pkhentz

PKHENTZ!

a new opera in one act

By Dylan Schneider

After a story by Andrei Sinyavsky

Duration: 1 hour

Cast: 4 singers, 1 actor

Instrumentation: single winds, sax,

accordion, piano, perc, strings

Premiere: 2016-17 season

Musicians: subLIMINAL opera

Currently, I am at work on my third opera, a one-act entitled PKHENTZ (pronounced “pah-KENTS”). The libretto is a collaborative adaptation of a story of the same title by renowned Russian dissident and author Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997), whose works written during the height of Soviet power offer a biting critique of life under an oppressive regime, often disguised in surreal circumstances.

In the opera, Andrei Kazimirovich, a cantankerous hunchback, endures a hermetic existence in a squalid flat in Moscow. His only relief from self-imposed isolation is his neighbor, Veronica, a voluptuous beauty, desperately in love with Andrei despite his revolting physique. Mysteriously, however, it is Andrei who finds her repulsive. Over the course of the opera, we learn why: Andrei is in fact no hunchback at all, but an alien—and also a cactus—who conceals his spiny appendages in his makeshift hump (finally revealed to the audience when Andrei, at last, takes a bath). On a symbolic level, the outrageous circumstances of the story become a dark exploration of the alienation of the individual under the totalitarian state.

PKHENTZ will receive its premiere in the 2015-16 season. It will be the inaugural production of New York City’s subLIMINAL OPERA, a collective of composers, performers, and theater designers, committed to the performance of new operas.