Joan of arc lives anew, reimagined in amy beth kirsten's 'savior' chicago tribune

Joan of Arc lives anew, reimagined in Amy Beth Kirsten's 'Savior'

Amy Beth Kirsten’s fascination with the miraculous details of the Joan of Arc story has resulted in "Savior," which will have its world premiere Monday at the Harris Theater. (Gennadi Novash photo)

By John von Rhein Chicago Tribune

MARCH 27, 2018, 11:30 AM

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my Beth Kirsten knew she would be taking on a fearsome challenge when she decided to create an evening-long multimedia work based on the life and death of Joan of Arc.

After all, the martyred maid of 15th century France has been the subject of countless artistic and literary explorations, including an opera by Tchaikovsky, Danish director Carl Dreyer’s 1928 French silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and Swiss composer Arthur Honegger’s 1938 oratorio “Joan of Arc at the Stake.”

But Kirsten, who was born in downstate Belleville and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and Kansas City,

Mo., enjoys creating wildly ambitious tasks for herself, then going at them hammer and tongs. She proved as much with her previous work of “composed theater” — her 2017 “Quixote,” a 90-minute reimagining of Cervantes’ classic novel “Don Quixote,” for actor, vocal trio and singing percussion quartet.

Kirsten’s long fascination with the miraculous details of the historic Joan’s story — her mystical visions, her courageous testimony before a kangaroo court, her politically motivated death as a convicted heretic — unfettered her imagination and allowed it to run free.

The result is “Savior,” a 65-minute vocal and instrumental theater work commissioned for MusicNOW and receiving its world premiere as part of the series’ 20th-anniversary season, Monday evening at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. Kirsten wrote both the music and libretto, and she will direct the performance, a collaboration between CSO musicians and guest artists from her New Haven, Conn.-based ensemble HOWL. Although the composer does not consider “Savior” an opera, the conception and stage layout straddle the fence between concert and theater.

Three women’s voices represent Joan, flutist Tim Munro (wearing a stag mask throughout the 65-minute performance) and a mezzo-soprano represent Joan’s divine voices, and the recorded voice of actor Sandy Smillie represents a reporter at Joan’s trial. The instrumentalists (including CSO cellist Katinka Kleijn and percussionist Cynthia Yeh) represent her interrogators. Movement, lighting and sound design provide additional theatrical layers.

“I was really trying to put myself in Joan’s shoes,” said Kirsten in a recent phone interview, when asked about the work’s yearlong gestation. “I joked with my actor friends that this was ‘method-composing’ for me.

I kept having to remind myself Joan was a real person, so I felt a certain sense of responsibility towards her.”

She drew on her own religious experiences as a child to evoke Joan’s saintly fervor.

“The young Joan was incredibly pious and would pray all the time,” Kirsten said. “The fact really resonated with me, since every summer my family would send me to a Presbyterian church camp in the beautiful pastures of Kansas. There I would meditate on passages in the Bible.”

She dedicated “Savior” to her grandmother, who passed away at 88 while she was composing the work. “So death was very much on my mind,” the composer recalled. “But while you’re ruminating on death, you think about life.”

One of the most unusual aspects of “Savior” is that the musician-actors will be performing not from sheet music but from electronic copies of the score scrolling across the screens of their iPads. This, Kirsten explained, will allow them to move about the stage more freely and interact more directly, as key moments of

Joan’s life play out through music, sound, movement and various forms of stage artifice.

Because a conductor might get in the way of the performers’ crucial interplay, not to mention distracting audience members, the score does not call for a conductor.

Kirsten draws a distinction between works of music theater by other composers (which suggest Broadway shows to her) and hybrid theater works of hers such as “Colombine’s Paradise Theater,” which the Chicagobased sextet Eighth Blackbird performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014. Her intention, she explained, is to integrate instruments, voices and bodies as equal means of artistic expression. Elements of the stage become part of the musical language.

