USC Thornton instrumentalists perform in “The Comet/Poppea”

The Comet/Poppea, a new opera by Yuval Sharon, premiered at the MOCA on June 14 and ran through June 23. The production featured USC Thornton Early Music faculty member Jason Yoshida on the theorbo, Strings doctoral student Eric Tinkerhess on the viola de gamba and alumnus Coleman Itzkoff (MM ’16) on the cello.

As described by The New York Times, “The Comet/Poppea alternates between a radically pared-down Poppea and an adaptation of Du Bois’s story by the librettist Douglas Kearney and the composer George E. Lewis. It’s a mash-up featuring stark transitions — and superimpositions — between Monteverdi’s Baroque style and Lewis’s high-modernist states of frenzy.”

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Photo courtesy of The Comet/Poppea; MOCA