SACRED AND PROFANE Comes to Symphony Space This Month

 Composers Robert Sirota and Sheree Clement will present a shared evening of their music titled Sacred and Profane on Tuesday, October 15, 2024 at 7:30pm at Symphony Space in Leonard Nimoy Thalia (2537 Broadway). Sacred and Profane invites audiences to explore the dual narratives of conflict and reconciliation. A unique blend of chamber music and opera, Sirota and Clement’s music grapples with the human condition through the lenses of comedy, drama, and lyricism. 

The evening will feature an all-star group of performers including soprano Ariadne Greif, baritone Paul Pinto, the Momenta Quartet, cellist Benjamin Larsen, pianist Hyungjin Choi, flutist Roberta Michel, violists Jonah Sirota and Nadia Sirota, and percussionist Katherine Fortunato.

Sacred and Profane opens with Robert Sirota’s Broken Places (2016), which comprises seven brief movements as a meditation on the theme of brokenness. The chamber work for flute and cello is accompanied by an original poem written as a textual companion to the piece.

Continuing the theme of contrast and internal conflict, the world premiere of Sheree Clement’s Mermaid Songs (2024) for string quartet and soprano features three humorous and forthright songs containing vivid dreams of becoming a mermaid, maintaining friendships with sea urchins, and coping with chemotherapy amidst champagne cocktail parties. Setting three poems from Heather Hartley’s Adult Swim, the three songs expose conflicting truths told through Clement’s intricate musical language and candid humor.

Robert Sirota’s 2005 work A Sinner’s Diary for flute, violas, cello, percussion, and piano, opens the second half of the concert, and serves as a musical confession, probing the push and pull of suffering, doubt, and grace. Written in nine movements, Sirota describes the piece as a “surreal liturgy” with titles and themes taken from rubrics in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. He explains that the movements, which began as a kind of journaling, “evolved into a conversation between my inner demons and the angels of my better nature. This duality reflects the year in which it was written – a year that included a number of personal crises as well as abundant grace.”

The evening ends with the live premiere of Sheree Clement’s Table Manners (2020), a comedic duet with soprano Ariadne Greif, baritone Paul Pinto, and 40 pounds of silverware. With text by Phillis Levin, the duet revolves around dueling themes of friendship, competition, and greed, punctuated by mercurial moments of connection and dada comedy. Table Manners is directed by Mary Birnbaum.

More about Robert Sirota: Robert Sirota’s works have been performed by orchestras across the US and Europe; ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, Sequitur, yMusic, Chameleon Arts, and Dinosaur Annex; Concerts on the Slope; the Chiara, American, Ethel, Elmyr, Blair and Telegraph String Quartets; the Peabody, Concord, and Webster Trios; and at festivals including Tanglewood, Aspen, Yellow Barn, and Cooperstown; Bowdoin Gamper and Bowdoin International Music Festival; and Mizzou International Composers Festival. Recent commissions include Jeffrey Kahane and the Sarasota Music Festival, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Palladium Musicum, American Guild of Organists, the American String Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, the Naumburg Foundation, and yMusic, Thomas Pellaton, Carol Wincenc, Linda Chesis, Trinity Episcopal Church (Indianapolis), and Sierra Chamber Society, as well as arrangements for Paul Simon. Since 2021, Sirota has presented Muzzy Ridge Concerts, an annual series featuring performances by world-class musicians, in his home studio in Searsmont, Maine.  

Robert Sirota has received grants from the Guggenheim and Watson Foundations, NEA, Meet the Composer, and the American Music Center. His music is recorded on Legacy Recordings, National Sawdust Tracks, and the Capstone, Albany, New Voice, Gasparo and Crystal labels, and is published by Muzzy Ridge Music, Schott, Music Associates of New York, MorningStar, Theodore Presser, and To the Fore. For complete information, visit www.robertsirota.com.

About Sheree Clement: With intricate shimmering colors over fragments of tunes, Sheree Clement builds surprising narratives. She upends the listener’s expectations with politically charged texts, found sounds and unusual structures, all to wake us up to the upheaval, conflicting truths and possibilities of now. Her works have been performed in New York at Merkin Hall and Miller Theatre, at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and at the Temple du Luxembourg, Paris, France. The New York Times has described her work as “intriguing”… “fascinating in its explorations of instrumental color” [with] “arresting moments of calm.” Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sheree has had her works performed by Speculum Musicae, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Canyonlands Ensemble in Salt Lake City. 

Recent premieres include Vocalise for the Naked Emperor, for the Louis Moreau Gottschalk Institute in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Fast Fish for the New York New Music Ensemble. This fall, Sheree will also produce a music video of her work, Teeth, for solo piano and fixed media with Eliza Garth. Among her honors are grants from NYSCA and a Goddard Leiberson Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Sheree holds composition degrees from the University of Michigan and Columbia University.