Collaborating with Eighth Blackbird on “Colombine” in fact suggested new possibilities of performance that led to Kirsten’s cofounding, with her colleague Lindsay Kesselman, the HOWL ensemble in 2012. (“I wondered if our group could kick it up a notch,” the composer said.) Each of the works she has written for the group thus far places musicians literally at the center of the action, empowering them to be actors and vocalists as much as virtuoso instrumentalists.

The unconventionality of Kirsten’s composed theater works owes something to the fact that she came relatively late to composition — and rather circuitously, at that.

After her family settled in west suburban Naperville, she attended Naperville Central High School, later the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and Illinois Benedictine College (now Benedictine University) in Lisle. After graduation, she worked as an office temp during the day and as a singer-songwriter at night. Eventually she earned a master’s degree in music from Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts and a doctorate in composition from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

It was there that she met her future husband, Christopher Theofanidis, who’s also a composer and a professor of music. They make their home in New Haven, where he is a member of the composition faculty at Yale. Kirsten teaches music composition privately and last fall joined the composition faculty at the Longy School of Music at Bard College, in Cambridge, Mass.

“It’s a funny thing,” Kirsten remarked. “I’ve been doing these big theatrical pieces the last few years, but all I want to do now is write a string quartet! I’d love to write for (Chicago’s) Spektral Quartet. I just think they are so awesome. There are technical things that came to mind while I was writing my earlier pieces I feel I could work out with a string quartet.”

So what’s it like returning to the area in which she grew up?

“Honestly, when I’m flying into O’Hare and look down on the city lights, I really feel as if I’m coming home,” Kirsten said. “It’s a wonderful thing to be able to make this kind of piece for members of the Chicago

Symphony Orchestra. This is not something I normally get to do, and it’s so exciting.”

MusicNOW will present the world premiere of Amy Beth Kirsten’s “Savior,” as performed by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and HOWL theater ensemble, at 7 p.m. Monday at Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St.; $28; 312-294-3000, www.cso.org.

Glover leads MOB’s ‘St. John Passion’ It would not be Lenten season in Chicago without a performance of one of the towering Passion settings of J.S. Bach.

With conductor John Nelson’s Chicago Bach Project silent this year, Jane Glover and her Music of the Baroque orchestra and chorus filled the breach with a glowing performance of Bach’s “St. John Passion” on Palm Sunday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. A second performance was given Monday night at the Harris Theater in downtown Chicago.

Bach’s gripping narrative of Christ’s Passion and death gained a welcome intimacy by virtue of Glover’s employing a 26-voice chorus (prepared by William Jon Gray) and chamber orchestra of equal size. Set within the whole was a stylish continuo group consisting of Craig Trompeter, cello and viola da gamba; Michael Beattie, organ; and Daniel Swenberg, theorbo.

The choir was small enough to ensure clear projection of the German text in its various guises as rabble, soldiers and priests (the chorus “Christus, der uns selig macht” was wonderfully light on its rhythmic feet), yet full enough to give weight to the Lutheran chorales that reflect on each turn of event.

Glover brought out the dramatic aspect through propulsive pacing up through the Crucifixion, relaxing her control and softening the dynamics for the later pages of grieving and spiritual consolation. In the stylish tenor Thomas Cooley she had an ideal Evangelist, firm of voice and commanding of expression. So intensely did he penetrate the long and demanding narration that the familiar saga took on the urgency of on-site reportage.

MOB regulars Yulia Van Doren, soprano, and Meg Bragle, mezzo-soprano, also sang sensitively in their solo arias, particularly Bragle with her affecting “Est ist vollbracht” (“It is finished”), accompanied by Trompeter’s florid gamba obbligato. Bass Michael Sumuel, new to the guest roster, made a powerful and eloquent Jesus.

Pilate’s pronouncements were strongly taken by bass Kevin Keys.

John von Rhein is a Tribune critic. jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com