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Spotlight Feature - Luisa Matthynssens


Welcome back to our Spotlight series! The countdown continues to our 11th annual New in November festival on Sunday, November 14 at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Hartford. We hope you've already purchased your tickets for this exciting evening celebrating new opera in Connecticut's capital city. To purchase your TICKETS for NIN11, visit our website. Today we are thrilled to introduce the composer and librettist behind our second featured opera: The Secret Life of Siri. We are delighted to welcome composer/librettist Luisa Matthynssens to our New in November festival. We hope you enjoy learning about Luisa and what Opera for the 22nd Century means to her.

 

Luisa Matthynssens is a composer and pianist residing in Oklahoma City. Her compositions fuse elements from many genres including the Romantic Period, Musical Theater, Jazz, and Latin styles. Her first opera, The Secret Life of Siri, for which she is both composer and librettist, was selected for Oklahoma City’s chapter of Opera on Tap’s Ten Minute Opera Festival in 2020 and is set to premiere at Hartford Opera Theater for their New in November series. Other notable works include ”Sun and Moon,” an ethereal chamber work for seven players, “Rosalina,” a rhythmic melancholic duet for cello and piano, “Ruminations,” a reflective piece for piano and electronics, and “To the Water and the Wild,” a song for voice and string quartet based upon W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Stolen Child.” In addition to composing for the stage, Luisa writes pedagogical pieces for her piano students that expand students’ harmonic language at the elementary and intermediate levels. She is the founder, instructor, and composer at Cadenza Studios, a private piano studio in Oklahoma City and online sheet music store specializing in pedagogical piano repertoire.

Luisa holds a Master’s Degree in Composition and Collaborative Piano, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Piano Performance and Pedagogy, both from the University of Central Oklahoma where she was under the tutelage of Samuel Magrill and Keith White for composition, and Sallie Pollack and Chindarat Charoenwongse-Shaw for piano.


Here is what Luisa wants HOTOpera fans to know about The Secret Life of Siri:

The Secret Life of Siri is a farce that explores the sentient side of our virtual assistants and their relationships to us and with each other.

Here is what Luisa had to say about Opera for the 22nd Century:

Opera reflects the time period in which it was written and depicts the drama found in everyday life, something for which there will never be a shortage. Opera will stay relevant to the 22nd century and beyond as composers continue to innovate as they adapt to the world around them to tell the stories left to be told.


 

Thank you for tuning in to our Spotlight series featuring Luisa Matthynssens and The Secret Life of Siri. Follow our social media pages this week for more information about this composer/librettist dream team and press/articles about their opera. Make sure to purchase your TICKETS for our 11th annual New in November festival. Stay tuned for more features.

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