ECHO

Chamber opera for 2024/25

Music, Yevgeniy Sharlat // Libretto, Stephanie Fleischmann

Hub New Music and Estelí Gomez collaborate on Yevgeniy Sharlat and Stephanie Fleischmann’s one-act chamber opera, ECHO (working title). A dark comedy set in a post-human dystopian world, ECHO chronicles the misadventures of an advanced singing robot who has malfunctioned amidst a cataclysm and reboots to find herself jettisoned on top of a trash heap behind the ruins of an opera house at the center of a decimated metropolis.

Sifting through the shards of this destroyed civilization for signs of life, the robot (who has been programmed with the consciousness of a former box-office worker) uncovers the remnants of a music box and a collection of discarded musical clowns (embodied by Hub New Music). Longing for the before-times, she enlists these antic figures to help her recreate what she remembers of a performance she witnessed long ago—a great diva singing a lament, an appeal to the gods for salvation. The robot believes that if she gets the prayer right, humanity will revive, and the world will once again reverberate with meaning.

Hilarity ensues as she attempts to cajole/strong-arm/hack this unruly, exceptionally clumsy and at times obstinate “orchestra” into performing an accompaniment worthy of her lament. Ultimately her pleading achieves its intended goal, only for her batteries to run down before she can complete her invocation.

Drawing on Commedia, Buster Keaton, Méliès, and Monteverdi, among others, ECHO explores what it is to lament, to attempt to re-member lost worlds through the redeeming power of art, which is instrumental if we are to move forward in the face of an uncertain future. As the opera veers from wildly funny to heartbreaking, comic and tragic collide to generate the fission of a one-of-a-kind work that looks back to some of our oldest operatic forms in order to create something completely new.

ECHO was commissioned with support from the Guggenheim Foundation. Performances last approximately one hour and can be presented in fully staged or concert formats.

collaborators