FULL Virginia and The Time Machine (Joan La Barbara) New York City 2018 Joan La Barbara, Julia Meadows

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Virginia and The Time Machine  
• Composer: La Barbara Joan   
• Libretto: Monique Truong    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: The Flea Theater, New York City  
• Recorded: November 2018
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Joan La Barbara, Julia Meadows
• Conductor:   
• Orchestra: Instrumental ensemble  
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Experiments in Opera  
• Date Published: 2019  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  With World War II drawing closer to England each day and critics decrying her newly published book on pacifism and women’s right, Virginia W. is besieged by voices of discord and ridicule. Trying to silence them, she imagines—and therefore possesses—a device with which she can turn a dial and listen to another time and place: August 1890, in St. Ives, a remote village on the Cornwall coast. Returning to the idyllic summers of her childhood, bathed in the sounds, sights, and the early morning light refracting off the Celtic Sea, she is eight years old, and her idealized, beloved Mother, then the heart of the family, is still alive. At the edge of this longed-for soundscape are jarring doubts, clashing facts about her childhood, and intimations of the tragedies to come, that disrupt Virginia W.’s reverie. The synthesizer serves here as a sonic time machine, bringing the sounds of what was and what was lost and intermingling them with Virginia W.’s present, creating a moment out of time, a neither here nor there, when she is both woman and girl, public author and private being, real and imagined.

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