NYT: 5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

“Primero Sueño” is vivid and hypnotic, worthy of its poet."

In 1692, a Mexican nun named Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote a poem for herself: “Primero Sueño.” Her magnum opus, it contains more than 900 lines about dreams, the nature of knowledge and feminism, shot through with visions of a soul that arcs above the sleeping landscape to survey all with divine perspective.

In Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera’s metatextual operatic treatment of the poem, Sor Juana’s journey of the soul is also the journey of an artist, a woman struggling against repressive male authority to insist on her own way of knowing the world.

The words are Sor Juana’s, but heard through Prestini and Herrera’s pared-down musical palette, they seem as if written anew.

Read NYT review in full here.