This is a holiday treat I’m especially looking forward to: the upcoming “teaser” for choreographer extraordinaire Donald Byrd‘s The Harlem Nutcracker at Spectrum Dance Theater.
Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s Nutcracker Suite is the musical inspiration for this work-in-progress. “The original story centers around an African-American family in Harlem on Christmas Eve,” according to Spectrum’s description. “It highlights the unique warmth and centrality of the grandmother in African-American culture, the resilience of Black American families and Harlem as a center of the African Diaspora.”
This year’s performance is being billed as a “teaser” to the complete production, tentatively scheduled to premiere in a little over a year. It includes the whole show except for the final 20 minutes — which will be unveiled as a surprise at the full premiere.
Dates: DEC 8-11 + 15-18, 2022 at On the Boards, 100 W Roy Street, Seattle, WA 98119. Tickets here.
As a gesture of solidarity and to support humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the Grammy-winning, Ukrainian-American pianist Nadia Shpachenko has released the album Invasion: Music and Art for Ukraine. The title work, composed for for piano, alto saxophone, horn, trombone, timpani, snare drum, and mandolin, represents the response to the war of her longtime collaborator and Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis Spratlan.
Invasion was composed for Shpachenko at the beginning of the invasion (the period 24 February–13 March 2022). The rest of the album features world premiere recordings of other works by Spratlan for solo piano. “These pieces reflect on the human experience, often finding solace and inspiration in nature and music of the past,” notes the press release from Reference Recordings. “Wonderer, a major piece that closes the album, connects in its character to the current experience of many Ukrainian people, especially those displaced by the war. The hero, searching through the unknown, overcoming pain, and reminiscing about things past, triumphs at the end.”
100% of the proceeds go to benefit Ukrainian people affected by war.
To celebrate the art ofMeredith Monk — who turns 80 today — Flotation Device is presenting a two-hour career retrospective from her experimental origins (w/Collin Walcott & Don Preston) through her recordings for ECM to the large-ensemble works she has written in recent years. Sunday 10pm to midnight PST, @KBCS 91.3fm https://kbcs.fm.
The incredible João Carlos Martins — a genuine cultural hero — celebrates the 60th anniversary of his debut at Carnegie Hall this evening at 7pm ET. He will lead NOVUS NY in a program combining Bach with music by the Brazilian composers Heitor Villa-Lobos and André Mehmari.
One of the great Bach interpreters at the keyboard, Martins shifted to conducting when it became no longer possible to continue his career as a concert pianist as a result of injuries and the condition of focal dystonia (which also affected the late Leon Fleisher). You can read in much greater detail here about the musician’s epic struggles and the love of music that has kept him going.
I had the honor of writing the program notes for his Carnegie Hall concert, which will present the following program:
J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1 and 3 “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from the Cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben BWV 147 (arranged by Heitor Fujinami)
HeitorVilla-Lobos Prelúdio from Bachianas BrasileirasNo. 4 W264 – 424
Lucerne Festival’s three-day fall edition devoted to contemporary music starts today. The opening program of Forward takes place at the Swiss Museum of Transport planetarium and is centered around the Swiss premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma for string quartet, featuring with 360-degree video by Sigurður Guðjónsson.
Telescope meets microscope: let’s shake up the relationship between outside and inside, between macrocosm and microcosm! Under the massive planetarium dome at the Swiss Museum of Transport, you will zoom into the infinite expanses of the universe, accompanied by improvisations. Sigurður Guðjónsson’s immersive 360-degree video Enigma also makes visible what is normally hidden from the human eye: with the help of an electron microscope, Guðjónsson scans the surface of a carbon fragment – suggestive images reminiscent of Martian landscapes. In tandem with the sounds of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, which oscillate subtly between flow and fragmentation, they combine to form a hypnotizing Gesamtkunstwerk.
As a tribute to the phenomenon known as Daniel Barenboim, here’s a collection of memories from his decades at Lucerne Festival.
On 25 August 1966 – the very same year as two other artists who have left a deep impression in recent decades, Bernard Haitink and Claudio Abbado – Daniel Barenboim appeared for the first time before the Festival audience in Lucerne. He was only 23 years old at the time, and yet he confidently played a double role: in piano concertos by Mozart (Jenamy) and Beethoven (Piano Concerto No. 2), he not only appeared as the soloist with the English Chamber Orchestra but also conducted from the keyboard, and he also took to the podium to conduct Bartók’s Divertimento for String Orchestra….
Seattle Pro Musica continues its 50th-anniversary season with Songs for the People, the second of its New American Composers concerts. The program features composer Melissa https://melissadunphy.com/about.phpDunphy, an award-winning and acclaimed composer specializing in vocal, political, and theatrical music.
SONGS FOR THE PEOPLE features five choral works by Melissa Dunphy, including the world premiere of her commissioned work, Songs for the People, set to poetry by the poet and anti-slavery activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Her other works on the concert address issues of immigrant rights and women’s rights. Melissa will present a pre-concert talk at 7:00 pm.
