Morningside Opera's PERGOLESI POWER GAMES Set for 1/16-17

Morningside Opera, the NYC-based opera company that most recently presented the acclaimed Here Be Sirens and ¡Figaro! (90210), teams up with all-female orchestral ensemble SIREN Baroque to present, PERGOLESI POWER GAMES, a double-feature of two masterpieces by baroque composer Giambattista Pergolesi at the Alchemical Theater Laboratory (104 West 14th Street - between 6thand 7th Avenues, for two performances only - Friday, January 16th and Saturday, January 17th at 7:30 PM. PERGOLESI POWER GAMES reunites the original cast of Stabat mater (first developed by Morningside Opera in 2012) and expands the evening to include a period chamber ensemble from SIREN Baroque. This return engagement is paired with a new production of Pergolesi's La serva padrona.Together, the two halves of PERGOLESI POWER GAMES turn this famous music inside out, revealing a whole new world of meaning in these classic works. Tickets are $20 advance/$25 at the door, and can be purchased by visiting https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/941647 or calling 866-811-4111.

Stabat mater (1736): back by popular demand! This lushly choreographed re-imagining of Pergolesi's iconic sacred oratorio explores the work's fetishization of female suffering. Promoting a fuller awareness of the power politics of beauty in our culture, this piece asks us to consider how women's pain is intrinsic to our understanding of beauty. This piece is choreographed by baroque dance specialist Laura Careless and features Morningside Opera company members Brett Umlauf and Amber Youell.

La serva padrona (1733): a comic tale of the crafty maidservant Serpina who tricks her employer Uberto into marrying her, this popular intermezzo reworks themes of gender and power in a darkly funny key. While often presented as a light comedy, this production brings out the more serious underbelly of the story by delving into the modern world of BDSM culture. Recasting Serpina as a professional dominatrix, this work examines the complex dynamic of paying someone to order you around - who is really in control? Directed by Morningside Opera artistic director Annie Holt, La serva padrona features company members Brittany Palmer and Michael Shaw.

Both pieces will feature a period chamber ensemble composed of a string quartet and harpsichord. Music director Kelly Savage will lead from the keyboard. Currently a faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Stanford University, Savage is artistic director of SIREN Baroque, and a founding member of Opera Feroce. She performs frequently on harpsichord, and was praised by the New York Times for her "deft accompaniment" in the pasticcio opera Amor & Psyche.

SIREN Baroque founder Antonia Nelson says, "To hear these two wonderful Baroque gems, fully orchestrated with period instruments in a wildly-new and twisted way is exactly what living and making music in New York City is about."

Musicologist and performer Amber Youell adds, "Pergolesi's trademark galant musical style, with its transparent textures and buoyant melodies (though with moments of rigorous counterpoint), seems at times almost glib or flippant. But upon investigation, the galant style reveals a more complex dynamic between pleasure and expression that would have been meaningful to its original 18th-century audiences."

Morningside Opera Artistic Director Annie Holt says, "We are so thrilled to bring Stabat mater back to the stage in this expanded form! As critics like James Oestreich of The New York Times, have noted, the early music scene in NYC has really taken off recently. In this production, we are excited to explore the tension between rigorous historical performance (in terms of the music) and innovative, edgy theatrical staging."

Morningside Opera is an artists' collective made up of singers, conductors, designers and directors, dedicated to challenging the boundaries of the genre through accessible performances of operas old, new, and somewhere in between: original mash-ups of operatic music into new stories, theatrical stagings of non-dramatic works, and transformative adaptations of perennial favorites. In 2012, The New York Times said that Morningside Opera's "bold imagination and musical diligence... marked this company as one to watch." Their previous production, Kate Soper's new music-theater piece "Here Be Sirens," re-worked classic texts on philosophy, history and gender to create "an erudite, hilarious, furiously inventive meditation on the siren myth" (The New Yorker). Another recent show, ¡Figaro! (90210), featured a new "Spanglish" libretto which transferred Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro to contemporary L.A., engaging issues of American citizenship and immigration; it was praised as "blasphemous, brilliant... uproariously funny" (NY Times) and "as timely as it is sexy" (NY Post). Morningside Opera has also co-sponsored conferences such as "The Nose in transit: William Kentridge and the poetics of displacement" with Columbia University, Freie University Berlin, and the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, and "Remixing Opera" with Columbia and Princeton in 2011.

Photo Credit: Noah Arjomad

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