MATA Presents at Carnegie Hill Concerts:
Azalea Twining | Anna Heflin
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Program:
AZALEA TWINING Enough Rope (2023-2025) World Premiere
Azalea Twining, Soprano
Sebastian Grinberg-Bly, Piano
A new song-cycle
ANNA HEFLIN: The Wonderland Series (2019)
Shannon Reilly, Violin/Vocals
a one-act opera for singing/acting violinist
by Anna Heflin
for Shannon Reilly
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Featuring:
Anna Heflin - composer, librettist, director, videographer
Shannon Reilly - acting violinist in the roles of Scholar, Charles Dodgson, Alice, Queen(s), Flowers
Katie Weissman - animal handler, bird trainer, rabbit keeper
Evan Courtin - electronic track support
Molly the cat - Dinah
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Enough Rope (2023-2025) is a song cycle of miniatures set to poems from Dorothy Parker’s collection of the same name. I first came across Parker’s poetry the Summer after graduating High School and instantly fell in love with her writing. Concise and cutting, yet sensitive–her work articulated my own experiences and feelings, so I began composing while reading. I chose six poems: “Prophetic Soul,” “The Thin Edge,” “Anecdote,” “The Small Hours,” “Portrait of the Artist,” and “August” to string together into a song cycle which describes the protagonist's loss of a relationship and identity, followed by her struggle to reclaim and grow into herself through the restorative properties of her artistic process.
Anna Heflin’s The Wonderland Series (2019) is “fascinating and impossibly concise…a dense, 33-minute fever dream in which music is fully integrated in a one-woman play that investigates numerous facets of author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s life and his work under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.” (Roc City News) In this opera for singing/acting violinist Shannon Reilly, Reilly is joined onstage by accompanying pre-recorded audio and video, all of which features her portraying the various characters. There are three layers to the piece: the music which is inspired by Lewis Carroll’s writings, scholarly research about the work and Carroll, and the character of Lewis Carroll himself (i.e. Charles Dodgson) which uses quotes from the author. After falling into Wonderland, the listener will encounter Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, The Scholar, Alice, The Queen, the Garden of Live Flowers, the Playing Cards, Dinah the Cat and others over the course of their journey. Themes in the work include Dodgson’s campaign against voter manipulation, his obsession with 42 and its relevance to Christianity and the Jabberwocky, the Carroll/Dodgson split identity, how Darwin’s work influenced Alice in Wonderland and more.
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Azalea Twining (19) is a soprano and composer. As a 2020-2021 fellow of the Luna Composition Lab at Kaufman Music Center, Azalea studied composition with Ellen Reid and composed Under Her Voices for piano trio, which was the winner of the 2021 G. Schirmer for Luna Lab Prize. She has continued to study composition and create pieces with a focus on singing her own work.
Azalea’s most recent and current projects include “Echo” for solo flute, commissioned by Intersection, The Red House for saxophone quartet, commissioned by Second Stage and Composers Now, and Evelyn: Four Bodies One Life, a dance opera created and performed by her family.
Azalea studied voice with Eileen Clark from 2014-2023 and is an alumni of the WNO Opera Institute, Eastman Summer Classical Studies programs, and NYU MPAP Summer Classical Voice Intensive. She is currently a music major at Columbia University, where she studies voice with Josephine Mongiardo-Cooper and is a member of the early-music choral ensemble, Collegium Musicum.
She is also honored to work outside of university—premiering works by composers Elizabeth Hoffman and Cecilia Olszewski. In the past year, she has had the pleasure of performing at The Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, SEAMUS Festival, and MATA Festival.
Azalea hopes to foster a career as a composer/performer.
Anna Heflin is a composer and writer who constructs high-octane, humorous, and sensual worlds with non-linear narratives that thrive on musical and psychological fragmentation. Whether writing a symphony or a staged literature-inspired solo opera for an instrumentalist, she is drawn to the unexpected and channels her highly imaginative virtuosic visions into complex characters and unorthodox narrative arcs that often integrate text and staging. Her long-term collaborations with individual artists and organizations developed over years of working as a freelance violist are central to her process and her core values include trust, risk-taking, experimentation, play, open communication, and creative problem-solving.
Her compositions do not fit neatly into a box and neither does she – she is invigorated by approaching music from every angle and can be found writing program notes for the LA Phil, giving academic lectures, hosting radio shows, leading roundtable discussions, and running her journal Which Sinfonia. Recent highlights include the sold-out run of Heflin’s The INcomplete Cosmicomics (2025) — her hour-long Calvino-riff opera full of “sly humor and eternal cosmic peace” (Classical Voice North America) for vocalizing cellist Aaron Wolff and looper at The Tank in NYC as produced by Experiments in Opera.
Heflin is currently based in Los Angeles pursuing her Doctorate in Music Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music.
Violinist Shannon Reilly thrives in the passionate pursuit of excellence in decoding and performing experimental contemporary music. A dedicated collaborator, she often premiers her colleagues’ compositions and works with emerging and student composers.
She regularly plays with ensembles, including Slee Sinfonietta and Liminal Space Ensemble, and has appeared with the Buffalo Chamber Players, Ensemble Signal, Buffalo’s Friends of Vienna series, and the Alla Balena Ensemble. She’s recorded new works by Anna Heflin, Connor D’Netto, and Duo Purla, in addition to her own active recital schedule and an upcoming premiere recording of works by Ákos Rózmann.
This is Reilly’s seventh year as Concertmaster and performance faculty for the June in Buffalo Festival at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where she also held the violin professorship for four years, and she routinely performs with the Buffalo and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Reilly holds both a Bachelor’s and a Masters degree in violin performance from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied violin with Reneé Jolles and Charles Castleman, and with Brad Lubman in the Musica Nova ensemble.
Reilly is an avid reader, currently making her way through the works of Terry Pratchett, and lives in Buffalo, NY, with her three dogs.