Also on the program are works by Dale Warland, Pärt Uusberg, and Eric Tuan.
The concert takes place at Seattle First Baptist Church, at 7:30 pm, November 12.
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, posing with his fencing rapier, painted by Mather Brown, in 1787. (Public domain)
Here’s my Seattle Timesstory for Seattle Baroque Orchestra’s upcoming concert devoted entirely to music by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges:
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, defies easy categorization.
For Seattle-based violinist, professor and filmmaker Quinton Morris, Bologne (1745-1799) combined “the entertainment appeal of Michael Jackson and the athleticism of Michael Jordan.” Morris’ award-winning film and performance project “Breakthrough,” which he has taken on tour around the world, presents Bologne’s many-layered story through a contemporary lens.
To launch this milestone season, Music of Remembrance (MOR) founder and artistic director Mina Miller has curated a remarkable program that will take place at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, 30 October, at 5pm. The centerpiece is a new production of Josephine, Tom Cipullo’s one-act monodrama by based on the life of the legendary singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who found fame and success in France as an artist, a French Resistance hero, and a civil rights activist after escaping racism in America.
“Josephine tells a story that resonates with all of us today,” comments artistic director Mina Miller, “a story about a woman with the courage to fight back against prejudice and discrimination, and stand up for her art and ideals to make a difference in the world.” Starring sopranoLaquita Mitchell in the title role, the production is directed by Erich Parce and conducted by Geoffrey Larson.
Also a highlight will be the world premiere of Wertheim Park, a setting of the poetry of Susan de Sola by composer Lori Laitman, which was commissioned by MOR. Soprano Alisa Jordheim interprets this haunting song, a deeply moving elegy for the Dutch Jews lost to the Holocaust.
In addition, the program includes chamber works by two Holocaust-era composers. Erwin Schulhoff’s virtuosic Concertino for Flute, Viola and Double Bass showcases two of the Seattle Symphony’s principal chairs, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi and flautist Demarre McGill, along with double bassist Jonathan Green. The concert opens with the elegiac Lamento for viola and piano by Dutch composer Max Vredenburg. Vredenburg sought haven in the Dutch East Indies only to endure years of captivity there under Japanese occupation; Schulhoff perished in a Nazi prison camp.
MOR’s stellar instrumental ensemble, drawn from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, features flutist Demarre McGill, clarinetist Laura DeLuca, violinist Mikhail Shmidt, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, cellist Walter Gray, double bassist Jonathan Green, and pianists Jessica Choe and Mina Miller.
For a quarter century now, MOR remembers the Holocaust through music and honors the resilience of all people excluded or persecuted for their faith, nationality, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. In addition to rediscovering and performing music from the Holocaust, MOR has commissioned and premiered more than 30 new works by some of today’s leading composers, drawing on the Holocaust’s lessons to address urgent questions for our own time.
Lamento (1953)
Max Vredenburg
Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola
Jessica Choe, piano
Wertheim Park (2022)
Music by Lori Laitman Poetry by Susan de Sola
World Premiere
Commissioned by Music of Remembrance
Alisa Jordheim, soprano
Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Jonathan Green, double bass; Mina Miller, piano
Concertino for Flute, Viola and Double Bass (1925)
Erwin Schulhoff
Demarre McGill, flute; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Jonathan Green, double bass
Josephine (2016)
Music and Libretto by Tom Cipullo
A Monodrama in One Scene
Laquita Mitchell, soprano
Music of Remembrance Instrumental Ensemble
DeMarre McGill, flute; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Walter Gray, cello;
Black Lodge is the first full-length feature film by the influential opera producer Beth Morrison Projects. andfeatures music by Grammy-nominated David T. Little, with a libretto by legendary Beat poet Anne Waldman. Drawing on the disturbing and complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room. Starring Timur and dancer Jennifer Harrison Newman, Black Lodge is now available for streaming on theOpera Philadelphia Channel.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer (Timur) faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman (Jennifer Harrison Newman) is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
The groundbreaking Beth Morrison Projects developed and produced Black Lodge over the past ten years. Founded by “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) Beth Morrison, who was honored as one of Musical America’s Artists of the Year/Agents of Change in 2020, BMP has grown into “a driving force behind America’s thriving opera scene” (Financial Times), with Opera News declaring that the company, “more than any other… has helped propel the art form into the twenty-first century.”
The project is attracting attention throughout the music industry. Renowned musician Thurston Moore, known as a member of Sonic Youth, serves as executive producer of Black Lodge. “This is opera ripping through the fabric of future vision psychosis where the integrity of classic form clasps the hands of radical possibilities,” said Moore. “David T. Little takes no prisoners here, in confluence with poet angel head Anne Waldman’s libretto of nature, irreality, and spirit consciousness, divining deliverance from life’s spectacle of chaos and love. You’re about to have your mind scorched, my friends!”
Composer Philip Glass (Akhnaten, Einstein on the Beach) is also a fan. “Black Lodge is a bold new operatic film,” said Glass. “It seamlessly blends poetry and music into a powerful cinematic experience.”
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 