Press Features

January 23, 2025

Primero Sueño featured in El Diario

La compositora y activista italoamericana Paola Prestini y la cantante y compositora mexicana Magos Herrera crearon esta obra que rinde homenaje a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la icónica escritora mexicana del siglo XVII quien es considerada la primera feminista de América.

January 22, 2025

Primero Sueño featured on NY1

More than three centuries after it was first published, "Primero Sueño," a masterpiece of the Hispanic Baroque, has found a home in Upper Manhattan.

Spectrum News NY1

January 22, 2025

Primero Sueño featured in The New York Times

At the Cloisters, Sor Juana’s Words Ring Out in Song: The opera “Primero Sueño” translates Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poem about the soul’s journey into a musical promenade around the Cloisters.

The New York Times

October 11, 2024

Paola Prestini on IDAGIO with Fred Plotkin

Fred Plotkin, pleasure activist, and passionate opera expert, speaks each Friday with fascinating people in the music world. He is the author of Opera 101 and Classical Music 101 and leads opera symposia for New York Times Journeys. In this episode, Fred speaks with composer Paola Prestini.

December 14, 2023

Explosions of the Voice: An interview with composer Paola Prestini

In an interview ostensibly about her, she tended to highlight the work of other artists. Her career puts this in practice: As both a composer and artistic director of National Sawdust, Prestini is attentive to the way art grows within a creative ecosystem

November 21, 2023

Peabody Magazine Sounding It Out

"Where you can tighten language, tighten it. Structure and form before, during, and after. Don’t forget to analyze your own work. Where are your holes? What do you fall back on? When feeling strong, challenge all these assumptions. Edit but balance with instinct."

Peabody Magazine

November 8, 2023

National Sawdust Brings Music And Artists To Brooklyn In A Uniquely Epic Way

"I believe strongly that artists have a unique power to address the most urgent issues of our time—that society needs us. But artists are not always given the tools to sustain their practice"

October 28, 2023

Ex-Tucsonan's 'The Old Man and the Sea' opera to get ASU world premiere

She also draws inspiration from her experience growing up in a border town. Prestini split her time between Tucson and Nogales, where her family had settled after emigrating from Italy when she was a baby. Her father relocated his family’s reed manufacturing business House of Prestini to Nogales, where it had been operating since 1974, to be closer

Arizona Daily Star

September 25, 2023

Song of the Stars, Part 1: Transforming Space into Symphonies

Space is famously silent, but astronomers and musicians are increasingly turning astronomical data into sound as a way to make discoveries and inspire people who are blind or visually impaired.

Scientific American

September 12, 2023

Edward Tulane: A Fairy-Tale Opera With Hidden Depth

After a two-year pandemic-imposed delay, Edward Tulane, Paola Prestini’s opera with librettist Mark Campbell (The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Stonewall, and Silent Night), had its belated premiere at Minnesota Opera in 2022.

San Francisco Classical Voice

August 18, 2023

Paola Prestini, composer

David Osenberg interviews Paola Prestini on the recording of her grand opera Edward Tulane.

Cadenza with David Osenberg WWFM

August 15, 2023

Paola Prestini on New Opera Recording Edward Tulane | Classical Conversations | Full Interview

Visionary composer (and co-founder of new music incubator National Sawdust) Paola Prestini talks with WGTE's Mary Claire Murphy about the just-released recording of her opera "Edward Tulane," based on the novel "The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane" by Kate DiCamillo.

WGTE Public Media

Behind the Playlist with Composer Paola Prestini

Paola Prestini's newly recorded opera Edward Tulane is a charming story about a porcelain rabbit who begins his journey with a little bit of hubris. There’s something about the visible physical fragility that we were all reminded of over the last few years that hits incredibly close to home in the work.

Louisville Public Media

Composer Paola Prestini Signs With Blu Ocean Arts

talian-American composer Paola Prestini will join artists such as Conor Hanick, Dan Tepfer, Jeffrey Zeigler, and Sandbox Percussion on the Blu Ocean Arts' roster.

The Violin Channel

BITS & BYTES: ‘Houses of Zodiac’ at Mass MoCA; ‘Guards at the Taj’ at Chester Theatre Company; ‘Crystal Radio Sessions’ at Ancram Opera House; Dirty Cello at Becket Arts Center; Berkshire Pulse at Chesterwood; St. Joseph’s Polish Picnic returns

“Houses of Zodiac” is "one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time."

The Berkshire Edge