0201: Press Play: A closer look at our first commission Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun

from Key Change · host The Santa Fe Opera, Opera for All Voices

Andrea Fellows Walters and Brandon Neal are back with Season 2! Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun, our first commission for Opera for All Voices, gets a closer listen with a live audience. Hopping back in our OFAV time machine, we travel to September 2018 Chicago. Sweet Potato had a live workshop with invited audience and we had a rare opportunity to find out both what audience members were anticipating before the workshop, and what they thought afterward. Andrea and our dramaturg Cori Ellison sat down with composer Augusta Read Thomas and librettist Leslie Dunton Downer to learn more about their alchemical process of working together on a new opera, influences and nuances of story, and what happens next with this new opera. Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun will premiere in Santa Fe, NM in October 2019. *** If you are new to Key Change, we recommend going back to listen to the first 8 episodes of Season 1 for even more OFAV context. Episode 3 is a first introduction to Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun with composer Augusta Read Thomas and beatbox artist Nicole Paris. If you can't right this minute, don't worry! We'll catch you up. *** Key Change is a production of The Santa Fe Opera in collaboration with Opera for All Voices. Produced and edited by Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios Hosts: Andrea Fellows Walters and Brandon Neal Audio Engineer: Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe Theme music by Rene Orth with Corrie Stallings, mezzo-soprano, and Joe Becktell, cello. Cover art by David Tousley Special music licensing from PodcastMusic.com Special thanks to the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, Reba Cafarelli, Cori Ellison, Andrea Klunder and Aliyah Rich for recording our audience reactions and Shannon Harris for recording our interviews in Chicago. OFAV Consortium Members: Lyric Opera for Kansas City, Minnesota Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, San Francisco Opera, Sarasota Opera and Seattle Opera. This podcast is made possible due to the generous funding from the Melville Hankins Family Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and an OPERA America Innovation Grant, supported by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. To learn more about Opera for all voices, visit us at SantaFeOpera.org

NOW PLAYING

0:00 30:02

1×

No transcript for this episode yet

We transcribe on demand. Request one and we'll notify you when it's ready — usually under 10 minutes.

Share this episode

Similar Episodes

Food Saved My Life

Mar 19, 2026 ·34m

Eat More Vegetables: The 4 Foods That Beat Ozempic (Naturally)

Feb 18, 2026 ·11m

How to End Heart Disease with Dr. Fuhrman

Feb 11, 2026 ·45m

Revolutionizing Breast Health: QT Imaging, Overdiagnosis, and What to Do Instead

Jan 27, 2026 ·35m

The Dark Side of the Supplement Industry

Nov 12, 2025 ·35m

Electrolytes, Energy, and the Deadly Salt Fix

Oct 17, 2025 ·40m

Similar Podcasts

Eat to Live Jenna Fuhrman, Dr. Fuhrman Our health is our most precious gift and smart nutrition can change your life. Each month, join Dr. Fuhrman and his daughter, Jenna Fuhrman as they discuss important topics in the world of nutrition. Eat to Live will change the way you eat and think about food. Kaizen Blueprint Aldo Chandra "Kaizen" is a Japanese term for continuous improvement. This podcast provides a blueprint to learn about health, wealth, relationships and everything else in between. Through our podcast, we strive to inspire, educate, and motivate our audience to cultivate a mindset of lifelong learning, productivity, and personal development. By sharing insights, strategies, and practical tips, we aim to guide listeners on their journey towards realizing their fullest potential, fostering success, and creating lasting positive change. Solving for Change MOBIA Technology Innovations Solving for Change welcomes business and technology leaders to share stories of bold business transformation within complex organizations. In an era when technology and markets are changing around businesses, the key to staying competitive is to evolve in response to those changes. MOBIA’s Mike Reeves and Marc LeBlanc investigate business transformation, deconstructing the challenges, ambitions, and market disruptions that drive companies to embark on transformation journeys, and exploring their unique approaches to achieving meaningful outcomes. What sparks leaders to pursue business transformation? How do they overcome the challenges along the way? What are the keys to creating enduring change? Through in-depth conversations with business and technology leaders, Mike and Marc answer these questions and explore how businesses evolve by pulling four key transformation levers: people, process, technology, and culture. Humanizing Change Tremendousness Join us each episode as we talk with innovators in their respective fields about their unique journeys and how they humanize change in their own work, right here, on Humanizing Change.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long is this episode of Key Change?

This episode is 30 minutes long.

When was this Key Change episode published?

This episode was published on April 10, 2019.

What is this episode about?

Can I download this Key Change episode?

Yes, you can download this episode by clicking the download button on the episode player, or subscribe to the podcast in your preferred podcast app for automatic downloads.

URL copied to clipboard!