Lisa Bielawa
World premiere of songs by Rome Prize winning composer Lisa Bielawa in Harrisburg
February 20, 2010
COMPOSER-VOCALIST LISA BIELAWA
World Premiere of Graffiti dell'amante
performed by Brooklyn Rider
Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 8pm
Presented by Market Square Concerts
Market Square Church | 20 S. 2nd Street | Harrisburg, PA
Program:
COLIN JACOBSEN: Achille's Heel, Lydia's Reflection, Second Bounce, Loveland, Shur Landing
PHILIP GLASS: String Quartet No. 2 ("Company")
LISA BIELAWA: Graffiti dell'amante
DMITRI YANOV-YANOVSKY: Lacrymosa (with Lisa Bielawa, voice)
FRANZ SCHUBERT: String Quartet in D Minor ("Death and the Maiden")
Tickets: $28 adults, $5 students at 717.214.ARTS or www.marketsquareconcerts.org
For more information: 717.221.9599
For more information about Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.com
"Bielawa walked into the hall as a professional, but she may well have walked out a star: the piece caused that kind of excitement." – The New Yorker blog
Harrisburg, PA—Composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa's Graffiti dell'amante will receive its world premiere in a concert by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider with Ms. Bielawa as vocal soloist at 8 pm on Saturday, February 20, 2010 presented by Market Square Concerts at Market Square Church (20 S. 2nd St., Harrisburg, PA). The concert will also include pieces written by Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen, plus Philip Glass' String Quartet No. 2 ("Company"), Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky's Lacrymosa featuring Ms. Bielawa as vocal soloist, and Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor, ("Death and the Maiden").
Written in Rome, where stories of love echo across centuries of art and poetry, Graffiti dell'amante is an open-ended song cycle for string quartet and soprano, in which the segments (called "Figures") that are performed at each concert are selected by the audience members.
Ms. Bielawa explains, "Originally inspired by Roland Barthes' playful yet poignant collection of poems A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, the piece uses various declarations of romantic Love to enact what Barthes calls the "Figures" of the Lover ("Absence," "Devotion," "Ravishment," "Remembering," etc.). The poems describe a great variety of subjects and narrators: male poet writes to a female Beloved; male poet writes a love poem from a woman's point of view; female novelist (with a male pseudonym) writes dialogue for a male character in love; male poet secretly writes taboo love poetry to another man. The Lover declares him/herself to, from, and through so many faces!"
Each performance of Graffiti dell'amante can include a different subset and arrangement of the Figures, resulting in a different piece every time – which might be any length, containing any combination of possible predicaments in any order. Because the audience selects the Figures to be performed, the piece will become a portrait of that group's combined attitude toward love at that moment.
Lisa Bielawa is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and is based at the American Academy in Rome until August 2010. Ms. Bielawa has written numerous works for voice, including her piece Chance Encounter, conceived with the soprano Susan Narucki, for twelve migrating instrumentalists and singer. Chance Encounter uses overheard speech and is meant to be performed in public places. It was premiered by Ms. Narucki and The Knights in Manhattan's Seward Park, and was performed again at the Whitney Museum in February. The work has been recorded by Grammy Award-winning producer Adam Abeshouse for release on the Orange Mountain Music label.
Born in San Francisco into a musical family, Lisa Bielawa played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. She moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University, and became an active participant in New York musical life. She began touring with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992, and in 1997 co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. In addition to her work with the Philip Glass Ensemble, she tours and records with John Zorn and has premiered and recorded works by many other composer colleagues.
Ms. Bielawa frequently takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. The New York Times describes her music as, "ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart," and Time Out New York praised her "prodigious gift for mingling persuasive melodicism with organic experimentation."
Recent performances of Ms. Bielawa's work include the premiere of Double Violin Concerto, written for violinists Colin Jacobsen and Carla Kihlstedt and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP); the premiere of In medias res, a concerto for orchestra also written for BMOP; the premiere of Portrait-Elegy by pianist Bruce Levingston; and the premiere of The Project of Collecting Clouds at Town Hall in Seattle by cellist Joshua Roman and chamber ensemble. Other recent highlights include performances of unfinish'd, sent by the Yerevan Ensemble of Soloists in Armenia; of Topos Nostalgia from Chance Encounter with Ms. Bielawa as the soprano in Salzburg; of Hurry at Carnegie Hall during Dawn Upshaw's Perspectives series; the premiere of The Right Weather by the American Composers Orchestra and Van Cliburn prize-winning pianist Andrew Armstrong during Zankel Hall's inaugural season; and the premiere of The Lay of the Love and Death at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. Ms. Bielawa's music is available on the Tzadik (A Handful of World), Albany Records (First Takes), and Innova (Hildegurls: Electric Ordo Virtutuum) labels. Upcoming releases in 2010 include The Lay of the Love on Premiere Commission Recordings and an orchestral disc on BMOP/Sound.
In addition to the 2009 Rome Prize, Ms. Bielawa has received fellowships and awards from the Alpert-Ucross Foundation, Creative Capital, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation, ASCAP, and the Fondation Royaumont in France. In 2007-2008, Lisa Bielawa was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow. An enthusiastic advocate for the field, Ms. Bielawa now serves on the board of the MATA Festival. In addition, she has served on the board of the American Music Center and taught composition through the New York Youth Symphony Making Score program. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.com.
More about Brooklyn Rider: The genre-defying string quartet Brooklyn Rider employs creative programming and exciting collaborations to illuminate music in fresh ways and invite their audiences into a shared experience. Uniquely capable of addressing a wide and inclusive range of music, they are as willing to explore the world of Haydn and Debussy as they are in the music of our time. They have performed in venues as varied as Joe's Pub in NYC, the Todai-ji Temple in Nara, Japan, and the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Born out of a desire to use the rich medium of the string quartet as a vehicle for communication across a large cross section of history and geography, Brooklyn Rider is equally devoted to the interpretation of existing quartet literature and to the creation of new works. They have worked with numerous composers such as Derek Bermel, Lisa Bielawa, Ljova, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Jenny Scheinman, Dimitry Yanov-Yanovsky, and a frequent part of Brooklyn Rider's programming also involves works written or arranged by members of the group. Exploring new creative possibilities through collaborative programs is also an integral part of their work. Some recent special guests include Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Syrian/Armenian visual artist Kevork Mourad, traditional and technology-based Japanese shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki, Irish fiddle player Martin Hayes, and singer/songwriter Christina Courtin, whose widely released debut album on the Nonesuch label features several tracks with the quartet. A long-standing relationship between Brooklyn Rider and Persian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor resulted in the critically acclaimed 2008 recording, Silent City, on the World Village/Harmonia Mundi label.
Much of Brooklyn Rider's desire to extend the borders of conventional string quartet programming has been through their longstanding participation in Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. As individual members of the ensemble, they have performed throughout the world, recorded three albums for Sony Classical, and have reached audiences through a series of educational initiatives, family concerts and media broadcasts. The quartet's name is inspired in part by the cross disciplinary vision of Der Blau Reiter (The Blue Rider); a pre World War I Munich-based artistic collective comprised of Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Scriabin, to name a few. The quartet also draws inspiration from the exploding array of cultures and artistic energy found in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, a place they also call home. For more information, visit www.brooklynrider.com.
