Bang on a Can All-Stars and Nashville Symphony perform Julia Wolfe’s Flower Power! Conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero.
3 performances: January 24-26. With visuals by Jeff Sugg.
Julia Wolfe describes Flower Power, inspired by the 1960s counterculture movement, as “about optimism, idealism, psychedelia, breaking with convention, and a little bit of love and peace.”
Program also includes Beethoven’s Seventh.
World Premiere performance of David Lang’s before and after nature with video design by Tal Rosner!
Performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the LA Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon.
“before and after nature is a meditation on the natural world, both before human existence and after humans are gone.”
Embodying “undivided devotion to the musical material,” the Grammy Award–winning vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices is a go-to collaborator for many of today’s most visionary composers. In this performance—in the intimate, in-the-round Zankel Hall Center Stage configuration—they sing a world premiere by the category-defying Julia Wolfe, a US premiere by John Luther Adams that takes listeners on a journey through the geological layers of the Grand Canyon, and a recent work by Michael Gordon that combines playfully direct lyrics with sumptuously scored singing.
Inspired by her love for the music and lore of Appalachia, Julia Wolfe based her text for Steel Hammer (called a “wild hybrid” by the New York Times) on over 200 versions of the “John Henry” ballad, which has been recorded by everyone from Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen. A runner-up for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, Steel Hammer features the alternately haunting and whimsical vocalizations of Norway’s renowned Trio Mediaeval, and stretches the standard instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars with wooden bones, mountain dulcimer, banjo, clapping, clogging and more.en.
Inspired by her love for the music and lore of Appalachia, Julia Wolfe based her text for Steel Hammer (called a “wild hybrid” by the New York Times) on over 200 versions of the “John Henry” ballad, which has been recorded by everyone from Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen. A runner-up for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, Steel Hammer features the alternately haunting and whimsical vocalizations of Norway’s renowned Trio Mediaeval, and stretches the standard instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars with wooden bones, mountain dulcimer, banjo, clapping, clogging and more.
Inspired by her love for the music and lore of Appalachia, Julia Wolfe based her text for Steel Hammer (called a “wild hybrid” by the New York Times) on over 200 versions of the “John Henry” ballad, which has been recorded by everyone from Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen. A runner-up for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, Steel Hammer features the alternately haunting and whimsical vocalizations of Norway’s renowned Trio Mediaeval, and stretches the standard instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars with wooden bones, mountain dulcimer, banjo, clapping, clogging and more.
Women artists take center stage in these concerts! Pianist Hélène Grimaud brings “astonishing proficiency and poetic sensibilities” (The Washington Post) to Brahms’s First Piano Concerto; 19th-century composer Louise Farrenc’s surging, Romantic First Symphony beguiles with mystery and melody; and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Julia Wolfe’s Pretty is a raucous, rhythmic romp.
Written for Lorelei Ensemble, Her Story invokes the words of historical figures and the spirit of pivotal moments to pay tribute to the centuries of ongoing struggle for equal rights, representation, and access to democracy for women in America.
