocal part was sung by Jakub Józef Orliński, a promising countertenor with a powerful, direct instrument that can shift between mixed voice and full falsetto without revealing a seam. In this as in all of her work, Prestini shows a strong compositional voice and an arresting focus in her writing: vigorous melodic lines grab the listener, supported by tart harmonies. At this point, she has to be considered a major talent.”
December 16, 2021
An evening of evocative music inspired imaginative storytelling at 21c Liederabend Op. Senses at National Sawdust, co-produced and directed by Beth Morrison Projects and Paola Prestini, acclaimed for their work pushing the boundaries of classical performance... Tenor Alex McKissick’s soaring voice brought the evening to a sweeping conclusion in the program’s last two pieces, selections from Prestini’s opera Edward Tulane... it was as if we were being asked to open our hearts to the evening’s experience. With the impressive talent that filled the stage, it would have been impossible not to.
November 18, 2022
Prestini examined further how we, as a world, must do better by seeing the truth that is our current reality. A crisis. She brought front and center the fragility of life and the impermanence of all existence.
September 30, 2024
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...
September 12, 2016
“It sparkles, both literally and figuratively…Her melodies entice and speak of a modern, yet accessible flare…it holds its intensity with valor through its end.”
July 1, 2021
"In [Jarful of Bees] mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti brings rich sound to the rangy, soaring vocal lines and to Royce Vavrek’s compact text."
March 7, 2017
“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”
Paola is an artistic visionary... there is a kind of energy system that follows her and her work everywhere she goes."
June 26, 2013
“Mr. Lubovitch’s new 'As Sleep Befell' made for a better match with Ms. Prestini’s music. At the center of a semicircle of string, wind and percussion players stood the vocalist Helga Davis, a kind of murmuring angel. Six shirtless male dancers were arrayed out in front of her on the ground, tossing and turning handsomely to Ms. Prestini’s atmospherics, as if in a shared dream … [it was] visually arresting.”
June 28, 2021
"a grand peroration of bell-tolling chords and octaves"
August 31, 2017
"[The Phoenix} left one wishing for more...it had a distinct brand of robust lyricism seasoned with witty asides. Violinist Jennifer Choi didn’t spare the Romantic sonorities as she spooled out the piece’s long melodic lines and kissed off the Kreislerian staccato and pizzicato passages."
May 7, 2025
Though 'Port(al)' was written for young singers, there was nothing toned-down or unsophisticated about it...'Port(al)' is an anti-war requiem
October 12, 2017
‘…the works ability to evoke sheer vastness of what lies beyond our experience.”
November 1, 2021
"One of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time...On the album, Prestini’s gorgeous and mysterious, hypnotically complex compositions, performed by Zeigler with daredevil intensity and a kind of surgical 'mad doctor' precision.""
September 28, 2023
"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."
May 16, 2022
Prestini’s music is haunting, playful, strange and joyful, and it was beautifully rendered by the affable and funny Eckert, the Attacca Quartet and the 29-member all-girls choir. Visually and aurally stunning...
November 8, 2017
“From her opera “Gilgamesh,” Ms. Prestini drew “Prelude and Aria,” which begins with heaving and ominous intensity and evolves into a plaintive vocal monologue, sung meltingly by the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski.”
September 28, 2024
Prestini has a thrilling knack for the aleatoric, and her vocal writing gives the singers a wide range of expression.
March 26, 2017
“Prestini’s graceful, lovely composition “The Hotel That Time Forgot”, was an exploration of invented memory”
June 27, 2022
Paola Prestini, is a composer who expresses a certain part of the contemporary American scene, the one that is…post everything. Very elegant writing [that] pays homage to the American biologist Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the US environmental movement.
February 13, 2020
Prestini’s Thrush Song incorporated the words of author and environmentalist Rachel Carson delivered both by Carson on tape and soprano Lucy Dhegrae, who proved a strong dramatic interpreter on top of her talents as a singer. Prestini played voice against strings, with percussion, to craft an exceptionally literate work. Thematic lines built in a coherent progression, phrases making paragraphs, resounding in a remarkable disruption. Prestini didn’t just give voice to another American heroine, but also to the birds that woman strived to save.
May 7, 2023
Prestini’s 'Voices' was a joyful and playful sound world that reflected on unification through the human voice. This higher level of awareness that [Prestini] understands wholeheartedly ... empowers others, especially young voices, to share with the world.
June 12, 2021
"Paola Prestini’s neoromantically-tinged triptych Ondine: Variations on a Spell begins with the broodingly impressionistic low-midrange Water Sprite, followed by the Bell Tolls, with a long upward drive from nebulosity to an anthemic, glistening payoff. The finale, Golden Bees follows a series of anthemic, flickering cascades."
October 1, 2017
"The final section features Prestini at her best, as she conjures a frightening Matrix dystopia in which the human mind is converted into artificial intelligence. A mesmerizing haze of sound builds up, layering humming choir, whistling electronics and a rumbling, Ligeti-like cluster chord in the instrumental ensemble that slowly shifts and intensifies, punctuated by radio interceptions of static and a woman’s voice”
August 2, 2022
As the composer explained before the live premiere, her aim was to embody both conflict and accord in the dialogue between piano and orchestra, while ultimately opting for optimism by embracing an innate “us” in the act of collaboration. That dramatic shift was evident in her musical design, which oscillates between simmering tensions, muscular bursts, and peaceable resolutions.
April 21, 2016
“Luminously involving music”
August 28, 2016
“Expansive-beyond-imagination images from the Hubble Space Telescope arrived in 360-degree virtual reality amid a new piece by Paola Prestini titled Hubble Cantata this month at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park… the resulting vistas proved the sky was anything but the limit.”
February 15, 2024
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.
May 15, 2017
“The Hubble Cantata, is a more than a piece of music. It is a new kind of collaboration: a nexus of art and science.”
October 6, 2024
[Paola's] use of the human voice as an interpreter of the ethereal is perfectly showcased in “Silent Light”.
September 14, 2023
"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."
November 25, 2013
“Well wrought … upbeat and enthralling.”
December 13, 2023
"One of the year's most satisfying releases"
October 7, 2024
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
October 8, 2022
Edward Tulane was a strong season-opener for this company, marking its forty-ninth premiere. Whether this is an opera primarily for children or for adults can be—and probably will be—debated. It can, of course, be both.
October 10, 2017
“The kind of experimentation Prestini has lent to her work will help shape what masterpieces come out of the next 50 years”
November 25, 2020
"New York composer Paola Prestini and Mexico-based singer-songwriter Magos Herrera (plus a crew of musicians) used the lockdown to collaborate at a distance, and the result is a melancholy but uplifting quasi-cantata full of bird calls, phone calls, and calls across frozen borders."
December 15, 2014
Prestini’s style weaves folk melodies and field samples with massive choral sections reminiscent of some forgotten Renaissance Mass, all filtered through her own distinctive musical language… the overall effect is engaging and quite moving. The major themes of transformation, immigration and culturally complex, layered ethnicity seem to resonate both on a macro level in the age of globalization, as well as on a micro level in what Prestini calls the search for 'internal geography.'
January 9, 2013
“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”
July 1, 2021
"This edition of 21c Liederabend bodes incredibly well for the future of art song. All the featured artists are people to look out for. Additionally, since this program is available online, anyone with an internet connection can view it. In that regard, it is truly the ultimate Schubertiades."
July 6, 2019
“How does one direct so that the opera breathes with its own artistic life and not the life of a movie put onto stage? …The answers came from an at-once pellucid and oftentimes deeply emotional score by Paola Prestini, set to Vavrek’s bang-on minimalist libretto…”
June 23, 2021
"All the homages extend the legacy, bring it into a piano-centered present day and thereby give pianist Faliks a lengthy set of tone poems and active excitement that shows off her beautiful interpretive skills and brings us to the edge of our seats--or perhaps rather our piano benches!"
June 27, 2012
“A sweeping social portrait of southern Italy.” … ”the songs and choral settings are painted in the bright hues and varied rhythms of folk exotica." ... “Their video counterparts in an artful film.”
November 20, 2023
"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."
August 10, 2016
"It was a thundering opus”
March 26, 2017
“The Hotel That Time Forgot”… Prestini’s music conveys the surreal visuals through gently repetitive figures, disparately overlapping lines and swooshing, sliding harmonies.”
August 11, 2016
“Prestini’s music…vividly shimmering and raging with the emotional temperatures of characters as suggested in Vavrek’s libretto, and generally conjuring up an authentically cosmic atmosphere with its trembling strings, ethereal wind lines, and luminous glockenspiel.”
December 5, 2023
"In Code, [Prestini] writes uncanny birdcalls for Roomful of Teeth and rippling passages for Pratt"

