UCSB Arts & Lectures - Winter Program 2024

Winter Program 2024

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A Standing Ovation to Jody & John Arnhold Launched in 2021 by a leadership gift from Jody & John Arnhold, the Arnhold Education Initiative has enabled Arts & Lectures to deepen its signature cross-campus collaborations by connecting world-class artists and thinkers with thousands of UCSB students in the classroom each year.

“The arts stimulate the imagination, so exposing students to those at the top of their craft will enhance the educational experience at UCSB. Students will think bigger, dream bigger, create bigger, and succeed bigger.” – John Arnhold

photo: David Bazemore; top inset: Kimberly Citro; bottom inset: Emilio Madrid

Wynton Marsalis and John Arnhold

Tiler Peck teaches a ballet master class for UCSB students

Jody Arnhold

The Arnholds’ commitment to arts education extends far beyond A&L. Scan to learn more about Jody’s passion for dance education and how the Arnholds elevate the cultural landscape in their hometown of New York City.

(805) 893-3535 www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

Dear Friends, Join us in 2024 to welcome an extraordinary slate of artists and speakers who break the mold and make things new.

At the presidential inauguration in 2021, Amanda Gorman’s rhythmic, musical performance awakened the nation to a new style of poetry and activism. Experience her unique voice on March 5 in A&L’s Justice for All programming initiative.

Celebrate soprano Renée Fleming’s 2023 Kennedy Center honor with a recital at The Granada Theatre on February 1. Witness her pioneering Music and Mind project the next day when she leads a panel discussion with doctors and neuroscientists on how music can improve and extend cognitive functioning.

Prepare to stomp, clap and shout with boundary-busting Americana firebrand Sierra Ferrell on March 10.

Hear & Now, our classical discovery series at Hahn Hall, heats up with recitals by rising instrumental stars and the inimitable vocal group Roomful of Teeth with Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane on February 3.

On February 6 our Thematic Learning Initiative welcomes Chris Anderson, head of TED and chief curator of “ideas worth spreading,” to distribute and sign complimentary copies of his new book, Infectious Generosity.

And please join us for a special Speaking with Pico event featuring author Abraham Verghese at the Arlington Theatre on February 21. Verghese’s bestseller The Covenant of Water was an Oprah’s Book Club pick.

In Border Crossings, A&L teams with multiple campus partners for a symposium, an exhibition and performances featuring Limón Dance Company and Santa Barbara Dance Theater on January 27 and 28.

Come along with us as we keep going beyond what’s expected in 2024.

With deepest gratitude,

Tiler Peck, Celesta and Michelle Dorrance

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Celesta M. Billeci Miller McCune Executive Director

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Community Partners

Illuminating a wide spectrum of systemic injustice, the Justice for All programming initiative looks to today’s great minds and creators and to the courageous leaders across the globe who are forging a new path forward. Join us as we learn from those confronting uncomfortable questions, solving difficult problems, and guiding us all toward a more equitable world.

Limón Dance Company, Jan 27 Celebrating the heroism of immigrant movement artists

Amanda Gorman, Mar 5 Advocating for the environment, racial equality and gender justice

Robert B. Reich, Apr 3 Championing labor justice

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, May 7 Grounding conservation in social justice

Look for additional events to be added throughout the season.

JUSTICE FOR ALL Lead Sponsors:

Marcy Carsey, Connie Frank & Evan Thompson, Eva & Yoel Haller, Dick Wolf, and Zegar Family Foundation JUSTICE FOR ALL UCSB Faculty Advisory Committee: Gerardo Aldana, Daina Ramey Berry, Charles Hale, Beth Pruitt, Victor Rios, Susannah Scott, Jeffrey Stewart, Sharon Tettegah

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Arts & Lectures’ Thematic Learning Initiative (TLI) extends the conversation from the stage into the community, enriching lifelong learning and initiating dialogue and empowerment through special events, book giveaways and more.

Winter Book Giveaway and Signing Curator of TED, Bestselling Author and Media Pioneer

Chris Anderson Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading Tue, Feb 6 / 7:30 PM Campbell Hall FREE (registration recommended) “This book was a much-needed gift to my weary and newsbattered heart.”

– Elizabeth Gilbert As head of TED, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world’s boldest thinkers sharing their most uplifting ideas. With his new book, Anderson looks at one of humankind’s defining but overlooked impulses – generosity – and how we can super-charge its potential to build a hopeful future.

Pick up your free copy of Infectious Generosity and stay for a brief conversation, Q&A and signing with the author. Books available while supplies last.

With thanks to our visionary partners,

Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin, for their support of the Thematic Learning Initiative

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2023-2024 Theme: Cultivating Connection

bottom photo: Andrew Eccles; middle photo: Mary Hinkson performing “If There Isn’t There Ought To Be” from After the Rain (1945) on February 4, 1949, Photographer unknown, University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives, Madison, WI.

Fostering community through acts of joy, creativity and belonging

FREE EVENTS

Ballerina Boys Film Screening

Thu, Jan 18 / 7 PM / Campbell Hall FREE (registration recommended) “A testament to the necessity of diversity, inclusion, love, passion and humor in the arts.” – Misty Copeland Inspired by the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the Trocks were fueled by the spirit of defiance and creative exuberance that the gay rights movement unleashed. This film follows the troupe on tour in an epicenter of continued struggles for LGBTQ rights.

RELATED EVENT

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Jan 25 (p. 8)

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900-1955 Art Exhibition

Thu, Jan 25 - Sun, May 5 / FREE UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum By focusing on the act of crossing borders, this exhibit celebrates a diverse range of dance artists who contributed movement language that came out of their lived experience to become what we know as modern dance.

RELATED EVENT

Limón Dance Company, Jan 27 (p. 12)

Renée Fleming’s Music and Mind Panel Discussion

Fri, Feb 2 / 9:30 AM / FREE (registration recommended) Mary Craig Auditorium, SB Museum of Art A leading advocate for the study of powerful connections between the arts and health, Renée Fleming will be joined by local researchers and medical practitioners for a public conversation exploring the intersection of music, health and neuroscience.

RELATED EVENT

Renée Fleming in Recital, Feb 1 (p. 25)

Look for additional events to be added throughout the season.

(805) 893-3535 | www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

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Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo Thu, Jan 25 / 8 PM / Granada Theatre

photo: Zoran Jelenic

Running time: approx. 120 minutes, including two intermissions

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo

Program

50th Anniversary

Le Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake, Act II)

Featuring Colette Adae, Ludmila Beaulemova, Maria Clubfoot, Holly Dey-Abroad, Nadia Doumiafeyva, Elvira Khababgallina, Varvara Laptopova, Anya Marx, Resi Oachkatzlschwoaf, Grunya Protazova, Olga Supphozova, Gerd Törd, Bertha Vinayshinsky, Tatiana Youbetyabootskaya, Blagovesta Zlotmachinskaya Bruno Backpfeifengesicht, Ilya Bobovnikov, Boris Dumbkopf, Araf Legupski, Marat Legupski, Sergey Legupski, Timur Legupski, Mikhail Mudkin, Boris Mudko, Chip Pididouda, Yuri Smirnov, Kravlji Snepek, Pavel Törd, Jens Witzelsucht, Tino Xirau-Lopez Tory Dobrin, Artistic Director Liz Harler, Executive Director Isabel Martinez Rivera, Associate Director Shelby Sonnenberg, Production Manager Raffaele Morra, Ballet Master

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Presented in association with Pacific Pride Foundation and UCSB Department of Theater and Dance

Music by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Choreography after Lev Ivanovich Ivanov Costumes by Mike Gonzales Decor by Clio Young Lighting by Kip Marsh Swept up into the magical realm of swans (and birds), this elegiac phantasmagoria of variations and ensembles in line and music is the signature work of Les Ballets Trockadero. The story of Odette, the beautiful princess turned into a swan by the evil sorcerer, and how she is nearly saved by the love of Prince Siegfried, was not so unusual a theme when Tchaikovsky first wrote his ballet in 1877 – the metamorphosis of mortals to birds and vice versa occurs frequently in Russian folklore. The original Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow was treated unsuccessfully; a year after Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893, the St. Petersburg Maryinsky Ballet produced the version we know today. Perhaps the world’s best known ballet, its appeal seems to stem from the mysterious and pathetic qualities of the heroine juxtaposed with the canonized glamor of 19th century Russian ballet.

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Benno: Kravlji Snepek (friend and confidant to) Prince Siegfried: Araf Legupski (who falls in love with) Colette Adae (Queen of the) Swans: Artists of the Trockadero (all of whom got this way because of) Von Rothbart: Yuri Smirnov (an evil wizard who goes about turning girls into swans) - Intermission -

Pas de Deux, Solo or Modern Work to be Announced Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet Music by Frederic Chopin Choreography by Peter Anastos Costumes by Olivia Kirschbaum Lighting by Kip Marsh The surfeit of “piano ballets” that have appeared since Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering (1969) sought to somehow humanize the classical ballet dancer and his milieu. Piano ballets take the aristocracy out of ballet dancing by presenting the dancers as affectionately friendly, democratic, just plain folks relating to each other; in much the same way, television talk shows demystified the glamor of Hollywood by featuring noted celebrities discussing their laundry problems. The Trockadero, not unaware of these trends, now tenders its own sensitive relationships.

Boy in Brick: Pavel Törd Boy in Blue: Chip Pididouda Girl in Lavender: Grunya Protazova (with a grey chiffon underlay) Girl in Orange: Ludmila Beaulemova (with a slight tilt to the left) Girl in Green: Holly Dey-Abroad (with a sparkle in her eye)

- Intermission -

Paquita Music by Ludwig Minkus Choreography after Marius Petipa Staged by Elena Kunikova Costumes and decor by Mike Gonzales Lighting by Kip Marsh Paquita is a superb example of the French style as it was exported to St. Petersburg in the late 19th Century.

Paquita was originally a ballet-pantomime in two acts, choreographed by Joseph Mazillier, to music by Ernest Deldevez. The story had a Spanish theme, with Carlotta Grisi (creator of Giselle) as a young woman kidnapped by gypsies, who saves a young and handsome officer from certain death. Premiering at the Paris Opera in 1846, the ballet was produced a year later in Russia by Marius Petipa. Petipa commissioned Ludwig Minkus, the composer of his two most recent successes (Don Quixote and La Bayadere) to write additional music in order to add a brilliant “divertissement” to Mazillier’s Paquita. Petipa choreographed for this a Pas de Trois and a Grand Pas de Deux in his characteristic style. These soon became the bravura highlights of the evening – to the point that they are the only fragments of Paquita that have been preserved. The dancers display a range of choreographic fireworks, which exploit the virtuoso possibilities of academic classical dance, enriched by the unexpected combinations of steps.

Ballerina and Cavalier Varvara Laptopova with Bruno Backpfeifengesicht Variations Variation 1: Colette Adae Variation 2: Resi Oachikatzlschwoaf Variation 3: Ludmila Beaulemova Variation 4: Nadia Doumiafeyva Variation 5: Varvara Laptopova

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About the Company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo was founded in 1974 by New York City-based ballet enthusiasts in order to present a playful, entertaining view of traditional, classical ballet in parody form and with men performing all of the roles – and in the case of roles usually danced by women: en travesti and en pointe.

Founders Peter Anastos, Anthony Bassae and Natch Taylor broke away from Larry Ree’s Gloxinia Trockadero Ballet to create a dance- and choreography-focused company. They put on their first shows on the makeshift stage of the West Side Discussion Group, an early gay and lesbian political organization, which was led by future Trockadero General Director Eugene McDougle.

The performances were infused with a subversive edge, as the country was still a long way from bringing drag performance to a mainstream audience.

The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, soon garnered critical acclaim and cultural cachet in publications with major reach such as The New Yorker, The New York Times and the Village Voice. By mid-1975, the company’s inspired blend of dance knowledge, comedy and athleticism had moved beyond New York City, with the Trocks qualifying for the National Endowment for the Arts Touring Program, hiring a full-time teacher and ballet mistress, and making its first extended tours of the United States and Canada.

Packing, unpacking and repacking tutus and drops, stocking giant-sized toe shoes by the case, and running for planes and chartered buses all became routine parts of life. They have been going non-stop ever since, appearing in 43 countries and more than 660 cities worldwide. The company branched out from the vibrant live performances and expanded its scope with an education program in 2016 and the Choreography Institute in November 2023. With so much activity, the Trocks have gathered a dedicated fan base, repeating performances in countries year after year and continuing to add first-time engagements as the company enters its 50th anniversary season.

Other television appearances have ranged from a Shirley MacLaine special to The Dick Cavett Show, What’s My Line?, Real People and On-Stage America. The dancers also have the distinction of appearing with Kermit and Miss Piggy on Muppet Babies.

The company’s awards include a prestigious U.K. Critics Circle National Dance Award for Best Classical Repertoire (2007) and nomination for Outstanding Company (2016); the U.K. Theatrical Managers Award (2006); and the Positano Award for Excellence in Dance (2007, Italy). The company has appeared in multiple galas and benefits over the years, including at the 80th anniversary Royal Variety Performance to aid the Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund in December 2008, which was attended by members of the British Royal family, including the (now) King Charles III. The original concept of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has not changed. It is a company of professional male dancers performing the full range of ballet and modern dance repertoire, including classical and original works in faithful renditions of the manners and conceits of those dance styles. The comedy is achieved by incorporating and exaggerating the foibles, accidents and underlying incongruities of serious dance. Muscular, athletic bodies delicately balancing on toes as swans, sylphs, water sprites, romantic princesses and angst-ridden Victorian ladies enhance the appreciation for the art form, delighting die-hard ballet fans and newcomers alike.

Looking to the future, the Trocks are making plans for new commissions, debuts and new audiences, while continuing the company’s original mission: to bring the pleasure of dance to the widest possible audience.

The company will, as they have for 50 years, “keep on Trockin.’”

Interest and accolades have accumulated over the years. The Trocks have proved an alluring documentary subject, and been featured in an Emmy-winning episode of the acclaimed British arts program The South Bank Show; the 2017 feature film Rebels on Pointe; and most recently Ballerina Boys, which aired on PBS American Masters in 2021. Several of the Trocks’ performances at the Maison de la Danse in Lyon, France, were also aired

by Dutch, French and Japanese television networks.

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Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo Box 1325, Gracie Station, New York City, New York 10028

Dancers Blagovesta Zlotmachinskaya and Mikhail Mudkin: Raydel Caceres Olga Supphozova and Yuri Smirnov: Robert Carter Gerd Törd and Pavel Törd: Matias Dominguez Escrig Tatiana Youbetyabootskaya and Araf Legupski: Andrea Fabbri Resi Oachikatzlschwoaf and Ilya Bobvnikov: Gabriel Foley Elvira Khababgallina and Sergey Legupski: Kevin Garcia Maria Clubfoot and Tino Xirau-Lopez: Alejandro Gonzalez Rodriguez Anya Marx and Chip Pididouda: Shohei Iwahama Nadia Doumiafeyva and Kravlji Snepek: Philip Martin-Nielson Holly Dey-Abroad and Bruno Backpfeifengesicht: Felix Molinero del Paso Ludmila Beaulemova and Jens Witzelsucht: Trent Montgomery Bertha Vinayshinsky and Boris Mudko: Sergio Najera Grunya Protazova and Marat Legupski: Salvador Sasot Sellart Colette Adae and Timur Legupski: Jake Speakman Varvara Laptopova and Boris Dumbkopf: Takaomi Yoshino

Company Staff Artistic Director: Tory Dobrin Executive Director: Liz Harler Associate Director: Isabel Martinez Rivera Production Manager: Shelby Sonnenberg Ballet Master: Raffaele Morra Lighting Supervisor: Matthew Weisgable Wardrobe Supervisor: Andrea Mejuto Education Manager: Roy Fialkow Digital Engagement Manager: Anne Posluszny Company Advancement Associate: MaryBeth Rodgers Fundraising Consultant: LG Capital for Culture Costume Designers: Ken Busbin, Jeffrey Sturdivant Stylistic Guru: Marius Petipa Orthopedic Consultant: Dr. David S. Weiss Photographer: Zoran Jelenic

Special Thanks to the Trocks’ Major Institutional Supporters: Booth Ferris Foundation The New York Community Trust The Howard Gilman Foundation Mertz Gilmore Foundation The Max and Victoria Dreyfus foundation Rallis Foundation Shubert Foundation This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Major support for the Choreography Institute is provided by Denise Littlefield Sobel.

Thanks to local and state cultural funding agencies for their contributions to the Trocks’ work in New York with support, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; and the NYU Community Fund.

Thanks to the Trocks’ Board of Directors and individual supporters for their generous contributions that make the company’s nonprofit mission possible.

Make up provided by: The official Pointe Shoe Provider of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo:

Music for ballets on the program is conducted by Pierre Michel Durand with the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, Pavel Prantl, Leader Booking Inquiries: Liz Harler, Executive Director liz@trockadero.org

Program subject to change without notice. trockadero.org facebook.com/thetrocks Instagram @lesballetstrockadero LES BALLETS TROCKADERO DE MONTE CARLO, Inc. is a nonprofit dance company chartered by the State of New York.

Martha Cooper, president; Jenny Palmer, vice-president; Amy Minter, treasurer; Mary Lynn Bergman-Rallis, secretary.

James C.P. Berry, Tory Dobrin

(805) 893-3535 | www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

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Limón Dance Company Dante Puleio, Artistic Director

Sat, Jan 27 / 8 PM / Granada Theatre Running time: approx. 103 minutes, including intermission

photo: Missa Brevis courtesy JLDF

Lead Sponsor: Jody & John Arnhold and the Arnhold A&L Education Initiative Justice for All Lead Sponsors: Marcy Carsey, Connie Frank & Evan Thompson, Eva & Yoel Haller, Dick Wolf, and Zegar Family Foundation Dance Series Sponsors: Margo Cohen-Feinberg, Donna Fellows & Dave Johnson, Barbara Stupay, and Sheila Wald Presented in association with UCSB Department of Theater and Dance

Limón Dance Company

Program

Founders: José Limón and Doris Humphrey Artistic Director: Dante Puleio Executive Director: Michelle Preston Associate Artistic Director: Logan Frances Kruger

Danzas Mexicanas

The Company Natalie Clevenger, Joey Columbus, MJ Edwards, Mariah Gravelin, Johnson Guo, Kieran King, Deepa Liegel, Olivia Mozie, Eric Parra, Nicholas Ruscica, Jessica Sgambelluri, Savannah Spratt, Lauren Twomley with Santa Barbara Dance Theater Paige Amicon, Derion Loman, Dalya Modlin, Niki Powell, Calder White Apprentices: Riley Haley, Tiersha Lin Narrator: Dion Mucciacito

Major Revival Choreography: José Limón (1939) Reconstruction and Reimagination: Dante Puleio in collaboration with the dancers (2022) Project Advisor: Risa Steinberg Historical Research: Sarah Stackhouse Music: Lionel Nowak, special 75th anniversary edition for the Limón Dance Foundation notated by Allen Fogelsanger Original Costumes: José Limón Costume Reimagination: Márion Talán de la Rosa Lighting Design: Al Crawford Dancers Indio: Eric Parra Conquistador: Jessica Sgambelluri Peón: MJ Edwards Caballero: Johnson Guo Revolucionario: Deepa Liegel A lost work of Limón’s, these five solos representing historical Mexican figures have been reconstructed and reimagined using photos, drawings, writings and notation from Limón’s personal “Libro de Ideas.” Limón performed this work in his early days as a dancer and choreographer, but with little archival footage and never having taught the work, this will be the first time

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the company has performed these fundamental and foundational solos.

