Check out ENAensemble (where I am the music director) for more info about my opera making!
COSMOPHOBIA
This is an in-progress, concert-length work being developed with singer, actor, and director Nicole Renna and flutist and composer Chelsea Meynig. This work explores the different relationships we each have to the cosmos: its terrifying infinities, its beauty, its nihilistic doom, and its empowering, endless creation. Scored for a chamber ensemble straddling traditional contemporary classical and singer-songwriter styles, it sets various texts, from technical descriptions of the Einstein field equations to introspective texts by each of the creators. Produced by ENAensemble and supported by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, this work is set for a premiere in Philadelphia in mid-2025.
GANYMEDE 5
Ganymede 5 is an hour long chamber opera in three acts with libretto by my illustrious librettist Aleksandar Hut Kono. It was premiered in the Philly Fringe Festival, September 18th, 2019 by ENAensemble.
You can listen to an excerpt here:
A bit about the opera:
I rewrote the first act as part of my PhD dissertation at Temple University, advised by Andrea Clearfield. Accordingly, only audio excerpts of the opera are available. Please reach out if you’re interested in hearing more!
Ganymede 5 Themes and Summary (Current Version)
Libretto – Aleksandar Hut Kono || Music – Evan Kassof || Dramaturg – Rose Freeman
Thematic Exigency
Set in the far-future, Ganymede 5 follows the political and personal dramas of nature pornography addicts. On Ganymede 5 – where a meticulous adherence to science renders it the most peaceful and powerful human colony in space – only terrestrial nature is taboo. The cost to build this utopian society was the total objectification and desolation of nature. This synthetic world is mediated via the omniscient Algorithm, and at its heart represents the maximization of a society’s adoption of technology to control the “self-made” world.
Plot Summary
Act 1 – The young politician Rava is arrested in a holographic meadow. The news of her arrest spreads across Ganymede 5 quickly and her friend Rita meets her in an interrogation room. Worried ‘their secret’ has been uncovered, Rita turns cold to her friend and leaves. The Chairwoman comes and offers to frame an immigrant to save Rava. Instead, Rava insists they change Ganymede to be more nature-accepting. The act ends with Rava’s dire fate sealed.
Act 2 – Seven is on a talk show introducing Meticulously Deranged, an exposé on his life as an immigrant on Ganymede 5. The host, Beethoven, teases Seven about the myriad absurdities and sexual deviances of Ganymede 5’s nature porn scene, but the interview turns dark when the true horror of Seven’s life is revealed.
Act 3 – Rita meets Seven back on Ganymede, and they watch a video of sheep grazing and smell a vile of hay. Their bliss is interrupted by the Chairwoman’s speech about Rava’s arrest. Then, Seven’s dealer calls him and they rush to see the new offer. The dealer has a jar of bees. Completely mesmerized, Rita steals them and runs back to Seven’s. They fight over the jar and ultimately, Seven smashes the jar. The bees escape, causing a chain reaction in the colony which ends in sudden destructive darkness.
2019 SERIAL OPERA PROJECT
The 2019 Serial Opera Project is a six month long serialized opera produced by ENAensemble, with each episode made by a different composer/librettist team.
The first episode has a libretto by Aleksandar Hut Kono and music by myself. It is scored for soprano, flute, violin, and percussion. Premiered 5 March 2019 at the Philadelphia Free Library’s Music Department with Alize Rozsnyai singing and revived as part of Between, featuring Katie Porcell.
GREENLAND
Premiered on 8 July, 2015 at the Milton Court Studio Theatre in London by the Guildhall Opera Program as part of the first year of the new MA in Opera Making & Writing course offered by the Guildhall School.
Greenland is an opera in one act with a libretto written by award-winning Croatian poet and writer Alexandar Hut Kono. The opera is about a camera crew making a propoganda film for the Nazi regime circa 1940 in Greenland being stranded on the ice sheet and trying to survive. Their journey (both psychological and physical) to survival is altered dramatically and profoundly by the appearance of an Aurora Borealis. Some argue the role of the Film Director (soprano) may be based on the film director Leni Riefenstahl; however, each of the characters are fictional and made to capture - in stark relief - the various types of people who participate in fascist regimes.
In January of 2016, a revival of Greenland was given at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and in Budapest as part of the Liszt Academy International Opera Festival.
Below is a recording of a complete performance of Greenland, given at the Milton Court Studio Theatre.
COLONY
Premiered on 30 May, 2015 at the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden by the ROH Youth Opera Company.
I was commissioned to write a 10-minute youth opera with librettists Ruth Mariner and Aleksandar Hut Kono. The opera is about the goings-on in an ant-colony, with a choir of scientists observing four choirs of 'ants'. The ants sing in a language we invented called Antish that uses a grammatical structure identical in logic to the way pheromones work to communicate within hives. The Scientists observe this colony of ants collecting food (State 0), tending to the queen and helping her lay eggs (State 1), attacking an invading mantis and consuming it (State 3), forming a raft of their bodies to survive a flood in he nest (State 5), and making landfall and returning to work as normal (State 5).
A DVD recording of Colony, along with the other works performed by the ROH Youth Opera Company is set to be released soon! In the meantime, here is a recording from the pit of the premiere!
Memoirs of Transformation
Premiered on 18 September, 2014 at the Duke's Hall at the Royal Academy of Music in London with singers from the RAM vocal department and opera program, instrumentalists from both the postgrad and undergrad courses at the Academy, and conducted by the composer.
Memoirs of Transformation was my concert project for the Royal Academy of Music's MMus course. Essentially my thesis, MoT, is an amalgamation of the myriad of different compositional, philosophical, practical, and aesthetic issues I was introduced to and forced to reckon with while at the Academy. MoT has a libretto written in four languages, with each scene being made out of libretto taken verbatim from famous 18th- and 19th-century operas including Marriage of Figaro, Madame Butterfly, William Tell, Eugene Onegin, Simon Boccanegra, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung. Additionally, in order to experiment with the perception of the drama, the opera was performed twice; first behind a screen so the audience could only hear the music, and after the interval, without a screen in a semi-theatricallized production.
Below is the video of the premiere of Memoirs of Transformation.
The premiere performance of Memoirs of Transformation. Although the video says this is Act II, the music is identical in both acts. What changes is the staging, with the 'first act' being performed behind a screen, so the audience only hears the music.
reflection
Premiered on 6 March, 2017 at Rock Hall at Temple University in Philadelphia by the Temple University New Music Ensemble.
Reflection – a work for soprano and small ensemble – is the culmination of a collaboration between Jannette Cheong, the author of the poem (Reflection, 2014), and myself. Jannette and I began discussing this work in May of 2015 in lobby of the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre where we were observing the rehearsals for my opera Colony. What attracted me to her work was the space it creates for music to participate in the poetic discourse. For every line she sets to paper, each poetically complete in its own right, there is an immense space between for the imagination to inhabit. Reflection’s score is meant to carry the listener through those spaces, augmenting the text with a musical discourse that illuminates an interpretation of Jannette’s expression.
From her notes, she begins that:
“On a late Autumnal day I walked across London. Three images crossed my consciousness and I noted these down:
• ‘The shadows of these buildings are empty, yet deep’
• ‘Who would be a road sweeper in autumn?’
• ‘I do not know what a blind person sees’”
And concludes that: “Reflection is good for the soul….”
Not quite an Opera: Film Scores
In Silence - a Fashion Film
Presented by the PETRIe Inventory. More information about this project can be found on the piece's page here.