This month will see a new venture for Catacoustic. After many successful collaborations with
institutions around the city, Catacoustic will for the first time collaborate
with another well-known music group in town.
Concert:nova is an innovative chamber group specializing in the
unexpected aspects of contemporary chamber music. Since the unexpected is part of Catacoustic’s
mission as well, the partnership seems a natural fit. Local audiences who are up for a challenge or
are looking for a new experience have found that both these groups fit the
bill.
To marry the Renaissance to the modern world, a universal is
required, and one has been found: the
works of William Shakespeare. For 400
years Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets have inspired artists in every creative
field, and composers are no exception.
This concert will explore music based on the work with pieces written during
Shakespeare’s lifetime, and pieces written as recently as 2004.
Shakespeare filled his plays with music and songs, some well
known to the Elizabethan audience, some written by himself. The clowns sang
comic songs, the mad sang perceptive nonsense, the amorous sang of love, the
cynical sang satire. Today we see these songs as words on the page, but at the
time these would all have been sung on stage, probably with instrumental
accompaniment. The tunes were composed
by Shakespeare’s own contemporaries, men like Thomas Morley, Anthony Holborne,
and of course the adaptable and accomplished Anonymous. Viols and lutes were
well-known to the Bard—he mentions both many times. Catacoustic performers
Annalisa Pappano and David Morris on viol, and David Walker and Brian Kay on
lute, will re-create not just the tunes Shakespeare would have known, but the
soundscape he would have recognized.
Shakespeare doesn’t belong only to the Elizabethans,
though. Each generation throughout the
centuries has offered its own take on the themes and characters that populate
his familiar world. Concert:nova will
play some of the more contemporary expressions his work has inspired. Here’s a sample: Amy Beach, 1867-1944, was an American pianist
and composer. Best remembered for her
songs, she composed music for several of Shakespeare’s lyrics. Ned Rorem, born in 1923, has frequently
written with Shakespeare in mind. The
cello suite After Reading Shakespeare
was composed in 1980. Erich Korngold is best remembered for his film scores, but
before there were movies there was incidental music for plays: his Much
Ado About Nothing was composed in 1919. Igor Stravinsky loved to compose
for unusual combinations of instruments, and Songs from William Shakespeare, 1953, was written for
mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet, and viola.
Performing for concert:nova are Ted Nelson, cello, Minyoung Baik,
violin, Heidi Yenney, viola, Randy Bowman, flute, Ixi Chen, clarinet, and
Avedis Manoogian, piano.
Singing with both groups will be acclaimed soprano Youngmi
Kim.
There is also a third participant in this
collaboration. Jennifer Joplin, a member
of the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, will be on hand, reading from the plays
and sonnets, knitting together the two worlds separated by 400 years of
changing fashions in music but united by the greatest wordsmith in history. A
highlight of the program will be a condensed, one-woman version of The Tempest, as illuminated by two
composers at either end of the spectrum.
Robert Johnson, 1583-1634, is the only person we can say with certainty
composed for the original stage productions of the plays—in other words, he was
an actual collaborator with the playwright himself. And Paul Morevec, a composer working on Long
Island, NY, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Tempest Fantasy. So we have
the very first composer to set Shakespeare to music, and perhaps the most
recent.
The Mercantile Library will play host to "A Common Thread." With
luck, the sunlight will stream through the tall windows and the wood will
glow. The playwright, the composers, the
musicians, and the actor will all conspire, and here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears. And by that music let us all embrace.
Sunday, March 17, 3:00pm, and Monday, Marcy 18, 7:00pm, at
the Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut St. #1100 45202. $25/advance | $30/door | $10/students w ID.
For tickets go to http://cncatacoustic.eventbrite.com/
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