I sat down yesterday with Danielle MacMillan who will sing Agni in Against the Grain’s upcoming production of Claude Vivier’s Kopernikus. Kopernikus is subtitled A Ritual Opera for the Dead and concerns the experience of transitioning from life to death as experienced by Agni. I had many questions:
- What was the music like? After all Vivier is not your “typical” composer.
- What’s the nature of the production?
- What does it feel like to play a dead person?
And a few more things that bubbled up as we talked. So here’s a summary.