Press Quotes

February 15, 2024
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.
October 2, 2024
A mourning hymn “There’s a city of light ’mid the stars,” set with jarringly dissonant intervals, was followed by a hypnotic choral echo of “White linens,” an aria sung by Esther’s mother, as the women washed and laid out the body. The resolution of the story seemed almost beside the point, and the clock—which Johan stopped when he first left the house after breakfast—was started again, implying that life goes on.
December 7, 2020
Join dozens of musicians from around the world for “Con Alma,” a live performance adapted from the recent album of the same title created by the composers Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera.
December 14, 2023
Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines.
August 13, 2016
“Crescendos, beauty, drama…It astounded me, this feeling of floating above Earth, and tears began to emerge from my cardboard goggles.”
December 16, 2021
An evening of evocative music inspired imaginative storytelling at 21c Liederabend Op. Senses at National Sawdust, co-produced and directed by Beth Morrison Projects and Paola Prestini, acclaimed for their work pushing the boundaries of classical performance... Tenor Alex McKissick’s soaring voice brought the evening to a sweeping conclusion in the program’s last two pieces, selections from Prestini’s opera Edward Tulane... it was as if we were being asked to open our hearts to the evening’s experience. With the impressive talent that filled the stage, it would have been impossible not to.
October 8, 2022
Prestini writes wonderfully for the chorus, whether it be Christmas carols in a Victorian style for a small ensemble or wordless choruses in two scenes in Act I. There is so much genuine wit in Campbell’s text—his sixth libretto for Minnesota—and there is such variety in Prestini’s expressive score—that we hop onboard the ride and develop an affection for Edward...
June 12, 2021
"Paola Prestini’s neoromantically-tinged triptych Ondine: Variations on a Spell begins with the broodingly impressionistic low-midrange Water Sprite, followed by the Bell Tolls, with a long upward drive from nebulosity to an anthemic, glistening payoff. The finale, Golden Bees follows a series of anthemic, flickering cascades."
September 28, 2024
Prestini has a thrilling knack for the aleatoric, and her vocal writing gives the singers a wide range of expression.
May 16, 2022
Prestini’s music is haunting, playful, strange and joyful, and it was beautifully rendered by the affable and funny Eckert, the Attacca Quartet and the 29-member all-girls choir. Visually and aurally stunning...
November 29, 2013
“The music was ace.”
December 15, 2014
Prestini’s style weaves folk melodies and field samples with massive choral sections reminiscent of some forgotten Renaissance Mass, all filtered through her own distinctive musical language… the overall effect is engaging and quite moving. The major themes of transformation, immigration and culturally complex, layered ethnicity seem to resonate both on a macro level in the age of globalization, as well as on a micro level in what Prestini calls the search for 'internal geography.'
August 8, 2023
Prestini is a deft composer and surefooted dramatically... Touching, elegant music.
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."
May 23, 2016
“A soundtrack at its most pure, this live score imparted a more resonant sensation than just film or concert alone; the whole evening brought together both sight and sound at the height of their powers.”
November 25, 2013
“Well wrought … upbeat and enthralling.”
September 12, 2016
“It sparkles, both literally and figuratively…Her melodies entice and speak of a modern, yet accessible flare…it holds its intensity with valor through its end.”
May 13, 2025
The musical composition 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!
June 28, 2021
"a grand peroration of bell-tolling chords and octaves"
May 5, 2023
... the most satisfying work was Paola Prestini’s ‘Voices’. In her beautifully crafted piece, Prestini captured the poignant recollections of beloved voices from childhood that were the first poetry of one’s life. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, without accompaniment or amplification to cloud their sound, expressed those sentiments beautifully.
December 11, 2020
"The Mexican singer Magos Herrera and the New York-based composer Paola Prestini have collaborated on a lovely new album called Con Alma – “With Soul.” The music draws on jazz, chamber music, and Latin song, without ever settling on any one of those things. After all, Herrera is a jazz singer who’s done a whole album with a string quartet, and Prestini is Artistic Director at National Sawdust, a venue that refuses to abide by stylistic boundaries."
December 2, 2020
"an unstoppable force"
November 25, 2020
"New York composer Paola Prestini and Mexico-based singer-songwriter Magos Herrera (plus a crew of musicians) used the lockdown to collaborate at a distance, and the result is a melancholy but uplifting quasi-cantata full of bird calls, phone calls, and calls across frozen borders."
May 4, 2023
[Prestini’s] setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and beautiful counterpoint.
June 23, 2021
"All the homages extend the legacy, bring it into a piano-centered present day and thereby give pianist Faliks a lengthy set of tone poems and active excitement that shows off her beautiful interpretive skills and brings us to the edge of our seats--or perhaps rather our piano benches!"
October 12, 2017
‘…the works ability to evoke sheer vastness of what lies beyond our experience.”
June 29, 2023
Prestini surfaces those messy emotions in music of candid vulnerability
May 11, 2015
Rhapsodic
January 16, 2016
“exuberant…an extreme expression of female agency.”
August 21, 2023
Paola Prestini’s Code is spectral and crystalline...
December 5, 2023
"In Code, [Prestini] writes uncanny birdcalls for Roomful of Teeth and rippling passages for Pratt"
August 8, 2016
The Hubble Cantata, composer Paola Prestini’s brilliant collaboration with librettist Royce Vavreck and the Hubble Space Telescope’s lead astrophysicist, Dr. Mario Livio. But in all other arenas, Hubble pushes its classical cosmic themes ever more upward than any orchestral work these ears have ear in a long time, upward and toward the stars. the success of this multi-disciplinary performance lies in its ability to exist as both high art and popular entertainment. And so The Hubble Cantata is a work that knows no parallel, pushing boundaries of technology and presentation that push our city’s relationship with multi-disciplinary performance further into uncharted territory.
January 13, 2013
“Spellbinding music…”
May 7, 2023
