Monday, June 1, 2026
In the 1960s, thanks to Ravi Shankar and George Harrison, many Americans not of South Asian descent were exposed to the sitar. A couple decades later, even without personally experiencing Peter Brook’s nine-hour adaptation at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, some of us became aware of Hinduism’s foundational epic, the Mahabharata. (In 1989, the Brook extravaganza was squeezed into a six-hour miniseries, then edited down to a three-hour film.)
This weekend and next — on June 6, 7, 12, 13 and 14 — In Series will offer area residents a 90-minute dose of Indian-inspired music and theater at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE: “The Song of Sakuntala.”
Having its world premiere, this cross-cultural chamber opera is the creation of Artistic Director Timothy Nelson, who, prior to joining In Series in 2018, led opera companies in Baltimore and the Netherlands and directed productions in several European countries, the U.K. included.
Mentored by the pathbreaking opera director Peter Sellars, Nelson — director, conductor, composer, keyboardist — has delivered season after season of spectacles for eye and ear, imaginatively fusing texts, music and dance across time periods and cultures. While seeking to redefine opera, the company is also a showcase for outstanding (and risk-taking) singers and instrumentalists.
The opera’s starting point was the play “The Recognition of Sakuntala” (pronounced “shah-KOON-tah-lah”) — in Sanskrit, Abhijnanashakuntalam (figure it out yourself) — by Kalidasa (the final “a” is silent), a fourth- or fifth-century author whose name means “servant of Kali.” The play, based on a narrative in the Mahabharata, roughly a millennium older, concerns the coming together, separating and reuniting of Sakuntala and Prince Dusyanta (pronounced “DOO-shee-ahnt”), in Nelson’s words, “the mother and father of ancient India.” (Videos posted on the In Series website provided Nelson’s quotes and other background.)
Kalidasa constructed his play in seven acts, forming a sort of palindrome — that is, act one pairs with seven, two with six and three with five, four being the keystone. Nelson has done the same. For example, the second act, “The Dreaming,” which features a solo for Prince Dusyanta, corresponds to the sixth act, “The Waking,” in which the prince realizes he has lost Sakuntala and sets out to find her. In each case, Nelson explains, “I chose scales that would match each other.”
In his score, Nelson has sought to incorporate elements of classical Indian music. Each act has an improvised introduction, known as an “alap,” and a governing scale or mode, known as a “raga.” In addition, the musical lines make use of a complex “tala” system of set-number rhythmic sequences (three beats, five beats, etc.).
“Conceived in the spirit of an intimate Indian classical music gathering,” Nelson’s “Song of Sakuntala” is nevertheless an opera. (He notes that Kalidasa’s play was the basis for operas by Franz Schubert — unfinished, like his B-minor symphony — and early 20th-century composer Franco Alfano.) The two roles will be sung by soprano Teresa Ferrara as Sakuntala and mezzo-soprano Aryssa Leigh Burrs as Prince Dusyanta. Baritone Marvin Wayne Allen will appear as the narrator, Bharata, son of the legendary couple. Allen will sing in the final act, in which “he is literally and metaphorically birthed,” says Nelson.
“Each act has the unique structure of beginning with a narration of the action of that act,” he explains, “and then the singers and instrumentalists performing the emotional journey of the action that’s just been described.”
Nelson has selected the passages they will sing from the work of three South Asian authors. Both Hyderabad-born poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) and Nobel Prize-winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote in English. Vidyapati (c. 1352-1448), a poet from Bihar, a historic center of Buddhism, wrote in Sanskrit and Maithili, a regional language of what is now the state of that name in northeast India and Nepal.
A poem by Vidyapati, long one of Nelson’s favorites, that begins “The moon has shone upon me,/the face of my beloved./O night of joy!” provides the text of the love duet that ends act three, “The Marriage.”
Additional text is from the Mahabharata. At times, the singers will sing Indian solfege — the syllables indicating specific notes — known as “sargam.”
Accompanying the singers will be a quintet playing both Western and South Asian instruments: Emily Grace Konkle on violin; Niccolo Seligmann on viola da gamba, Rajib Karmakar on tanpura, Stephanie Ying on oboe and Nitin Mitta on tabla.
Essential to Baroque music, six-stringed viola da gambas were superseded by four-stringed violins, violas and cellos in the later 18th century. The tabla is a pair of Hindustani hand drums, one larger than the other. Smaller than but similar to a sitar — with a long neck and a gourd-shaped body (the “tumba,” sometimes made from an actual gourd) — the tanpura is a plucked instrument that lacks frets and has far fewer strings: four compared to the sitar’s 18 to 21.
In classical Indian music, the tanpura sounds a drone under various melodic and harmonic lines (in accordance with the raga), driven and accented by the tabla. “The whole piece takes place over a single drone,” Nelson notes, adding that it is in C. Only during a solo aria in the fourth act does the tanpura go silent.
“Kalidasa’s seven-act structure exemplifies a trait of non-Western aesthetics, which is that art doesn’t need to always be a journey to something,” says Nelson. “It can be about being somewhere, about sitting in a meditative state, in a state of reflection, in one place, neither coming nor going.”
“The Song of Sakuntala” will be performed at the Atlas, 1333 H St. NE, on Saturday, June 6, at 7 p.m.; Sunday, June 7, at 2:30 p.m.; Friday, June 12, at 7 p.m.; Saturday, June 13, at 7 p.m.; and Sunday, June 14, at 2:30 p.m. There will also be three performances at Baltimore Theatre Project, on June 19, 20 and 21.