The Silver Cypress is the creation of Iranian-American composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh, who won the commission from the prestigious Beth Morrison Projects that is being workshopped by opera artists at the Banff Centre. With previous commissions from ensembles like the Kronos Quartet and L’Orchestre de Paris among others, Nourbakhsh has typically relied on her lived experience to create a musical language all her own. In The Silver Cypress, this language creates a dystopian world where water (and the nourishment of life) is scarce and a community resembling climate refugees is suffering.

“We wanted to explore a world where people have lost water, but also have lost the water within, which is their tears,” Nourbakhsh explains, “and connecting tears with the magic of empathy and also storytelling as a way to understand each other better and to be able to live with each other.”

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