Sleepers Awake

About

In this opera, the chorus has the starring role. Composer Gregory Spears, whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe), creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser. As the Opera Philadelphia Chorus sings itself in and out of slumber, the voices pull us into a liminal space where time is both fractured and cyclical. Conceived with and directed by the transformative Jenny Koons, this visually dazzling world premiere activates a collective voice to question the fragile line between waking and dreaming. Corrado Rovaris conducts.