First performance August 4, 1939 at Lisser Hall, Mills College, Oakland by José Limón.

Missa Brevis Choreography: José Limón (1958) Music: Zoltán Kodály,* Missa Brevis In Tempore Belli 2024 Reconstruction: Kathryn Alter and Kurt Douglas Reconstruction Assistants: Eric Parra and Lauren Twomley 2024 Costume Design and Construction: Caitlin Taylor Original Costume Design: Ming Cho Lee Scenic Design: Ming Cho Lee Lighting Design: Steve Woods, executed by William Brown The Company Limón Dance Company (LDC) and Santa Barbara Dance Theater (SBDT) Soloist – The Outsider – Lauren Twomley (LDC) LDC: Natalie Clevenger, Joey Columbus, MJ Edwards, Mariah Gravelin, Johnson Guo, Kieran King, Deepa Liegel, Olivia Mozie, Eric Parra, Nicholas Ruscica, Jessica Sgambelluri, Savannah Spratt SBDT: Paige Amicon, Riley Haley (Apprentice), Tiersha Lin (Apprentice), Derion Loman, Dalya Modlin, Niki Powell, Calder White; Understudies (Apprentices): Sky Pasqual, Gabi Smith, Chloe Swoiskin Introitus: Organ Introduction Kyrie and Gloria: The Company Qui Tollis: Lauren Twomley Cum Sancto Spiritu: Lauren Twomley with Joey Columbus, Johnson Guo, Nicholas Ruscica Credo: Joey Columbus, Johnson Guo, Nicholas Ruscica, with MJ Edwards, Mariah Gravelin, Deepa Liegel Crucifixus: Jessica Sgambelluri Et Resurrexit: The Company Sanctus: MJ Edwards, Jessica Sgambelluri, Savannah Spratt Benedictus: Lauren Twomley with MJ Edwards, Jessica Sgambelluri, The Company Hosanna: Savannah Spratt Agnus Dei: Lauren Twomley with The Company Ite, Missa Est: Lauren Twomley with The Company

Limón called this work his “prayer for peace.” Zoltán Kodály, the Hungarian composer, wrote Missa Brevis in Tempore Belli under great hardship during the siege of Budapest. It is a Mass in Time of War. Its first performance was given in the cellar of a bombed-out church.

Limón’s stirring choreography depicts an indomitable humanity amidst the legacy and destruction of war. It is a memento to cities destroyed during World War II and to those unconquerable qualities in human beings that compel the spirit to rise up in hope and to survive. *By arrangement with Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., publisher and copyright owner First performed April 11, 1958 at the Juilliard School of Music New York City, NY.

- Intermission -

Chaconne Choreography: José Limón (1942) Staging and Direction: Logan Frances Kruger Music: J.S. Bach, Chaconne from Partitia No. 2 in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin Original Lighting Design: Steve Woods 2022 Lighting Design: Al Crawford Dancer: Savannah Spratt The chaconne as a dance form originated in Mexico during the Spanish occupation. Bach employed the strict musical form of the chaconne but enriched it with powerful emotional implications. Limón has tried to capture in his dance both the formal austerity and the profound feeling of the music.

First performed December 27, 1942 at the Humphrey-Weidman Studio Theater, New York City, by José Limón.

Migrant Mother Choreography: Raúl Tamez* (2022) Music: Los Cardencheros de Sapioriz, Cantos Tzotziles de San Pedro Chenalhó, Juan Pablo Villa, Lila Downs, Felipe Esparza, and Los Cojolites Rehearsal Assistant: Deepa Liegel Costume Design: Edgar Sébastien Lighting Design: Al Crawford Dancers Joey Columbus, MJ Edwards, Mariah Gravelin, Johnson Guo, Kieran King, Deepa Liegel, Eric Parra, Nicholas Ruscica, Jessica Sgambelluri, Savannah Spratt, Lauren Twomley

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Raúl Tamez is the first Mexican choreographer to create a work on the company since José Limón.

This work is a response to Limon’s Tonantzintla (1951), which means “place of our little mother.” Limón was mesmerized by a Baroque Catholic church built up by Mexican Indigenous people, where they were partially allowed by the Franciscan friars to portray some of their enormously rich cosmology. The result was a unique style of syncretic Baroque never seen before.

This new piece encourages voices that are often marginalized in terms of symbolic domination, colonization and creolization. It is a tribute to the majesty of the prehispanic heritage in Mesoamérica.

Commissioned by Northrop at The University of Minnesota.

First performed April 26, 2022 at the Joyce Theater in New York, NY by the Limón Dance Company. *2022 Bessie Award for Outstanding Creator and Choreographer

Doris Humphrey (Founder/Choreographer, 1895-1958) is recognized as a founder of American modern dance.

She developed a distinctive movement approach based on the body’s relationship to gravity and the use of weight. The company she formed with Charles Weidman produced great dances as well as outstanding performers, José Limón among them. When physical disability ended her career as a dancer, she became the artistic director for José Limón and his company, creating new works for him and for The Juilliard.

Artistic Leadership (LDC)

About The Limón Dance Company The Limón Dance Company (LDC) has been at the vanguard of dance since its inception in 1946. The first dance group to tour internationally under the auspices of the State Department and first modern dance company to perform at Lincoln Center in New York, it has performed twice at the White House. The José Limón Dance Foundation, with Company and Institute, is the recipient of a 2008 National Medal of Arts. José Limón has a special place in American culture for a social awareness that transcended distinct groups to address how we all search for commonality. It is with this ethos that the company continues to commission works by critically acclaimed and emerging international voices 50 years after Limón’s passing. His works continue to influence the evolution of the art form with their arresting visual clarity, theatricality and rhythmic and musical life. www.limon.nyc

Founders José Limón (Founder/Choreographer, 1908-1972) electrified the world with his dynamic dancing and dramatic choreography. One of the 20th century’s most important and influential dance makers, he spent his career pioneering a new art form and fighting for its recognition.

Born in Culiacán, Mexico in 1908, he moved to California in 1915, and in 1928 came to New York where he saw his

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first dance program. Limón enrolled in Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman’s dance school and performed in several of their works from 1930 to 1940. In 1946, with Doris Humphrey as artistic director, Limón formed his own company. Over the next 25 years, he established himself and his company as a major force of 20th century dance.

Limón created a total of 74 works, including The Moor’s Pavane, Concerto Grosso and Missa Brevis.

Dante Puleio (Artistic Director, He/Him). A widely respected former member of the Limón Dance Company for more than a decade, Puleio was appointed the sixth artistic director in the company’s 77-year history, a position that originated with Doris Humphrey. After a diverse performing career with the Limón Dance Company, touring national and international musical theater productions, television and film, he received his MFA from University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on contextualizing mid-20th century dance for the contemporary artist and audience. He is committed to implementing that research by celebrating José Limón’s historical legacy and reimagining his intention and vision to reflect the rapidly shifting 21st century landscape.

Logan Frances Kruger (Associate Artistic Director, She/Her), an Atlanta, Georgia native, received her early training from Annette Lewis and Pala Jones-Malavé, and went on to receive a BFA from The Juilliard School. Her extensive performing career has included work with renowned artists such as Shen Wei, Jonah Bokaer and Adam H Weinert. Kruger was a principal dancer with the Limón Dance Company for nine years, and was the company’s rehearsal director for four years before being appointed associate artistic director in 2021. Kruger has taught master classes and workshops across the globe, and is a reconstructor of Limón’s repertory.

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About Santa Barbara Dance Theater Santa Barbara Dance Theater (SBDT), founded in 1976, is the longest continuously-running contemporary dance company in the south coast region and the only resident professional company in the University of California system. This season marks the company’s 47th anniversary season. SBDT has commissioned choreographic works by Joshua Beamish, Josh Manculich, David Maurice, Stephanie Miracle, Charles Moulten, Andrea Giselle Schermoly, Yusha-Marie Sorzano and others; restaged works by established choreographers José Limon, Remy Charlie, Jane Dudley, Louis Falco, Lucas Hoving, Jennifer Muller and David Parsons; and has premiered works by UCSB faculty members and three previous artistic directors – Alice Condodina (1976-1990), Jerry Pearson (1991-2010) and Christopher Pilafian (2011-2020). The company has performed in New York City and toured internationally in the Czech Republic, Ireland, China and South Korea, and regionally in San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Under the direction of Brandon Whited (2021-present) the company begins a new chapter; honoring the company’s history and legacy while continuing to engage audiences with forward-thinking and cutting-edge dance performance.

Artistic Leadership (SBDT) Brandon Whited (Artistic Director, He/Him), is an associate professor and vice-chair for the UCSB Department of Theater and Dance. He holds a BFA (UNC School of the Arts) and an MFA (The Ohio State University). Whited freelanced with companies including Steeledance, Randy James Dance Works and Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company, and joined Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2008 – touring for six years and originating roles in four works. Whited’s choreography has been presented domestically in New York, Maryland, Ohio, Washington, Texas and California, and internationally in Italy. He has presented work in Santa Barbara since joining UCSB dance faculty in 2016, and began the artistic directorship of Santa Barbara Dance Theater in 2021.

Guest Choreographers Raúl Tamez (Choreographer, He/Him), is considered one of the most prominent dance artists in his country.

In 2016, due to his talent for choreography, he obtained the National Dance Award of Mexico. He has received numerous grants, awards and funding to develop as a dancer and choreographer. His work has taken him

around the globe to more than 36 countries. He is also a sociologist and producer directing his own company and the International Dance Festival of Mexico City.

Limón Dance Company Natalie Clevenger (Dancer, She/They), received her BFA in dance from the University of Arizona in the fall of 2018, where she was awarded the Gertrude Shurr award for excellence in modern dance. Upon graduation, Clevenger joined Dance Kaleidoscope and is now a member of the Limón Dance Company.

Joey Columbus (Dancer, He/Him) began his dance training in the Chicagoland area before obtaining his BFA in dance from the Ailey/Fordham BFA program.

He has performed with companies such as RIOULT and Company XIV as well as at The Metropolitan Opera.

MJ Edwards (Dancer, They/Them) from Middletown, NY, studied at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School and MOVE|NYC|. Edwards then trained at the San Francisco Ballet School. They went further to study at The Juilliard School and joined the Limón Dance Company in 2021.

Mariah Gravelin (Dancer, She/Her) joined the Limón Company in 2019 where she has performed and taught nationwide. She holds a BFA from Alvin Ailey/Fordham University (2018). She is on faculty for the Limón Institute and can be found with her camera in hand photographing when not dancing.

Johnson Guo (Dancer, He/Him) began his dance training under Eliot Feld’s Ballet Tech Program at the age of 8. Guo furthered his dance education at the Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase, graduating in the class of 2022.

Kieran King (Dancer, He/Him) from Dallas, Texas, began dance training at Collin College and continued his studies at the University of Oklahoma. King joined Dance Kaleidoscope in 2019, under David Hochoy’s direction.

This is King’s first season with the Limón Dance Company.

Deepa Liegel (Dancer, She/Her) rejoined the Limón Dance Company as a member in 2022. Professionally, she’s worked with Mark Morris Dance Group, Metropolitan Opera, Broadway Bares and Delta Rae. BFA in dance performance from SMU. Rep: Jim Keith, MTA NYC Division. Instagram: @deepaleaps.

Olivia Mozie (Dancer, She/Her), born in Greenville, SC, began dancing at 4 years old at the School of Carolina Ballet Theatre, continuing her education at The SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. Mozie is a

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senior at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, studying under Kurt Douglas. This will be Mozie’s first season with Limón.

Eric Parra (Dancer, He/Him) is a first-generation Colombian-American artist hailing from Union City, NJ. Parra graduated from Montclair State University with a BFA in dance performance. Parra is currently a performing artist for Limón Dance Company and Camille A. Brown & Dancers.

Nicholas Ruscica (Dancer, He/Him), is originally from Toronto, Canada where he began his training at Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre. Ruscica continued his studies at California Institute of the Arts, receiving his BFA in 2020 and was a four-year recipient of the President’s Merit Scholarship.

Jessica Sgambelluri (Dancer, She/Her) is a 2014 graduate of Marymount Manhattan College. Sgambelluri has danced for Graham 2, TED Talks Live, Caterina Rago Dance Company, The Metropolitan Opera and Buglisi Dance Theatre. Sgambelluri joined the company in 2019.

Dalya Modlin (Dancer, She/Her), a recent UCSB graduate, is originally from Southern California. She honed her skills at the Orange County School of the Arts’ commercial dance conservatory. Last year, Modlin toured with the UCSB Dance Company, and in August 2023 she became a company member of Santa Barbara Dance Theater.

Niki Powell (Dancer, She/Her) is a dancer, choreographer and studio owner/director. She earned a BFA in dance and a BA in philosophy from SMU. Powell has danced professionally and taught all over the world. She has been dancing with Santa Barbara Dance Theater for seven seasons along with a flourishing freelance career.

Calder White (Dancer, He/Him) is a freelance dancer, choreographer and floorwork teacher based on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and TsleilWaututh nations (so-called Vancouver, British Columbia).

He is a current company member with Shay Kuebler/ Radical System Art, Joshua Beamish/MOVEthecompany, Rachel Meyer and Santa Barbara Dance Theater.

Savannah Spratt (Dancer, She/Her) joined Limón in 2016.

Hailing from Rochester, PA, she holds a BFA from UNCSA and collaborates often with Helen Simoneau Danse and the Merce Cunningham Trust. Spratt is a licensed GYROKINESIS Level 1 Apprentice who enjoys knitting.

Riley Haley (Apprentice, She/Her) is a fourth-year UCSB Dance BFA student and an SBDT apprentice. She began training at the Beck Center for the Arts (Cleveland, OH), and continued at Del Mar Ballet (San Diego, CA). She has attended workshops led by Juliano Nunes, Flockworks, Ohad Naharin and former Batsheva dancers.

Lauren Twomley (Dancer, She/Her), born in Brooklyn, NY, graduated from SUNY Purchase in 2018. Twomley currently works with Soluq Dance Theater, is a dancer, rehearsal coordinator and social media manager for Peter Stathas Dance, and has been with the Limón Dance Company since 2019.

Tiersha Lin (Apprentice, She/Her) is a fourth-year dance BFA and economics and accounting BA. Previously, she worked with IndepenDance Company and trained at the CalArts CSSSA intensive. At UCSB, Lin has performed in multiple concerts and is currently a member of UCSB Dance Company in addition to apprenticing with SBDT.

Santa Barbara Dance Theater Paige Amicon (Dancer, She/Her) is a dance artist and teacher based in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts under Susan Jaffe with a BFA in contemporary dance. Amicon’s most recent performance experience includes works by Santa Barbara Dance Theater and Ate9 Dance Company.

Derion Loman (Dancer, He/Him), a UCSB alumni, is currently a freelance artist based in Los Angeles. His professional career includes Pilobolus Dance Theater, Diavolo, America’s Got Talent, World of Dance and Google.

Loman is an international choreographer whose most recent work premiered at the Joyce Theater. This is Loman’s second season with Santa Barbara Dance Theater.

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José Limón Dance Foundation Board of Directors Ivan Sacks, Chair Robert A. Meister, Treasurer & Past Chair Paula Carriço Kurt Douglas Tina Evans, Secretary Sonia Garcia-Romero Sylvia Ann Hewlett Jonathan Leinbach, M.D. Cecilia Picón Katrina Robinson

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Dante Puleio, Artistic Director Michelle Preston, Executive Director Logan Frances Kruger, Associate Artistic Director Lena Lauer, Director of Limón Institute Daniel Fetecua Soto, Trainee Program Director Louise Brownsberger, Production & Touring Manager Enzo Celli, Marketing Manager Elizagrace Madrone, Development Manager Donnell Williams, Licensing Manager Kiefer Rondina, Institute Coordinator Bill Schaffner, Stage Manager William Brown, Lighting Supervisor Joy Havens, Wardrobe Supervisor Aaron Selissen, Company Fitness Trainer

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900 - 1955

Domestic (U.S.) Bookings Red Shell Management, LLC Edward V. Schoelwer, (646) 495-156 | eschoelwer@redshellmgmt.org Press Representation Michelle Tabnick, (646) 765-4773 | michelle@michelletabnickpr.com The José Limón Dance Foundation, Inc. is supported with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support is generously provided by the following institutions: Henry and Lucy Moses Fund; The Howard Gilman Foundation; Miriam and Arthur Diamond Charitable Trust; The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation; Hispanic Federation, the City of New York, and the Department of Youth and Community Development; UMEZ Cultural Fund Aid III; Jody and John Arnhold; The Varnum De Rose Charitable Trust; The Shubert Foundation; West Harlem Development Corporation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Inc.; Mex-Am Cultural Foundation; Withers Bergman LLP; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; Bank of America Charitable Foundation; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; WQXR. The Limón Dance Company is a member of Dance/USA, Dance/NYC, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Western Arts Alliance, National Association of Schools of Dance, the Arts & Business Council and the United States-Mexico Chamber of Commerce.

Special Thanks

In January 2024, A&L joins the UCSB Department of Theater and Dance and the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum in presenting an exhibition, symposium and performance series to celebrate the contributions of borderland artists, largely erased from dance history, such as the Mexican-born American choreographer José Limón.

- Exhibition Thu, Jan 25 - Sun, May 5 / FREE UCSB Art, Design, & Architecture Museum Part of A&L’s Thematic Learning Initiative (see page 7)

- Symposium Day 1: Fri, Jan 26 / 9:30 AM - 5 PM / FREE Day 2: Sat, Jan 27 / 10 AM - 3:30 PM / FREE UCSB Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Room 1151 (Ballet Studio)

- Performances Limón Dance Company Sat, Jan 27 / 8 PM / Granada Theatre (see page 12) Border Crossings: Voices of Exile and Hope Limón Dance Company, Santa Barbara Dance Theater, UCSB Dance Company Sun, Jan 28 / 3 PM / UCSB Hatlen Theater Border Crossings is made possible thanks to generous support from Jody and John Arnhold ’75 | Arnhold Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the UCSB Department of Theater and Dance

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photo: Scott Groller; inset photo: José Limón in “Revalucionario” from Danzas Mexicanas. Photo by John Lindquist. © Houghton Library, Harvard University. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.

Staff

Zlatomir Fung, cello Benjamin Hochman, piano Sun, Jan 28 / 4 PM / Hahn Hall

photo: Jung Huang

Running time: approx. 96 minutes, including intermission

Supporting Sponsor: Linda Stafford Burrows

Program

About the Program

Robert Schumann: Fünf Stücke im Volkston (Five Pieces in Folk Style), op. 102 Mit Humor ‘Vanitas vanitatum’ Langsam Nicht schnell, mit viel Ton zu spielen Nicht zu rasch Stark und markiert

Robert Schumann (1810-1856): Fünf Stücke im Volkston (Five Pieces in Folk Style), op. 102

Marshall Estrin: Cinematheque - Intermission Benjamin Britten: Cello Sonata, op. 65 Dialogo. Allegro Scherzo-Pizzicato. Allegretto Elegia. Lento Marcia. Energico Moto perpetuo. Presto Sulkhan Tsintsadze: Five Pieces on Folk Themes Villain’s Song on a Carriage Tchonguri Sachidao Nana Dance Tune

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Central to Robert Schumann’s biography are the mental health issues that plagued his adult life. He struggled with depression, auditory hallucinations (in later years the pitch A5 – the pitch used to tune orchestras – rang constantly in his ears), a fear of heights and other phobias. By his forties Schumann was in such distress that he threw himself into the Rhine. He survived and asked to be committed to an asylum, where he spent the last two years of his life. These major depressive episodes alternated with remarkable bursts of energy and productivity. Schumann composed the Fünf Stücke im Volkston in one of these fecund periods, writing the set in the spring of 1849.

