CaltechLive! presents GRAMMY-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer on Friday, May 13, at 7:30 p.m. at Beckman Auditorium (332 S. Michigan Ave, Pasadena, CA, 91106) on the Caltech campus, as part of the 2022 CaltechLive! performance series. Chanticleer is known around the world as "an orchestra of voices" for its wide-ranging repertoire and dazzling virtuosity.
This performance marks the first in-person, live performance on the Caltech campus since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. Tickets are $45 and can be purchased online link or at the Caltech Ticket Office (Caltech Cahill Center for Astroscience and Astrophysics, 1216 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91106).
The program, called Awakenings, begins with a commissioned work from composer Ayanna Woods touching on shared experiences of the past years. The text for close[r], now is an erasure poem created by Woods from unusual source material: a March 11, 2020, Los Angeles Times commentary by theatre critic Charles McNulty detailing reasons why theaters and live performing arts should "close, now."
Chanticleer's Music Director Tim Keeler said, "Woods restructured and resampled the article to create a new text full of questioning and yearning, highlighting the changes we've had to make to connect. Through isolation and distance, we've been forced to 'hone the dexterity of love' and to be creative with how we care for each other. Woods closes the piece with an imperative for the world: 'come back to life.' In Chanticleer, it's our hope that the life we return to is more compassionate, more caring, and more creative than the one that we left in 2020."
"We are delighted, at long last, to be reopening Beckman Auditorium for public performances after their long absence," said
Michael Alexander, Caltech Director of Public Programming. "While COVID protocols will still be in force, we are thrilled to be able to welcome our audience back-and with what more appropriate artists than the wonderful Chanticleer, who revel in the sound of the human voice."
Chanticleer covers a wide and eclectic range of music in Awakenings, including Claudio Monteverdi's Lauda Jerusalem from his Vespers of 1610; O Radiant Dawn, James MacMillan's tribute to the O Antiphon for December 21st, "O Oriens" - often translated as "O Morning Star"; Regina caeli, a text associated with Easter, a Marian antiphon calling for joy and celebration at Christ's rebirth from Alexander Agricola and Vicente Lusitano; and Ulysses Kay's Music, to a text by Ralph Waldo Emerson, serves as a fitting tribute to recent difficulties.
Béla Bartók Négy régi magyar népdal ("Four old Hungarian Folksongs"), written in 1910, is one of Bartók's first forays into this genre; then William Byrd's raucous and celebratory motet Laudibus in sanctis will be sung.
There are three additional commissioned works on the program: one is Steven Sametz's Birds of Paradise, commissioned in 2020 by Chanitcleer; and the others are by Augusta Read Thomas, who is represented with The Rewaking and The Bird her punctual music brings, both from Purple Syllables, commissioned by Music Accord in 2004, for Chanticleer.
The first part of the concert ends with joyful singing in Elmúlt a tél ("Winter is gone") by Lajos Bárdos, and the program concludes with emeritus music director Joseph H. Jennings' masterful and classic arrangement of the bossa nova standard, Journey to Recife-a journey to "a place where you can find joy and release."
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