Ipsa Dixit

September 4, 8pm, Modern Opera Fest returns in early September with Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit. Directed by Ashley Tata and featuring the composer as vocalist, it explores the intersection of music, language, and meaning, blending elements of monodrama, Greek theater, and screwball comedy to skewer the treachery of language and the questionable authority of artistic expression. Alex Ross has called the work “a twenty-first century masterpiece” (The New Yorker). Composed for soprano, flute, violin, and percussion, Ipsa Dixit was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in music. In six movements drawing on texts by Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Wittgenstein, Jenny Holzer, and Lydia Davis, the opera explores ideas from poetics, rhetoric, and metaphysics through extended vocal techniques and blistering ensemble virtuosity. See this ninety-minute tour de force in the Pavilion Theater on September 4, 8 pm. Tickets are $40; $25. Audiences members wanting to attend both Ipsa Dixit, September 4, and Savage Winter, September 9, and save $40 with a Modern Opera Fest Pass. “Brainily winsome.” Kate Soper enacts “the polarities out of which art emerges.” — Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times “A brainy and emotional tour de force.” — Alex Ross, The New Yorker