Prestini’s 'Voices' was a joyful and playful sound world that reflected on unification through the human voice. This higher level of awareness that [Prestini] understands wholeheartedly ... empowers others, especially young voices, to share with the world.
August 28, 2016
“Expansive-beyond-imagination images from the Hubble Space Telescope arrived in 360-degree virtual reality amid a new piece by Paola Prestini titled Hubble Cantata this month at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park… the resulting vistas proved the sky was anything but the limit.”
July 1, 2021
"This edition of 21c Liederabend bodes incredibly well for the future of art song. All the featured artists are people to look out for. Additionally, since this program is available online, anyone with an internet connection can view it. In that regard, it is truly the ultimate Schubertiades."
Paola is an artistic visionary... there is a kind of energy system that follows her and her work everywhere she goes."
November 20, 2023
"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."
March 7, 2017
“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”
March 27, 2023
Paola Prestini’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is an opera of layers. Voices evolve into otherworldly soundscapes as cello and percussion deliver a call-and-response that tugs on our ears like receding waves underfoot. Characters meld into one another as their roles collide and coalesce. Themes cascade together even as they bridge disparate musical motifs ... layers flowed into a swirling gyre of fate, dreams and emotion worthy of the dark blue depths they plumb.
November 6, 2015
“magnificent drumming…a successful experiment…pitched towards the ecstatic sense of wonder in the natural world…a showcase for lovely and refined music making by composers and performers alike.”
August 18, 2021
"[G-Force] opens with long, elegiac string notes, but despite being described as a lamentation of sorts, it quickly becomes frenzied, frenetic and even fun...Prestini shrewdly uses the bounce of [the vibraphone]’s sound to play off the traditional string quartet’s textures."
May 19, 2016
“the music — commissioned from five composers and performed by some of the most innovative soundsmiths around — is specifically tailored to the film’s passionate environmental advocacy and carries equal weight with the visual.”
October 10, 2022
Minnesota Opera's 'Edward Tulane' delights with evocative music, dazzling visuals and heart... Prestini's arias and orchestrations are a paradoxical combination of simplicity and complexity. Vocal lines move in unpredictable directions — sometimes barely moving at all— and the composer eschews comforting resolutions in favor of chords that keep you hanging.
August 31, 2023
"An album designed to be relistened to with Talmudic fervor. Prestini delves into the still point of Eliot and Hale's turning world, one that was- as more than a thousand letters would suggest- full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless."
December 13, 2023
"One of the year's most satisfying releases"
November 8, 2017
“From Paola Prestini we heard a prelude and aria from her opera Gilgamesh. A daring opening, with hard strings biting on a semitone, builds into climbing waves of strings, creating drama and establishing a musical language to use throughout the piece. The vocal part was sung by Jakub Józef Orliński, a promising countertenor with a powerful, direct instrument that can shift between mixed voice and full falsetto without revealing a seam. In this as in all of her work, Prestini shows a strong compositional voice and an arresting focus in her writing: vigorous melodic lines grab the listener, supported by tart harmonies. At this point, she has to be considered a major talent.”
November 18, 2022
Prestini examined further how we, as a world, must do better by seeing the truth that is our current reality. A crisis. She brought front and center the fragility of life and the impermanence of all existence.
August 8, 2016
“Hubble Cantata saw audience members explore the Orion Nebula while a new piece of music played – the latest in a series of experiments between VR technology and classical music”
June 4, 2014
The evening was kicked off by composer, mover and shaker Paola Prestini, a curator of the annual River to River festival and creative director of the Brooklyn-based Original Music Workshop.
July 6, 2019
“How does one direct so that the opera breathes with its own artistic life and not the life of a movie put onto stage? …The answers came from an at-once pellucid and oftentimes deeply emotional score by Paola Prestini, set to Vavrek’s bang-on minimalist libretto…”
February 13, 2020
Prestini’s Thrush Song incorporated the words of author and environmentalist Rachel Carson delivered both by Carson on tape and soprano Lucy Dhegrae, who proved a strong dramatic interpreter on top of her talents as a singer. Prestini played voice against strings, with percussion, to craft an exceptionally literate work. Thematic lines built in a coherent progression, phrases making paragraphs, resounding in a remarkable disruption. Prestini didn’t just give voice to another American heroine, but also to the birds that woman strived to save.
April 1, 2025
A beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music, combined with improvisatory passages, drones, jazz harmonic structures and live electronics.
February 5, 2025
This work is everything dreamed and imagined, produced and performed with utmost care, consciousness and soul. “Primero Sueño” lights the way forward for all.
June 24, 2012
“Paola Prestini, and her creative team have high ambitions…[and] common sense about what works onstage: characters you can connect to, music that engages.” ... “The layering of ideas and music knitted together to present something that moves forward with the vitality of the original folk material.”
April 21, 2016
“Luminously involving music”
June 27, 2012
“A sweeping social portrait of southern Italy.” … ”the songs and choral settings are painted in the bright hues and varied rhythms of folk exotica." ... “Their video counterparts in an artful film.”
June 22, 2018
“The Glass Box” “Prestini’s effects include humming and whistling, with luminous chords underpinning gentle cascades of recitative. As a mother and daughter are reunited at the end, a repeated, unresolved chord adds a note of unease.”
December 21, 2021
The music was excellent... something of an all-star line-up, and all 11 composers on both nights were women. The singers, all recent graduates of the Juilliard School, were equally excellent.
May 7, 2025
Though 'Port(al)' was written for young singers, there was nothing toned-down or unsophisticated about it...'Port(al)' is an anti-war requiem
January 9, 2013
“The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic…[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses.”
April 9, 2023
