FULL THE PRIDE OF PRIPYAT (Sunny Knable) New York 2023 Erin Brittain, Rachael Basescu, Grant Mech

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: The Pride of Pripyat  
• Composer: Knable Sunny   
• Libretto: Jim Knable based on Adam Higginbotham’s "Life in Pripyat Before, and the Morning After, the Chernobyl Disaster"  
• Venue & Opera Company: The Church-in-the-Gardens, Forest Hills, Queens, New York  
• Recorded: March 19, 2023
• Type: Concert Live
• Singers: Erin Brittain, Rachael Basescu, Grant Mech
• Conductor:   
• Orchestra: Patrick Fink, PIANO  
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Sunny Knable  
• Date Published: 2026  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
• Subtitles: nosubs  

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

PROGRAM NOTE from the LIBRETTIST:
Inspired by the success of its Russian-themed mini opera For Love of Country at the 2019 Asheville Fringe Arts Festival, The Perspective Collective reached out to composer Sunny Knable about the idea of a follow-up companion piece focusing on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986. After exploring some musical ideas, Sunny Knable enlisted his playwright brother Jim Knable to develop a story and libretto for the piece. Over three months, The Brothers Knable, who previously found success with their frequently produced young audience opera The Magic Fish, collaborated to shape six scenes exploring the experience of Chernobyl through the lens of the growing little city next to it, Pripyat. Using a variety of primary source materials, though fundamentally inspired by Adam Higginbotham’s “Life in Pripyat Before, And the Morning After, the Chernobyl Disaster,” published on Atlas Obscura, Jim Knable crafted a narrative that begins with Pripyat’s chief architect Maria Protsenko and weaves through more than a dozen characters, from teachers to babushkas to nurses and their patients, who were forced to deal with their basic notions of patriotism, loyalty, love, and hope through a disaster we all know to be of epic proportions.
– Jim Knable

PROGRAM NOTE from the COMPOSER:
The Pride of Pripyat is musically inspired by such disparate elements as the hammering of workers, propaganda songs of the USSR, Ukrainian folk songs, the beeping of hospital machinery, and the cacophony of carnival music. While the kaleidoscopic storylines of multiple characters provided ample variety for musical expression, the entire piece can be boiled down to a 12-tone row (12 notes completing a chromatic scale) which governs the whole opera from its Overture, six Scenes, and five Interludes. No audience need be burdened with the mathematical principles a composer uses to generate ideas. Still, you might be interested that this musical DNA is based on the literal spelling of “C-H-E-R-N-O-B-Y-L” in musical language. For opera and musical theatre fans, you might hear nods to Sondheim, John Adams, or Kurt Weill, among others. From the beginning of this project, I intended to set the libretto written by my brother in whatever musical language would present the most honest, empathic, and unified whole. I am grateful to The Perspective Collective for commissioning it. While we finished the first draft of this piece just before the pandemic, long before the Ukrainian War, and before America’s Insurrection, its subject remains unfortunately relevant to today’s world.
– Sunny Knable

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