Music by Paola Prestini
Libretto by Royce Vavrek
Stage Director & Designer Thaddeus Strassberger
Based on the film Stellet Licht by Carlos Reygadas
Silent Light is a new Opera based on the film Stellet Licht by Carlos Reygadas. Commissioned by Banff Centre for the Arts.
National Sawdust's 10th Anniversary Season opens this September with composer, co-founder and artistic director Paola Prestini's first full-length work in our space - the celebrated and immersive new opera Silent Light. This "remarkable production" (Calgary Herald) will play four performances from September 26-29.
In Silent Light, based on Carlos Reygada’s Acclaimed 2007 Film, a fraught love story unfolds in a Mennonite community in the plains of northern Mexico. Silent Light Is composed by Prestini, with a libretto from Royce Vavrek, directed by Thaddeus Strassberger, and conducted by Christopher Rountree. Engaging the aural, visual, and olfactory, and harnessing the uniqueness of National Sawdust’s architecture and Meyer constellation sound system, the production immerses audiences in a socially cloistered and sensuously expansive environment.
The all-star cast includes Anthony Dean Griffey, Maggie Lattimore, Daniel Okulitch, Julia Mintzer, and Brittany Renee. The ensemble is rounded out with NOVUS ensemble including Katie Hyun (violin), Gareth Flowers (trumpet), Marlon Patton (Percussion), Dave Nelson (Trombone), Jeffrey Zeigler (Cello), with Foley designed by Sxip Shirey.
This production is produced in partnership between VisionIntoArt and National Sawdust and is Co-Commissioned by Trinity Church, Banff, and VisionIntoArt with support provided by Jeanne Giordano, Elizabeth Madigan Jost, Simon and Catriona Mordant, Jill and Bill Steinberg, and Veronica Watson.
Artists’ Statement:
We decided on “Silent Light” because of the vast emotional canvas the films characters offer. There is no score, location sounds seem hard-edged, and when a hymn is sung, it is not a tune but a dirge. It was the perfect skeleton for an opera.
Set among the 100,000 or so Mennonites living in Mexico, the leads double as a choir and embody them- people who deeply hold their values and try to act upon them, and yet who do not seem to be zealots.
“Silent Light” has a beauty based on nature and the rhythms of the land. It opens with a sunrise and closes with a sunset, and is a solemn and profound film about a man transfixed by love, which causes him to betray his good and faithful wife. How he fell into this love, we do not know. Certainly, Johan isn’t the kind of man to go straying. Nor is Marianne, the woman he loves, a husband stealer. That they are both good to the core is the source of their pain.
Esther, Johan’s wife and the mother of their six children, knows Marianne and knows about the affair. Johan has told her. He is a religious man and has also confessed to his father and his best friend. There is the sense that he will never leave Esther and never stop loving Marianne. He and Esther say they love each other, and they mean it. You see how love brings its punishment.
At the end, Marianne tenderly kisses Esther and resurrects her. Ritual, every day life and finally, a moment of the surreal, tie the story together. This is a story of people trying to do their best.
A richly ambiguous, provocative, and heady experience.
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
Each shift in Prestini’s score was arresting.
[Paola's] use of the human voice as an interpreter of the ethereal is perfectly showcased in “Silent Light”.
“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…”
