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Saturday, August 2, 8pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Tickets: $29-$44
Dorothy Chang: Strange Air (World Premiere/Women’s Philharmonic Commissioning Initiative)
Mason Bates: Liquid Interface (Mason Bates, electronica) (West Coast Premiere)
John Corigliano: Conjurer (Evelyn Glennie, percussionist) (West Coast Premiere)
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Three remarkable composers join tonight’s audience for three new works,
each promising to hit it out of the park! The program opens with the World Premiere of composer Dorothy Chang’s Strange Air,
the first of the Women’s Philharmonic Fund’s commissioning project
(supported in part by Festival patron Russ Irwin) and representing a
new Festival partnership with Meet the Composer. Mason Bates’ Festival debut last season created a “buzz,” literally and figuratively, when he performed his Rusty Air in Carolina. He returns to once again perform on electronica with the Festival orchestra in a work titled Liquid Interface.
Bates became consumed with the idea of water as the influence of a
musical endeavor when he lived on Berlin’s enormous Lake Wannsee. “Over
the course of barely two months, I watched this huge body of water
transform from an ice sheet thick enough to support sausage vendors, to
a refreshing swimming destination heavy with humidity.” Liquid Interface
begins with glaciers and moves through all the forms of water,
inhabiting an increasingly hotter world in each of its four progressive
movements. The work is dedicated by Bates to his mentor and friend, John Corigliano. So how appropo that Academy, Grammy, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Corigliano should join us for Bates’ West Coast Premiere, as well as the West Coast Premiere of his own Conjurer, a percussion concerto featuring soloist Dame Evelyn Glennie. A work for string orchestra and percussionist, Corigliano’s Conjurer is in three movements, each restricted to a particular type of percussion: wood, metal, and skin. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review said of the Pittsburgh Symphony’s premiere, “[Conjurer]…proved
to be a brilliant compositional achievement, one blessed by the full
dimension performance by soloist Dame Evelyn Glennie, conductor Marin
Alsop and the orchestra.” Few soloists have evoked as effusive a
response by Festival audiences as Glennie, and tonight marks her third
visit. The evening marks a triple play, indeed! (A Talkback Session with Marin Alsop, guest artists, and composers follows the concert.) |
“Mason Bates, 30 years old...knows how to command an orchestra just as well as he does his touchpad. Bates's Liquid Interface... surpassed in sheer sonic beauty even the works by Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky that rounded out the program." -Washington Post
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| “An Evelyn Glennie concert is an unforgettable experience, as she moves with feline agility between the instruments, weaving magic patterns with energy and charm.” -Blackmore Vale Magazine. |
Photo (clockwise beginning L): Dame Evelyn Glennie (EG Images (c)/James Wilson), John Corigliano (j. Henry Fair), Dorothy Chang (Brian Hawkes Photographic, Inc.), and Mason Bates.
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