Skylark Vocal Ensemble. Photo: Sasha Greenhalgh.
I am thrilled that brilliant GRAMMY Award-nominated vocal ensemble Skylark will premiere my work Transform the World with Beauty on April 4, 5, 6, and 7 during their tour of Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.! Concert details are listed below.
Skylark is one of the leading vocal ensembles in the U.S., praised for their “awe-inspiring” performances (Boston Music Intelligencer), and their “original” (BBC Radio 3), “imaginative” (Limelight Australia), and “engrossing” (WQXR NYC) programming.
Skylark commissioned me to write a piece for their program Masterpiece, offering musical reflections and reactions to the visual arts. Transform the World with Beauty, an 11-minute work in three movements, is inspired by the flowering of visual art and poetry in Victorian Britain during the 1840s-1870s.
The first movement, “My First Camera,” celebrates avant-garde photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. In my adaptation of an excerpt from Cameron’s autobiography, this pioneering artist describes the power of her creative impulse when she first took up the camera as a 48-year-old wife and mother. (Image: Julia Margaret Cameron, “Pomona,” 1872.)
“In an Artist’s Studio” is a setting of a poem by Christina Rossetti. She offers an incisive, feminist critique of her brother, Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his obsessive depictions of an idealized woman. (Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Annunciation” (detail), 1849.)
The final, title movement is inspired by the work and ideas of William Morris. The botanical and mythological titles of Morris’ sensuous textiles and wallpaper designs are juxtaposed with lofty sentiments from his philosophical lectures and essays. These two strands of Morris’ world, disparate at first, come together into a hopeful vision of society “transformed” through the beauty of nature and art. (Image: William Morris, “Strawberry Thief” wallpaper design, 1883.)
Transform the World with Beauty will be recorded during Skylark’s tour, and I look forward to sharing it with you all! Sadly, I can’t attend the Massachusetts dates myself, but I’m thrilled to hear the concert in D.C. See the links below and visit Skylark’s website for more information.
THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 2019 AT 7:00PM
Fitchburg State University, Fitchburg, MA
Tickets
FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 2019 AT 7:00PM
Gloucester Meeting House, Gloucester, MA
Tickets
SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 2019 AT 3:00PM
Cole Memorial Chapel, Wheaton College, Norton, MA
Tickets
SUNDAY, APRIL 7, 2019 AT 4:00PM
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Georgetown Parish, Washington DC
Tickets
The World Premiere is presented by SITE Santa Fe, a world-renowned space for contemporary art. The program will be repeated on Montage Music Society’s Altazano Salon Series.
