Oct. 10/16: World Premiere of Martin Brody's The Carp, Presented by Ecce Arts

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Contact: Katy Salomon | Primo Artists | VP, Public Relations 
katy@primoartists.com | 646.801.9406

Ecce Arts Presents the World Premiere of
Composer Martin Brody's The Carp

A new 60-minute chamber operetta that transforms a bizarre 2003 news story
about a “talking fish” into a witty, hybrid comic work scored for four singers and
five instrumentalists, featuring a libretto by art historian Dario Gamboni

October 10: New England Conservatory (Boston, MA) 

October 16: Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence, Italy) 

“Fish Market” by Johanna Weiss 

"An intensely communal encounter for our own time" – The Boston Globe 

www.eccearts.com 

Boston, MA (September 8, 2026) — Ecce Arts presents the world premiere of The Carp, a new chamber operetta by composer and long-time Ecce collaborator Martin Brody, on Saturday, October 10, 2026 at 7:00 PM at New England Conservatory's Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre in Boston. The production travels to Florence, Italy for its Italian premiere on Friday, October 16, 2026 at 7:00 PM at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, where Brody wrote the work during his residency as Fellow in Residence in 2025. Both performances feature the same cast and ensemble, conducted by Stratis Minakakis. 

The Carp is a 45-minute work for four singers and five instrumentalists, with a libretto by art historian Dario Gamboni. It takes as its subject a 2003 news story, reported in The New York Times, of a carp said to have spoken before its slaughter at a fish market. Brody and Gamboni build the account of an articulate fish delivering an apocalyptic message into a hybrid comic form that moves between opera and cantata, with the four singers shifting between named characters and chorus and a clarinet standing in for the voice of the fish itself. The piece extends Brody's long-standing engagement with musical modernism, narrative ambiguity, and interdisciplinary collaboration. 

The cast brings together soprano Stephanie Lamprea as Zalman's Wife, baritone Nathan Halbur as Zalman, tenor Samuel Rosner as Zev, and baritone Corey Gaudreau as Luis, with an ensemble of clarinetist Aleksis Martin, violinists Emma Burge and Anna Pavlou, violist Philip Rawlinson, and cellist Robbie Bui.

The Boston performance takes place in the Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre, an intimate, flexible space in New England Conservatory's Student Life and Performance Center. In Florence, the work returns to the setting in which it was written: Villa I Tatti, a center for advanced humanities research with significant art and library collections, situated on an estate of olive groves, vineyards, and Renaissance-style gardens on the border of Florence, Fiesole, and Settignano. 

Performance Calendar

Saturday, October 10, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Ecce Arts | Martin Brody: The Carp (World Premiere)
Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre | New England Conservatory | Boston, MA 

Friday, October 16, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Ecce Arts | Martin Brody: The Carp (Italian Premiere)
Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies | Florence, Italy 

Tickets: Available at eccearts.com 

Program:
Martin Brody — The Carp (libretto by Dario Gamboni)

Cast:
Stephanie Lamprea, soprano (Zalman's Wife)
Nathan Halbur, baritone (Zalman)
Samuel Rosner, tenor (Zev)
Corey Gaudreau, baritone (Luis)
Aleksis Martin, clarinet
Emma Burge, violin
Anna Pavlou, violin
Philip Rawlinson, viola
Robbie Bui, cello
Stratis Minakakis, conductor and music director 

About Martin Brody
Martin Brody is the Catherine Mills Davis Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College. He served as composer in residence at the American Academy in Rome in the 2001-2002 season and as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director of the Academy from 2007 to 2010. As a composer, he has received grants and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He has also served as resident composer at the Bogliasco Foundation and La Mortella. He has written extensively about modern music during the Cold War, with special emphasis on the music of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Stefan Wolpe. He is currently President of the Stefan Wolpe Society, Director of One Landscape – an arts and conservation organization – and a trustee of the American Academy in Rome. 

About Dario Gamboni
Dario Gamboni is professor emeritus of art history at the University of Geneva and an honorary fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. He engages in issues of visual perception and of interactions (including violent ones) with art. His books include The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (1997), Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (2002), and The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature (1989).

During his stay in Rome, Gamboni continued his exploration of the aesthetics of marble, participating in a workshop at the Bibliotheca Hertziana related to a recent collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Marble: From Late Antiquity to the Present (2021), which he edited with Gerhard Wolf and Jessica N. Richardson. Gamboni also worked on a review of Fabio Barry’s Painting in Stone on the same subject, “for which Rome is a crucial place, starting with the Pantheon, which contains the oldest preserved examples of ‘book-matched’ marble incrustation, a mode of decoration that interests me particularly.” Expanding on his book The Museum as Experience (2019), he revisited the Museo Mario Praz in Rome and sought out similar museums established by artists and collectors. 

After his Residency, Gamboni joined I Tatti in Florence as a visiting scholar, together with his wife, Johanna Weis, an artist in residence there.

About Ecce
Ecce is an ensemble of performing and creative artists who take on intensive collaborations and performance projects that touch on important cultural and social aspects of our time. The group's core aim is to work in a collaborative, creative, socially engaged, and interdisciplinary way. They routinely reach out to artists from around the world to assist in collaborative projects, and the ensemble is diverse in its talents and creative visions. 

Historic collaborators during their 10-year-long residency in Auvillar, France, included international figures such as Kaija Saariaho, Toshio Hosokawa, Philippe Hurel, Mark Andre, Garth Knox, Keiko Murakami, and a range of other performers, theater artists, and movement artists. Now held in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, the ensemble's summer festival, Etchings, features a transatlantic dialogue of American and European concert music with a range of additional concert experiences that transcend boundaries. The festival provides its featured fellow composers and national audiences opportunities to experience music free from the bounds of genre.

Etchings is directed by Grace Hughes, JoAnna Pope and John Aylward. The Etchings Festival Music Director is Stratis Minakakis. Ecce Ensemble performers are Jordan Hadrill, violin, Robbie Bui, cello, Lily Xie, flutes, Aleksis Martin, clarinet, and Geoff Burleson, piano. 

Learn more at www.eccearts.com.

# # #