Name: Opera Fusion: New Works: SLEEPERS AWAKE
Start: 2025-11-08T14:00:00-05:00
Location: Cincinnati Music Hall

A public performance of excerpts from the new opera SLEEPERS AWAKE.
Music by Gregory Spears
Co-creator & stage director Jenny Koons
Inspired by the writings of Robert Walser and others
Composer Gregory Spears, whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe), creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser. As the work’s chorus sings itself in and out of slumber, the voices pull us into a liminal space where time is both fractured and cyclical. Conceived with and directed by Jenny Koons, this new work activates a collective voice to question the fragile line between waking and dreaming.
Commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, the complete work will receive its world premiere in April 2026.
Tickets for the OF:NW workshop public performance of excerpts on Saturday, November 8, 2025, in the Wilks Studio at Music Hall are available for $15 (adults); free for full-time students (1 ticket per valid ID).