Los Angeles - The final concerts of the inaugural LA International New Music Festival take place on Monday, May 21 and Saturday, May 26 at 8:00 p.m. at The Colburn School. Presented by two-time Grammy® Award-winning Southwest Chamber Music, concerts are preceded at 7:00 p.m. by a discussion with the concert's composers and musicians moderated by Martin Perlich.  

 

 

Vu's The Song of Napalm, which closes the festival, is set to a poem by the noted poet and Vietnam veteran Bruce Weigl. The searingly vivid text describes the "Napalm girl," Phan Thi Kim Phuc, immortalized in Nick Ut's 1972 photo of a young Vietnamese girl, clothes burning off her body, holding her arms like wings and running toward the camera. Commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music, it is sung in English by Hughes and spoken in VIetnamese by Weigl's adopted daughter, Hanh Weigl. The Song of Napalm is composed for an eleven-piece chamber ensemble which also features Vân Ánh Vanessa Võ dan bau, t'rung and dan tranh. Von der Schmidt conducts.

 

Gabriela Ortiz' Rio Bravo, a US premiere, sings of the women of Ciudad Juárez, based on the poem by Mónica Sánchez Escuer. Their thoughts flow between terror and smiles. One violin, Gamma, a baritone, Hughes, and six cups of glass, played by ensemble members, sing the whispers of these women, the fear in their prayers, their dreams and their nightmares that lie at the foot of the borderlands.  

 

The LA premiere of Alexandra du Bois' Night Songs, written for the Kronos Quartet, is based on the diary of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew living in Amsterdam during WWII. The diary was published as An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 in 1981. Du Bois writes, "This is not a narrative work but is rather a response to Hillesum's words. As the world around Etty Hillesum was shrinking, her inner world was growing and blossoming. That was a jumping-off point for my music." Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz in 1943. 

 

Martin Perlich, who hosts the festival concert previews, is producer and host of "Conversations in New Music," a new web series featuring video interviews with participants in composing, performing, conducting, programming and writing about contemporary art music.  Perlich, veteran broadcaster, novelist and author of The Art of the Interview, has posted on his web site previous video interviews of festival participants Elliott Carter, Anne LeBaron, Daniel Catán, Alexandra du Bois, Kurt Rohde, Jeff von der Schmidt, Jan Karlin, William Kraft, and Kurt Rohde.