International Street Cannibals Presents THE EASILY SATISFIED LOVER

The new music ensemble, International Street Cannibals (ISC), presents "The Easily Satisfied Lover" - an evening of vocal works from the period of early modernism, which turns its lens on archaic male narratives of romance and reframes them through the voice and sensibility of a 21st century woman. Central to the evening is the performance of Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama, Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21 (1912) - a fantastical setting of 21 poems by Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud and freely translated in German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The program is a creation of soprano Ariadne Greif, Los Angeles-based director Gray Palmer, and ISC's founder/director Dan Barrett. It features conducting by maestro Christopher Lyndon-Gee; film footage by Swiss-Japanese filmmaker Caroline Mariko Stucky, especially created for this performance; and technical direction and stage management by Tyler Learned.

Inspired by Pierrot, a descendant of the Italian commedia dell'arte, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire is scored for a female singer/reciter, accompanied by five instruments. It features free atonality and Schoenberg's innovative style of vocal delivery, Sprechstimme (partly spoken, partly sung). The work is unique in that the vocalist is given the dual roles of a man telling his love for a woman, and the woman as the "object" of his love. Hartleben's thorough rewriting of the original poems is infused with a stark expressionist palette and sexual, hallucinatory, and sometimes violent imagery. The performance will pinpoint and underscore its inherent and unilateral objectification of women. It will also mine the gender ambiguity of the performer and offer many double entendres by turning the extremely vivid and sensual elements of the work on their head.

"Pierrot is sometimes a fictional storybook character, sometimes a deeply relatable caricature, and sometimes a real person the narrator seems to know or identify with," says Greif. "With this Pierrot Lunaire, we want to reframe these antiquated male narratives of love as child-sized fables, but with a wider perspective." Combining an early silent movie aesthetic with a childlike sensibility, Caroline Mariko Stucky's film features surreal, moonlit, and non-narrative tableaux that continuously play with the notion of scale, while mimicking the symbolic landscapes and panoramas of the text.

Also included in the evening are lieder and songs reflecting other male narratives of romance, composed by Schoenberg and some of his contemporaries. These include two songs from Schoenberg's cabaret song cycle, "Brettl-Lieder"; a chamber arrangement of Alban Berg's "Lied der Lulu" from Act. 2 of Lulu; and the gleeful self-abnegating French song, "La femme est faite pour l'homme" ("Women are made for men"), made popular by actress Arletty in Max de Vaucorbeil's movie, Une idée folle (A Crazy Idea, 1933). The concert will end with Greif's rendering of Sholom Secunda's Yiddish song, "To Me You're Beautiful" (1932) -an unexpected affirmation of feminine sexuality in that period.

PROGRAM:

Arnold Schoenberg
"Galathea" (1901) from Brettl-Lieder, no. 7; text by Frank Wedekind
"Der genügsame Liebhaber" (1901) from Brettl-Lieder, no. 1; text by Hugo Salus
Ariadne Greif, soprano; Nara Avetisyan, piano

Alban Berg
"Lied der Lulu" from Act 2 of Lulu (1929-1935); arr. by Jonathan Keren; text adapted by the composer from plays of Frank Wedekind
Ariadne Greif, soprano; Christopher Lyndon-Gee, conductor
Ensemble: Jessica Jade Han, flute/piccolo; Sammy Lesnick, clarinet/bass clarinet; Anna Tsukervanik, violin/viola; Dan Barrett, cello; Nara Avetisyan, piano

Casimir Oberfeld
"La Femme est faite pour l'homme" (1934); text by René Pujol & Charles Louis Pothier
Ariadne Greif, soprano; Nara Avetisyan, piano

Arnold Schoenberg
Pierrot Lunaire ("Three times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire"), trans. by Otto Erich Hartleben
Ariadne Greif, soprano; Christopher Lyndon-Gee, conductor
Ensemble: Jessica Jade Han, flute/piccolo; Sammy Lesnick, clarinet/bass clarinet; Anna Tsukervanik, violin/viola; Dan Barrett, cello; Nara Avetisyan, piano
Film by Caroline Mariko Stucky

Sholom Secunda
"Bei Mir Bistu Shein" (1932); text by Jacob Jacobs
Ariadne Greif, soprano; Nara Avetisyan, piano

The International Street Cannibals' concert will take place in the main space of St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, on Sunday, April 15 at 3:30 pm. St Mark's Church is located at 131 East 10th Street, New York City. Tickets are $20. General Admission/$15 for seniors, students & children at door.

For more information, contact office@stmarksbowery.org or call 1-212-674-6377
For more information on ISC, visit www.streetcannibals.com

Dan Barrett (cello) is Director of the ISC (International Street Cannibals). Solo credits include Radio France Festival Présences (Paris), Kennedy Center (Washington D.C.), The Gulbenkian Festival (Lisbon), Accademia d'Estate Internatiozionale (Lucca, Italy), Alvin Ailey Dance Company and WQXR, as well as recorded works by Iannis Xenakis (Mode and Vanderberg labels). More solo work can be heard on PBS, in such documentaries as "The Great Depression," Ric Burns' "The Way West," "Andy Warhol," "The History of New York" and "Death and The Civil War," in numerous HBO and ESPN documentary features, as well as on the BBC America series, "Copper," on which his playing was prominently featured. Other credits include onstage cellist in James Joyce's The Dead on Broadway, with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, principal cellist in the STX Ensemble (Xenakis USA), Strathmere Chamber Orchestra, Connecticut Grand Opera and the SEM Ensemble, and appearances with the NYC Opera, the American Ballet Theater and the Sirius Quartet. His compositions have been performed by The Absolute Ensemble, The Absolute Chamber Players, Composer's Concordance, Mountain Stage, the ISC, The West Virginia Symphony, and the North/South Consonance. He has recorded extensively for RCA, Sony, Naxos, Windham Hill, Shanachie, and MCR record labels."

