Renée Fleming to Perform World Premiere of VOCAGAMMIFIED With Cal Performances

Legendary soprano Renée Fleming will perform a new version of Tod Machover's Gammified, titled VocaGammified, written for her and presented as part of Cal Performances' digital series Illuminations-"Music and the Mind." The performance premieres on April 29 and remains available on-demand through July 28. Gammified was originally commissioned by The Kronos Quartet and was recently added to the Kronos' growing online compendium of its massive commissioning project "Fifty for the Future." The Kronos' new recording of Gammified, along with full score and parts available for download, Machover's program notes, a video interview and more, are now available online.

Gammified is a piece for string quartet and electronics that uses cutting-edge research from the MIT Media Lab, where Machover is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media. The piece's electronic track features Gamma frequencies, which have begun to show highly promising results for resynching the brain, promoting mental wellbeing and reversing the symptoms Alzheimer's disease. Machover and Fleming are both engaged in exploring the connections between music and health, and after listening to a recording of the Kronos Quartet's premiere performance of Gammified, Fleming asked Machover if he'd be interested in creating a version with a vocal line for her. The new piece, for string quartet, voice and electronics, was commissioned for Fleming by Cal Performances as part of her "Music and the Mind," series, ongoing creative collaborations with researchers, scholars, and scientists; the digital program also includes a discussion with UC Berkeley professor of neuroscience Ehud Isacoff.

Sorta Voce was commissioned by cellist Matt Haimovitz as part of his new "Primavera Project," and will appear on the first CD release of the project on the PENTATONE label in June 2021. Haimovitz's project is a collaboration of music and art inspired by one of the most widely admired and enigmatic paintings of the Renaissance, Botticelli's Primavera (ca 1480), and the reimagining of the Primavera by world-renowned contemporary artist Charline von Heyl in her own large-scale painting. Haimovitz says, "In our new reality of the global pandemic and social upheaval, both Primavera paintings' composition, characters, symbolism, nature and flora, darkness and light, mythology, identity, and spirituality are ripe for reflection and new interpretations. Each composer has been asked to compose a work interpreting the paintings from a present-day perspective, embracing our shared humanity and contributing to a contemporary culturally relevant Renaissance."

Machover's Sorta Voce, composed in early 2021, is for unamplified solo cello, with an optional vocal obligato by the cellist. Like Botticelli's painting, it explores the power and ambiguity of breath - both from the mouth and using a new cello technique developed by Machover - which the composer says "can destroy as well as sustain, begin life as well as end it." Sorta Voce is both very rapid and very quiet, often on the edge of inaudibility and on the verge of revealing the simple, haunting melody that ties the piece together and is heard in entirety only near the end of the work. In this way, Sorta Voce explores the will to persist, the longing for rebirth after tough times, and the acceptance of life's constant ebb-and-flow.