The year prior had witnessed the outbreak of revolutions that spread across Europe like wildfire. As sometimes happens until the battle reaches one’s own doorstep, Schumann remained untroubled as the Revolutions of 1848 drew closer. “For some time now I’ve been very busy – it’s been my most fruitful year,” Schumann wrote to Ferdinand Hiller, the dedicatee of his Piano Concerto, in a letter written the week he finished the Fünf Stücke.

A few weeks later the May Uprising erupted in the Schumanns’ hometown of Dresden. When an armed brigade attempted to recruit Robert, he, his wife Clara, and their eldest daughter fled out the back gate to the nearest train station. (Fellow composer and Dresdner

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Richard Wagner, a fervent revolutionary, spent the week-long uprising manning barricades and volleying grenades before fleeing to Switzerland to avoid arrest.) Schumann continued composing in earnest, unperturbed by his temporary exile to a nearby spa town.

structural ideas, shared harmonic and motivic elements create large-scale relationships among the movements.

Despite the title, none of the five movements has a distinctly “folk” style. Schumann creates a loose overarching structure by alternating minor and major opening key signatures between movements. The first movement bears the subtitle “Vanitas vanitatum,” a favorite saying of Schumann’s. The phrase comes from a poem of the same name by Goethe, which recounts the exploits of a drunken, one-legged soldier. The angular, asymmetrical music of the outer sections could suggest the off-kilter motions of such a character.

Britten had long been a fervent admirer of Shostakovich when the composers met in 1960. Dmitri Shostakovich was attending the Western premiere of his Cello Concerto and invited Britten to sit in his box with him.

Performing the concerto was preeminent Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a former composition student of Shostakovich’s. Rostropovich’s playing clearly made a strong impression on Britten, for after the concert Shostakovich told his former pupil, “Slava, do you know I am aching from so many bruises along my side… at the concert tonight, every time Britten admired something in your playing, he would poke me in the ribs, and say, ‘Isn’t that simply marvelous!’ As he liked so many things throughout the concerto, I am now suffering!” Shostakovich introduced the two men and Britten immediately made plans to write a new piece for the cellist.

Following the tender lullaby the third movement opens with cello intoning a full-voiced, languorous melody over a spare, jaunty piano accompaniment. The final section of the movement, with slow, entrancing melodies and delicate arpeggios, is Schumann at some of his dreamiest, worlds away from the revolution that literally came knocking at his door.

In the fourth movement, Schumann alternates two sections – the first rollicking and exuberant, the second muted and restless – in a simple ABA form. The pieces conclude with a fiery fifth movement, propelled forward by declamatory cello lines and an emphatic piano accompaniment.

Marshall Estrin (b. 1996): Cinematheque My friendship with Zlatomir Fung is based in many things, one of which is our mutual love of film. In the course of our early conversations, Zlatomir told me that his favorite films were, in no particular order: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Claire’s Knee (1970) Rashōmon (1950) Annie Hall (1977) Moonlight (2016) Each movement of Cinematheque is a musical interpretation of one of these films. In some movements, the music depicts the film’s characters. In others, it portrays plot events or larger narrative themes. The movements are cast into specific musical forms that reflect the artistic expression of the individual film.

While each movement is based on its own thematic and

– Marshall Estrin

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Cello Sonata in C Major, op. 65

Four months later the Cello Sonata was complete, and the two men sat down to rehearse it. Fueled by a combination of broken German and whiskey, Britten and Rostropovich made it through the rehearsal (“We played like pigs,” Rostropovich recalled, “but we were so happy.”).

The sonata instigated a lasting friendship between the two men, who remained close until Britten’s death in 1976. The two men premiered the sonata in July 1961 at Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival. Two years later, Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, visited the USSR for the work’s Soviet premiere. The Cello Sonata would be the first of five major works Britten composed for Rostropovich over the next decade (the cellist referred to them as his “lifebelts”).

The uptempo first movement, titled Dialogo, opens with soft-spoken, halting figures in the cello. As the title suggests, cello and piano are equal partners in this conversational music. Following a repeat of the first section, the music slowly grows more animated, with contrasts of dynamic and pitch heightening the sense of tension. In the last bars, the cello intones the first eight notes of the harmonic series as the piano plays in its highest and lowest ranges.

In the second movement, the cello strings are entirely plucked rather than bowed, evoking the sounds of Balinese gamelan percussion. The piano’s staccato

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responses create a playful repartee. The middle movement, Elegia, opens with a lugubrious dirge.

Dissonant harmonies, slow tempo, and uneven phrases in the piano create a sense of deep unease. An animated middle section includes rich, plaintive music in the cello, but the music eventually collapses in lethargic descending figures. The movement closes with both instruments speaking in hushed tones.

The fourth movement is an aggressive, off-kilter march.

Despite its brevity, the movement contains an array of dazzling technical effects for the cello. One scholar writes that Britten found in Rostropovich “a musical partner upon whose technique and musical sympathy he could rely absolutely,” a claim surely informed by this demanding music. The fifth and final movement, a skittish moto perpetuo, bristles with nervous energy.

Sulkhan Tsintsadze (1925-1991): Five Pieces on Folk Themes Soviet composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze hailed from the small city of Gori in eastern Georgia. A year before Tsintsadze’s birth, control of the Soviet Union had been seized by another of Gori’s native sons, Joseph Stalin.

Tsintsadze followed the path of many Soviet ethnic minority composers, studying at his local conservatory before moving to Moscow. Trained as a cellist, he became a founding member of the State String Quartet of Georgia as a teenager. His time in the quartet instilled a lifelong love of the genre: he ultimately wrote 12 string quartets, and his Five Pieces on Folk Themes reflect his fondness for the cello. Tsintsadze composed the Five Pieces, one of his earliest works, for cellist David Shafran (a contemporary of Rostropovich) in 1950. That same year, Tsintsadze won the State Stalin Prize of the USSR despite still being enrolled at the conservatory. This honor, unusual for a student composer, must be viewed in the political context of the late-Stalinist era.

In contrast to the imperialism of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union sought to demonstrate its commitment to all of the national minorities now under the Soviet umbrella. Under Stalin, this campaign came to be known as the Friendship of the Peoples. Two years prior to Tsintsadze receiving the Stalin Prize, Central Committee secretary and propagandist Andrei Zhdanov issued an infamous decree attacking composers for, among other things, excessive Western influence in their works. Some of the more notable targets of the Zhdanov Decree included Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokoviev, and Georgian-born composers Aram Khachaturian and Vano

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Muradeli (also from Gori). Zhdanov singled out Muradeli for “insufficient” use of authentic folk music in his proStalin opera The Great Friendship. Muradeli’s censuring sent a clear message to minority composers: their value to the Soviet Union lay in composing music based in their native folk traditions that exhibited enough sophistication (but not too much) to demonstrate how far their “provincial” music had come under Soviet Russian guidance and leadership. “For national minority composers in the late Stalinist era,” writes historian Leah Goldman, “the official promotion of minority music served in equal measure as an empowering and imprisoning force, opening the door to… fame and fortune while limiting access to those who faithfully performed their national musical identity.”

Tsintsadze’s Five Pieces, with their overt roots in Georgian folk music, demonstrate a desire to advance under the cultural strictures of the Central Committee. Indeed, many of his early chamber works hew closely to their source material, though his later compositions show an increasing synthesis of folk idioms with his own stylistic voice. The opening piece, an improvisatory modal song supported by syncopated piano, mimics a villager singing while pushing a hand cart. The movement ends with the cello intoning high, thin harmonics, as if the driver’s final whistled refrain were carried across a distant breeze. Chonguri, named for a traditional Georgian stringed instrument similar to a lute, is a solo for the cello played entirely pizzicato.

Georgian folk music has a long and rich tradition of vocal polyphony characterized by dissonant harmonies and rhythmic droning. These characteristics are on display in the third movement, a swaggering song whose title loosely translates to “Wrestling.” This is followed by a tender, muted lullaby and an exuberant dance song to conclude the set.

Program notes © Andrew McIntyre, 2023

Zlatomir Fung The youngest cellist ever to win First Prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition, Zlatomir Fung is poised to become one of the preeminent cellists of our time. Astounding audiences with his boundless virtuosity and exquisite sensitivity, the 24-year-old has already proven himself a star among the next generation of world-class musicians.

As artist-in-residence with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the 2023-2024 season, Fung appears

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at London’s Cadogan Hall and tours the U.K. with the orchestra. In North America, he debuts with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Springs Philharmonic (performing Anna Clyne’s Dance for Cello and Orchestra), Sarasota Orchestra and Winnipeg Symphony. He also debuts at the Rhode Island and Sacramento philharmonics and returns to the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. Internationally, he tours Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Japan; he performs the U.K. premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto with the BBC Philharmonic and appears with the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra in the Canary Islands.

Propulsion Lab in 2023. Fung has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today and has appeared six times on NPR’s From the Top. He plays a 1717 cello by David Tecchler of Rome, kindly loaned to him through the Beare’s International Violin Society by a generous benefactor.

Recent concerto highlights include his debuts with the New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille and BBC Philharmonic, as well as Detroit, Seattle, Milwaukee, Utah, Rochester and Kansas City symphonies.

Benjamin Hochman

Alongside demonstrating a mastery of the canon with his impeccable technique, Fung brings exceptional insight into the depths of contemporary repertoire, championing composers such as Unsuk Chin, Katherine Balch and Anna Clyne. In 2023, under the baton of Gemma New and with the Dallas Symphony, Fung gave the world premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto with “jaw-dropping brilliance” (Dallas Morning News) as the dedicatee of the work.

A winner of the 2017 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the 2017 Astral National Auditions, Fung has taken the top prizes at the 2018 Alice & Eleonore Schoenfeld International String Competition, the 2016 George Enescu International Cello Competition and the 2015 Johansen International Competition for Young String Players, among others. He was selected as a 2016 U.S. Presidential Scholar for the Arts and was awarded the 2016 Landgrave von Hesse Prize at the Kronberg Academy Cello Masterclasses.

Fung was announced as a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship Winner in 2022 and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2020. He was named to WXQR’s Artist

In all roles, from soloist to chamber musician to conductor, Benjamin Hochman regards music as vital and essential.

Composers, fellow musicians, orchestras and audiences recognize his deep commitment to insightful programming and performances of quality.

photo: Jennifer Taylor

Fung made his recital debut at Carnegie Hall in 2021 and was described by Bachtrack as “one of those rare musicians with a Midas touch: he quickly envelopes every score he plays in an almost palpable golden aura.”

Other recent highlights include returns to the Wigmore Hall and appearances at the Verbier, Dresden, Janacek May and Tsinandali festivals, Cello Biennale, La Jolla Chamber Music Society, ChamberFest Cleveland and the Aspen Music Festival.

Of Bulgarian and Chinese heritage, Zlatomir Fung was born into a family of mathematicians and began playing cello at age 3. Fung studied at The Juilliard School under the tutelage of Richard Aaron and Timothy Eddy, where he was a recipient of the Kovner Fellowship. Outside of music, his interests include chess, cinema and creative writing.

Highlights of 2023-2024 include Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Boston Philharmonic conducted by Benjamin Zander and solo recitals in Jerusalem, Brattleboro and on Chicago’s Live from WFMT. His chamber music collaborations take him to Carnegie Hall, People’s Symphony Concerts, Kronberg Festival in Germany, and Krzyzowa Music in Poland. He conducts the premiere of Gilad Cohen’s Concerto for Harp, Strings and Horn, tours the U.S. with cellist Zlatomir Fung and curates the Kurtág Festival at Bard College New York.

Born in Jerusalem in 1980, Hochman’s musical foundation was laid in his teenage years. Frank at the Curtis Institute of Music and Goode at the Mannes School of Music proved defining influences. At the invitation of Uchida, he spent three formative summers at the Marlboro Music Festival.

At 24, Hochman debuted as soloist with the Israel Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall conducted by Pinchas Zukerman. Orchestral appearances followed with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago and Pittsburgh symphonies, and Prague Philharmonia under conductors

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including Noseda, Pinnock, Robertson and Storgårds.

A winner of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant, Hochman performs at venues and festivals across the globe, including the Philharmonie in Berlin, Vienna Konzerthaus, the Kennedy Center in Washington, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Germany’s Klavierfestival Ruhr and Lucerne and Verbier festivals in Switzerland.

In 2015, Hochman developed an auto-immune condition affecting his left hand. He decided to pursue his longstanding interest in conducting, studying with Gilbert at Juilliard where he was granted the Bruno Walter Scholarship and the Charles Schiff Award. He assisted Louis Langrée, Paavo Järvi, and Edo De Waart and created the Roosevelt Island Orchestra, consisting of some of New York’s finest orchestral and chamber musicians alongside promising young talent from top conservatories. Invitations to conduct the orchestras of Santa Fe Pro Musica, Orlando and The Orchestra Now at Bard New York followed.

Fully recovered, Hochman re-emerged as pianist in 2018.

He recorded Mozart piano concertos nos. 17 and 24, playing and directing the English Chamber Orchestra (Avie Records). He presented the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas at the Israel Conservatory in Tel Aviv, performed Beethoven sonatas for Daniel Barenboim as part of a filmed workshop at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin and played both Beethoven and Kurtág for Kurtág himself at the Budapest Music Centre.

Hochman is a Steinway Artist and a resident of Berlin, where he is a lecturer at Bard College Berlin.

Coming in Spring

“There are simply two kinds of string quartets: the Danish, and the others.”

Boston Classical Review

Danish String Quartet The Doppelgänger Project, Part IV

The Danish String Quartet is joined by Finnish cellist Johannes Rostamo for the eagerly-anticipated capstone to their international Doppelgänger Project. In part IV, the Danish pairs Schubert’s String Quintet, frequently cited among the greatest of all works of chamber music, with a new piece by renowned British composer Thomas Adès.

Event Sponsor: Anonymous Presented in association with UCSB Department of Music

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@artsandlectures

photo: Caroline Bittencourt

Wed, Apr 10 / 7 PM / Campbell Hall Tickets start at $25 / $15 UCSB Students

Nita Farahany and Nicholas Thompson How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything Wed, Jan 31 / 7:30 PM / Campbell Hall

Event Sponsor: Sara Miller McCune Corporate Sponsor: Sage Publishing Presented in association with UCSB Center for Responsible Machine Learning and Mellichamp Initiative in Mind & Machine Intelligence

Nita Farahany Imagine a world where employers can see into their workers’ brains. Where your thoughts can be tracked through AI. And where you can peer into your own mind to cure addictions. All of this is possible today, thanks to the merging of Artificial Intelligence and neuroscience.

In the brilliant new book The Battle For Your Brain, Nita Farahany offers us a much-needed map to navigate this fast-changing technological landscape. How do we avoid the dangers of lost privacy and rights while taking advantage of the unprecedented opportunities? With the rapid advance of wearable neurotech and generative AI (think ChatGPT), we face important ethical questions about privacy, human rights, equity – and even what it means to be human. “We are at a pivotal moment in human history, in which control of our brains can be enhanced or lost,” Farahany says. “We need to define contours of cognitive liberty now or risk being too late to do so.” But these technologies, she argues, are also an opportunity to transform how we learn, work and live.

You’re driving home after a long day, desperate to stay awake. Suddenly, a mild zap from your headrest bolts you upright, alert. You’re safe – no caffeine required. This kind of revolutionary device is already in action, and they’re only getting more sophisticated. Farahany is at the forefront of the technology and ethics of wearable AI devices that use our biological and neurological data. An internationally acclaimed thought leader who bridges law, ethics and technology to champion ethical progress in science and technology, she says these “mind-reading”

neuroscience and AI technologies will revolutionize everything. The same zap that can save a drowsy driver can also be used in the workplace to increase safety measures or tell businesses whether their customers really love what they’re looking at.

Farahany’s impactful insights have reverberated on stages from TED and the World Economic Forum to the Aspen Ideas Festival and beyond. She consistently shapes public discourse and policy on neuroscience, artificial intelligence and societal impacts through her rigorous scholarship and influential public engagements with academics, policymakers and corporations.

President Obama appointed Farahany to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, where she served for seven years. She currently serves on the National Advisory Council for the National Institute for Neurological Disease and Stroke, as an elected member of the American Law Institute and on the Global Future Council on Frontier Risks for the World Economic Forum, among others. Farahany is a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences and is on the board of advisors for Scientific American. As an ethics consultant, her expertise is sought by corporations and governments worldwide. Her contributions have been recognized through election to prestigious bodies including the American Law Institute, the Uniform Laws Commission and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Farahany is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law & Philosophy and Founding Director of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. She is a widely published scholar on the ethics of emerging technologies, including the book The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. She spearheads research on futurism, law and ethical implications of emerging technologies for society – offering a roadmap for cognitive freedom in our increasingly interconnected world.

Nicholas Thompson Nicholas Thompson has occupied the most prestigious positions in the world of tech writing and journalism – staking out a bold, optimistic vision for what our future will look like. Thompson currently serves as CEO of The Atlantic, leading the team to National Magazine Award wins for unprecedented coverage of the Covid-19 Pandemic, new perspectives on 9/11, the rise of global autocratic power; the case to return the national parks to Native American tribes; and the hypocrisy behind high-class education in America. His years of experience covering tech makes him a leading analytical voice in the field, where he uncovers how each new development in the world of tech will impact us all.

stories: The main strategy for growing audience is to publish more, better stories. The stories we’re prouder of, the stories we put more effort into, attract more readers.

He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed biography The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War – a fascinating double biography that follows two rivals and friends from the beginning of the Cold War to its end. The New York Times said that the book was “brimming with fascinating revelations about the men and the harrowing events they steered through.”

Thompson is a former senior editor at Legal Affairs and a former contributor at CBS. With a massive and vigilant following on social media, he’s one of LinkedIn’s most-followed individuals. He earned the 21st Century Leader Award from The National Committee on American Foreign Policy, was a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Thompson is also an accomplished runner and is currently the American record holder for men over age 45 in the 50k.

Special Thanks

How will the world’s dominant tech corporations – Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft – interact with citizens, help write policy and redefine privacy and security? How will artificial intelligence and robotics change our devices, the way we work, earn a living, fight wars, solve problems – our very selves? No matter the subject – design, culture, media, tech, ethics or our digital future – he’s more than ready to break the news with big ideas and fearless takes.

As the Editor-in-Chief of Wired, Thompson broke massive stories about Facebook’s hidden flaws, cyberwarfare, the Robert Mueller investigation and numerous other topics.

His groundbreaking investigative reporting on Facebook was a finalist for a 2020 Loeb Award, and he oversaw work that won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Award and has even led to Oscar-winning films.

