Heartbeat Opera Announces The World Premiere Of QUANDO At The McKittrick Hotel, 4/7–4/9

New York's radical indie opera company HEARTBEAT OPERA announces its newest project: the world premiere of QUANDO at the legendary McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea (home of the transportive Sleep No More). A co-production with Long Beach Opera, QUANDO is produced by Heartbeat's newly-appointed Associate Artistic Director Derrell Acon.

Some of the most beautiful and famous music from the operatic canon becomes the landscape for this fierce social satire of sex, activism, and the performance of everyday life. Music from Verdi's operas La Traviata and Don Carlo and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice are repurposed and refashioned into a 28-minute short film that follows a starry-eyed young couple as their night on the town unravels into a surrealist swirl of decadence, intrigue and, ultimately, vengeful justice.

The short film will be screened as is, and then followed by a second presentation that features live composer-performers actively disrupting and reconstituting the music from the score for a one-of-a-kind theatrical experience. No two performances will be the same, as the ending will change with each iteration of the live performances, and audiences will be challenged to re-examine their perceptions of art and its role in societal transformation.

In Daniel Schlosberg's new arrangement for four instrumentalists and electronics, Verdi and Gluck are transformed into a swirling fantasy of artifice and extremity. Through deconstructing and layering, violin, cello, clarinet (doubling saxophone), and piano become everything from a bombastic electro-orchestra to the most intimate chamber ensemble. Cloying synthesizers stand in for orchestral grandeur, an electric guitar strums faintly, a saxophone wails-the sound is almost too beautiful to be believable, and all is not what it seems.

QUANDO is the pilot project of NO EVIL Projects, an initiative meant to create a self-replenishing fund of seed money for new projects in the opera field by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color) creators.

Learn more at heartbeatopera.org.

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