I don't think that the audience present could have been more receptive to the performance… To say it was "genre-defying" would be an understatement …thrilling, entertaining and moving all at once … [Con Alma] uses music in creating a shared experience--showing that even when we are physically alone, we can have a common experience with others.
September 12, 2016
“An enchanted exploration of the eternal mysteries….[Prestini’s] atmospheric but tuneful music for “Gilgamesh” inhabited an indie-opera rainforest of its own…”
January 26, 2025
Timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City.
January 29, 2025
A deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous.
June 22, 2012
“Ms. Prestini – an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished”
June 10, 2022
[A] groundbreaking, experimental production... a fantastical, complex, dream-like work... 'Houses of Zodiac' left me feeling moved in a new and profound way.
August 8, 2016
“A brilliant collaboration. Prestini’s time spent perfecting 30-plus commissioned multidisciplinary works and serving as creative and executive director of Williamsburg’s National Sawdust have only further fortified her with the tact to balance all the voices, mixed media and technology that combine to make The Hubble Cantata such a spectacle…”
May 19, 2022
"The one hour and 20-minute opera-theater ended to dead silence from a stunned, enraptured audience. Then the applause started, audience members stood up, and the cheering lasted a full four minutes."
May 4, 2025
...exceptionally well written...Prestini is unafraid to take risks concerning the magnitude or moving parts of a production, and those risks certainly paid off for an inspiring performance of 'Port(al)'
August 11, 2016
“Prestini’s music…vividly shimmering and raging with the emotional temperatures of characters as suggested in Vavrek’s libretto, and generally conjuring up an authentically cosmic atmosphere with its trembling strings, ethereal wind lines, and luminous glockenspiel.”
November 8, 2017
“From her opera “Gilgamesh,” Ms. Prestini drew “Prelude and Aria,” which begins with heaving and ominous intensity and evolves into a plaintive vocal monologue, sung meltingly by the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski.”
October 8, 2022
Edward Tulane was a strong season-opener for this company, marking its forty-ninth premiere. Whether this is an opera primarily for children or for adults can be—and probably will be—debated. It can, of course, be both.
October 1, 2024
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.
November 1, 2013
“Hubble Cantata … a work of extraordinary beauty.”
August 8, 2016
“The performance itself was full of magic and wonder. Space, of course, is silent: there is no audible music of the spheres. But, Prestini has written some astonishing musical passages that capture a sense of what it might be like to be set adrift in a universe without the limitations of space or time.”
December 19, 2021
... National Sawdust reopens to a realm of the senses... an indulgent salon of new songs of nostalgia and reckoning... Paola Prestini's evocative 'Distance to the Market', abetted by Adam Richardson's fine, warm baritone, opened the concert... the evening succeeded on all counts."
October 10, 2017
“The kind of experimentation Prestini has lent to her work will help shape what masterpieces come out of the next 50 years”
June 20, 2012
“An inquisitively progressive piece.” ... “[baritone Chris Burchett’s] depth and focus is quite beautiful.” ... “This is, I think, what will make us want to see this again and again- we’ll take something completely new from it each time we see it.” ... “Overall, I must and I will see this project in its entirety… it’s a gem.”
September 30, 2024
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...
September 12, 2023
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.
August 31, 2017
"[The Phoenix} left one wishing for more...it had a distinct brand of robust lyricism seasoned with witty asides. Violinist Jennifer Choi didn’t spare the Romantic sonorities as she spooled out the piece’s long melodic lines and kissed off the Kreislerian staccato and pizzicato passages."
May 15, 2017
“The Hubble Cantata, is a more than a piece of music. It is a new kind of collaboration: a nexus of art and science.”
October 6, 2024
[Paola's] use of the human voice as an interpreter of the ethereal is perfectly showcased in “Silent Light”.
July 1, 2021
"In [Jarful of Bees] mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti brings rich sound to the rangy, soaring vocal lines and to Royce Vavrek’s compact text."
October 1, 2024
A richly ambiguous, provocative, and heady experience.
October 1, 2024
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.
September 14, 2023
"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."
October 7, 2024
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
December 14, 2023
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.
September 18, 2019
“Entitled ‘Holes in the Sky’ after a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe, the concert included music by Clara Schumann, Florence Price, Meredith Monk, Nina Simone, Paola Prestini, Joni Mitchell, and others. It proved a fitting celebration of the work – it’s now safe to say the tradition – of women composers.”
May 19, 2016
“Some is outright gorgeous. Ms. Prestini’s choral piece for the section “A Padre, a Horse, a Telescope” sets Jesuit sources — including a Hail Mary in Cochimi, an extinct Native American language — to an ethereal blend of Mexican Baroque music and otherworldly ululations.”
March 21, 2023
This evening was just the healing many of us are seeking —the healing power of soulful art and engaging creative activism.
April 4, 2010
"Radiant … [and] amorously evocative.”
January 25, 2021
"As a musical documentary of emotion, Herrera and Prestini gathered more than 30 musicians from three continents for their cross-border album of original works, representing a feat that in itself defines the indefatigable spirit of women today."
November 1, 2021
"One of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time...On the album, Prestini’s gorgeous and mysterious, hypnotically complex compositions, performed by Zeigler with daredevil intensity and a kind of surgical 'mad doctor' precision.""
October 8, 2024
Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting.
November 22, 2020
"The piece [G-Force], composed as a tribute to the close friend named in the title, is a real mood-spinner and makes full use of each instrument’s voice."
May 23, 2016
“But the music…! The Colorado’s soundtrack positively radiates optimism.”
March 26, 2017
“The Hotel That Time Forgot”… Prestini’s music conveys the surreal visuals through gently repetitive figures, disparately overlapping lines and swooshing, sliding harmonies.”
May 13, 2025
Critical Acclaim

