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Laura Bohn and David Castillo performing Anne Lebaron's Radiant Depth Unfolded - Settings of Rumi
Laura Bohn and David Castillo performing Anne Lebaron's Radiant Depth Unfolded - Settings of Rumi

22 March 2022 Comments Off on Beyond Opera Collective Premiere LeBaron & Van Zandt – Video Views: 780 CE News

Beyond Opera Collective Premiere LeBaron & Van Zandt – Video

Composers Edition is pleased to be able to share filmed performances of works from the Beyond Opera Collective concert at CSU Fullerton New Music Festival in March 2022.

Radiant Depth Unfolded – Settings of Rumi

for soprano and ensemble
Anne LeBaron
2015

Laura Bohn (soprano), David Castillo (baritone), Lisa Sylvester (piano)

Radiant Depth Unfolded was commissioned by SongFest and the Sorel Organization. As Anne LeBaron tells us

Faced with the initial challenge of selecting a poet, I was ultimately led to Jalal al-Din Rumi. The next step was identifying several poems from the ocean of poetic forms and words that poured forth from the steady, mystical, lifelong discourse that Rumi held with a dervish learning community. The ecstatic, everyday, and esoteric poems I chose are snapshots from the vast emotional and spiritual territory explored by this master. The order of the five poems in this cycle was intended to reflect the fluidity of literary forms generated by Rumi throughout his long and luminous life.

Dish

for soprano and ensemble
Anne LeBaron
1990

Laura Bohn (soprano), Nigel Deane (violin), Richard An (piano and synth), Miller Wrenn (electric bass), Efraim Schulz-Wackerbarth (drums), Anne LeBaron (electronics), Marc Lowenstein (conductor)

A rarely performed postmodern ode emanating from the frontlines of the sexual battlefield, Dish, based on Jessica Hagedorn’s evocative poetry, invites free-wheeling textual commentaries and embellishments. As Anne LeBaron Tells us

These appear as fragments of responses to interviews I conducted with strangers in New York’s Central Park about their go-to “pick-up” lines, and as clips of high-voltage improvisations performed in recording studios by the poet, an actor, and a boyfriend. All of these simultaneities percolate atop relentless drums and bass. Meanwhile, the singer expresses a mélange of emotions and unfettered observations as she reels from claustrophobic housework to memories of an unnamed lover to exuberant devil-may-care freedom. She then frames a raw flirtatious dialogue with a shoutout to Eastern mysticism tinged with cynicism, finally issuing a reminder to balance one’s nighttime peregrinations with some daytime culture when arriving in New York. Soprano Dora Ohrenstein, who commissioned and recorded Dish in 1990, writes in the liner notes that Dish is the “musical equivalent of a Rauschenberg collage.

The New Frontier: An Atomic Age Jazz Opera

for soprano and ensemble
Music by Jack Van Zandt
Libretto by Jill Freeman
2021

Nadia Shpachenko (keyboards, ensemble director), Brian Walsh (soprano and tenor saxes), Kye Palmer (trumpet and flugelhorn), Derek Tywoniuk (vibraphone and marimba), Jordan Curcuruto (drum kit), Katie Eikam (percussion), John Kennedy (bass)

The New Frontier: An Atomic Age Jazz Opera is a tragicomic musical theater work about aspects of life against the backdrop of the atomic bomb and the daily Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation during the 1950s and 60s. Van Zandt and Freeman, whose school years spanned the late 1950s through the 60s, drew on their childhood memories of the era along with meticulous research in formulating the libretto and musical content. 

The musical style is influenced by angular 1950s and 60s jazz and art music, especially cool jazz, hard bop, and avant-garde music of the period. The libretto, both sarcastic and serious, is heavily influenced by the slang of beatniks and the period style of Beat poets, absurdist playwrights, and French existentialists.

The story is conveyed through soprano Stacey Fraser assuming a different character for “singing” each of the separate songs on the jazz-like set list, with a wide-ranging number of emotions and musical formats. The order is sequenced to tell the story and explore the feel of the period with music of many different emotional qualities. The characters in this cabaret performance include 1930s physicist Lise Meitner, a teacher instructing her class in Duck and Cover drills, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, a fallout shelter saleswoman appropriating the language of hipsters for her sales pitch, a fictional survivor of an atomic war describing the nuclear winter she lives in, a scientist giddy from observing the pyrotechnics of hydrogen bomb explosions, and Death happily dancing with The Bomb.

Ukrainian Pianist Nadia Shpachenko, born in Kharkiv, who directed the ensemble preluded their performance with a few words about her birth country at this difficult time followed by a rendition of the Ukrainian National Anthem which we would also like to share with you here:

Beyond Opera Collective perform the Ukrainian National Anthem


Beyond Opera Collective produces multimedia and theatrical musical works by composers and co-directors Anne LeBaron and Jack Van Zandt for online streaming and live public performances. The international company is comprised of select professional musicians, vocalists, librettists, choreographers, dancers, videographers, directors, and designers from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Ireland. Upcoming productions include LeBaron’s opera, LSD: Huxley’s Last Trip, and Van Zandt’s multimedia dramatic madrigal, On the Shores of Eternity.

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