Marie talks about her experience performing Rossini's opera, Otello, in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with Cecilia Bartoli, Ensemble Matheus, and Jean-Christophe Spinosi.

Recording the podcast from Paris on the night of the final performance, Marie discusses the production, Rossni's opera itself, and some of the atmosphere surrounding the controversial natures of the performances. This production marked Bartoli's return to the Paris opera scene in her first staged opera there for 20 years. Conducted by the "enfant terrible" of classical music, Jean-Christophe Spinosi, this was a production wrapped up with history, drama, and controversy.

Russian-American writer, Olga Zilberbourg, talks about coming of age during the fall of the Soviet Union, moving to the United States at the age of 17, and how these extraordinary experiences have shaped her identity as an artist.

Olga has been up until now mostly a short story writer, and is currently working on her first novel. She has been published in both English and Russian, and has been deeply impacted by both of her two countries. She discusses how she reconciles these two vastly different cultures in both her life and in her art, not to mention the challenges she's faced learning to write in a foreign language.