Opera Wire

The musical composition 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!

Jennifer Pyron
May 4, 2025
Critical Acclaim

Oberon's Grove

...exceptionally well written...Prestini is unafraid to take risks concerning the magnitude or moving parts of a production, and those risks certainly paid off for an inspiring performance of 'Port(al)'

Lili Tobias
May 7, 2025
Critical Acclaim

Poison Put to Sound

Though 'Port(al)' was written for young singers, there was nothing toned-down or unsophisticated about it...'Port(al)' is an anti-war requiem

Max Keller
April 1, 2025
Critical Acclaim

Opera Magazine

A beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music, combined with improvisatory passages, drones, jazz harmonic structures and live electronics.

Arlo McKinnon
February 5, 2025
Critical Acclaim

Opera Wire

This work is everything dreamed and imagined, produced and performed with utmost care, consciousness and soul. “Primero Sueño” lights the way forward for all.

Jennifer Pyron
January 29, 2025
Critical Acclaim

Observer

A deeply satisfying blend of musical styles that are alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous.

Gabrielle Ferrari
January 26, 2025
Critical Acclaim

Bachtrack

Timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City.

Kurt Gottschalk
October 1, 2024
Critical Acclaim

Night After Night

A richly ambiguous, provocative, and heady experience.

Steve Smith
October 7, 2024
Critical Acclaim

Parterre Box

The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.

Dan Johnson
October 8, 2024
Critical Acclaim

Opera Canada

Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting.

Nolan Kehler
October 6, 2024
Critical Acclaim

OperaWire

[Paola's] use of the human voice as an interpreter of the ethereal is perfectly showcased in “Silent Light”.

Jennifer Pyron
October 1, 2024
Critical Acclaim

Musical America

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.

Fred Cohn
September 30, 2024
Critical Acclaim

Classical Voice North America

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...

Anne E. Johnson
October 1, 2024
Critical Acclaim

The Observer

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.

Gabrielle Ferrari
September 28, 2024
Critical Acclaim

Cadenza NYC

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

Bryan Taylor
October 2, 2024
Critical Acclaim

The Wall Street Journal

A mourning hymn “There’s a city of light ’mid the stars,” set with jarringly dissonant intervals, was followed by a hypnotic choral echo of “White linens,” an aria sung by Esther’s mother, as the women washed and laid out the body. The resolution of the story seemed almost beside the point, and the clock—which Johan stopped when he first left the house after breakfast—was started again, implying that life goes on.

Heidi Waleson
February 15, 2024
Critical Acclaim

The Triangle Review

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.

Pamela Vesper
December 14, 2023
Critical Acclaim

VAN Magazine

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.

December 14, 2023
Critical Acclaim

VAN Magazine

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

Julia Conrad
September 14, 2023
Critical Acclaim

Bandcamp

"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."

Peter Margasak
August 31, 2023
Critical Acclaim

VAN Magazine

"An album designed to be relistened to with Talmudic fervor. Prestini delves into the still point of Eliot and Hale's turning world, one that was- as more than a thousand letters would suggest- full of complexities and contradictory chasms, a love rendered in words representing both the flesh and the fleshless."

Olivia Giovetti
August 25, 2023
Critical Acclaim

All Things Considered, NPR

"Uncanny ... a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano ... Pratt has rediscovered the sweet spot he once enjoyed in the recording studio. [STILLPOINT] makes for one endlessly engaging recording. Let's hope we don't have to wait 12 years for the next one."

Tom Huizenga
November 20, 2023
Critical Acclaim

Boston Musical Intelligencer

"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."

Lee Eiseman
December 5, 2023
Critical Acclaim

National Public Radio

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

Tom Huizenga
December 13, 2023
Critical Acclaim

National Public Radio

"One of the year's most satisfying releases"

Tom Huizenga
September 28, 2023
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

"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."

Seth Colter Walls
August 21, 2023
Critical Acclaim

I Care If You Listen

Paola Prestini’s Code is spectral and crystalline...

A. Kori Hill
August 8, 2023
Critical Acclaim

BBC Music Magazine

Prestini is a deft composer and surefooted dramatically... Touching, elegant music.

Christopher Cook
September 12, 2023
Critical Acclaim

San Francisco Classical Voice

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.

Jason Victor Serinus
October 10, 2022
Critical Acclaim

Star Tribune

Minnesota Opera's 'Edward Tulane' delights with evocative music, dazzling visuals and heart... Prestini's arias and orchestrations are a paradoxical combination of simplicity and complexity. Vocal lines move in unpredictable directions — sometimes barely moving at all— and the composer eschews comforting resolutions in favor of chords that keep you hanging.

Rob Hubbard
June 29, 2023
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

Prestini surfaces those messy emotions in music of candid vulnerability

Oussama Zahr
April 9, 2023
Critical Acclaim

Broadway World

I don't think that the audience present could have been more receptive to the performance… To say it was "genre-defying" would be an understatement …thrilling, entertaining and moving all at once … [Con Alma] uses music in creating a shared experience--showing that even when we are physically alone, we can have a common experience with others.

