The Artists
Anna Pidgorna, Composer
ANNA is a Ukrainian-born, Canadian-raised composer and multi-media artist who combines sound, visual arts, writing, and carpentry to create works that are dramatic and picturesque. She works extensively with Ukrainian folk singing, incorporating elements of this style in instrumental music and performing as a pseudo-folk vocalist herself. With an enduring love for the outdoors, Anna draws a great deal of inspiration from the natural soundscape, often imitating birds and animals. Having studied visual art from an early age, she incorporates visual elements into some of her manuscripts. She has been commissioned by Wild Shore Festival, Irish Language Art Song Project, Ludovico Ensemble, Ensemble Paramirabo, 21C Festival, Soundstreams, Toronto’s New Music Concerts, Gryphon Trio, and Thin Edge New Music Collective. She is a recipient of two SOCAN Foundation Emerging Composers’ Awards and represented Canada at the ISCM World New Music Days 2013 festival in Vienna. Anna recently completed a PhD in music at Princeton University.
Maria Reva, Librettist
MARIA writes fiction and opera libretti. She is the author of the story collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear (Doubleday, Virago, and Knopf Canada New Face of Fiction, 2020). Maria’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Journey Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s RBC Bronwen Wallace Award in 2018 and a National Magazine Award in 2019. Her musical collaborations include an opera libretto for ERATO Ensemble, texts for Vancouver International Song Institute’s Art Song Lab, and a script for City Opera Vancouver. In March 2017, musica intima vocal ensemble premiered Uta’s Escape, a commission by Canadian composer Jennifer Butler based on one of Maria’s stories. Maria was born in Ukraine and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, and is at work on an opera and a novel.
