Composer, creator and connector Paola Prestini, one of NPR’s “Top 100 Composers in the World” before she was 40, who swept up practically every award there was at Juilliard and works on a grand scale. Four opera world premieres in the last season alone, and first woman to be commissioned in Minnesota Opera's New Works Initiative. That was for Edward Tulane, which I love, her grand opera about the toy rabbit who falls overboard and goes on a miraculous journey in his quest to get back to his little girl. I love the way she writes for voice and orchestra and the way she incorporates technology and virtual reality and electronics into her music. She’s a ravenous collaborator, a chameleon.
Born in Trento in Italy in 1975, she comes from a storied musical family in the woodwind business. Her father founded Prestini musical instruments pads and reeds; and his father, and grandfather, were sought after oboists who played with La Scala and Toscanini. The family emigrated to America when she was tiny and she was raised on the Mexican border literally a stone’s throw from the wall, saying that growing up on the border, speaking different languages, gave her the foundation for her particular style of music that instinctively interacts with any different cultures. “I had an example of what it meant to reinvent yourself, to have a blank slate and create the world that you want to be in,“ she says. She is a proud new American.
And, she’s a proud American entrepreneur. She founded her first arts collective while still at Juilliard and now runs the performance venue National Sawdust in Brooklyn. She has a staff! Her collaborations range from Philip Glass and Renee Fleming and her husband the cellist Jeffrey Ziegler, to poets and filmmakers, visual artists and scientists.
“What is the world around you?” she constantly asks herself, and “How do you nurture that world around you? Most importantly, you have to figure out what it is that will keep you creating. That is a true measure of success.”
Paola Prestini (1975 –)
MUSIC: Edward Tulane, Act 1, Scene 1
Minnesota Opera / Lidiya Yankovskaya
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