Richard Sasanow
March 27, 2023
Critical Acclaim

The Berkshire Eagle

Paola Prestini’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is an opera of layers. Voices evolve into otherworldly soundscapes as cello and percussion deliver a call-and-response that tugs on our ears like receding waves underfoot. Characters meld into one another as their roles collide and coalesce. Themes cascade together even as they bridge disparate musical motifs ... layers flowed into a swirling gyre of fate, dreams and emotion worthy of the dark blue depths they plumb.

Evan Berkowitz
May 5, 2023
Critical Acclaim

Seen and Heard International

... the most satisfying work was Paola Prestini’s ‘Voices’. In her beautifully crafted piece, Prestini captured the poignant recollections of beloved voices from childhood that were the first poetry of one’s life. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, without accompaniment or amplification to cloud their sound, expressed those sentiments beautifully.

Rick Perdian
May 7, 2023
Critical Acclaim

OperaWire

Prestini’s 'Voices' was a joyful and playful sound world that reflected on unification through the human voice. This higher level of awareness that [Prestini] understands wholeheartedly ... empowers others, especially young voices, to share with the world.

Jennifer Pyron
May 4, 2023
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

[Prestini’s] setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and beautiful counterpoint.

Anastasia Tsioulcas
March 21, 2023
Critical Acclaim

OperaWire

This evening was just the healing many of us are seeking —the healing power of soulful art and engaging creative activism.

Jennifer Pyron
October 8, 2022
Critical Acclaim

Opera News

Edward Tulane was a strong season-opener for this company, marking its forty-ninth premiere. Whether this is an opera primarily for children or for adults can be—and probably will be—debated. It can, of course, be both.

Michael Anthony
October 8, 2022
Critical Acclaim

Opera News

Prestini writes wonderfully for the chorus, whether it be Christmas carols in a Victorian style for a small ensemble or wordless choruses in two scenes in Act I. There is so much genuine wit in Campbell’s text—his sixth libretto for Minnesota—and there is such variety in Prestini’s expressive score—that we hop onboard the ride and develop an affection for Edward...

Michael Anthony
November 18, 2022
Critical Acclaim

OperaWire

Prestini examined further how we, as a world, must do better by seeing the truth that is our current reality. A crisis. She brought front and center the fragility of life and the impermanence of all existence.

Jennifer Pyron
May 16, 2022
Critical Acclaim

San Diego Union Tribune

Prestini’s music is haunting, playful, strange and joyful, and it was beautifully rendered by the affable and funny Eckert, the Attacca Quartet and the 29-member all-girls choir. Visually and aurally stunning...

Pam Kragen
August 2, 2022
Critical Acclaim

San Fransisco Classical Voice

As the composer explained before the live premiere, her aim was to embody both conflict and accord in the dialogue between piano and orchestra, while ultimately opting for optimism by embracing an innate “us” in the act of collaboration. That dramatic shift was evident in her musical design, which oscillates between simmering tensions, muscular bursts, and peaceable resolutions.

Josef Woodard
June 27, 2022
Critical Acclaim

Connected to the Opera

Paola Prestini, is a composer who expresses a certain part of the contemporary American scene, the one that is…post everything. Very elegant writing [that] pays homage to the American biologist Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the US environmental movement.

Fabio Larovere
May 19, 2022
Critical Acclaim

Patch

"The one hour and 20-minute opera-theater ended to dead silence from a stunned, enraptured audience. Then the applause started, audience members stood up, and the cheering lasted a full four minutes."

Helen Ofield
May 13, 2022
Critical Acclaim

Opera News

“Prestini’s eclectic score, expertly realized by Eckert, the chorus and the Attacca Quartet, ranged from chant-influenced passages to thorny patches of dissonance, moving from background to foreground and back again. At times you forgot there was a score; at other times, like that accordion melody, it was unforgettable... The whole presentation was so innocent, so imaginative, so nurturing, so charming, so beautiful, that my cynical, post-Covid sensibility tried to resist. But we all have our place in the universe, in the present moment, and perhaps beyond. As the Magician discovered, and we along with him, resistance is futile.”

James Chute
June 10, 2022
Critical Acclaim

Total Theater

[A] groundbreaking, experimental production... a fantastical, complex, dream-like work... 'Houses of Zodiac' left me feeling moved in a new and profound way.

Willard Manus
May 9, 2022
Critical Acclaim

The Marginalian

"... the body is the soul-- it is more plainly evident than ever that regulatory control of the mind, of the soul, of consciousness itself. This is what visionary composer and National Sawdust founder Paola Prestini explores with elegance and enchantment in her piece 'Biking Through Time', which I had the pleasure of seeing performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus."

Maria Popova
Critical Acclaim

Paola is an artistic visionary... there is a kind of energy system that follows her and her work everywhere she goes."

Philip Glass
December 21, 2021
Critical Acclaim

The Financial Times

The music was excellent... something of an all-star line-up, and all 11 composers on both nights were women. The singers, all recent graduates of the Juilliard School, were equally excellent.

John Rockwell
December 19, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Bachtrack

... National Sawdust reopens to a realm of the senses... an indulgent salon of new songs of nostalgia and reckoning... Paola Prestini's evocative 'Distance to the Market', abetted by Adam Richardson's fine, warm baritone, opened the concert... the evening succeeded on all counts."

Kurt Gottschalk
December 16, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Opera News

An evening of evocative music inspired imaginative storytelling at 21c Liederabend Op. Senses at National Sawdust, co-produced and directed by Beth Morrison Projects and Paola Prestini, acclaimed for their work pushing the boundaries of classical performance... Tenor Alex McKissick’s soaring voice brought the evening to a sweeping conclusion in the program’s last two pieces, selections from Prestini’s opera Edward Tulane... it was as if we were being asked to open our hearts to the evening’s experience. With the impressive talent that filled the stage, it would have been impossible not to.