At The New Yorker, Thompson served as editor of the magazine’s digital platforms, breaking new ground with stories about his friendship with Joseph Stalin’s daughter; how our lives are forever changed by the consumer drone industry; and arson amid the election cycle. His work at The New Yorker is defined by his fearless leadership and unwavering commitment to quality

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Renée Fleming, soprano Howard Watkins, piano Thu, Feb 1 / 7 PM / Granada Theatre

photo: Andrew Eccles Decca

Running time: approx. 85 minutes, including intermission

Major Sponsors: Audrey & Timothy O. Fisher and Sara Miller McCune Event Sponsor: Ellen & Peter O. Johnson

Program Caroline Shaw: Aurora Borealis Gabriel Fauré: Au bord de l’eau, op. 8, no. 1 Les berceaux, op. 23, no. 1 Franz Liszt: S’il est un charmant gazon Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh Edward Grieg: Lauf der Welt Zur Rosenzeit Jerome Kern: All the Things You Are

Hazel Dickens: Pretty Bird George Frideric Handel: Care Selve from Atalanta Nico Muhly: Endless Space Joseph Canteloube: Baïléro Maria Schneider: Our Finch Feeder from Winter Morning Walks Björk: All Is Full of Love Howard Shore: Twilight and Shadow from The Lord of the Rings Kevin Puts: Evening Curtis Green: Red Mountains Sometimes Cry (recorded, during credits) Program subject to change

- Intermission -

Artist Statement

Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene

When I was 14, the film Soylent Green was released, a sci-fi thriller about a dystopian future of worldwide pollution, dying oceans, depleted resources and rampant starvation. The story was set in the year 2022.

Entr’acte: Jackson Browne: Before the Deluge (recording) Arrangement: Caroline Shaw with Rhiannon Giddens, Alison Krauss, Renée Fleming and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, piano The following accompanied by a film provided by National Geographic. During the second half, the audience is asked to kindly hold applause until the end of the program.

The movie has faded from memory, but one scene left a profound impression. An aged researcher, unable to go on, has chosen assisted suicide at a government clinic. To ease his last moments of life, he is shown videos of a world that no longer exists: flowers and savannahs, flocks and herds, unpolluted skies and waters, all set to a soundtrack of classical music by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Grieg.

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This scene captured my imagination in a terrifying way.

The impact increased when I later learned that the actor playing the researcher, Edward G. Robinson, was terminally ill at the time it was filmed.

Fast forward to the pandemic. After more than two decades of constant touring, usually to urban cultural centers, performances abruptly ceased, and I suddenly found myself at home. I sought comfort in long walks outside near my house. I needed this time outdoors to maintain my emotional equilibrium, and I was reminded that nature would always be my touchstone. At the same time, the news about climate change grew more alarming: the extinction of animals we took for granted when we were children, the knowledge that white rhinos had disappeared from the wild, and daily reports of heat, fires and flooding. I realized that the crisis we had been warned of for so long had arrived.

I thought of the great legacy of song literature that I love, when Romantic-era poets and composers reveled in imagery of nature, finding reflections of human experience in the environment. I decided to record some of this music, and to juxtapose these classics with the voices of living composers, addressing our current, troubled relationship with the natural world.

The result, in collaboration with my friend Yannick NézetSéguin, was the album Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene.

When it received the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, I was thrilled, and I had the idea to tour music addressing this theme of nature as both our inspiration and our victim.

I was incredibly fortunate to connect with the imaginative, dedicated leadership at the National Geographic Society, the global nonprofit committed to exploring, illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. It has been so exciting to work with this universally respected, landmark institution. I am deeply grateful for the help of President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Ulica, Chief Executive Officer Jill Tiefenthaler and Producer/Editor Sam Deleon, whose expertise and vison have been instrumental in creating the video you will see in the second half of tonight’s program.

Thankfully, the stunning natural world depicted in this film still exists, unlike that movie scene so upsetting to my younger self. In blending these beautiful images with music, my hope is, in some small way, to rekindle your appreciation of nature, and encourage any efforts you can make to protect the planet we share.

– Renée Fleming

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About the Program More than any other artistic movement of the last three hundred years, Romanticism posited a profound relationship between humankind and nature. Born in part as a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism prized the subjective, personal experiences of the individual and their relation to the natural world. As we increasingly bear witness to anthropogenic climate change, the Romantic’s wariness of the Industrial Revolution seems prophetic.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the founding writers of the Romantic movement, spoke of “a more perfect language than that of words – the language of God himself, as uttered by Nature.” Ludwig van Beethoven, the consummate Romantic composer, sought such a language in his frequent nature walks; he often carried pencil and paper with him to record bursts of inspiration.

Save for the opening piece, the first half of the program is devoted exclusively to texts by Romantic poets set

by Romantic composers. While all of the composers in the first half penned numerous works concerning the natural world, Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Fauré have been particularly devoted to such pieces. From his first published song, “The Butterfly and the Flower,” Fauré’s catalog of songs reads like a compendium of flora and fauna. Shaw’s most recent albums include Evergreen, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part and Narrow Sea. Yet the Romantics saw nature not merely as a placid repository of fragrant roses, graceful swans and gentle streams, but as a powerful and even terrifying force. As art historian Kathryn Calley Galitz writes, The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenthcentury aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise…, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Géricault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa, based on a contemporary event.

Fauré’s setting of the Prudhomme poem “Les Berceaux” speaks to these anxieties. Arpeggiated piano chords

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evoke the ceaseless ebb and flow of the sea, a fickle mistress who both sustains and potentially steals the lives of the men who sail upon it. Shaw’s “Aurora Borealis” explores the unreachable awe of the northern lights.

Emily Dickinson wrote that the aurora “Infects my simple spirit / With Taints of Majesty,” while contemporary poet Mary Jo Salter looks upon these “freak streaks in the sky” as imperfect guides. A sparse, high piano line opens the piece with the evocation of distant, twinkling stars. The vocal line slowly undulates, hanging suspended like the aurora itself.

The second half of the program further explores the terrible and sublime power of nature. Kevin Puts’ “Evening,” a setting of contemporary poet Dorianne Laux, despairs at the effects of climate change. “Everything ends,” the voice intones softly over a lean piano accompaniment. The rapturous text and soundscapes of Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” belie themes of apocalyptic destruction alongside creation. Written in response to the first snippets of birdsong in spring, according to Björk the song also takes inspiration from Ragnarök, the utter destruction of the world foretold in Norse mythology (opera fans may be more familiar with the Wagnerian equivalent, Götterdämmerung, or “Twilight of the Gods”).

Nico Muhly’s “Endless Space,” one of several songs on the program commissioned for Voice of Nature, contains texts from seemingly disparate sources: the poetry of seventeenth-century English poet Thomas Traherne and the writing of climate journalist Robinson Meyer. Meyer’s opening lines, “One of the great things about Earth as an image / is that… it’s too much. / It helps me to think about how we share the planet,” point to a core theme of Voice of Nature: the natural world, utterly beautiful, boundless, uncontrollable and sublime, unites every human being that has ever drawn breath. While the Romantics privileged the subjective and the individual, nevertheless we are connected. In today’s highly atomized world in which many of us are tethered to our screens, the climate crisis has shown us that our fates have always been deeply intertwined.

Both the first and last song on the second half were composed during the Vietnam War. Over the course of the war, the American military sprayed over eleven million gallons of the so-called “rainbow herbicides,” including Agent Orange, to destroy crops and tactical cover. This disastrous attempt to control nature resulted in massive losses of biodiversity in Vietnamese forests as well as health problems and birth defects in millions of

Vietnamese civilians, American military veterans and their families. Concurrently, the Cold War threat of mutually assured destruction loomed over the planet. President John F. Kennedy referred to this nuclear threat as a “sword of Damocles,” an apt allusion for the climate crisis.

Yet art has and will continue to provide us words to articulate our feelings in times of collective crisis.

Songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David published “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in 1965, the year American large-scale military combat units first entered Vietnam. David struggled for two years to finish the lyrics. He recalled, Then, one day, I thought of, “Lord, we don’t need another mountain,” and all at once I knew how the lyric should be written. Things like planes and trains and cars are man-made, and things like mountains and rivers and valleys are created by someone or something we call God. There was now a oneness of idea and language instead of a Conflict.

Nearly seventy years later, amidst a succession of daunting global crises, that call for oneness and love seems both daunting and utterly vital.

Program notes © Andrew McIntyre, 2023

Renée Fleming Renée Fleming is one of the most highly-acclaimed singers of our time, performing on the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls. A 2023 Kennedy Center Honoree, winner of five Grammy awards and the U.S. National Medal of Arts, she has sung for momentous occasions from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Diamond Jubilee for Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. A groundbreaking distinction came in 2008 when she became the first woman in the 125-year history of the Metropolitan Opera to solo headline an opening night gala, and in 2014 she became the first classical artist ever to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. In 2023, the World Health Organization appointed her a Goodwill Ambassador for Arts and Health.

Fleming’s current concert calendar includes appearances in London, Vienna, Milan and Los Angeles, and at Carnegie Hall. In May at the Metropolitan Opera, she will reprise her role in The Hours, an opera which premiered last year, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and awardwinning film. Last March, she portrayed Pat Nixon in a new production of Nixon in China at the Opéra de Paris.

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Fleming’s new anthology, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, will be published in spring 2024. A prominent advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health and neuroscience, as artistic advisor to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Fleming launched the first ongoing collaboration between America’s national cultural center and its largest health research institute, the National Institutes of Health.

She created her own program called Music and the Mind, which she has presented in more than 50 cities around the world, earning Research!America’s Rosenfeld Award for Impact on Public Opinion. In 2020, Fleming launched Music and Mind LIVE, a weekly web show exploring the connections between arts, human health and the brain, amassing nearly 700,000 views from 70 countries. She is now an advisor for major initiatives in this field, including the Sound Health Network at the University of California San Francisco and the NeuroArts Blueprint at Johns Hopkins University.

Fleming has recorded everything from complete operas and song recitals to indie rock and jazz. In January, Decca released a special double-length album of live recordings from her greatest performances at the Metropolitan Opera. In February, Fleming received the Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo Album for Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, with Yannick Nézet-Seguin as pianist.

Known for bringing new audiences to classical music and opera, Fleming has sung not only with Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli, but also with Elton John, Paul Simon, Sting, Josh Groban and Joan Baez. She has hosted a wide variety of television and radio broadcasts, including the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series and Live From Lincoln Center. Fleming’s voice is featured on the soundtracks of Best Picture Oscar winners The Shape of Water and The Lord of the Rings.

Fleming’s first book, The Inner Voice, was published by Viking Penguin in 2004 and is now in its 16th printing.

It is also published in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia and China. Co-artistic director of the Aspen Opera Center and VocalArts at the Aspen Music Festival, Renée is also advisor for special projects at LA Opera, and she leads SongStudio at Carnegie Hall. Fleming’s other awards include the 2023 Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, Germany’s Cross of the Order of Merit, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, France’s Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, and honorary doctorates from eight major universities.

Howard Watkins American pianist Howard Watkins is a frequent associate of some of the world’s leading musicians on the concert stage and as an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. His appearances throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, Russia and Israel have included collaborations with Joyce DiDonato, Diana Damrau, Thomas Hampson, Kathleen Battle, Grace Bumbry, Mariusz Kwiecien, Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani at such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kennedy Center, the United States Supreme Court, Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Elbphilharmonie and the Bolshoi Theater. His current and former faculty affiliations include The Juilliard School, the Bard College Conservatory of Music, the Merola Opera Program, the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Program, the Yale School of Music as a Visiting Presidential Fellow, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival, the Mannes School of Music, the North Carolina School of the Arts, the International Vocal Arts Institute (Israel, Japan and China), IIVA in Italy, the Brancaleoni Music Festival in Italy, the Tokyo International Vocal Arts Academy (TIVAA), and VOICExperience in Orlando, Tampa and Savannah. A native of Dayton, Ohio, Watkins completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in accompanying and chamber music at the University of Michigan. Honored as the 2004 recipient of the Paul C. Boylan Award from the University of Michigan for his outstanding contributions to the field of music, he is also the 2019 recipient of the Lift Every Voice Legacy Award from the National Opera Association.

Related Thematic Learning Initiative Event

Renée Fleming’s Music and Mind Fri, Feb 2 / 9:30 AM / Santa Barbara Museum of Art FREE (registration recommended) With thanks to our visionary partners, Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin, for their support of the Thematic Learning Initiative Presented in association with Cancer Foundation of Santa Barbara, Cottage Health and the Foundation for Cottage Rehabilitation & Goleta Valley Cottage Hospitals, and UCSB SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind

www.reneefleming.com

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Roomful of Teeth with Gabriel Kahane Sat, Feb 3 / 7 PM / Hahn Hall

photo: Anja Schutz

Running time: approx. 95 minutes, including intermission

Presented in association with UCSB Department of Music

Roomful of Teeth

About the Program

Estelí Gomez, voice Martha Cluver, voice Caroline Shaw, voice, violin Virginia Kelsey, voice Steven Bradshaw, voice Jodie Landau, voice, vibraphone Thann Scoggin, voice Cameron Beauchamp, voice

Caroline Shaw (b. 1982): The Isle

Gabriel Kahane, voice, piano, guitar Sound Engineer: Randall Squires

Program Gabriel Kahane: Works to be announced from stage Caroline Shaw: The Isle - Intermission Gabriel Kahane: Elevator Songs

The Isle begins with a cloud of murmuring voices – a musical imagining of something hinted at in Shakespeare’s stage directions in The Tempest. The calls for “a burden, dispersedly” and “solemn music” suggest an off-stage refrain and/or perhaps something even more otherworldly. In Shakespearean Metaphysics, Michael Witmore writes: “Like the island itself, which seems to be the ultimate environment in which the play’s action takes place, music is a medium that flows from, within, and around that imaginary place into the ambient space of performance proper. If some of the courtiers from Naples and Milan are lulled to sleep by the island’s ‘solemn music,’ the audience can hear this music in a way that it cannot feel the hardness of the boards that the sleeping players lie on.” In taking cues from this reading of the play, I’ve constructed my own musical reading of the island of The Tempest. Three monologues, by Ariel, Caliban and Prospero, are set in three distinct ways. Ariel’s initial song of welcome appears, for the most part, homophonically, although its break from the quasi-robotic delivery (into the “burden, dispersedly”) points to the character’s vaporous and ethereal nature. Caliban’s famous description of the island as “full of noises” finds its home in a distraught and lonely monodic song, ornamented and driven by extraneous sounds. Prospero’s evocation of the various features and inhabitants of the island (from the final

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act) breaks apart into spoken voices that eventually dissolve into the wordless voices of the beginning, mirroring his pledge to throw his book of spells into the sea (and possibly to return to the island’s pre-lingual state). The harmonic material of the beginning and the end of the piece (the murmuring voices) is a 24-chord progression that includes all major and minor triads of the Western 12-note system (for fun). As Prospero says: “But this rough magic I here abjure, and when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses that this airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (Solemn music)” – Caroline Shaw

Gabriel Kahane (b. 1981): Elevator Songs (2017) Elevator Songs is a celebration of the individual voices that comprise Roomful of Teeth. While the ensemble is widely known for its incredible stylistic flexibility and use of extended vocal techniques, I learned over the course of several workshop sessions with the group at MASS MoCA in 2022 that they are all, unsurprisingly, wonderful singers of tunes. Given my background as a singer-songwriter, it felt natural to use this project as an opportunity to create, in essence, a “Roomful of Teeth Songbook,” an anthology to showcase each voice within the context of a larger work. What you will hear tonight grew out of the first movement, written as a sketch during that aforementioned visit to MASS MoCA. Elevator Songs is dedicated, with love and admiration, to Roomful of Teeth.

Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, King’s Place in London and the Barbican.

The group has also performed commissioned works for Roomful of Teeth and orchestra with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, The Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony and others, and has moved into stage work with the visionary opera director Peter Sellars in Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus.

Roomful of Teeth discography includes their eponymous first album, released in 2012, which was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and featured Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winning piece “Partita for 8 Voices.” Other recordings include: Render (2015), The Colorado (2016), Silkroad Ensemble’s Sing Me Home, which won the 2016 Grammy for Best World Music Album, and two EPs: The Ascendant (Wally Gunn) and Just Constellations (Michael Harrison). Their newest album Rough Magic was released in May 2023 to ecstatic critical acclaim, and has been nominated for two Grammy Awards. Teeth’s recordings have been featured on television and in film, including Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Netflix’s Dark, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé.

Roomful of Teeth is devoted to creating beauty and community with passionate curiosity, contagious enthusiasm and deep gratitude.

– Gabriel Kahane

Roomful of Teeth Roomful of Teeth is a Grammy Award-winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.

Roomful of Teeth has built a significant and ever-growing catalog of music through deep collaboration with a broad range of composers including Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim,

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Caroline Shaw, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Clyne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Cava Menzies, Judd Greenstein, Terry Riley, Toby Twining, Ted Hearne, Eve Beglarian, Caleb Burhans, Ambrose Akinmusire, Michael Harrison, Peter S. Shin and Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate.

www.roomfulofteeth.org

Gabriel Kahane Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work increasingly exists at the intersection of art and social practice. Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, he is known to haunt basement rock clubs and august concert halls alike, where you’ll likely find him in the green room, double-fisting coffee and a book.

He has released five albums as a singer-songwriter including his most recent LP Magnificent Bird (Nonesuch

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Records), hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a gorgeous, intimate collection of musical snapshots.”

As a composer, he has been commissioned by many of America’s leading arts institutions, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Public Theater, which in 2012 presented his musical February House.

In his 2023-24 season, Kahane embarks on a new collaborative commissioning project with the Attacca Quartet, Pekka Kuusisto and Roomful of Teeth as part of a two-year initiative with San Francisco Performances, with additional performances scheduled around the U.S. and Europe. Season highlights include the European premiere of emergency shelter intake form in London with the BBC Concert Orchestra, duo recitals with Jeffrey Kahane, a conducting appearance with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the New York premiere of his piano concerto Heirloom by Jeffrey Kahane and The Knights. Venues include UCLA’s Nimoy Theater, Seattle’s Meany Center and New York’s 92NY.

photo: Jason Quigley

In 2019, Kahane was named the inaugural creative chair for the Oregon Symphony, following the premiere in Portland of his oratorio emergency shelter intake form, a work that explores inequality in America through the lens of housing issues. The piece was released as an album in March of 2020, and is scheduled for performance by half a dozen other American orchestras in the coming years.

Kahane’s discography also includes 2014’s The Ambassador, which received an acclaimed staging at BAM, directed by Tony and Olivier award-winner John Tiffany; an album of chamber music, The Fiction Issue, with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and vocalist/composer Shara Nova; a recording with The Knights of his orchestral song cycle Crane Palimpsest; as well as the original cast album for February House.

A frequent collaborator across a range of musical communities, Kahane has worked with an array of artists including Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers, Caroline Shaw and Chris Thile.

After nearly two decades in Brooklyn, Kahane relocated with his family to Portland, Oregon, in March of 2020.

Their freakishly self-possessed cat, Roscoe Greebletron Jones III, when not under investigation for securities fraud, continues his fruitless attempts to monetize his Instagram account.

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Live Taping!

Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Distributed by NPR Music

Mountain Stage with Host Kathy Mattea

Featuring Brett Dennen, Craig Finn, Ben Lee, Judith Owen and Raye Zaragoza photo: Jason Adams

Sun, Feb 4 / 6:30 PM / Granada Theatre

Mountain Stage For 40 years, Mountain Stage has stood as one of the most beloved and enduring programs in public radio history, broadcasting thousands of raw, unforgettable performances by rising stars and veteran legends alike from the series’ humble home in Charleston, West Virginia.

