San Francisco Conservatory of Music Presents MUSIC TEXTUAL, 8/22

The Hot Air Music Festival Present Musical Textual: Where Music and Text Combine. Featuring The Betons: Ella Barros and Wolfgang Thompson &The Hot Air Chamber Ensemble with Soprano Shawnette Sulker, And Actor Trish DeBaun, and Conductor Matthew Cmiel &The Hot Air Vocal Ensemblein.

TWO BAY AREA PERFORMANCES: Saturday, August 21st, 20107:30 PM at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (50 Oak St. San Francisco, CA, 94102) $15 at the door $10 in advance http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/120440 ANDSunday, August 22nd, 20107:30 PM at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Wolfgang Thompson and Matthew Cmiel, two cutting edge artists, team up to combine their separate fields in an artistic experience that will blur the lines between music and theater. Both artists bring their own personal flair for the dramatic and the powerfully emotional in these evenings packed with resonance. The program features new creations of Wolfgang Thompson and Matthew Cmiel matched with a new interpretation of a classic by Elliott Carter.

Wolfgang Thompson and Matthew Cmiel met earlier this year at the Hot Air Music Festival and the two began almost instantly to plot future collaborations. They seek to take what is new, unsettling, even frightening due to staggering difficulty or complexity and communicate it in an emotionally resonant manner with an audience.

Here they begin to explore the relation between the arts: text, music, and theater. First up? Anne: a new work created by Wolfgang Thompson. The ballet Anne, conceived through the desire to bring to light the beautiful and haunting poems of Anne Sexton, probes the complexity and irony of Anne Sexton's life, as well as her predilection for self-destruction and negation of body. Annegenerates the same emotion on stage as Anne Sexton's poetry creates in its readers - forthright and raw. The relationship of text and body movement in Anne creates its own musical composition. Anne Sexton's poetry is the score to this musical/textual narrative through her tormented life. Anne will be performed by The Betons: Ella Barros and Wolfgang Thompson.

Second! Murmur: by Matthew Cmiel, a piece for four performers singing and playing percussion, set to text from Muriel Rukeyser's Body of Waking. The text of this song is taken from an untitled poem in Body of Waking. It pictures life, all life - be it human, animal, or plant - as being unified. Rukeyser portrays this oneness through a constant and barely audible murmuring at the very edges of our collective awareness. All beings hear this murmuring, which is the voice of the earth speaking through all of us. The earth's voice is often a quiet murmuring, occasionally expanding into "bird calls" of lightning or "red central roots" rumbling more aggressively outwards from the earth's core. Matthew has chosen to take this text of unity and stage it as a ritual, a ceremony celebrating that common bond we all share. Life.

Last!Elliott Carter's A Mirror on Which to Dwell, Six poems of Elizabeth BishopWolfgang Thompson and Matthew Cmiel join forces on this work to create something rare - a fully staged song-cycle. Though traditionally this piece is un-staged, the workings and emotions brought forth through the talents of actress Trish DeBaun act as a guide and interpreter for the audience. This famously difficult piece will be sung by the stunning Shawnette Sulker, and performed with musicians from the Hot Air Music Festival's Chamber Orchestra. The composer writes about the piece."The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop impressed me because they have a clear verbal coherence as well as an imaginative use of syllabic sounds that suggest the singing voice. I was very much in sympathy with their point of view, for there is almost always a secondary layer of meaning, sometimes ironic, sometimes passionate, that gives a special ambiance, often contradictory, to what the words say."

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