About Hilliard and Boresi
Peter Hilliard & Matt Boresi are the creators of new opera and opera-adjacent work, regularly praised for their "subtlety, humor, charm, and sorrow."
In the early days of the pandemic, the two conceived and spearheaded the most ambitious opera commissioning project of 2020. Working with conductor/lead producer Maria Sensi Sellner The Decameron Opera Coalition employed dozens of artists and birthed 9 new operas, each produced by a different company across the US. Tales From A Safe Distance, streamed in 4 episodes on line and is held together by a frame opera written by Hilliard and Boresi, starring legendary baritone Luca Pisaroni. OperaWire listed it as one of the top 5 industry-defining moments of 2020, and WQXR awarded the project a “Freddie” award for excellence in opera. The second season, “Heroes” included a performance by Karen Slack of new art song. The third Decameron project included a hilarious set of Hilliard and Boresi Christmas Carols.
Their most recent full length opera “The Last American Hammer”, (World Premiere, UrbanArias, Washington DC 2018), featuring renowned soprano Elizabeth Futral, was praised by critics as a “beautifully prepared, dramatically taut” production, ”which makes us challenge our cultural, political, racial and regional assumptions head on”, with “a difficult - but needed - conclusion for these times.” It received a second production at Pittsburgh Opera in 2020, a third at the University of Illinois, and a fourth production at Opera Grand Rapids.
Hilliard and Boresi’s blues-infused opera, "Blue Viola" (UrbanArias, Opera Memphis, Lyric Opera Of the North) was called as "as good a rejoinder as any the notion that opera is dead".
Matt and Peter have created award-winning crossover work from Off-Broadway’s “Don Imbroglio” and “Going Down Swingin’” to an award winning comic romp through the complete works of Verdi with vegetable puppets. They both holds Master of Fine Arts degrees from the Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University.
Peter lives in Philadelphia. Matt lives in Chicago.
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