Launched in 1983 by Groce, executive producer Andy Ridenour and chief engineer Francis Fisher, Mountain Stage began as a regional production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting before quickly gaining NPR distribution and expanding its reach to a national audience. Bookings on the two-hour, Sunday afternoon program were eclectic, to say the least, with each episode showcasing a handful of artists across a broad range of styles and genres, and audiences responded favorably to the unique mix of down home talent and household names. Though any number of early events could be credited with helping to fuel the show’s remarkable rise – some point to the breakout success of West Virginia natives like Tim O’Brien and Kathy Mattea, who began performing on the series well before fame came calling, while others recall the show’s star turn at the Public Radio Program Directors Conference in 1986, when they presented station reps with authentic West Virginia hors d’oeuvres (fresh ramps and hamburgers cut into quarters) – most agree that it was R.E.M.’s 1991 appearance that marked an indelible turning point in the Mountain Stage story.

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Program will be announced from stage Running time: approx. 150 minutes, no intermission

While the performance undoubtedly raised Mountain Stage’s profile with artists and audiences around the world, the series remained true to its Appalachian roots, maintaining the same small, tight-knit staff and commitment to embodying the warmth, honesty and openness of West Virginia and its people in everything they did. The decades to come would yield countless more iconic performances from an incredibly diverse array of guests – John Prine, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. John, Mavis Staples, Townes Van Zandt, Hugh Masekela, Buddy Guy, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Wilco, Phish and Angélique Kidjo, to name just a few – but each and every artist found themselves treated with the same respect and hospitality as the last, regardless of whether they were Grammy-winning superstars or fresh faced rookies making their radio debut.

These days, Mountain Stage can be heard on nearly 300 public radio stations nationwide (and globally via NPR Music), but its heart and soul remain firmly planted in Charleston, WV, where the series continues to present world class performances with the same passion, dedication and curiosity that’s guided it from the start.

More information available at mountainstage.org (Continued on page 42)

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Your Legacy: Our Future Arts & Lectures has an unwavering commitment to bringing big ideas and stellar performances to our community, and to fostering connection through the arts and conversation.

If you share our mission to Educate, Entertain and Inspire, we invite you to include Arts & Lectures in your estate plans.

To learn more about Legacy Giving, contact Stacy Cullison, Senior Director of Development, at (805) 893-3755 or Stacy.Cullison@ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

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Education and Community Engagement How do we build a more connected, thoughtful and compassionate community?

We do it with opportunities that are accessible to all. Through Access for ALL – Arts & Lectures’ Learning programs – inspirational, dynamic learning experiences are possible for students and lifelong learners across classrooms, our community and the UCSB campus.

Access for ALL serves more than 30,000 students and community members annually.

Here’s how we’re impacting our community:

• Assemblies in elementary and secondary schools • Workshops and conversations with artists and speakers • Ticket subsidies for students at all levels • The Thematic Learning Initiative’s lifelong learning opportunities

• Matinee field trips for K-12 students at local theaters • Lecture-demonstrations and artist panels in University classes

• Master classes for students and community members • Post-show Q&As with audiences of all ages • Free family performances in

Please consider a contribution to A&L’s award-winning education programs.

Call Stacy Cullison, Senior Director of Development & Special Initiatives, at (805) 893-3755 to learn more.

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photos: David Bazemore

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“Art teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see.”

– Bill T. Jones, Choreographer and MacArthur Fellow Thank you to our Education and ¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara!

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Arnhold A&L Education Initiative WILLIAM H. KEARNS FOUNDATION Sara Miller McCune Martha Graham Dance Company’s Anne Souder teaches a master class for UCSB students

Audrey & Timothy O. Fisher Connie Frank & Evan Thompson Kath Lavidge & Ed McKinley Dorothy Largay & Wayne Rosing

Classical superstars Gautier Capuçon, Lisa Batiashvili and Jean-Yves Thibaudet in a Q&A with UCSB students

Anonymous University Support:

Office of the Chancellor Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor

K-12 students cheer on Versa-Style Dance Company during an Arts Adventures bus-in at The Granada Theatre

Office of Education Partnerships

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¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! brings people together to share the rich cultural heritage of Latin America, serving more than 15,000 students and community members each year throughout Santa Barbara County.

Created in 2006 out of a commitment to arts access for all, Viva works with dozens of local partners to present high-quality artists who share their knowledge and passion. Schools, neighborhood spaces and community centers come alive in these free programs for youth and families.

A young audience member with Grandeza Mexicana dancers after a community performance

¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! is a collaboration between UCSB Arts & Lectures, The Marjorie Luke Theatre, the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center and the Isla Vista School Parent Teacher Association serving Carpinteria, Santa Barbara, Goleta, Lompoc, Santa Maria, Guadalupe and New Cuyama.

Winter 2024 FREE Community Concerts

Charro Esteban Escobedo delights audiences at The Marjorie Luke Theatre

Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles January 19-21

Please consider a contribution to the award-winning ¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! program. Call Director of Development Elise Erb at (805) 893-5679 to learn more.

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photos: Isaac Hernández de Lipa

Quitapenas March 8-10

Members of Ballet Folklórico de Los Ángeles with Viva Coordinator Alíz Ruvalcaba and her daughter

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Invitation to A&L’s exclusive Season Announcement Party

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Opportunity to attend master classes and other educational activities

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Invitation to a member appreciation event

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Recognition in A&L event programs or digital media

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$10,000+

Leadership Circle includes all the benefits of Executive Producers Circle plus your own personalized membership experience.

photo: Isaac Hernández de Lipa

To inquire about membership or a customized Leadership Circle experience, please call Membership Director Rachel Leslie at (805) 893-3382.

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Thank You Arts & Lectures Members!

Arts & Lectures Council Arts & Lectures is privileged to acknowledge our Council, a group of insightful community leaders and visionaries who help us meet the challenge to educate, entertain and inspire.

Rich Janssen, Co-Chair Kath Lavidge, Co-Chair Marcy Carsey Timothy O. Fisher Dorothy Largay

Patricia MacFarlane Susan McCaw Sara Miller McCune Jillian Muller Natalie Orfalea

Tom Sturgess Anne Smith Towbes Lynda Weinman Merryl Snow Zegar

Arts & Lectures Ambassadors Arts & Lectures is proud to acknowledge our Ambassadors, volunteers who help ensure the sustainability of our program by cultivating new supporters and assisting with fundraising activities.

Donna Fellows Eva Haller Robin Himovitz

Luci Janssen Maxine Prisyon Heather Sturgess

Anne Smith Towbes Sherry Villanueva Crystal Wyatt

Arts & Lectures Program Advisor Bruce Heavin

Leadership Circle Our Leadership Circle members, a group of key visionaries giving $10,000 to $100,000 or more each year, make a significant, tangible difference in the community and help bring A&L’s roster of premier artists and global thinkers to Santa Barbara. We are proud to recognize their philanthropy.

$100,000+ Jody & John Arnhold Audrey & Timothy O. Fisher ◊ ‡ Connie Frank & Evan Thompson Eva & Yoel Haller ◊

Manitou Fund Sara Miller McCune ◊ ‡ Jillian & Pete Muller Natalie Orfalea & Lou Buglioli

Lynda Weinman & Bruce Heavin ◊ ‡ Dick Wolf Zegar Family Foundation Anonymous (2)

Martha Gabbert William H. Kearns Foundation ‡ Dorothy Largay & Wayne Rosing

Laura & Kevin O’Connor Sage Publishing ‡ Heather & Tom Sturgess ◊ ‡

Ellen & Peter O. Johnson Siri & Bob Marshall Marilyn & Dick Mazess Montecito Bank & Trust Shanbrom Family Foundation Merrill Sherman Russell Steiner

Barbara Stupay Sheila Wald Susan & Bruce Worster Crystal & Clifford Wyatt Laura & Geofrey Wyatt Anonymous

$50,000+ Patricia & Paul Bragg Foundation Marcy Carsey Marcia & John Mike Cohen ‡ Justin Brooks Fisher Foundation

$25,000+ Betsy Atwater Mary Becker ‡ Cancer Foundation of Santa Barbara Margo Cohen-Feinberg Donna M. Fellows & Dave Johnson G.A. Fowler Family Foundation Luci & Rich Janssen ‡

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@artsandlectures (805) 893-3535 | www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

$10,000+ Allyson & Todd Aldrich Jennifer & Jonathan Blum Otis Booth Foundation Gary Bradhering & Sheraton Kalouria Christine Bruce & John Hilliard Scott Charney & Ellen McDermott Charney Sarah & Roger Chrisman Tana & Joe Christie

NancyBell Coe & William Burke ‡ David & Debby Cohn Robyn & Larry Gottesdiener Lisa & Mitchell Green Robin & Roger Himovitz John T. Kuelbs Chris & Mark Levine Sharon & Bill Rich ◊

Julie Ringler & Richard Powell Linda Stafford Burrows Stone Family Foundation Anne Smith Towbes ‡ US Bank Foundation Nicole & Kirt Woodhouse Anonymous

Producers Circle Arts & Lectures gratefully recognizes the commitment and generosity of our Producers Circle members, who have made gifts between $2,500 and $9,999. Recognition is based upon a donor’s cumulative giving/pledges within a 12-month period.

$5,000+ Executive Producers Circle Deirdre & William Arntz Leslie Sweem Bhutani Elizabeth & Andrew Butcher Annette & Dr. Richard Caleel Susan Eng-Denbaars & Steve Denbaars Olivia Erschen & Steve Starkey Katrina Firlik Andrea & Mark Gabbay Pamela Gann & David Hardee Nanette & Jeff Giordano

Shari & George Isaac Ann Jackson Family Foundation Margaret & Barry Kemp Maia Kikerpill & Daniel Nash Cindy & Steve Lyons Ann & John McReynolds Suzanne & Duncan Mellichamp Maryanne Mott Lisa Reich & Bob Johnson ◊ Kyra & Tony Rogers

Eva & Bryan Schreier Laurie Seigel & Joseph Nosofsky Randall & Roxanna Solakian Joan Speirs Towbes Foundation David Tufts & Cris Dovich Sandra & Sam Tyler Judy Wainwright Mitchell & Jim Mitchell Beth & George Wood Anonymous (2)

Ruth & Alan Heeger Daniel & Mandy Hochman Carolyn Holmquist Donna & Daniel Hone Judith L. Hopkinson ‡ Andrea & Richard Hutton Carolyn Jabs & David Zamichow Mary Grace Kaljian Connie & Richard Kennelly Linda Kitchen ‡ Nancy & Linos Kogevinas Larry Koppelman Pat Lambert & Rick Dahlquist Karen Lehrer & Steve Sherwin Denise & George Lilly Peggy Lubchenco & Steve Gaines Nancy & Mike McConnell Nancy McGrath Amanda McIntyre Gene l. Miller Michael Millhollan & Linda Hedgepeth Lois & Mark Mitchell Harriet Mosson Elizabeth & Charles Newman Dale & Michael Nissenson Jan Oetinger Joan Pascal & Ted Rhodes Lynn & Mel* Pearl Meg & Doug Pearson

Ann & Dante Pieramici Ann Pless Justine Roddick & Tina Schlieske Jean Rogers Susan J. Rose Gayle & Charles Rosenberg Jo & Ken Saxon Karen Shapiro & Richard Appelbaum Anitra Sheen Holly & Lanny Sherwin Rebecca Sokol Smith Lynne Sprecher Carol Spungen Dale & Gregory Stamos Debra & Stephen Stewart Sheila Stone Mary Jo Swalley ◊ Denise & James Taylor Amy & George Tharakan Kathryn & Alan Van Vliet Christine Van Gieson & John Benson Dianne & Daniel Vapnek Sherry & Jim Villanueva Dr. Richard Watts Alexis & Mike Weaver Kathy Weber Dr. Bob Weinman Anonymous

$2,500+ Producers Circle Martha & Bruce Atwater Marta Babson Jill & Arnie Bellowe Deirdre & Fraser Black Michael Bolton Susan D. Bowey Victoria Hendler Broom Drs. Paula & Thomas* Bruice Sherri Bryan & Tim Dewar Susan & Claude Case Lilyan Cuttler & Ned Seder Deborah David & Norman A. Kurland Maria José de Araújo & Michael McColm Phyllis de Picciotto & Stan Roden Deanna & Jim Dehlsen Eva Ein & Michael Palmer Julia Emerson Cynthia Enlow & Elise Antrim Doris & Tom Everhart Richard Flacks Tisha Ford Charlie Franciscus & Dr. Herb Rogove Bunny Freidus Patricia & Michael French Priscilla & Jason* Gaines Grafskoy Hindeloopen Limited, LLC Tricia & Don Green Paul Guido & Stephen Blain Belle Hahn

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Circle of Friends $1,000+ Peggy & Steve Barnes Holly Becker Morgan Bennett David Cadoff Dorothy Daniels Lynn Daniels & John Matthews

Cid & Thomas* Frank Linda Gorin - In Memory of Arnold B. Gorin, M.D. Sandra Howard Janet & Robert Kates

Danson Kiplagat Roger & Barbara Kohn Irene Marsi Nancy & Douglas Norberg Andrew & Liisa Primack

Eileen Read Robin Rickershauser Diane & Charles Sheldon Kirstie Steiner & John Groccia Claire & Glenn Van Blaricum

Kris & Eric Green Diana Katsenes Elinor & James Langer Janice & David Levasheff Melinda & Aaron Lewis

Priscilla & Forrest Mori Almeda & J. Roger Morrison Carol & Stephen Newman D.E. Polk & J.P. Longanbach

Minie & Hjalmer Pompe van Meerdervoort Carol Vernon & Robert Turbin David Warnock

James & Diane Giles Nancy Goldberg Jody Holehouse Cheryl & G.L. Justice

Anna & Peter Kokotovic Carol & Don Lauer Karen Merriam Jeanne & Larry Murdock

Peter Rathbone Maryan Schall Richard Wimbish Anonymous

Anne & Jeffrey Donahue Elizabeth Downing & Peter Hasler Pamela Elliott Lorne Fienberg Lori Frank Monique Gingold Laura & Michael Hamman Janet Healy Lauren Hobratsch Andriana Hohlbauch Stacey & Raymond Janik Susan Kadner AJ Kamp Lois Kaplan Jean Keely Laurie King

Karina Kulangara Pamela & Russell Lombardo Martin Lynch Doug McKenzie Kurt Meyer Thomas & Sally Mueller Carolyn & Dennis Naiman Pietro Nasta Fredric Pierce Deborah & Ken Pontifex Karen Poythress Julie & Chris Proctor Kathy & Mark Rick Mark Rosenthal Judith & Michael Rothschild

Steven Sereboff Joan & Steven Siegel Mitchell Sjerven Jeanne Sloane Beverly & Michael Steinfeld Sarah Stokes Terry & Art Sturz Anne & Tony Thacher William & Diana Thomas Sharron Thomas Susan Thomason Marion & Frederick Twichell Carole Wasserman Elizabeth Watson Jo Ellen & Thomas Watson

$500+ Kent Allebrand Michael & Marilyn Avenali Linda & Peter Beuret Rochelle & Mark Bookspan Dodd & Beth Geiger

$250+ Harold Baer Michael Chabinyc Roberta & Matt Collier Victoria Dillon Ann & David Dwelley

$100+ Rene Aiu Lynn & Joel Altschul Susan Badger Kirsten Baillie Deborah Barr Randy Bassett Rosalie Benitez Poe Wayne Benner Cherie Bonazzola Jane Brody & Royce Adams Vikki Cavalletto Kathleen Copeland Constance Cullen Jeanette Curci Lila Deeds Joan & Thomas Dent

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Legacy Circle

Arts & Lectures Staff

Legacy Circle members listed below have made provisions in their estate plans to support A&L and ensure our exciting programs continue for future generations. We are pleased to acknowledge these thoughtful commitments.

Celesta M. Billeci, Miller McCune Executive Director Meghan Bush, Associate Director Ashley Aquino, Contracts Administrator Marisa Balter, Financial Analyst Michele Bynum, Senior Artist Stanly Chung, Development Coordinator Shiloh Cinquemani, Assistant Ticket Office Manager Stacy Cullison, Senior Director of Development & Special Initiatives Charles Donelan, Senior Writer/Publicist Elise Erb, Director of Development Kevin Grant, Senior Business Analyst Ashley Greene Hill, Education Associate Jenna Hamilton-Rolle, Director of Education & Community Engagement Nina Johnson, Marketing Manager Rachel Leslie, Membership Director Mari Levasheff, Marketing Manager Hector Medina, Marketing & Communications Production Specialist Caitlin O’Hara, Director of Public Lectures & Special Initiatives Elizabeth Owen, Programming Manager James Reisner, Manager of Ticketing Operations Summer Rivera, Chief Financial & Operations Officer Angelina Toporov, Marketing Specialist Laura Wallace, Finance & HR Manager Eliot Winder, Production Manager

Judy & Bruce Anticouni Helen Borges* Ralph H. Fertig* Audrey & Timothy O. Fisher Georgia Funsten* Eva & Yoel Haller Susan Matsumoto & Mel Kennedy Sara Miller McCune Lisa A. Reich Sharon & Bill Rich Hester Schoen* Heather & Tom Sturgess Mary Jo Swalley Lynda Weinman & Bruce Heavin

Arts & Lectures Endowments Fund for Programmatic Excellence Beth Chamberlin Endowment for Cultural Understanding Commission of New Work Fund Education and Outreach Fund Sara Miller McCune Executive Director of Arts & Lectures Harold & Hester Schoen Arts & Lectures Endowment Sonquist Family Endowment Lynda Weinman & Bruce Heavin Arts & Lectures Endowment for Programmatic Excellence

Government & Regional Funders California Arts Council City of Santa Barbara National Dance Project National Endowment for the Arts Santa Barbara County Office of Arts & Culture UCSB Summer Culture and Community Grant Program

University Support Arts & Lectures is especially grateful to UCSB students for their support through registration and activity fees.

These funds directly support lower student ticket prices and educational outreach by A&L artists and writers who visit classes.

List current as of January 4, 2024. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy. Please notify our office of any errors or omissions at (805) 893-3382. * In Memoriam ◊ Indicates those who have made plans to support UCSB Arts & Lectures through their estate ‡ Indicates those that have made gifts to Arts & Lectures endowed funds in addition to their annual program support

(805)893-3535 893-3535 || www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu (805)

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photo: Reto Sterchi

mining songs. Mattea’s most recent release, 2018’s Pretty Bird, marked her triumphant return to the studio after nearly losing her voice and prompted glowing profiles from NPR, Billboard, Rolling Stone and more.

(Continued from page 32)

Kathy Mattea Over the course of Mountain Stage’s 40-year run on public radio, the show has become something of a second home for Mattea, who’s appeared as a guest on the Charleston-based program more times than any other female artist (she ranks second overall only to her good friend and fellow West Virginia native Tim O’Brien).

Mattea explains: “Beyond the world-class performances, beyond the collaborative atmosphere, beyond how much fun it is, I think the show offers a really important insight into the people and the culture that make West Virginia so special, and I’m always thrilled to help share that with the world.”

Born and raised in Kanawha County, Mattea lived in West Virginia until the late 1970s, when she moved to Nashville to pursue her dreams of a career in music.