Evelyn Kocak
October 10, 2017
Critical Acclaim

The Los Angeles Times

“The kind of experimentation Prestini has lent to her work will help shape what masterpieces come out of the next 50 years”

November 1, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Strings Magazine

"One of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time...On the album, Prestini’s gorgeous and mysterious, hypnotically complex compositions, performed by Zeigler with daredevil intensity and a kind of surgical 'mad doctor' precision.""

August 18, 2021
Critical Acclaim

NJ.com

"[G-Force] opens with long, elegiac string notes, but despite being described as a lamentation of sorts, it quickly becomes frenzied, frenetic and even fun...Prestini shrewdly uses the bounce of [the vibraphone]’s sound to play off the traditional string quartet’s textures."

James C. Taylor
July 1, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Opera News

"In [Jarful of Bees] mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti brings rich sound to the rangy, soaring vocal lines and to Royce Vavrek’s compact text."

Judith Malafronte
July 1, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Indie Opera Podcast

"This edition of 21c Liederabend bodes incredibly well for the future of art song. All the featured artists are people to look out for. Additionally, since this program is available online, anyone with an internet connection can view it. In that regard, it is truly the ultimate Schubertiades."

Gregory Moomjy
June 28, 2021
Critical Acclaim

San Francisco Classical Voice

"a grand peroration of bell-tolling chords and octaves"

Richard S. Ginell
June 23, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

"All the homages extend the legacy, bring it into a piano-centered present day and thereby give pianist Faliks a lengthy set of tone poems and active excitement that shows off her beautiful interpretive skills and brings us to the edge of our seats--or perhaps rather our piano benches!"

Grego Applegate Edwards
June 12, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Lucid Culture

"Paola Prestini’s neoromantically-tinged triptych Ondine: Variations on a Spell begins with the broodingly impressionistic low-midrange Water Sprite, followed by the Bell Tolls, with a long upward drive from nebulosity to an anthemic, glistening payoff. The finale, Golden Bees follows a series of anthemic, flickering cascades."

January 25, 2021
Critical Acclaim

Classical Voice North America

"As a musical documentary of emotion, Herrera and Prestini gathered more than 30 musicians from three continents for their cross-border album of original works, representing a feat that in itself defines the indefatigable spirit of women today."

Xenia Hanusiak
December 11, 2020
Critical Acclaim

NewSounds

"The Mexican singer Magos Herrera and the New York-based composer Paola Prestini have collaborated on a lovely new album called Con Alma – “With Soul.” The music draws on jazz, chamber music, and Latin song, without ever settling on any one of those things. After all, Herrera is a jazz singer who’s done a whole album with a string quartet, and Prestini is Artistic Director at National Sawdust, a venue that refuses to abide by stylistic boundaries."

John Schaefer
December 7, 2020
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

Join dozens of musicians from around the world for “Con Alma,” a live performance adapted from the recent album of the same title created by the composers Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera.

Katherine Cusumano & Emma Grillo
December 2, 2020
Critical Acclaim

The Washington Post

"an unstoppable force"

Michael Brodeur
November 25, 2020
Critical Acclaim

New York Magazine

"New York composer Paola Prestini and Mexico-based singer-songwriter Magos Herrera (plus a crew of musicians) used the lockdown to collaborate at a distance, and the result is a melancholy but uplifting quasi-cantata full of bird calls, phone calls, and calls across frozen borders."

Justin Davidson
November 22, 2020
Critical Acclaim

WTTW

"The piece [G-Force], composed as a tribute to the close friend named in the title, is a real mood-spinner and makes full use of each instrument’s voice."

Hedy Weiss
August 8, 2016
Critical Acclaim

Observer

The Hubble Cantata, composer Paola Prestini’s brilliant collaboration with librettist Royce Vavreck and the Hubble Space Telescope’s lead astrophysicist, Dr. Mario Livio. But in all other arenas, Hubble pushes its classical cosmic themes ever more upward than any orchestral work these ears have ear in a long time, upward and toward the stars. the success of this multi-disciplinary performance lies in its ability to exist as both high art and popular entertainment. And so The Hubble Cantata is a work that knows no parallel, pushing boundaries of technology and presentation that push our city’s relationship with multi-disciplinary performance further into uncharted territory.

Justin Joffe
August 31, 2017
Critical Acclaim

New York Classical Review

"[The Phoenix} left one wishing for more...it had a distinct brand of robust lyricism seasoned with witty asides. Violinist Jennifer Choi didn’t spare the Romantic sonorities as she spooled out the piece’s long melodic lines and kissed off the Kreislerian staccato and pizzicato passages."

David Wright
November 6, 2015
Critical Acclaim

MusicalAmerica

“magnificent drumming…a successful experiment…pitched towards the ecstatic sense of wonder in the natural world…a showcase for lovely and refined music making by composers and performers alike.”

Daniel Stephen Johnson
January 16, 2016
Critical Acclaim

Art and Culture Today

“exuberant…an extreme expression of female agency.”

Nélida Nassar
February 7, 2016
Critical Acclaim

Boston Globe

“Paola Prestini invited listeners into her sensually saturated dreams…soloists Tim Fain, violin, and Maya Beiser, cello, performed the two captivating concertos of Prestini’s ‘Labyrinth,’ surrounded by a phantasmagoria of visual projections.”

Zoë Madonna
April 21, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The Los Angeles Times

“Luminously involving music”

Mark Swed
May 19, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

“the music — commissioned from five composers and performed by some of the most innovative soundsmiths around — is specifically tailored to the film’s passionate environmental advocacy and carries equal weight with the visual.”

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
May 19, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

“Some is outright gorgeous. Ms. Prestini’s choral piece for the section “A Padre, a Horse, a Telescope” sets Jesuit sources — including a Hail Mary in Cochimi, an extinct Native American language — to an ethereal blend of Mexican Baroque music and otherworldly ululations.”

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
May 23, 2016
Critical Acclaim

NewSounds

“But the music…! The Colorado’s soundtrack positively radiates optimism.”

Daniel Stephen Johnson
May 23, 2016
Critical Acclaim

MetLiveArts

“A soundtrack at its most pure, this live score imparted a more resonant sensation than just film or concert alone; the whole evening brought together both sight and sound at the height of their powers.”

