With music by Wayne Shorter and a libretto by Esperanza Spalding Iphigenia is not an adaptation of the Greek myth as much as it is an intervention into myth-making itself, and intervention into opera as we know it. Classical and jazz forms collide in a full orchestral score that features Shorter’s ground-breaking method of symphonic improvisation, with his venerated quartet at the centre. Spalding’s libretto is deeply poetic and then suddenly radical – Iphigenia is multiplied, her identity is fractured and shared until the stage is occupied by a chorus of her. 

Iphigenia was born to be sacrificed — or so the Greek myth would have us believe, but what if she contests her fate? What if the winds don’t blow and the sails hang limp in the sea air? Iphigenia stares down the history of opera and makes some demands on its future: No more tragic women singing through suicide and going mad in perfect pitch. No more spectacles of women dead and dying. In the end Shorter and Spalding turn their gaze outward beyond the stage: What will we make, they ask, at this precise moment in our collective present when we are so desperately in need of new visions for the world. 

HarrisonParrott is pleased to collaborate on the international touring of this brand new opera.