She signed her first record deal in 1983 and charted with a pair of early releases, but it was her acclaimed third album, Walk the Way the Wind Blows, that truly signaled her arrival as a star. The record produced four Top 10 singles at country radio and set the stage for Mattea’s 1987 smash, Untasted Honey, which marked the first of five of her albums to be certified gold. Untasted Honey contained back-to-back No. 1 country singles, as did 1989’s Willow in the Wind, which helped Mattea take home two consecutive Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year awards along with a Grammy for Best Female Vocal Performance. Over the next three decades, Mattea would go on to record nearly a dozen more albums exploring country, folk, Celtic and gospel music; collaborate with everyone from Jackson Browne to Townes Van Zandt; notch her first platinum record with a collection of her greatest hits; earn her second Grammy Award; top the Bluegrass Albums chart; and garner yet another Grammy nomination for Coal, her Marty Stuart-produced exploration of Appalachian

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In 2019, Mattea began guest-hosting episodes of Mountain Stage at the suggestion of co-founder and original executive producer Andy Ridenour. Filling in for longtime host Larry Groce, who’d never missed a show in the series’ entire run, was a daunting task, but Mattea’s deep well of musical knowledge, easygoing chemistry with guests and profound personal reverence for the program and its history made her a natural. In 2021, Mattea took over as full-time host, receiving a warm welcome from loyal listeners around the country.

“One of the reasons I love this job so much is that it’s not about me,” Mattea explains. “There’s something so rewarding about being able to take whatever success I’ve had in my career and pass that on to the next person, to be able to shine a light on these amazing artists and this wonderful state and this incredibly important institution.”

Her place in Mountain Stage history long since assured, Kathy Mattea is ready to help guide the show into the future one joyous, eclectic night of music at a time.

Credits Host: Kathy Mattea Executive Producer: Adam Harris Senior Producer: Jeff Shirley Artistic Director: Larry Groce Associate Producers: John Inghram, Mallory Richards Engineered by: Patrick Stephens, Ritchie Collins, Jim Raines, Brian Hensley, Greg McGowan, Scott Robinson Production Assistance by: Michael Lipton, Lance Schrader, Chris Meade, Don London, Kelley Laseter, Jenn Brown, Mary Lee, Big Jay Mountain Stage Band: Ron Sowell, band director, acoustic guitar Bob Thompson, piano Julie Adams, vocals Michael Lipton, guitar Steve Hill, bass Ryan Kennedy, guitar Ammed Solomon, drums Photographic Services: Chris Morris, Music in Motion Promotions

Special Thanks

(805) 893-3535 | www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

Blue Note Records 85th Anniversary Celebration Starring The Blue Note Quintet Thu, Feb 8 / 8 PM / Campbell Hall Program will be announced from the stage

Jazz Series Lead Sponsor: Manitou Fund Presented in association with UCSB Department of Music Gerald Clayton, piano Joel Ross, vibraphone Immanuel Wilkins, saxophone Kendrick Scott, drums Matt Brewer, bass

Gerald Clayton Six-time Grammy-nominated pianist, composer and bandleader Gerald Clayton earned recent Recording Academy recognition for Happening: Live at the Village Vanguard, his debut release on Blue Note Records.

Collaborating over the years with such distinctive artists as Diana Krall, Roy Hargrove, Dianne Reeves, Terence Blanchard, John Scofield, Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Bernstein, Ambrose Akinmusire, Gretchen Parlato, Ben Wendel, the Clayton Brothers Quintet and legendary band leader Charles Lloyd, Clayton currently serves as director of Next Generation Jazz Orchestra following service as musical director for Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour.

Under the instruction of Billy Childs, Clayton earned a Bachelor of Arts in piano performance at University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music following a year of intensive study with Kenny Barron at The Manhattan School of Music. Clayton’s creative spirit honors the legacy of his father, bassist-composer John Clayton. In 2016, he received a Duke University commission to render the Piedmont blues experience in early 20th-century Durham; Piedmont Blues features

a mixed media performance to critical acclaim. In 2019, he received a commission from Los Angeles County Museum of Art to compose a musical pendant for artist Charles White’s “5 Great American Negroes” mural; Clayton titled the project White Cities: A Musical Tribute to Charles White. In January 2020, he began work on the critically-acclaimed score for Sam Pollard’s awardwinning documentary MLK/FBI. The emotional resonance of Clayton’s score imbues the film with subtle, lingering moments of struggle and humanity, and helps capture a complex arc of an enduring subject.

Joel Ross Joel Ross continues refining an expression that’s true to his sound and his generation. In 2019, the vibraphonistcomposer issued his anticipated Blue Note debut, the Edison Award-winning record KingMaker, to eruptive critical acclaim. This was followed by his 2020 release Who Are You?, which features his band Good Vibes at their most synchronous. New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello praised the album for the ways it “speaks to a new level of group cohesion… more tangle, more sharing, more possibility.”

The Parable of the Poet, Ross’ third release for Blue Note Records, explores feelings of self-awareness – confidence, doubt, regret and forgiveness – through storytellings and retellings. Using collaborative improvising, collective melody and instrumental features, the intuitive bandleader spotlights unique

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attributes of fellow artists Immanuel Wilkins, Maria Grand, Marquis Hill, Kalia Vandever, Sean Mason, Rick Rosato, Craig Weinrib and returning special guest Gabrielle Garo.

anniversary that featured Ambrose Akinmusire, Robert Glasper, Derrick Hodge, Lionel Loueke and Marcus Strickland and released the album Our Point of View in 2017. Scott’s 2023 Blue Note album Corridors finds him paring down to a trio with saxophonist Walter Smith III and bassist Reuben Rogers.

Immanuel Wilkins The music of saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins is filled with empathy and conviction, bonding arcs of melody and lamentation to pluming gestures of space and breath. Listeners were introduced to this riveting sound with his acclaimed debut album Omega, which was named the No. 1 Jazz Album of 2020 by The New York Times. The album also introduced his remarkable quartet with Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass and Kweku Sumbry on drums, a tight-knit unit that Wilkins features once again on his stunning sophomore album The 7th Hand.

The 7th Hand explores relationships between presence and nothingness across an hour-long suite comprised of seven movements. “I wanted to write a preparatory piece for my quartet to become vessels by the end of the piece, fully,” observed the Brooklyn-based, Philadelphia-raised artist who Pitchfork said “composes ocean-deep jazz epics.”

Matt Brewer Matt Brewer was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico surrounded by a family of musicians and artists. At the age of 10, Brewer fell in love with the bass and began a lifelong study of music. He graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy and went on to study at The Juilliard School. He’s travelled the world playing in the bands of Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, Dave Binney, Gerald Clayton, Ben Wendel, Aaron Parks, Vijay Iyer, Dhafer Youssef, Antonio Sanchez, Mark Turner, Steve Lehman, Ben Monder and Lage Lund, among many others). He has been a frequent guest lecturer at the Banff Centre and is an adjunct faculty member at the New School University.

Special Thanks

Kendrick Scott Kendrick Scott was born in Houston, Texas and grew up in a family of musicians. By age 8 he had taken up the drums and he later attended Houston’s renowned High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA), a school which has produced an impressive array of musical talent including Scott’s label mates Jason Moran and Robert Glasper, as well pop star Beyoncé and many others. While still attending HSPVA, Scott won several DownBeat magazine student awards, as well as the Clifford Brown/Stan Getz Award from the International Association of Jazz Educators. He was later awarded a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music, where he majored in music education.

Scott has toured with Herbie Hancock, Charles Lloyd, The Crusaders, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Kurt Elling and Terence Blanchard, also appearing on several of the trumpeter’s Blue Note albums including Flow (2005), A Tale of God’s Will (2007) and Magnetic (2013). Scott’s first two releases on Blue Note as a leader presented his band Kendrick Scott Oracle: We Are the Drum (2015) and A Wall Becomes a Bridge (2019). Scott was also a member of the Blue Note All-Stars, a supergroup formed for the label’s 75th

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Resmaa Menakem Setting a Course for Healing Historical and Racialized Trauma Mon, Feb 12 / 7:30 PM / Campbell Hall

photo: J. Leader

Justice for All Lead Sponsors: Marcy Carsey, Connie Frank & Evan Thompson, Eva & Yoel Haller, Dick Wolf, and Zegar Family Foundation Presented in association with the following UCSB partners: Counseling and Psychological Services, Division of Student Affairs, Feminist Futures, Office of Black Student Development, and Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Embodied provocateur, multiple-levels thinker and structural paradigm-shifter Resmaa Menakem (MSW, LICSW, SEP) is an author, agent of change, therapist and licensed clinical worker specializing in racialized trauma, communal healing and cultural first aid based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As the originator and leading proponent of somatic abolitionism, an embodied antiracist practice for living and culture building, Menakem is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute, and is an educator and coach.

Working at the intersections of anti-racism, communal healing and embodied purpose, Resmaa Menakem is the challenging yet compassionate coach we all need in this time of racial reckoning and near-global dysregulation.

Menakem is known as the author of the New York Times bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning, Monsters in Love: Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy – And What You Can Do About It and The Stories From My Grandmother’s Hands, a children’s picture book with actor T. Mychael Rambo and illustrator Leroy Campbell.

a social worker for Minneapolis Public Schools; a youth counselor; a community organizer; and a marketing strategist. Menakem is a senior fellow at The Meadows Behavioral Healthcare. In 2022 he established The AddiEun Foundation in Minneapolis. He is a key collaborator and facilitator for Education for Racial Equity and a sought-after public speaker and panelist. In 2023, Menakem released an on-demand, self-paced course in collaboration with Sounds True titled Healing Racialized Trauma: Somatic Abolitionism for Every Body.

Menakem has been a guest on Charlamagne Tha God’s Comedy Central TV program, Tha God’s Honest Truth, and radio show, The Breakfast Club with DJ Envy; Oprah; Sundays with Vernā; Krista Tippett’s On Being; Dan Harris’ 10% Happier, Eric Zimmer’s The One You Feed, and many other major shows, podcasts and media. www.resmaa.com

Menakem has worked as a community care counselor for civilian contractors in Afghanistan as well as a certified military family life consultant; the director of counseling services for Tubman Family Alliance; the behavioral health director for African American Family Services in Minneapolis; a domestic violence counselor for Wilder Foundation; a divorce and family mediator;

(805) 893-3535 | www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

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Abraham Verghese in Conversation with Pico Iyer

Speaking with Pico Series Sponsors: Martha Gabbert, Siri & Bob Marshall, and Laura & Kevin O’Connor

Dr. Abraham Verghese Dr. Abraham Verghese is a bestselling author and prominent voice in medicine with a uniquely humanistic view of the future of health care. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama “for reminding us that the patient is the center of the medical enterprise.” For 15 years, Verghese was Vice Chair for the Theory & Practice of Medicine at Stanford University.

Outside of health care, Verghese is best known as a phenomenally successful author. His first novel Cutting for Stone topped the New York Times bestseller list for over two years, was translated into more than 20 languages, and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Amazon named it one of its 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime. In 2023, he published his long-awaited second novel, The Covenant of Water, which debuted as a New York Times bestseller, remained on the list for several weeks, and was the 101st pick for Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah Winfrey, who named the book among the top three she’s read in her life, was so taken by the story that she developed a six-part podcast series diving into the book’s themes through intimate conversations with Verghese. His memoirs include the award-winning My Own Country and The Tennis Partner.

Trained in infectious diseases and pulmonary medicine, Verghese has long been a top thinker in healthcare.

His TED talk “A Doctor’s Touch” has been viewed almost two million times, and is as meaningful now as the day he delivered it. He is co-host with Dr. Eric Topol of the

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Medicine and the Machine podcast, and is a top thinker on how we utilize cutting-edge technology to advance medicine with a focus on the physical patient. This dualpronged approach, incorporating both an appreciation of technological developments and a profound commitment to the sacred relationship between doctor/caregiver and patient, makes Verghese a leading voice in the discussion about what quality care means now and in the future. Verghese leads PRESENCE, a multidisciplinary center that studies the human experience of patients, physicians and caregivers. His warmth and vision as well as his world-class gifts as a storyteller make him a powerful speaker to both health-care professionals and the patient in all of us.

Pico Iyer Pico Iyer is the author of 16 books, translated into 23 languages, and dealing with subjects ranging from the XIVth Dalai Lama to Islamic mysticism and from globalism to the Cuban Revolution. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and The Art of Stillness. His latest, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, has been a national bestseller, and he’s just

(805) 893-3535 | www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

photo: Derek Shapton

photo: Barbi Reed

Wed, Feb 21 / 7:30 PM / Arlington Theatre

completing his next work, on his first 32 years with a community of Benedictine monks in Big Sur. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, the liner notes for many Leonard Cohen albums and Criterion Collection movies and a screenplay for Miramax. Since 1986 he has been a regular essayist for Time, The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and many others.

Coming in Spring

Lauren Groff

in Conversation with Pico Iyer

His four TED talks have received more than 11 million views, and he has been featured in program-length interviews with Oprah, Krista Tippett and Larry King, among others.

photo: Eli Sinkus

Born in Oxford, England in 1957, Iyer was a King’s Scholar at Eton and was awarded a Congratulatory Double First at Oxford, where he received the highest marks of any student on English Literature at the university. He received a second master’s degree at Harvard and was recently a Ferris Professor at Princeton.

Books by both authors are available for purchase in the lobby and a signing follows the event

Special Thanks

“A gifted writer capable of deft pyrotechnics.”

New York Times Book Review A three-time National Book Award finalist, bestselling novelist and short story writer, Lauren Groff is known for literary masterpieces such as Fates and Furies, Matrix and her new novel The Vaster Wilds.

Speaking with Pico Series Sponsors: Martha Gabbert, Siri & Bob Marshall, and Laura & Kevin O’Connor

Tue, Apr 9 / 7:30 PM / Campbell Hall Tickets start at $20 / $10 UCSB Students

(805) 893-3535 | www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

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Taj Mahal Quintet and Sona Jobarteh Thu, Feb 22 / 8 PM / Campbell Hall

photo:

Program will be announced from stage Running time: approx. 150 minutes, including intermission

Presented in association with UCSB Department of Music

About the Program

Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal, the eminent figure in the American blues and roots music scene, and Sona Jobarteh, the multi-talented Gambian griot and kora virtuoso/composer, come together to explore the deep ancestral ties between American blues and West African music.

If anyone knows where to find the blues, it’s Taj Mahal.

A brilliant artist with a musicologist’s mind, he has pursued and elevated the roots of beloved sounds with boundless devotion and skill. Then, as he traced origins to the American South, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere, he created entirely new sounds, over and over again. As a result, he’s not only a god to rock ’n’ roll icons such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, but also a hero to ambitious artists toiling in obscurity who are determined to combine sounds that have heretofore been ostracized from one another. No one is as simultaneously traditional and avant-garde.

To Taj Mahal, the blues is strongly connected to its African roots. His finger-guitar style shows a strong influence of the West African kora. His deep understanding of African music and his past collaborations with renowned African artists like Toumani Diabate and Bassekou Kouyate have informed both his own musical journey and these latest concerts with Sona Jobarteh.

Sona Jobarteh, Africa’s first female griot and kora virtuoso, strives not only to maintain her musical heritage but also to support a more humanitarian future.

Her music draws from an ancient West African griot tradition dating back centuries. She is a living archive of the Gambian people and was inaugurated in 2023 as a professor at Berklee College of Music.

In a distinctive and spellbinding artistic collaboration, together Taj Mahal and Sona Jobarteh explore the common roots of these musical legacies.

Quantifying Taj’s significance is impossible, but people try anyway. A 2017 Grammy win for TajMo, his collaboration with Keb’ Mo’, brought his Grammy tally to three wins and 14 nominations, and underscored his undiminished relevance more than 50 years after his solo debut. Blues Hall of Fame membership, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association and other honors punctuate his resume. He appreciates the accolades, but his motivation lies elsewhere. “It’s not a hunger, not a lust or even a thirst,” Taj says of what drives him. “It’s just more knowledge of self – to realize that almost everything is right here. We’re so used to looking outside of ourselves for things, and it’s right here.”

Over the years, Taj had also emerged as a mind-boggling, multifaceted player. In addition to the guitar, he has become proficient on about 20 different instruments

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– and counting. “There weren’t an awful lot of people still playing these instruments that came from my culture,” Taj explains. “Not that they didn’t before, but nobody was playing them in the time I was. But I wanted to hear them. So I watched people play, got one, sat down, remembered the music that I was listening to, and started picking it out on the mandolin or banjo or 12-string.”

educational reform across the continent of Africa. The academy is the first of its kind to deliver a mainstream academic curriculum at a high level, while also bringing the culture and traditions of its students to the forefront of their everyday education. These efforts have garnered her invitations to speak at high profile events around the world – including summits for the UN, the World Trade Organization and UNICEF.

As Taj thinks about the dozens and dozens of albums, collaborations, live experiences and captured sounds, he finds satisfaction in one main idea. “As long as I’m never sitting here, saying to myself, ‘You know? You had an idea 50 years ago, and you didn’t follow through,’ I’m really happy,” he says. “It doesn’t even matter that other people get to hear it. It matters that I get to hear it – that I did it.”

Special Thanks

Sona Jobarteh Preserving her musical past, Sona Jobarteh innovates to support a more humanitarian future. The spirit of Sona Jobarteh’s musical work stands on the mighty shoulders of the West African griot tradition; she is a living archive of the Gambian people. With one ear on the family’s historic reputation, one on the all-important future legacy and her heart in both places, she is preparing a place today for the next generation. Her singing and kora playing while fronting her band spring directly from this tradition. The extent of her recognition today is evidenced by more than 23 million viewers on YouTube and considerable numbers on other digital platforms.

Sona Jobarteh has performed at venues from the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles to Symphony Space in New York, and she’s sold out the Barbican in London, Cologne’s Philharmonie and the Seine Musicale in Paris.

These performances are underpinned by her skills as a composer arising from early days at London’s RCM and Purcell School of Music.

Sona Jobarteh scored the 2010 documentary Motherland and is featured on the soundtrack of Beast (2022), starring Idris Elba. She co-wrote a track on LL Cool J’s latest album with Q Tip, and filmed several of her live shows for CBS’ 60 minutes.

Jobarteh’s dedication to spreading powerful humanitarian messages through her songs and her stage performances makes her much more than a musician; she is active in social change and leads by example.

She singlehandedly set up The Gambia Academy, a pioneering institution dedicated to achieving

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Launching UCSB’s Campus Decarbonization Study Project as Part of the Task Force for a Fossil-free UC

Michael E. Mann Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

photo: Joshua Yospyn

Fri, Feb 23 / 7:30 PM / Campbell Hall Presented in association with the following UCSB partners: Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, Chancellor’s Task Force on Sustainability, College of Engineering, College of Letters & Science, Decarbonization Study Project Committee, Environmental Studies Program, Institute for Energy Efficiency, Mellichamp Academic Initiative in Environmental Justice, Mellichamp Academic Initiative in Sustainability, and the departments of Earth Science and Political Science

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. He is director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM).

Mann received his undergraduate degrees in physics and applied math from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.S. degree in physics and a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University.

Mann was a lead author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001 and was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003. He has received a number of honors and awards including NOAA’s outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the 50 leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2012 and was awarded the National Conservation Achievement Award for science by the National Wildlife Federation in 2013.

He made Bloomberg News’ list of 50 most influential people in 2013. In 2014 he was named Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and received the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. He received the

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Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One in 2017, the Award for Public Engagement with Science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and the Climate Communication Prize from the American Geophysical Union in 2018. In 2019 he received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and in 2020 he received the World Sustainability Award of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2020. He received the Leo Szilard Award of the American Physical Society in 2021 and was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 2023. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is also a co-founder of the award-winning science website RealClimate.org.

Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, numerous op-eds and commentaries, and six books including Dire Predictions, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, The Madhouse Effect, The Tantrum that Saved the World, The New Climate War and Our Fragile Moment.

Books are available for purchase in the lobby and a signing follows the event

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Leila Josefowicz, violin John Novacek, piano Sun, Feb 25 / 4 PM / Campbell Hall

photo: Tom Zimberoff

Running time: approx. 90 minutes, including intermission

Event Sponsor: Luci & Rich Janssen Presented in association with UCSB Department of Music

Program

About the Program

Claude Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor, L. 140 Allegro vivo Intermède: Fantasque et léger Finale: Très animé

In choosing the repertoire, we wanted to explore and celebrate the magical sounds and gestures that highlight the period of expressionism, catapulting us further into the music of the 20th century.

Karol Szymanowski: Mythes, op. 30 La Fontaine d’Arethuse Narcisse Dryades et Pan - Intermission Erkki-Sven Tüür: Conversio for Violin and Piano (1994) Igor Stravinsky: Divertimento from Le baiser de la fée (“The Fairy’s Kiss”) Sinfonia Danses suisses Scherzo Pas de Deux: Adagio, Variation and Coda

The beloved Debussy Sonata and Szymanowski Myths enchant and transport us to the lush and lavish harmonic fantasy world that points to the sounds of jazz! The Tüür and Stravinsky continue our journey into a more angular and visceral world with sharper edges, delighting us with unexpected surprises of humor and wit, dancing with twists and turns, excitement and passion.

– Leila Josefowicz

Claude Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor, L. 140 Debussy’s final years were wretched. He developed colon cancer in 1909 and underwent a painful operation, radiation therapy and drug treatment. It was all to no avail, and the disease took its steady course. The onslaught of World War I in 1914 further depressed him, but it also sparked a wave of nationalistic fervor, and he set about writing a set of six sonatas for different combinations of instruments. It may seem strange that the iconoclastic Debussy would return in his final years to so structured a form as the sonata, but he specified that his model was the French sonata of the eighteenth century and not the classical German sonata. To make his point – and his nationalistic sympathies – even more

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clear, Debussy signed the scores of these works “Claude Debussy, musicien français.”

Debussy lived to complete only three of the projected six sonatas: a Cello Sonata (1915); a Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp (1916); and the Violin Sonata, completed in April 1917. It was to be his final work, and it gave him a great deal of difficulty. From the depths of his gloom, he wrote to a friend: “This sonata will be interesting from a documentary viewpoint and as an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war.” Debussy played the piano at the premiere on May 5, 1917, and performed it again in September at what proved to be his final public appearance. His deteriorating health confined him to his room thereafter, and he died the following March.

For all Debussy’s dark comments, the Violin Sonata is a brilliant work, alternating fantastic and exotic outbursts with more somber and reflective moments. In three concise movements, the sonata lasts only about thirteen minutes. Debussy deliberately obscures both meter and key over the first few measures of the Allegro vivo, and only gradually does the music settle into G minor. The haunting beginning of the movement feels subdued, almost ascetic, but the dancing middle section in E major is more animated. Debussy brings back the opening material and rounds off the movement with a con fuoco coda.

The second movement brings a sharp change of mood after the brutal close of the first. Debussy marks it fantasque et léger (“Fantastic [or fanciful] and light”), and the violin opens with a series of leaps, swirls and trills before settling into the near-hypnotic main idea. The second subject, marked “sweet and expressive,” slides languorously on glissandos and arpeggios, and the movement comes to a quiet close. Over rippling chords, the finale offers a quick reminiscence of the very opening of the sonata, and then this theme disappears for good and the finale’s real theme leaps to life. It is a shower of triplet sixteenths that rockets upward and comes swirling back down: the composer described it as “a theme turning back on itself like a serpent biting its own tail.” There are some sultry interludes along the way, full of glissandos, broken chords, rubato and trills, but finally the swirling energy of the main theme drives the music to its animated close.

Debussy may have been unhappy about this music while working on it, but once done he felt more comfortable with it, writing to a friend: “In keeping with the contradictory spirit of human nature, it is full of joyous tumult… Beware in the future of works which appear to inhabit the skies; often they are the product of a dark, morose mind.”

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Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937): Mythes, op. 30 World War I forced Szymanowski to remain in his native city of Tymoszowska in Poland, and there he composed prodigiously: the Symphony No. 3, Violin Concerto No. 1 and numerous songs, cantatas and piano pieces all date from the first years of the war. Now in his early 30s, Szymanowski had only recently thrown off the influence of Wagner and Strauss to forge his own style, a style that grew in large measure from his exploration of Sicily and North Africa and from his new awareness of ancient cultures. Musically, this meant a style characterized by great attention to instrumental color, busy textures and an expressionism that can verge on intoxicated ecstasy.

Szymanowski composed several works for violin and piano during this period, among them his three Myths, Opus 30 in 1915. Szymanowski had fallen in love with classical antiquity, and each of the three movements – The Fountain of Arethusa, Narcissus and Dryads and Pan – is based on a different Greek myth. Arethusa was a nymph loved by both Artemis and the river god Alpheus.

Bathing in a river, she was forced to flee underwater to the island Ortygia to escape Alpheus; on that island, Artemis transformed her into a fountain, but Alpheus followed, was himself transformed into a river, and so was united with Arethusa at last. Szymanowski makes no attempt to cast this myth in a “classical” style but instead sets The Fountain of Arethusa in a shimmering, post-impressionistic musical language. This is a displaypiece for both instruments, from the delicate piano introduction (clearly the sound of the fountain) through the writing for violin, which has a sort of fantastic tonal opulence, soaring high in its range, slipping into passages played entirely in harmonics, and leaping between an extroverted brilliance and a reflective lyricism. The Fountain of Arethusa has become one of Szymanowski’s most popular works.

Narcissus was loved by Echo, but he was so consumed with himself that he rejected her; she in turn caused him to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool, where he withered away and was transformed into a flower. Szymanowski casts his Narcissus in a rondo-like form, with the violin’s principal melody returning in different keys and guises.

Dryads were tree-nymphs (the most famous of them was Euridice, wife of Orpheus), and Pan the god of fields, forests and flocks. Pan pursued the nymph Syrinx, who fled to the river Ladon and prayed to be turned into a reed; her prayer was granted, and Pan cut the reed and from it made his pipes. Szymanowski’s setting of this tale is notable for its brilliant writing for violin: Dryads

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and Pan offers the violinist a cadenza (rare in chamber music) and features quarter-tones and harmonics used to imitate the sound of Pan’s flute. Szymanowski wrote Myths for the Polish violin virtuoso Paul Kochanski and dedicated it to Kochanksi’s wife Sofia.

Erkki-Sven Tüür (b. 1959): Conversio for Violin and Piano Among the many results of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is that Western audiences discovered a range of original musical voices that had been kept from general public attention during the period of Soviet control. These voices, quite varied, included Giya Kancheli in Georgia, Henryk Gorecki in Poland, Peteris Vasks in Latvia and an impressive range of Estonian composers, of whom Erkki-Sven Tüür is one of the most prominent. As a young man, Tüür formed a rock group that combined contemporary rock with renaissance music, but his professional training had a more traditional basis: he graduated from the Tallinn Conservatory in 1984. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Estonia’s declaration of independence, Tüür was able to achieve a measure of independence of his own: he left his state job and became a freelance composer. Today Tüür, who is also a painter, lives and works on one of the remote islands off the Estonian coast in the Gulf of Finland. He is quite a prolific composer. His catalog of works includes nine symphonies; concertos for violin, viola, cello, piano, piccolo, clarinet and bassoon (as well as such unusual instruments as accordion, marimba, recorder and percussion); plus numerous works for chamber ensembles, for piano and for voice.

Tüür’s Conversio for violin and piano (1994) achieves an unusual sonority for this combination of instruments.

Instead of trying to generate the lyric sound of most violin music, Tüür defies expectations with a sonority so staccato that it sounds pointilistic. The violin’s opening ostinato figure – surging and asymmetric – is gradually interrupted by the piano’s sharp chords. The two textures weave together, eventually rising to strident climax made of disconnected but rhythmic attacks. The music’s hard edges gradually melt away in favor of a more sustained, almost tolling sonority, and Conversio fades into silence on the violin’s virtually inaudible tremolo.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Divertimento from Le baiser de la fée (“The Fairy’s Kiss”) As a small boy, Stravinsky was taken to see a performance of Sleeping Beauty and fell in love with the music of Tchaikovsky on the spot. In one of his autobiographies, Stravinsky recalls an even more intense

memory: at a performance of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar in 1893, the 11-year-old Stravinsky came out of his family’s box to see a tall figure stride past. His mother leaned down and whispered: “Igor, look, there is Tchaikovsky.”

Stravinsky notes: “I looked and saw a man with white hair, large shoulders, a corpulent back, and this image has remained in the retina of my memory all my life.”

A love for Tchaikovsky’s music remained with Stravinsky all his life as well, and when in 1927 the dancer Ida Rubinstein suggested that he write a ballet for her new company, Stravinsky quickly accepted her proposal that he compose a score based on themes by Tchaikovsky, much as he had written Pulcinella on themes by Pergolesi in 1920. Stravinsky based the ballet on the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Ice Maiden, in which a fairy finds a boy lost in a snowstorm and imprints a magic kiss upon him.

This kiss gives her control of the boy, and 20 years later – on his wedding day – she re-appears, kisses him again, and takes eternal possession of the young man.

Stravinsky drew his themes for this ballet from five of Tchaikovsky’s songs and about a dozen of his piano pieces, so that the resulting ballet is an amalgam of both composers’ styles, combining Tchaikovsky’s melodic gift with Stravinsky’s own sensibilities (and not all the music in the ballet is by Tchaikovsky – Stravinsky himself composed a number of short or transitional sections).

First performed in Paris on November 27, 1928, The Fairy’s Kiss (as Stravinsky called the ballet) has never enjoyed the success of his other ballets, but Stravinsky retained his fondness for the music. Several years later, in the early 1930s, when Stravinsky went on concert tours with the violinist Samuel Dushkin, he needed music for the two of them to play together. He composed the Duo Concertant for Dushkin and arranged several of his orchestral scores for violin and piano to fill out these programs. One of these scores was The Fairy’s Kiss, though when Stravinsky made the violin-piano arrangement, he changed its title to the more abstract Divertimento.

The ballet was in four scenes, and Stravinsky kept the order of the original pieces intact but made cuts that reduce the Divertimento to less than half the length of the 45-minute ballet. The Divertimento is in four movements, with the first two performed without pause: the serene opening Sinfonia is the ballet’s first scene, the stately Danses suisses the second. The brief Scherzo is taken from the third scene; some of this music bears a strong resemblance to Stravinsky’s Apollo, completed the same year as The Fairy’s Kiss. The final movement, characterized by great rhythmic variety, is based on three of the four sections of the original ballet’s Pas de Deux:

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Adagio, Variation and Coda. As ballet or as instrumental suite, this music remains a heartfelt tribute from one artist to another.

Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Leila Josefowicz Leila Josefowicz’ passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin is reflected in her diverse programs and enthusiasm for performing new works. A favourite of living composers, Josefowicz has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Luca Francesconi, John Adams and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all written specially for her.

Artist-in-Residence of Iceland Symphony Orchestra for the 2023-2024 season, Josefowicz will perform Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto with Daniel Bjarnason and Bartók’s Violin Concerto No.2 with Eva Ollikainen, as well as present a solo recital at Harpa Hall.

Elsewhere, Josefowicz’ season includes engagements with Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Musikkollegium Winterthur, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Lahti, Milwaukee, Taipei and Antwerp symphony orchestras. Josefowicz also presents the world premiere of Jüri Reinvere’s Concerto for Violin and Harp alongside Trina Struble and The Cleveland Orchestra, and tours Germany and Austria with Junge Deutsche Philharmonie with concerts in Berlin, Vienna and Dresden.

Highlights of recent seasons include appearances with Berliner Philharmoniker; Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich; Royal Concertgebouworkest; Konzerthausorchester Berlin; Dresden Philharmonie, Oslo, Helsinki and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras; NDR Elbphilharmonie; the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, where she worked with conductors at the highest level including Matthias Pintscher, John Storgårds, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Louis Langrée, Hannu Lintu and John Adams.

Josefowicz enjoyed a close working relationship with the late Oliver Knussen, performing various concerti, including his violin concerto, together over 30 times.

Other premieres have included Matthias Pintscher’s Assonanza with Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 with New York Philharmonic, Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes with Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Steven Mackey’s Beautiful Passing with BBC Philharmonic.

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Together with John Novacek, with whom she has enjoyed a close collaboration since 1985, Josefowicz has performed recitals at world-renowned venues such as New York’s Zankel Hall and Park Avenue Armory, Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center and Library of Congress and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Reykjavik, Trento, Bilbao and Chicago. This season their collaboration continues with recitals in California, appearing at Festival Mozaic, UC Santa Barbara, San Francisco Performances and Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Colburn Celebrity Recital series.

Josefowicz has released several recordings, notably for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips/Universal and Warner Classics and was featured on Touch Press’s acclaimed iPad app, The Orchestra. Her latest recording, released in 2019, features Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Violin Concerto with Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu. She has previously received nominations for Grammy Awards for her recordings of Scheherazade.2 with St Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto with Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.

In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, joining prominent scientists, writers and musicians who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.

John Novacek Versatile, Grammy-nominated pianist John Novacek regularly tours the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia as solo recitalist, chamber musician and concerto soloist; in the latter capacity he has presented over thirty concerti with dozens of orchestras. Novacek was recently appointed to the piano and collaborative piano faculty of The Mannes School of Music at The New School’s College of Performing Arts.

John Novacek’s major American performances have been heard in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ David Geffen and Alice Tully halls, 92nd Street Y, Columbia University’s Miller Theater, Merkin Concert Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Symphony Space, Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Boston’s Symphony Hall, Chicago’s Symphony Center and Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl, while international venues include Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Salle Gaveau and Musée du Louvre, London’s Wigmore Hall and Barbican Centre

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and Tokyo’s Suntory, Opera City and Bunkamura halls.

He is also a frequent guest artist at festivals, here and abroad, including New York City’s Mostly Mozart Festival, California’s Festival Mozaic and those of Aspen, Cape Cod, Caramoor, Chautauqua, Colorado College, Great Lakes, Mendocino, Mimir, Music in the Vineyards, Ravinia, Seattle, SummerFest La Jolla, Wolf Trap, Canada’s Festival of the Sound, Ottawa, Chamberfest, Scotia, SweetWater and Toronto Summer Music, BBC Proms (England), Braunschweig (Germany), Lucerne, Menuhin Gstaad and Verbier (Switzerland), Serenates d’Estiu (Spain), Sorrento (Italy), Stavanger (Norway), Toulouse (France) and Sapporo (Japan). He has also made his debuts with the Orquesta Filarmónica de la Ciudad de México, as well as with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, the Austin, Duluth Superior, Springfield (Mass.) and Traverse symphony orchestras, National Academy Orchestra of Canada and Symphony Nova Scotia.

Often heard on radio broadcasts worldwide, John Novacek has appeared on NPR’s Performance Today, St. Paul Sunday and, as both featured guest composer/ performer, on A Prairie Home Companion. He was also seen and heard on television, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Entertainment Tonight and CNN International. Recently, Novacek has been prominently featured in discussion and performance on the highly successful PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This hosted by Scott Yoo. John Novacek is a highly sought-after collaborative artist and has performed with Joshua Bell, Renaud Capuçon, Jeremy Denk, Matt Haimovitz, Leila Josefowicz, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Truls Mørk, Elmar Oliveira and Emmanuel Pahud, as well as the Afiara, Colorado, Harrington, Jupiter, New Hollywood, St. Lawrence, SuperNova and Ying string quartets. He also tours widely as a member of the multi-faceted Intersection, a piano trio that includes violinist Kaura Frautschi and cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper. As a tireless advocate for contemporary music, Novacek has also given numerous world premieres and worked closely with composers John Adams, Kenji Bunch, Gabriela Lena Frank, John Harbison, Jennifer Higdon, George Rochberg, Robert Sierra, John Williams and John Zorn.

of Music degree from New York City’s Mannes College of Music, studying with Peter Serkin in piano and Felix Galimer and Julius Levine in chamber music. Novacek’s coaches in composition included Frederick Werle, Aurelio de la Vega and Daniel Kessner.

John Novacek’s original compositions have been widely performed and frequently recorded by major international soloists and ensembles. Commissioning entities include: New York Philharmonic, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, Fresno Ballet, Accordo/Schubert Club (film score), Fuji TV, Seattle Commissioning Club, Scotia Festival, Eastman School of Music, McGill University, West Texas A&M University, The 5 Browns, Concertante, Ensemble Liaison, Millennium, Manasse/ Nakamatsu Duo, Harrington String Quartet, Ying Quartet and Quattro Mani. He has also prepared special arrangements for The Three Tenors, Boosey & Hawkes, EMI, Atlantic Records, John Williams, Lalo Schifrin, Kiri Te Kanawa and pop diva Diana Ross.

John Novacek has recorded over 35 CDs, encompassing solo and chamber music by most major composers from Bach to Bartók, as well as many contemporary and original scores. CD titles include Road Movies (2004 Grammy nomination, Best Chamber Music Performance), Great Mozart Piano Works, Spanish Rhapsody, Novarags (original ragtime compositions), Classic Romance, Hungarian Sketches, Intersection, Romances et Meditations and, with Leila Josefowicz, Americana (Gramophone Editor’s Choice), For the End of Time, Shostakovich and Recital (BBC Music Magazine, 5 stars/June 2005’s chamber choice). 2020 saw the IBS Classical releases of Chausson’s Concert in D for Violin, Piano & String Quartet and an album of viola sonatas by Glinka, Hindemith and Schubert with Randolph Kelly.

John Novacek is a Steinway Artist.

Special Thanks

John Novacek took top prizes at both the Leschetizky and Joanna Hodges international piano competitions, among many others. He studied piano with Polish virtuoso Jakob Gimpel at California State University, Northridge, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree, summa cum laude. Subsequently, he earned a Master

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Amanda Gorman Tue, Mar 5 / 7:30 PM / Arlington Theatre

photo: Daniel Williams

Major Sponsor: Dorothy Largay & Wayne Rosing Justice for All Lead Sponsors: Marcy Carsey, Connie Frank & Evan Thompson, Eva & Yoel Haller, Dick Wolf, and Zegar Family Foundation Presented in association with the following UCSB partners: Feminist Futures and the departments of English and Sociology

Amanda Gorman Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history. She is a committed advocate for the environment, racial equality and gender justice.

Gorman’s activism and poetry have been featured on the Today Show, PBS Kids and CBS This Morning, and in The New York Times, Vogue and Essence. After graduating cum laude from Harvard University, she now lives in her hometown of Los Angeles.

The special edition of her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” was published in March 2021. Her debut picture book, Change Sings, released in September 2021 and her poetry collection Call Us What We Carry in December 2021, all debuting at No. 1 on New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Her newest children’s book, Something, Someday, was released in September 2023.

In 2017, Amanda Gorman was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word – a program that supports Youth Poets Laureate in more than 60 cities, regions and states nationally. Gorman’s groundbreaking performance of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 presidential inauguration received international critical acclaim, inspiring millions of viewers with her message of hope, resilience and healing.

theamandagorman.com

Gorman appeared on the cover of Time magazine in February 2021 and was the first poet to grace the cover of Vogue in its May 2021 issue. She was Porter Magazine’s July 2021 cover star and received the Artist Impact Award at the 2021 Backstage at the Geffen Awards. Gorman was one of five Variety Power of Women honorees and it cover star, as well one of three cover stars for Glamour’s Women of the Year.

