“Here at the BAM opera house, home of great, like-minded works such as Einstein on the Beach, I was thrilled to see the opera looking so handsome, with Jon Gibson's score sounding so colorful and mellifluous. …The music's hypnotic repetitiveness draws you into a contemplation of what Tesla represented and how America treats its innovators…”
-David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Nikola Tesla is unstuck in time in Violet Fire… The energetic young Serbian conductor Ana Zorana Brajovic, with a dozen accomplished musicians, made the most of Mr. Gibson’s simple, colorful melodies, with playing that was unfailingly secure and attractive… The role of the White Dove, a source of inspiration for Tesla, was simultaneously sung by Mirjana Jovanovic, a soprano, and danced by Joanna Kotze, who moved with an appealingly pigeonesque angular grace… Video projections by Sarah Drury and Jen Simmons lent an appropriate whiff of celluloid science fiction...”
-Steve Smith, New York Times
To Nikola Tesla’s long list of accomplishments--physicist, engineer and inventor--we can now add opera star, at least in absentia... He was also a tragic figure, making his life the stuff of which great theater is made... the staging is just magnificent ...very effective at conveying the mood. The music is terrific also. I recommend it highly to anyone, it’s just a beautiful production.
-Ira Flatow, Science Friday
Belgrade 2006
“A fascinating artistic conception… It was an opportunity for connecting the creative, scientific process on one side and on the other, the artistic act... The libretto is stratified and intertextual, and that fact gave the composer an opportunity to make fine music in a post-minimalistic musical language. The libretto provoked the director to interesting solutions; the directing is based on the best approaches in the field of contemporary opera direction.”
-Ivana Stamatovic, Politika
Philadelphia workshop 2004
"Undulating arpeggios repeated endlessly, creating an otherworldly musical environment for the story of the visionary electrical inventor Nikola Tesla... High-strung rhythms pulsed through instrumental texture like electricity. Vocal leaps erupted like power surges. Rhythmic counterpoint juxtaposed steady electrical pulse against something as irregular as Morse code. The music was dreamy... It also served as a reminder that the minimalist aesthetic has been the source of so much significant American music."
- David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer
"The surprise for me is not that Seidel's libretto bounces around in time – adding to the Tesla man-outside-of-time theme – but that it is poetry. Gibson's lovely, efficient, and sometimes even beguilingly astringent music was played onstage by the Relache Ensemble. There's just enough minimalist churning to suggest electric dynamos, but no predictable Phil Glass crescendos. The vocal writing is surprisingly beautiful. I was thrilled."
- John Perreault, artsjournal.com/artopia
"The narrative structure of the opera is smartly conceived... Gibson and librettist Miriam Seidel created characters who sing intelligibly, and with texts that are emotionally meaningful... The images projected on several screens were often delicate and beautifully animated."
- Peter Dobrin, Philadelphia Inquirer
"This production employed complex projections, sound effects, highly imaginative and dramatic lighting... the production was truly captivating."
- David Tilman, Jewish Exponent
More media coverage:
"Nikola Tesla's Brain," column by Andrei Codrescu, Gambit Weekly
"Inventor's Opera Turn," commentary by Andrei Codrescu, NPR All Things Considered
"Fire in the Sky:" arts section cover story, Philadelphia City Paper