Ariadne Greif, praised for her "luminous, expressive voice," "searing top notes," and "dusky depths," (New York Times), began her opera career as a 'boy' soprano in Los Angeles and at the LA Opera, eventually making an adult debut singing Lutoslawski's Chantefleurs et Chantefables with the American Symphony Orchestra. She starred in roles ranging from Therese/Tirésias in Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias , singing a "thoroughly commanding and effortless" run at the Aldeburgh Festival, to Sappho in Atthis by Georg Friedrich Haas, which the New York Times called "a solo high-wire act for Ms. Greif," "a vehicle for Ms. Greif's raw, no-holds-barred performance," and "one of the most searingly painful and revealing operatic performances in recent times." This season and last season include Carmina Burana, La Bohème, The Magic Flute, Beethoven Symphony No. 9 , Mozart Requiem , Mozart Vespers K.321, and Babbit's A Solo Requiem, performances with William Kentridge of the Dada masterpiece Ursonate, concerts of chamber music in Weill Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, across the US, Canada, Finland, the Middle East, and appearances with Mainly Mozart Miami, Contemporaneous, Metropolis Ensemble, Lukas Ligeti, Gabriel Kahane, SHUFFLE Concert, The Knights, and members of The Orlando Philharmonic. Greif created a twenty-composer commissioning project of her own, called Dreams & Nightmares. Her most recent role was Adina in The Elixir of Love with The Orlando Philharmonic. www.ariadnegreifsoprano.com

Christopher Lyndon-Gee was nominated for GRAMMY Awards for the first volume of complete works of Igor Markevitch (1998); for George Rochberg's Symphony No. 5 and Transcendental Variations on Naxos (2003), and for Hans Werner Henze's Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 3 (2007). Many of his seventy-nine CD recordings have been listed among Gramophone's "Editor's Choice", Fanfare's "Outstanding CDs of the Year", Penguin Guide to Compact Discs' multiple Rosettes and Key Recordings listings. Since 2013, he has been guest-conductor the National Symphony Orchestra of the Lithuanian Philharmonic, conducting also at the GAIDA Festival of contemporary music in Vilnius. He studied in London under Rudolf Schwarz, in Rome Franco Ferrara, and at Tanglewood on invitation of Leonard Bernstein, with additional studies under Maurice Abravanel, Erich Leinsdorf, and Kurt Masur. He served as Bruno Maderna's assistant at La Scala, Milan, second conductor at the Teatro Regio (Turin) and at the RAI Orchestra Torino. With composer Lorenzo Ferrero, he co-founded Ensemble Fase Seconda, which commissioned many European works. As composer, Lyndon-Gee studied with Goffredo Petrassi, Luciano Berio, Sylvano Bussotti, Pierre Boulez and Jean Martinon. A Laureate of the Onassis Foundation, Athens, he was honored with the Adolf Spivakovsky Prize, three 'Sounds Australian' awards, and two MacDowell Fellowships.

Gray Palmer is a writer, composer, director, and performer based in Los Angeles. His plays have been published by Padua Press and produced by Padua Playwrights, Animal Show, Gunfighter Nation, Sharon's Farm, Pharmacy, and Machine Project. His theater journalism is online at stageraw.com. Mr. Palmer has a special interest theater poetry. He has been affiliated with Jean Erdman's Theater of the Open Eye in NYC, Appaloosa Productions in Dallas, and since 2005, with Padua Playwrights and Gunfighter Nation in Los Angeles. @jamesgraypalmer

Caroline Mariko Stucky is an award-winning, Swiss-Japanese independent filmmaker with a fierce passion for American culture. For Caroline, film, the world of the image, is the ultimate language that trumps the kaleidoscope of spoken languages of her childhood. The bulk of Stucky's work has been as a cinematographer, most notably on The Perfect Bunny (2014), written and directed by multiple Goya Award winner Jorge Laplace, Homage to Switzerland (2015), an adaptation from Ernest Hemingway's short story, directed by Pierric Tenthorey, Wishful Whiskers (2017), a children's short starring Ilana Becker and Sophie Knapp, and Starfish (2017), a feature film about grief and healing, starring Margaret Curry and Pascal Yen-Pfister. Other upcoming projects include Brunch Wars, written and directed by Kamran Khan, which is a second collaboration with producer Pulkit Datta, writer/director of Wishful Whiskers. In 2018, she will be the cinematographer for Betting Big, a show about tech investors, hosted by the business journalist Bonnie Halper and Carry Me, a half-hour drama series starring Alison Bartlett. www.carolinemarikostucky.com