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Meow Meow Sequins and Satire, Divas and Disruptors: The Wild Women of the Weimar Republic

photo: Karl Giant

Thu, Mar 7 / 8 PM / Lobero Theatre

Post-post-modern diva Meow Meow has hypnotized, inspired and terrified audiences globally with unique creations and sell-out seasons from New York’s Lincoln Center and Berlin’s Bar Jeder Vernunft to London’s West End and the Sydney Opera House.

Named one of the top performers of the year by The New Yorker, the spectacular crowd-surfing tragi-comedienne has been called “sensational” (The Times, U.K.), a “diva of the highest order” (New York Post), “The Queen of Chanson” (Berliner Zeitung), and “a phenomenon” by the Australian press. Her award-winning solo works have been curated by David Bowie, Pina Bausch, Mikhail Baryshnikov and numerous international arts festivals.

As well as being a prolific original music, theater and dance-theater creator, Meow Meow specializes in the Weimar repertoire and French chanson. She has played Jenny in Weill’s Threepenny Opera in Paris and London with the London Philharmonic and Anna 1 and 2 in Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins with Orchestra Victoria, as well as numerous Weimar works with Sydney Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Oregon Symphony, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Bergen Philharmonic. Meow Meow has performed Schoenberg Ensemble founder Reinbert de Leeuw’s homage to Schubert and Schumann, Wunderschön, throughout Australia and in the U.K. with the Hebrides Ensemble.

Highlights of recent seasons include concerts at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Davies Symphony Hall in

San Francisco and performances of William Walton’s Façade and Seven Deadly Sins conducted by Vladimir Jurowski at the Berlin Konzerthaus; Miss Adelaide in a concert version of Guys and Dolls at London’s Royal Albert Hall; performances of Meow Meow’s Pandemonium with the Sydney Symphony at the Sydney Opera House in 2018; and an extended run of concerts at the Barbican with Barry Humphries and the Aurora Orchestra. That program, a highly acclaimed return season, resurrected lost and banned works from the Weimar period. Meow Meow and Humphries premiered this program with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in the major concert halls of Australia including the Sydney Opera House, and then toured it to Tanglewood Music Festival, London’s Cadogan Hall and the Edinburgh International Festival.

Recent London appearances include her Pandemonium and More Pandemonium concerts at Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic and a sell-out season of her Christmas creation Apocalypse Meow at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2017.

Meow Meow had an opera written for her by Richard Mills and Victorian Opera, and has appeared on the West End in Kneehigh and Michel Legrand’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. She played Titania in Emma Rice’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe; Pegleg in Tom Waits’ musical fable The Black Rider with Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre, directed by Matt Lutton; and Edith Piaf in Cocteau’s Le bel indifferent, directed by Ted Huffman for the Greenwich Music Festival.

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In the United States, Meow Meow was commissioned for David Bowie’s Highline Festival by director John Cameron Mitchell. Her piece An Audience with Meow Meow premiered at Berkeley Rep with direction by Emma Rice and was recreated for Boston Arts Emerson, directed

by Leigh Silverman and designed by Andrea Lauer.

Wainwright, the late Michel Legrand and The Von Trapps as well as original songs written by Lauderdale and Meow Meow, performed with members of Pink Martini and the Oregon Symphony.

Meow Meow has performed with Pink Martini at the Berlin Philharmonie, Royal Albert Hall, Opera Garnier Monte Carlo, the Hollywood Bowl, and across Europe, Canada and the United States. She appears frequently in the Bard College Spiegeltent Summer series and has performed in concert with Alan Cumming at The Met Museum, and in Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music series. Meow Meow performed in the PIAF! Centenary Celebration Concert at Town Hall with the American Pops Orchestra, and toured the U.S. with punk cabaret outfit Amanda Palmer and the Dresden Dolls. Meow Meow has guested with the La Clique, Club Swizzle, and La Soiree companies globally including at Sydney Opera House, London’s Roundhouse, and in New York City.

Special Thanks

www.meowmeowrevolution.com

Meow Meow’s original works include Vamp, Beyond Glamour, Feline Intimate, Meow Meow’s Little Match Girl, Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid, His Master’s Choice, Apocalypse Meow and An Audience with Meow Meow.

These shows have played from Edinburgh International Festival to Berkeley Rep, from the Southbank Centre to the Sydney Festival and Shakespeare’s Globe, and from Shanghai to Slovenia, garnering numerous awards including the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award, Green Room and Australian Helpmann Awards.

Meow Meow created Souvenir, an ongoing fantastical song cycle on the history of the Theatre Royal, written with composers Jherek Bischoff and August Von Trapp, for the Brighton Festival, the Theatre Royal Tasmania and Her Majesty’s Theatre South Australia. In 2017, she conjured a bespoke creation for Liverpool Culture’s Sgt. Pepper at Fifty celebrations involving the city’s brass bands, a three-day riot and a requiem in a graveyard. The Graveyard Tour continues with her Sleepless Beauties collaborators – designers and composers Andrea Lauer, Jherek Bischoff and Jethro Woodward.

Meow Meow’s albums with frequent collaborators, composer Iain Grandage and the Wild Dog Orchestra, include Vamp, Songs From a Little Match Girl, and Mermaid (with the Siren Effect Orchestra). Her latest album, Hotel Amour, recorded with Thomas M. Lauderdale of Pink Martini, features duets with Rufus

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@artsandlectures

Tommy Emmanuel, CGP with special guests Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley Sat, Mar 9 / 8 PM / Campbell Hall

photo: Simone Cecchetti

Program will be announced from the stage Running time: approx. 140 minutes, including intermission

Tommy Emmanuel The real-time exuberance Tommy Emmanuel brings to every note of every song he plays is palpable and infectious. His fans are in love with his unbound talent as a guitarist of multitudes, as well as his ability to play three parts at once – always with pure heart and real soul.

It’s one thing to play these multi-dimensional arrangements flawlessly on an acoustic guitar. But to do it with that smile of the ages, that evidence of authentic, unbridled delight, is an irresistible invitation to feel his music as deeply as he does. “The joy,” he says, “is there always because I’m chasing it through music. Seeing the surprise in people’s eyes is worth living and working for... I can’t help but play to the people with all my heart, which is overflowing with joy of being in that moment that I’ve worked all my life for. And here it is!”

Emmanuel’s happiness, like his music, is pure and expressed in real-time. Nothing is phony. It’s a quality that reaches far beyond any one language, and it’s instantly understood by all his fellow humans. It’s the reason he smiles so much while playing, and why his audience does as well. As many have said, it’s hard not to be happy at his shows. Because his joy, and the timeless river of inspiration which is the source, is universally recognized. And it feels good.

In 2018, Emmanuel made the album Accomplice One, a series of duets with a range of artists – including Rodney Crowell, Mark Knopfler, Amanda Shires, Jason

Isbell, Jerry Douglas, Jake Shimabukuro and more – that reflected his love of all kinds of music. His accomplices on the album seemed as inspired by his energy and passion as Emmanuel was by theirs, and he played with effortless grace.

Now comes the long-awaited sequel, Accomplice Two. It shares the same exuberance, diversity and sense of adventure as the first album, with a great range of artists.

This album features rock legends Michael McDonald, Jorma Kaukonen and Little Feat; bluegrass superstars such as Billy Strings, The Del McCoury Band, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull and David Grisman; country icons such as Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Jamey Johnson and Raul Malo; and guitar heavyweights like Yasmin Williams, Larry Campbell and Richard Smith.

Emmanuel also has a new television special called Accomplice LIVE!, which began airing on PBS in March of 2023. This special features some of Emmanuel’s best-known songs and duets with accomplices such as Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Sierra Hull, Yasmin Williams and many others.

Emmanuel was born in 1955 in Muswellbrook, New South Wales Australia, and started playing the guitar at age four. In his 20s, he was the most sought-after performer and session musician in Sydney. By age 30, he was burning on electric guitar with several rock bands in stadiums across Europe. He could have gone on to live the rock star life. Yet he yearned for something purer and closer to his heart, and went acoustic.

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The inspiration for Emmanuel’s transformation was his hero, Chet Atkins, who represented the simplicity of one man, one guitar, and unlimited passion for serving the song. Eventually Emmanuel met his hero and started a lifelong friendship that shaped his music forever. Atkins welcomed Emmanuel into guitarist knighthood by bestowing upon him the coveted title of CGP (Certified Guitar Player) – an honor awarded only to four other humans ever – and they recorded an album together, The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World.

Stuart and Steve Wariner, among many others.

Receiving Atkins’ love and esteem lifted Emmanuel into a different realm. Because, as Atkins recognized instantly and told the world, musicians like this don’t come along that often; pay attention to this man. And people have paid attention. From sold out shows all over the world to multiple Grammy nominations, Australian Recording Industry Association Awards, International Bluegrass Music Association Awards, and countless Best Acoustic Guitarist wins in numerous music magazine readers polls… The world is taking notice.

Hensley, a native of Jonesborough, Tennessee, earned IBMA Guitar Player of the Year nominations in 2020, 2021 and 2022. He made his Grand Ole Opry debut at the age of 11 (thanks to an invite from Marty Stuart with Earl Scruggs). Hensley’s musical influences are as farranging as The Allman Brothers Band, Ray Charles, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and he has had the opportunity to perform with the likes of Johnny Cash, Peter Frampton and Old Crow Medicine Show, among many others.

Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley Take a 15-time IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) Dobro Player of the Year and a Tennesseeborn guitar prodigy called “Nashville’s hottest young player” by Acoustic Guitar magazine, and you have Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley, a Grammy-nominated powerhouse acoustic duo that has electrified the acoustic music scene around the world. Acoustic Guitar describes their sound as “steel-string bluegrass with all the intensity of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Known for their white-hot picking and world class musicianship as six-string virtuosos, as well as their soulful stone country vocals, Ickes and Hensley cleverly and uniquely meld bluegrass, country, blues, rock, jamgrass and string band music of all kinds. Their signature blend of music that defies restrictions of genre can be heard on their new record, Living in a Song, released in February 2023. With the new album, Ickes and Hensley spotlight their songwriting chops by collaborating with and paying homage to some of Nashville’s finest songwriters. They made a conscious decision to lean the music in a classic country direction, with some elements of Americana and bluegrass thrown in for good measure.

Ickes, the most decorated musician in IBMA Awards history, grew up in California’s Bay Area. A former founding member of bluegrass “supergrou”” Blue Highway and highly sought-after Dobro master, Ickes has graced the recordings and concerts of artists such as Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Earl Scruggs, Merle Haggard, Alison Krauss, Tony Rice and several others.

All four of the Compass Records albums released by Ickes and Hensley have received widespread acclaim, including their debut Before the Sun Goes Down, which garnered a Grammy nomination, The Country Blues and World Full of Blues, produced by Grammy-winning producer Brent Maher (The Judds, Kenny Rogers, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson), which features collaborations with Vince Gill and Taj Mahal. The new Ickes and Hensley record, Living in a Song (once again produced by Maher), highlights the duo’s songwriting chops like never before and is receiving glowing reviews.

Among notable side projects, Ickes and Hensley teamed up with guitar master Tommy Emmanuel for a very special EP, Tommy Emmanuel: Accomplice Series Vol. I with Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley (released at Emmanuel’s invite via his label, CGP Sounds) to critical acclaim. Ickes and Hensley have also recorded several songs with the legendary Taj Mahal, who invited them to go on tour and be part of his first-ever Taj Mahal Sextet. robandtrey.com

Special Thanks

As a duo, Ickes and Hensley have shared the stage or collaborated with Tommy Emmanuel, Taj Mahal, Vince Gill, David Grisman, Jorma Kaukonen, Hot Tuna, Marty

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@artsandlectures

Sierra Ferrell Shoot For the Moon Tour Sun, Mar 10 / 7 PM / Campbell Hall

photo: Reamer

Program will be announced from the stage

Sierra Ferrell With her spellbinding voice and time-bending sensibilities, Sierra Ferrell makes music that’s as fantastically vagabond as the artist herself. Growing up in small-town West Virginia, the singer/songwriter/multiinstrumentalist left home in her early 20s to journey across the country with a troupe of nomadic musicians, playing everywhere from truck stops to alleyways to freight-train boxcars speeding down the railroad tracks.

After years of living in her van and busking on the streets of New Orleans and Seattle, she moved to Nashville and soon landed a deal with Rounder Records on the strength of her magnetic live show. Now, on her highly anticipated label debut Long Time Coming, Ferrell shares a dozen songs beautifully unbound by genre or era, instantly transporting her audience to an infinitely more enchanted world.

Co-produced by Stu Hibberd and ten-time Grammy Award-winner Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch), Long Time Coming embodies a delicate eclecticism fitting for a musician who utterly defies categorization. “I want my music to be like my mind is – all over the place,” says Ferrell, who recorded the album at Southern Ground and Minutia studios in Nashville.

“I listen to everything from bluegrass to techno to goth metal, and it all inspires me in different ways that I try to incorporate into my songs and make people really feel something.” In sculpting the album’s chameleonic sound, Ferrell joined forces with a knockout lineup of guest musicians (including Jerry Douglas, Tim O’Brien, Chris

Scruggs, Sarah Jarosz, Billy Strings and Dennis Crouch), adding entirely new texture to each of her gracefully crafted and undeniably heartfelt songs.

Sprung from her self-described “country heart but a jazz mind,” Long Time Coming opens on the unearthly reverie of “The Sea,” a haunting and hypnotic tale of scorned love. Its bewitching arrangement is adorned with sublime details like Ferrell’s tender toy-piano melodies and Scruggs’ woozy steel-guitar work. In a striking sonic shift emblematic of the whole album, Ferrell then veers into the galloping beat and classic bluegrass storytelling of “Jeremiah,” a heavy-hearted but sweetly hopeful romp featuring Jarosz on banjo and octave mandolin. Another impossibly charming bluegrass gem, “Bells of Every Chapel” sustains that wistful mood as Ferrell muses on the exquisite pain of “loving someone unconditionally with all your heart, but they don’t receive your love the way you want them to.” Graced with Strings’ nimble acoustic-guitar work and the heavenly harmonies of O’Brien and Julie Lee, “Bells of Every Chapel” reaches its breathtaking crescendo as Ferrell belts out the song’s closing lyrics, effectively twisting that heartache into something strangely glorious.

One of the most enthralling moments on Long Time Coming, “Far Away Across the Sea” finds Ferrell serenading her tragically distant beloved, channeling the track’s ardent longing in wildly cascading guitar lines and the fiery trumpet work of Nadje Noordhuis. “Since I’m singing about the ocean in that song, I wanted it to have a calypso vibe – but then there’s also a bit of a tango feel to it, and

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some Spanish influence too,” Ferrell points out. Noting that she first became fascinated with island music while touring with blues singer/songwriter C.W. Stoneking, Ferrell also infuses an element of calypso into “Why’d Ya Do It” – a beguiling and bittersweet lament whose lyrics perform a sort of poetic love spell (“My love for you’s a deep blue ocean, baby/I just wanna swim inside”).

In her elegant blurring of musical boundaries, Ferrell brought her vast imagination to the reworking of two signature fan favorites, including “In Dreams” – a song previously glimpsed in a viral video that’s now amassed nearly four million views on YouTube. A bold departure from the rugged simplicity of that rendition, the album version of “In Dreams” unfolds with an unbridled splendor that wholly intensifies the impact of Ferrell’s outpouring. Meanwhile, in reimagining the selfreflective “Made Like That,” Ferrell introduces unexpected flourishes like loping percussion and luminous piano tones, ultimately building an even more immersive atmosphere around the song’s softly devastating confession. “When I wrote ‘Made Like That,’ I was thinking about where I am now compared to what my life was like in West Virginia,” she says. “It was hell for me to be stuck in a small town, but I got out and finally realized what the world had to offer. Now I’m here, and I’m so much healthier and happier.”

Despite its endless wandering into new sonic terrain, Long Time Coming is indelibly rooted in Ferrell’s ravishing vocal presence, revealing her extraordinary ability to draw enormous feeling from just one single note. A lifelong singer, she got her start performing covers in a local bar at the young age of seven. “There was this little dead-end bar nearby that my mom and I would go hang out at during the day, and I’d get up and sing Shania Twain songs,” she recalls. “There’d be hardly anyone in there, so I’d have free rein of the place.” Later on, while living in a trailer park, Ferrell had a chance encounter that would soon turn out to be life-changing. “I met all these homeless kids who were traveling all over the place and playing amazing old songs, and I wanted to be a part of that,” says Ferrell. “The music they were making was so honest, so pure. It seemed important to bring that kind of music back, and it’s been with me ever since.” Though her years of traveling proved immensely formative, Ferrell eventually settled in Nashville in her late 20s. Soon after her arrival, she began taking the stage at major festivals like The Avett Brothers at the Beach, AmericanaFest and Out on the Weekend, and touring with the likes of Parker Millsap and Charley

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Crockett, immediately captivating crowds with her joyful and spirited live set.

A consummate musician’s musician, Ferrell found an easy camaraderie with the many luminaries who accompanied her on Long Time Coming. To that end, her most cherished moments in the album’s production include the recording of the soul-stirring choir-like harmonies of “West Virginia Waltz,” as well as Rory Hoffman’s impromptu whistling on “Bells of Every Chapel.” (“Rory’s got one heck of a whistle on him,” she marvels). At the same time, the making of Long Time Coming fully affirmed her affinity for lifers like Strings.

“Billy’s in it for the music, which is something we have in common,” she says. “We’re just gonna keep playing till we’re not on this Earth anymore.”

While the wayward sound of Long Time Coming is in many ways a perfect echo of Ferrell’s free-spirited nature, there’s also a much deeper intention at play: a desire to expand her listeners’ capacity for wonder, so that they might uncover some enchantment in their own lives.

“A lot of us are taught to wake up, go to work, make money, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat,” says Ferrell. “It’s so easy to get caught up in that nine-to-five routine, and end up numb and dulled-down to everything. I want my music to help people break away from that – to get lost in their imagination, and start seeing how magical the world can be if you just pay attention.”

Special Thanks

@artsandlectures

Hael Somma, Chamonix, photo by Antoine Mesnage

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Coming in Spring 2024 April Wed, Apr 3 Sun, Apr 7 Tue, Apr 9 Wed, Apr 10 Wed, Apr 17 Fri, Apr 19 Sat, Apr 20 Tue, Apr 23 Wed, Apr 24 Fri, Apr 26 Sat, Apr 27

Robert B. Reich, What Really Happened to the American Dream? (And How Can it be Restored?)

Fatoumata Diawara - note new date Lauren Groff in Conversation with Pico Iyer Danish String Quartet, The Doppelgänger Project, Part IV Herbie Hancock Antonio Sánchez, Birdman Live 10th Anniversary Randall Goosby, violin Rhiannon Giddens, You’re the One Evan Osnos, Two Superpowers: Navigating China and America in the New Age of Uncertainty Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Deep River Kronos Quartet | Five Decades

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Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What if We Get It Right?

Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross - UCSB READS -

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Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us Fri, May 10 Cristina Mittermeier - note new date Between Land and Sea: Saving Our Oceans to Save Ourselves Wed, May 15 Ephrat Asherie Dance, ODEON Thu, May 16 Bruce Liu, piano

Fatoumata Diawara, Apr 7