Press Features

May 26, 2020

The Art Of Recovery: How Artists Are Grappling With The Covid-19 Pandemic

When concerts, performances, shows and events ground to a halt this spring, the dust that arose enveloped the art world in uncertainty.

All Arts
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May 14, 2020

Video Premiere: “Birdsong” from Paola Prestini’s Sensorium Ex

Today’s video premiere features Lucy Dhegrae and Jeffrey Zeigler performing an excerpt from the work-in-progress opera Sensorium Ex by composer Paola Prestini and librettist Brenda Shaughnessy.

I Care If You Listen
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May 8, 2020

San Diego Opera’s ‘Aging Magician’ a genre-hopping journey through transcendence

a genre-hopping journey through transcendence

San Diego Tribune
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March 1, 2020

Opera News Spotlight Feature

Opera News profiles Paola around the premiere of Edward Tulane at Minnesota Opera

Opera News
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February 27, 2020

Daring Multi-Media Composer’s Opera ‘Aging Magician’ Opens on San Diego Opera’s dētour Series

Daring Multi-Media Composer’s Opera ‘Aging Magician’ Opens on San Diego Opera’s dētour Series

San Diego Story
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September 18, 2019

Music Review: On Clara Schumann’s 200th, Lara Downes Plays the Schumanns and More on CD and in Concert

Entitled ‘Holes in the Sky’ after a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe, the concert included music by Clara Schumann, Florence Price, Meredith Monk, Nina Simone, Paola Prestini, Joni Mitchell, and others. It proved a fitting celebration of the work – it’s now safe to say the tradition – of women composers.

blogcritics.org
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September 6, 2019

Talking Mass and Wild Order with Visionary Composer Paola Prestini

Trinity celebrates the release of six major recordings this year and reflects on a legacy of commissioning, premiering, and recording multiple new works that Trinity helped pioneer and develop, including Paola Prestini's Imaginary World of Wild Order: A Mass, excerpts of which will be featured at the season opener concert on September 12.

Trinity Wall Street
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July 6, 2019

Banff Centre's Silent Light finds intimate beauty in the sounds of silence

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…

Calgary Herald
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July 1, 2019

Applying Tech World Model to Music

National Sawdust sets itself apart from other arts institutions through the unique way in which it supports artists and their projects.

Philanthropy Journal News
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February 5, 2019

The Philharmonic’s New Season: What Our Critics Want to Hear

Joan La Barbara is the kind of gifted, veteran New York composer the Philharmonic has often declined to notice. She’s experimentally minded, certainly, but her works contain plenty of more traditional operatic melody, too.

The New York Times
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July 27, 2018

On creating your own space and setting your own metrics for success

I try and balance the different sides of myself with the projects that I choose. For me, Sawdust represents the activist side, the side that contributes to the community at large.

The Creative Independent
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July 25, 2018

Ascoli, Buttafuoco e Paola Prestini chiudono la Milanesiana

The Milanesiana adventure in Ascoli, a cultural and interdisciplinary festival conceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi, will end tonight. At 11.30 today the exhibition 'Le Storie Natuali' by Luigi Serafini was inaugurated at Forte Malatesta, which was attended, in addition to the artist, by Vittorio Sgarbi and Stefano Papetti.

il Resto del Carlino Ascoli
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June 29, 2018

The imaginative composer behind the Williamsburg-based National Sawdust

When you enter the performance space of National Sawdust, you immediately understand why it’s described as an incubator of artistry. The abstract design gets your creative juices going.

Pix 11 News
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June 21, 2018

Paola Prestini’s Multimedia Opera ‘Oceanic Verses’ Debuts

A multimedia opera set in Southern Italy is due to premier at the Kennedy Center this month, written and composed by Paola Prestini. Titled “Oceanic Verses,” the concert and film project follows the stories of four characters as they explore the cultural and folkloric past of their Mediterranean setting.

Huffington Post
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March 10, 2018

Minnesota music scene finally amplifying women composers: 'It's past time'

Dead white men still dominate classical music. Despite growing numbers of female composers, symphony orchestras and opera companies still announce seasons overflowing with Beethoven and Bach, Puccini and Bizet.

Star Tribune
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