Festival O19 Launches With World Premiere of DENIS & KATYA

O19, the third edition of Opera Philadelphia's annual season-opening festival, launches on September 18 with the world premiere of Denis & Katya at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre. Winner of the prestigious Fedora Generali Prize for Opera for 2019, this immersive new multimedia chamber opera is the work of composer Philip Venables and librettist-director Ted Huffman, the duo behind the award-winning Royal Opera House commission 4.48 Psychosis.

Their inspiration was the true story of two 15-year-old runaways who became social media sensations when they livestreamed an armed stand-off with Russian Special Forces that culminated in their own deaths. Commissioned and produced in collaboration with Music Theatre Wales and Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, Denis & Katya marks the latest in a string of important new works first brought to life at Opera Philadelphia, which continues to prove itself "one of American opera's success stories" (New York Times).

It was in November 2016 that, as the BBC News reported, "Two Russian teens die[d] after firing at police in live web drama." After running away from home, 15-year-olds Denis Muravyov and Katya Vlasova livestreamed their final hours on multiple social media platforms, creating a real-time voyeuristic spectacle and leaving behind a trail of devastating footage of their drinking, smoking, cuddling, and crying as they prepared to die. On the chilling livestream, Katya said, "We have zero options." To re-create their harrowing last days, the new opera interweaves verbatim text, original video footage, social media messaging, and stylized dramatization, breaking the fourth wall in order to examine the vast public response to their story and what this response says about us as a society.

Librettist and director Ted Huffman's work "conjures dark magic with utmost skill" (Financial Times). He explains:
"I came across the story of Denis and Katya - as many others did - through a Facebook news item, a promoted link: two angelic faces over a lurid headline comparing them to Romeo and Juliet. The story had been chosen for me by an algorithm. I clicked. I forwarded the link to Phil and we started to chat about them, not only about their story but why we had been drawn into it, how it was that the internet cycle of news had brought them to us - these two, chosen from among what must have been thousands of tragic deaths and suicides that day, that week, that month, in the world.

"There is something undeniably theatrical about [Denis and Katya's] last days. They chose to put themselves on camera. It felt like they were reaching out for some kind of connection on the internet, and I think opera is all about connection. Naturally, the next question is, whose perspective is the storytelling coming from, and it was really interesting to me to try to incorporate multiple perspectives. I think this idea that a community can tell a story is very powerful."

Philip Venables, "one of the finest composers around" (The Guardian), adds:
"The making of this piece is another form of the kind of 'watching' and the kind of exhibitionism or voyeurism that the piece itself is talking about. The piece is going to be a really good mix of theater and opera, a really good mix of drama and reality, of fact and fiction."

Opera Philadelphia's world premiere production of Denis & Katya is scored for four cellos and features a double cast, all of whose members take on multiple roles. The first cast pairs American baritone Theo Hoffman, a 2016 Grand Finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions who is known for his "solid, burnished baritone" (Opera News), with German-American mezzo-soprano Siena Licht Miller, who combines "exceptional presence and stage savvy, a gloriously ripe, distinctive mezzo-soprano, and the Junoesque beauty of a European movie star" (Parterre). The second cast comprises British baritone Johnny Herford, whose creation of the leading role in the Royal Opera House's world premiere production of Philip Glass's The Trial scored him a Welsh Theatre Award nomination, and Australian mezzo-soprano Emily Edmonds, who is "surely a star in the making" (BachTrack). Now making her Komische Oper Berlin debut in the title role of L'enfant et les sortilèges, Edmonds was one of the six original cast members in the world premiere production of 4.48 Psychosis. She, Hoffman, and Herford are all making company debuts in Denis & Katya, while Miller returns to Opera Philadelphia after appearances last year in recital at the O18 festival and as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The opera, co-commissioned and co-produced with Music Theatre Wales and Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, received the prestigious €150,000 Fedora Generali Prize for Opera on June 28, 2019, at a ceremony in Venice. The privately funded Fedora Prizes are dedicated to helping innovative opera and ballet projects that are still in the making to reach the stage while involving emerging artists of different nationalities and backgrounds.

Tickets are now on sale at operaphila.org or by calling 215-732-8400.