San Francisco-based contemporary opera company Opera Parallèle invites you to the top of the world with Everest: An Immersive Experience. Inspired by the true events of a 1996 expedition, Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer’s masterful opera follows climbers as they confront their physical and emotional limits in their quest to conquer the mountain. Building on the success of OP’s award-winning film Everest: A Graphic Novel Opera, this production combines the vividness of graphic novels with the visceral power of opera in a unique immersive environment. With a rich recording of a renowned cast and orchestra led by Maestro Nicole Paiement, the animations come to life through facial tracking technology that transforms the singers’ movements (at the time of recording) into animated graphics that follow their voices. Everest offers an entirely new way to experience opera, placing you directly into the action and immersing you in the intricate imagery and soaring soundscape of an incredible story.
About the Producers
Nicole Paiement is the founder and general and artistic director of Opera Parallèle, and Brian Staufenbiel is the company’s creative director. For the past 15 years, they have led OP’s innovative productions, including recent collaboration on Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell’s The Shining, Philip Glass’ La Belle et la Bête, David Little and Laura Karpman’s Birds & Balls (librettos by Royce Vavrek and Gail Collins), and Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer’s Everest: An Immersive Experience, a work that originally premiered at The Dallas Opera, where Paiement is principal guest conductor. An active guest conductor, Paiement has also conducted with companies across the U.S., including Washington National Opera, Seattle Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and The Atlanta Opera. In 2022, she debuted with the English National Opera conducting Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s It’s a Wonderful Life, returning in 2023 to conduct Everest with the BBC Symphony at the Barbican Centre. In 2024, she debuted with the Vienna Volksoper, conducting both a symphonic concert and John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary.
Specializing in multimedia, immersive, and interdisciplinary productions, Brian Staufenbiel works across a range of disciplines, collaborating with film and media designers, choreographers and dancers, circus artists, and designer fabricators. His progressive approach to stagecraft has garnered critical acclaim for many of OP’s productions, including Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking, Philip Glass’ Orphée and Les Enfants Terribles, Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s Ainadamar, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Terence Blanchard and Michael Cristofer’s Champion, and Jonathan Dove and April De Angelis’ Flight. Staufenbiel’s other recent credits include Elektra with Minnesota Opera, productions for the online festival season of the Sun Valley Music Festival, Ainadamar at Pacific Opera Victoria, and Das Rheingold at Calgary Opera. Film work includes Flight for Seattle Opera, the award-winning graphic novel film of Everest for OP, a feature-length version of Gordon Getty’s opera Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and a new documentary about Frederica von Stade.
