Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash concludes her Carnegie Hall Perspectives series with a performance on Saturday, February 20 at 8:00 p.m. in Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, featuring songs from her Grammy-Awarding winning album The River & The Thread. The record, a collaboration with her partner, producer, and co-writer John Leventhal, musically, narratively, spiritually, and geographically explores the American South. For the second half of the program, Cash is joined by acclaimed musician Jeff Tweedy--founding member and leader of the American rock band Wilco--to perform songs from her storied musical catalogue with an emphasis on songs from her critically acclaimed 2009 album The List.
This season at
Carnegie Hall, Cash presented a residency shining a light on the rich and disparate elements of American southern roots music, from traditional bluegrass to country and soul music, and from Western swing to hardscrabble, virtuosic folk music. Featured artists who performed as part of the residency included The Time Jumpers; Ry Cooder;
Ricky Skaggs;
Sharon White; and St. Paul and the Broken Bones, all in celebration of a soulful and quintessentially American cultural form.
Rosanne Cash is one of America's preeminent performing songwriters. A four-time Grammy Award-winning singer and composer, she has recorded 15 albums, is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2014 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for the Performing Arts, and is a recent inductee in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. She is the author of a best-selling memoir, Composed, and a prolific writer and speaker. Her essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and the Oxford American, among others. Cash first performed at
Carnegie Hall in 1994. She returned for a solo Zankel Hall performance in 2006 as part of the WFUV Live at Zankel series and appeared in 2007 as part of an all-star Rainforest Foundation Fund Benefit Concert.
As the founding member and leader of the American rock band Wilco and before that the co-founder of the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy is one of contemporary American music's most accomplished songwriters, musicians, and performers. Since starting Wilco in 1994, Tweedy has written original songs for eight Wilco albums and collaborated with folk singer Billy Bragg to bring musical life to three albums of
Woody Guthrie-penned lyrics in the Mermaid Avenue series.
Now in its 16th season,
Carnegie Hall's Perspectives series is an artistic initiative in which select musicians are invited to explore their own musical individuality and create their own personal concert series through collaborations with other musicians and ensembles.
Previous Perspectives artists have included Senegalese vocalist Youssou N'Dour; Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso; Indian classical tabla player Zakir Hussain; experimental rocker
David Byrne; and singer-songwriter
James Taylor; as well as conductor and pianist
Daniel Barenboim; conductors
Pierre Boulez,
James Levine,
Michael Tilson Thomas, and
David Robertson; violinists Gidon Kremer, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Christian Tetzlaff; cellist
Yo-Yo Ma; pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Leif Ove Andsnes, Martha Argerich, Emanuel Ax, Maurizio Pollini, András Schiff, Peter Serkin, and Mitsuko Uchida; sopranos Renée Fleming and
Dawn Upshaw; mezzo-soprano
Joyce DiDonato; bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff; the Emerson String Quartet; the Kronos Quartet; and early music ensemble L'Arpeggiata. Other Perspectives artists in the 2015-2016 season are pianist Evgeny Kissin and conductor
Sir Simon Rattle.