“Primal Loss: Four Hundred Years of Orpheus and Eurydice in Opera”

A lecture and recital by award-winning composer Matthew Aucoin and selections performed by soprano Liv Redpath

Aucoin will discuss his opera Eurydice premiering at the Metropolitan Opera in November 2021, the influences of playwright Sarah Ruhl and the history of Orphic operas.

Proof of vaccine or valid exemption required for all attendees. See stallercenter.com/contact/Covid for details

Sponsored by the English Department, the Office of the Provost, the Music Department, the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, The Hellenic Center, the Graduate Student Organization, the Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, the Walt Whitman Birthplace, and the Walt Whitman Initiative.

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, writer, pianist, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. He is Artist-in-Residence at Los Angeles Opera, and has worked as a composer and conductor with the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the American Repertory Theater, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Music Academy of the West. He is co-Artistic Director of the American Modern Opera Company.

Liv Redpath is quickly becoming a leading soprano leggero on the opera and concert stage today. During the 2021-22 season, Ms. Redpath returns to the Deutsche Oper Berlin to make her debut in the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor as well as the Metropolitan Opera where she covers the title role in Aucoin's Eurydice conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin with staging by Mary Zimmerman. A graduate of Harvard University and The Juilliard School, Ms. Redpath is a former Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist with the Los Angeles Opera. She was one of twelve finalists worldwide at the 2019 Operalia competition and sang under the baton of Plácido Domingo in Prague for the final round concert. Redpath has been engaged by numerous opera companies including The Santa Fe Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Opera, Aspen Music Festival, Scottish Opera, New York Festival of Song, and the Wolf Trap Opera, among others. Her wide-ranging operatic repertoire includes Le nozze di Figaro, Hansel and Gretel, Ariadne auf Naxos, Béatrice et Bénédict, Orphée et Eurydice, Dido and Aeneas, Cendrillon, Die Zauberflöte, Lakmé, Les contes d’Hoffmann, Die Fledermaus, Les mamelles de Tirésias, The Golden Cockerel, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Candide, L’enfant et les sortilèges, and Crossing.

Music by Matthew Aucoin, libretto by Sarah Ruhl, based on her play Eurydice.

A co-production of the Metropolitan Opera and LA Opera.

Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and LA Opera. Originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program with support from the OPERA America Repertoire Development Grant.

Production a gift of Robert L. Turner.