When I spoke to Paola Prestini over Zoom, we immediately started talking about her dream to make an opera from Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a novel about two women whose lives are forged in response to each other. Prestini’s music is just as defined by her collaborations. 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—and whether that ecosystem is healthy or not.
Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines. Recent projects include “Houses of Zodiac,” a “solo cello album” that features no less than four poets, four films, two choreographers, and one throat singer. The upcoming opera/research project “Sensorium Ex” is the result of a years-long collaboration between scientists, artists, and the voice-related disability community. In 2015, Prestini co-founded National Sawdust, one of the few New York cultural institutions led by women. An incubator for a wide variety of experimental music, the Brooklyn venue models what an equitable classical music environment actually sounds like.
We sat down to talk about Prestini’s most recent opera, “No One is Forgotten,” co-composed with foley artist Sxip Shirey. Commissioned by the Dallas Opera and inspired by true accounts from detained journalists and aid workers, the radio opera uses 3D audio technology to depict two women in captivity. Searing, imaginative, and darkly funny, the work is another extravaganza of collaboration: it was produced by Eve Gigliotti, who also gives a spectacular performance; features exceptional actors and musicians; and is adapted from a play by Winter Miller worth reading on its own. The hour-long production can be streamed anywhere.
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