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"Southwest Chamber Music has always programmed creatively and internationally"--Los Angeles Times
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Southwest Chamber Music
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638 E. Colorado Blvd. Suite 201
Pasadena, CA
91101-2006
Toll Free: 1-800-726-7147
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Final two concerts on
Monday 5/21 & Saturday 5/26
5/26 Memorial Day Weekend concert honors all veterans with free tickets
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Soprano Elissa Johnston and Southwest Players conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt May 9
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8:00pm, The Colburn School, downtown LA
Concert previews at 7:00 pm with host Martin Perlich and composers Gabriela Ortiz, Alexandra du Bois, Vu Nhat Tân, and Anne LeBaron
The LA International New Music Festival welcomes the pre-eminent dan bau, t'rung and dan tranh master Vân Ánh Vanessa Võ and bass-baritone Evan Hughes as guest artists on the final concerts of the festival.
The May 21 concert
This coming Monday, the program includes nine works with four premieres, an homage to three composers we have lost in the past year, Milton Babbitt, Peter Lieberson, and Daniel Catan, and a new work written by 103-year-old (!) Elliott Carter. Fresh from her triumph as composer of the opera, Crescent City, Anne LeBaron's Solar Music will open the concert in a piece that musically depicts the Remedios Varo painting of a woman bowing the rays of the sun. It is written for four flutes (bass, alto, flute, piccolo) and harp, played by Larry Kaplan and Alison Bjorkedal. Cracking Bamboo by Vu Nhat Tân, a Southwest commission, was written for Võ and members of the Southwest Players, with the composer taking the piano part.
Carter's Three Explorations, based on texts from T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets, will have its west coast premiere with bass-baritone Hughes, who sang the world premiere at Alice Tully Hall, and a 12-member ensemble conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt. Two other works also receive their west coast premieres: Milton Babbitt's Concertino Piccolino with Lynn Vartan, solo vibraphone, and Forgiveness by Peter Lieberson with baritone Hughes and Peter Jacobson, cello. Together with Daniel Catan's Encantamiento with Kaplan and Bjorkedal, these works form an homage to the three composers whose passing has been marked in the last year.
Two works by Gabriela Ortiz, Aroma Foliado for string quartet and Atlas Pumas with Vijayan and Vartan plus Stravinsky's elegant, later work, Elegy for JFK, complete the program.
Memorial Day Weekend Concert
The May 26 festival program honors all war veterans by presenting probing works that reflect on the humanity and inhumanity of war-torn peoples. Any veteran from any country may receive a free ticket to the concert at the box office the night of the performance.
Alexandra du Bois' string quartet Night Songs (Nachtlieder) are not songs but musical responses to An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943. Hillesum was a Dutch Jew who did not survive the extermination camps but left a remarkable memoir in her diaries and letters. Du Bois writes, "As the world around Etty Hillesum was shrinking, her inner world was growing and blossoming. That was a jumping-off point for my music." This will be the first performance in LA.
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Vu Nhat Tân's The Song of Napalm, closing the festival in its world premiere, is the setting of a poem about the Vietnam War 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. The Song of Napalm, commissioned by Southwest, is for Hughes, Võ and the Southwest Players.
Opening the concert, Rio Bravo by Gabriela Ortiz, in its U.S. premiere, addresses a different war, the Drug War between the drug cartels and the US-Mexican border. The women of Ciudad Juarez are collateral damage and stand together at the banks of their Rio Bravo looking across the border at the U.S.-named Rio Grande. They listen to the water "like life's delicate trickle."
In the string quartet, Miroir, mémoire, Paris-based Tôn Thât Tiêt recalls the pre-war Vietnam of his boyhood by the Perfume River in in the town of Hue through the poetry of Li Po. Southwest has performed Ton's works to great acclaim in Vietnam and the U.S. This will be the world premiere of the piece.
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Jeff von der Schmidt, Perlich, Hyo-shin Na, Vu Nhat Tan in concert preview.
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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 is a veteran broadcaster, novelist and author of The Art of the Interview.
Composers pictured top to bottom: Vu, Carter, LeBaron, DuBois, Ortiz, Tôn
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Programs
Monday, May 21
Anne LeBaron - Solar Music
Gabriela Ortiz - Aroma Foliado
Igor Stravinsky - Elegy for JFK
Elliott Carter - Three Explorations (West Coast Premiere)
Milton Babbitt - Concerto Piccolino (West Coast Premiere)
Daniel Catán - Encantamiento
Peter Lieberson - Forgiveness (LA Premiere)
Gabriela Ortiz - Atlas Pumas
Vu Nhat Tân - Cracking Bamboo (World Premiere)
Saturday, May 26
Gabriela Ortiz - Rio Bravo (US Premiere) Tôn Thât Tiêt - Miroir, Mémoire (World Premiere) Alexandra du Bois - Night Songs (LA Premiere) Vu Nhat Tân - The Song of Napalm (World Premiere)
Location and Tickets
The Colburn School, Los Angeles
200 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Parking is available on the street and at Disney Hall.
All concerts begin at 8 p.m.
Pre-concert talk: 7 p.m. prior to each concert
Single Tickets:
$38 general admission
$28 seniors over 65
$10 students with full-time I.D.
For tickets or information: 1.800.726.7147 or www.swmusic.org |
  
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Ainadamar
by Osvaldo Golijov
Presented by Long Beach Opera Sun. May 20 @ 7pm Terrace Theater, Long Beach
Ainadamar, Arabic for "Fountain of Tears," is a famous well in Granada where Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca was murdered by Fascist forces in 1936. The story of Lorca's life and death unfolds in dreamlike episodes.
The flamenco and Latin-tinged score illustrates the work's fiery passion and sadness. The opera is a gripping reflection on the undying faith of a people for whom Lorca became a symbol of political and artistic freedom.
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