Winner of the 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition!“A vivid Orlando makes history in Vienna” (New York Times International): Olga Neuwirth’s opera Orlando, based on...

Winner of the 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition!

“A vivid Orlando makes history in Vienna” (New York Times International): Olga Neuwirth’s opera Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, is the first full-length opera by a woman celebrating its premiere at the Vienna State Opera. Olga Neuwirth, for a long time one of the great composers of the present, succeeds with this opera in creating a captivating arc across many musical genres. It’s an exciting, socially critical production by Polly Graham who puts a fantastically singing and playing Kate Lindsey in the center of the action. For Orlando, Neuwirth won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award; it became “world premiere of the year” by Opernwelt magazine, and for Die Zeit, the Hamburg-based national German newspaper, it was “the premiere of the season.”

Acclaim:

"Neuwirth’s score, fusing orchestral, electronic and sampled sounds, is often bewitching...while the use of musical quotations, from Elizabethan polyphony to Lady Gaga, is certainly entertaining.

"The Vienna production...clearly didn’t stint on anything. Some of the sense of grandeur may be lost on a small screen, but the use of video, with texts projected on to the set, as well as the sumptuous costumes by Comme des Garçons, is certainly lavish...

"As Orlando, the mezzo Kate Lindsey is outstanding in what is a hugely demanding role...Constance Hauman provides a telling cameo as the Queen. Matthias Pintscher is the conductor, efficiently coordinating everything[.]"

--The Guardian (Andrew Clements)