Opera and Music Theater
La Ballonniste
Lisa Bielawa, composer
Claire Solomon, librettist
Charlie Otte, production and design consultant
La Ballonniste unfolds in three short acts, charting Elisabeth Thible’s rise from penury as the abandoned wife of a wax-worker to success in the Lyon Opéra and finally to stratospheric celebrity, passing through the science of hot air balloons, animal magnetism, and the difficulty of keeping up appearances for an absolute monarch.
Set on the cusp of the French Revolution, La Ballonniste is an allegory for the end of absolutism with surprising contemporary resonance, staging the lush excesses of the ancien régime as freedom soars as a descant, above the skies, in a rapture of aesthetic pleasure.
A Guggenheim Fellowship project
Available for commission
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Centuries in the Hours
Lisa Bielawa, composer
Claire Solomon, librettist
Lisa Bielawa and Claire Solomon's opera Centuries in the Hours was inspired by two hundred years of women’s diaries Bielawa discovered as a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2018. As in much of Bielawa’s previous work, Centuries in the Hours lifts women’s lives from obscurity to join the flow of public history. Solomon’s libretto puts these diarists into dialogue, staging a crazy-quilt America as seen from its domestic sphere.
Seeking producers for premiere production
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Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser
Lisa Bielawa, composer
Erik Ehn, librettist
Charles Otte, director
Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser was broadcast on KCETLink’s Emmy® award-winning arts and culture series Artbound, as well as online for free, on-demand streaming, which was a first for the network. The Los Angeles Times called Vireo an opera, “unlike any you have seen before, in content and in form,” and San Francisco Classical Voice described it as, “poetic and fantastical, visually stunning and relentlessly abstract.”
Vireo is an Artist Residency Project of Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, a unit of Cal State Fullerton's College of the Arts shepherded by Director and Chief Curator John Spiak. The unique multimedia initiative includes online articles and videos showcasing various facets of the production. Vireo is the winner of the 2015 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Multimedia Award and was awarded a prestigious MAP Fund Grant for 2016 through Grand Central Art Center. Bielawa and Otte recently received nominations for the 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards for their work on the project.
Chance Encounter
Chance Encounter is a site-specific musical work, co-conceived by world-renowned soprano Susan Narucki and Lisa Bielawa, in which a soprano and 12 instruments convene, one or several at a time, in and out of the texture and context of public spaces. The soprano sings songs and arias constructed of texts collected in transient public spaces, thereby enacting the listener’s private (yet collective) experience of the performance space itself. Each performance ‘venue’ requires a re-mapping of the spatial and movement elements of the piece onto the new location. The piece is available for national and international touring.
Lisa Bielawa's Chance Encounter is a 35-minute piece in, and about, transient public space with texts overheard in transient public space. Chance Encounter has been recorded by The Knights and Susan Narucki for Orange Mountain Music (December 2010), and has been performed in Venice with Lisa Bielawa as the soprano soloist as part of the 12th International Venice Biennale of Architecture, in partnership with urban placemaker Robert Hammond, known for championing New York's High Line. It was performed in Rome by soprano Susan Narucki, the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, and the Rome-based Blue Chamber Orchestra on the banks of the Tiber River and as part of the opening of the celebrated new MAXXI Museum, also in partnership with Hammond. The work has also been performed in Vancouver, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, by Ms. Narucki and members of The Knights.