Meryl Cates
August 8, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The Guardian

“Hubble Cantata saw audience members explore the Orion Nebula while a new piece of music played – the latest in a series of experiments between VR technology and classical music”

Brian Wise
August 8, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The Observer

“A brilliant collaboration. Prestini’s time spent perfecting 30-plus commissioned multidisciplinary works and serving as creative and executive director of Williamsburg’s National Sawdust have only further fortified her with the tact to balance all the voices, mixed media and technology that combine to make The Hubble Cantata such a spectacle…”

Justin Joffe
May 11, 2015
Critical Acclaim

New Sounds

Rhapsodic

Marina Kifferstein
December 15, 2014
Critical Acclaim

Q2 Music

Prestini’s style weaves folk melodies and field samples with massive choral sections reminiscent of some forgotten Renaissance Mass, all filtered through her own distinctive musical language… the overall effect is engaging and quite moving. The major themes of transformation, immigration and culturally complex, layered ethnicity seem to resonate both on a macro level in the age of globalization, as well as on a micro level in what Prestini calls the search for 'internal geography.'

Marina Kifferstein
November 10, 2014
Critical Acclaim

Q2 Music

Next is Listen, Quiet by Paola Prestini, an unexpectedly catchy track featuring Jason Treuting of So Percussion. It’s not so much music for solo cello as it is a fantastically quirky percussion piece with a cello narrator. An expert welder of elements, Prestini cuts in recordings of women’s voices in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of The Books’ Lemon of Pink album.

Carol Ann Cheung
June 4, 2014
Critical Acclaim

New York Classical Review

The evening was kicked off by composer, mover and shaker Paola Prestini, a curator of the annual River to River festival and creative director of the Brooklyn-based Original Music Workshop.

Kurt Gottschalk
November 29, 2013
Critical Acclaim

The Wall Street Journal

“The music was ace.”

Rebecca Bratburd
August 8, 2016
Critical Acclaim

Feast of Music

“The performance itself was full of magic and wonder. Space, of course, is silent: there is no audible music of the spheres. But, Prestini has written some astonishing musical passages that capture a sense of what it might be like to be set adrift in a universe without the limitations of space or time.”

Steven Pisano
August 10, 2016
Critical Acclaim

Hyperallergic

"It was a thundering opus”

Carey Dunne
August 11, 2016
Critical Acclaim

VAN Magazine

“Prestini’s music…vividly shimmering and raging with the emotional temperatures of characters as suggested in Vavrek’s libretto, and generally conjuring up an authentically cosmic atmosphere with its trembling strings, ethereal wind lines, and luminous glockenspiel.”

Kenji Fujishima
August 13, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The New Yorker

“Crescendos, beauty, drama…It astounded me, this feeling of floating above Earth, and tears began to emerge from my cardboard goggles.”

Sarah Larson
August 28, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Expansive-beyond-imagination images from the Hubble Space Telescope arrived in 360-degree virtual reality amid a new piece by Paola Prestini titled Hubble Cantata this month at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park… the resulting vistas proved the sky was anything but the limit.”

David Patrick Stearns
September 12, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The Boston Globe

“An enchanted exploration of the eternal mysteries….[Prestini’s] atmospheric but tuneful music for “Gilgamesh” inhabited an indie-opera rainforest of its own…”

Zoë Madonna
September 12, 2016
Critical Acclaim

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

“It sparkles, both literally and figuratively…Her melodies entice and speak of a modern, yet accessible flare…it holds its intensity with valor through its end.”

Justin Casinghino
November 25, 2013
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

“Well wrought … upbeat and enthralling.”

Steve Smith
November 1, 2013
Critical Acclaim

Classical TV

“Hubble Cantata … a work of extraordinary beauty.”

June 26, 2013
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

“Mr. Lubovitch’s new 'As Sleep Befell' made for a better match with Ms. Prestini’s music. At the center of a semicircle of string, wind and percussion players stood the vocalist Helga Davis, a kind of murmuring angel. Six shirtless male dancers were arrayed out in front of her on the ground, tossing and turning handsomely to Ms. Prestini’s atmospherics, as if in a shared dream … [it was] visually arresting.”

Brian Seibert
March 7, 2017
Critical Acclaim

Broadway World

“Timeless magic…Shockingly beautiful.”

Kristen Morale
March 26, 2017
Critical Acclaim

New York Classical Review

“Prestini’s graceful, lovely composition “The Hotel That Time Forgot”, was an exploration of invented memory”

Anthony Tommasini
March 26, 2017
Critical Acclaim

The New York Times

“The Hotel That Time Forgot”… Prestini’s music conveys the surreal visuals through gently repetitive figures, disparately overlapping lines and swooshing, sliding harmonies.”

Anthony Tommasini
May 15, 2017
Critical Acclaim

WQXR

“The Hubble Cantata, is a more than a piece of music. It is a new kind of collaboration: a nexus of art and science.”

Daniel Stephen Johnson
October 12, 2017
Critical Acclaim

The Los Angeles Times

‘…the works ability to evoke sheer vastness of what lies beyond our experience.”

Mark Swed
October 1, 2017
Critical Acclaim

Opera News

"The final section features Prestini at her best, as she conjures a frightening Matrix dystopia in which the human mind is converted into artificial intelligence. A mesmerizing haze of sound builds up, layering humming choir, whistling electronics and a rumbling, Ligeti-like cluster chord in the instrumental ensemble that slowly shifts and intensifies, punctuated by radio interceptions of static and a woman’s voice”

Joe Cadagin
January 13, 2013
Critical Acclaim

The Washington Post

“Spellbinding music…”

Joan Reinthaler
November 8, 2017
Critical Acclaim

New York Classical Review

“From Paola Prestini we heard a prelude and aria from her opera Gilgamesh. A daring opening, with hard strings biting on a semitone, builds into climbing waves of strings, creating drama and establishing a musical language to use throughout the piece. The vocal part was sung by Jakub Józef Orliński, a promising countertenor with a powerful, direct instrument that can shift between mixed voice and full falsetto without revealing a seam. In this as in all of her work, Prestini shows a strong compositional voice and an arresting focus in her writing: vigorous melodic lines grab the listener, supported by tart harmonies. At this point, she has to be considered a major talent.”

Eric C. Simpson