Director

Kirsten Z Cairns

Music Director / Conductor

Brandon Zhou

1st Wanderer

Nathan Halbur

2nd Wanderer

Erin Matthews

The Hunter

Daniel Fridley

The Bound Man/King

Omar Najmi

Viola

Alexander Vavilov

Cello

Nicholas Johnson

Double Bass

Dan Gorn

Electric Guitar

Dan VanHassel

Laptop

Tianyi Wang

Designer

Peter Torpey

Stage Manager

Marsé Alaundra

A special workshop exploration of an opera in one act. Prologue and Scenes 1, 2, and 3.

With thanks to the Goethe Institut Boston for making their space available for this event; and to Clark University for their support of this production.

If you would like to support a full production of Oblivion, please donate to Enigma Chamber Opera. Thank you for your support!

Program Note

Two wanderers in a surreal and otherworldly landscape question their memory and identity? What do they remember of their lives? What paths will they travel? Will they find redemption or the truth of who they are?

Oblivion explores the afterlife, in all its spiritual, mythological, and existential aspects, and its similarities to our current conceptions of a post-apocalyptic world. The original libretto draws its mythos from Dante’s Purgatorio and the Book of Daniel while keeping the drama in an eerily familiar space.

—

Oblivion is a personal meditation on religion, spirituality, and the afterlife, but for me it is also a cautionary tale on how we trust others to set the terms of our own lives. Forging one’s own path is a fraught but beautiful transcendentalist ideal and one that I experienced early on in my life as a relief to organized religion. But the American imagination has done little to deliver on its transcendental ideals, caught between its troubling history and its still untamed thirst for expansion. I hope Oblivion might be a window into, and critique of, the contemporary American soul.

It’s been a pleasure revisiting the work with Kirsten Cairns, who I’ve come to admire for her vision and artistry.

— John Aylward

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