Prototype Festival 2020, January 17 & 18
Julian Wachner, Composer
Julian was named one of Musical America’s Top 30 Professionals for 2018—serves as director of music at Trinity Church Wall Street, overseeing an annual season of hundreds of events. Besides serving as principal conductor of NOVUS NY, The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Wachner was recently appointed as artistic director of the Grand Rapids Bach Festival. Wachner also enjoys an active schedule as a guest conductor including recent and upcoming performances with the Los Angeles Opera, San Francisco Opera, Beijing Music Festival, The Shed, Philharmonia Baroque, Apollo’s Fire, Kansas City Symphony, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Lincoln Center Presents, Utrecht Early Music Festival, Metropolitan Museum, Carnegie Presents, and the PROTOTYPE Festival. As a leading impresario of new music, Wachner collaborated on the development, performance and recording of three Pulitzer Prize-winning works: Du Yun’s Angels Bone (2017), Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields (2015), and Ellen Reid’s p r i s m (2019). Wachner’s own compositions have been variously described as “jazzy, energetic, and ingenious” (Boston Globe), “a compendium of surprises” (Washington Post) and “bold and atmospheric,” demonstrating “an imaginative air for allusive text setting” (The New York Times). He is published exclusively by E.C. Schirmer and represented world-wide by Opus 3 Artists.
Cerise Lim Jacobs, Librettist
Cerise creates new American opera from her chequered past in multicultural Singapore and her sojourns around the world. Her original libretti are inspired by the myths that live in our imaginations and the excitement of current events and people she encounters. With her husband Charles, she conceived of and wrote the libretti for Ouroboros Trilogy, comprising Naga (by Scott Wheeler), Gilgamesh (by Paola Prestini) and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning Madame White Snake (by Zhou Long). Ouroboros Trilogy premiered in Boston in September 2016 and was hailed as “enchanted” (Boston Globe) and “binge-worthy” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). “The music should be heard, the production should be seen and there is wisdom in the text.” (BMINT). REV. 23, a fierce and poignant satire on life after the prophesied Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation ends at Chapter 22, but not anymore!) with composer Julian Wachner premiered in 2017; and PermaDeath, one of the world’s first video game operas, with composer Dan Visconti, premiered in 2018. 2019 sees the premiere of I Am A Dreamer Who No Longer Dreams, An Immigrant Story, created by immigrants to address the most important issue facing America today. Cerise has been named a 2017 Mover & Shaper by Musical America, an award given to music professionals for driving the performing arts towards a future shaped by their vision, and one of Boston’s 100 Most Influential People of Color in 2018.
REV. 23
January 17 & 18 at 8pm | January 18 at 3pm at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice | 120 minutes with one intermission
Julian Wachner, composer
Cerise Lim Jacobs, librettist
James Darrah, director
Daniela Candillari, music director
CAST:
Lucifer: Alexander Elliot; Hades: Kyle van Schoonhoven; Persephone: Colleen Daly; SunTzu: Paul An; Fury 1: Anna Schubert; Fury 2: Naomi Louisa O’Connell; Fury 3: Melanie Long; Adam: Brian Giebler; Eve: Sophia Byrd; Michael the Archangel: Michael Maniaci
Featuring: NovusNY (Trinity Wall Street’s resident contemporary music orchestra)
Lauded as an “an endlessly unfolding chain of highly controlled polystylism” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), Julian Wachner’s REV. 23 is an exploration of an “unpublished” new chapter of the Book of Revelation. With an audacious libretto by Cerise Lim Jacobs, this striking new production by director James Darrah takes us on a fantastical journey through the myths of our collective unconscious.
Produced by Trinity Church Wall Street
Commissioned by White Snake Projects
REV. 23 is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
photo by Margaret Durow