Becky Oehlers Photography

THE CROSSING A TRAVEL GUIDE TO NICARAGUA

WORLD PREMIERE // ANNENBERG CENTER RESIDENT ENSEMBLE

Conductor Donald Nally Cello

A Travel Guide to Nicaragua is a world premiere from Michael Gordon based on texts by the composer, Mark Twain and Rubén Darío.

There will not be an intermission.

Sunday, March 22 @ 7 PM

Zellerbach Theatre

Media support for this performance provided by WRTI.

40 ANNENBERG CENTER PRESENTS PROGRAM NOTES

Michael Gordon’s first eight years were lived at a great distance – geographically and experientially – from his life today in New York when his Eastern European parents made their home in the jungle on the outskirts of Managua, Nicaragua. A Travel Guide to Nicaragua is his hazy memory of this strange and good life of exotic tarantulas and parrot bites. Yet, Gordon’s third substantial work for The Crossing reaches beyond his childhood, pondering the world of Mayans and Aztecs, and drawing on words of poet Rubén Darío and those of Mark Twain, following his remarkable trip to this small, beautiful country.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

The Crossing The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir and listening to music for choir. Many of its nearly ninety commissioned premieres address social, environmental and political issues.

The Crossing collaborates with some of the world’s most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Annenberg Center, Beth Morrison Projects, Allora & Calzadilla, , and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of world’s most prestigious venues and presenters, such as the Park Avenue Armory, Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, National Sawdust, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Haarlem Choral Biennale in The Netherlands, The Kennedy Center in Washington, Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space in New York, Winter Garden with WNYC, and Duke, Northwestern, Colgate and Notre Dame Universities. The Crossing holds an annual residency at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana where they are working on an extensive, multi-year project with composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker .

With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 19 releases, receiving two Grammy® Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and three Grammy® nominations in as many years. The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forum’s 2017 Champion of New Music. They were the recipients of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, and the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America.

Donald Nally (Director) Nally conducts The Crossing, the internationally acclaimed, Grammy® Award-winning professional choir that commissions, premieres and records only new music. He holds the John W. Beattie Chair of Music at where he is professor and director of choral organizations. Nally has served as chorus master at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and for many seasons, at the Festival in . Nally has commissioned over 100 works and, with The Crossing, has produced 17 recordings, winning two Grammy® Awards. He was the American Composers Forum 2017 Champion of New Music and received the 2017 Michael Korn Founders Award from Chorus America. His ensembles have twice received the Margaret Hillis Award for Excellence in Choral Music. Nally has worked closely with the artists Allora & Calzadilla and composer on projects in London, Osaka, Cleveland, Edmonton and Philadelphia. In the 2018-19 season, he was a visiting resident artist at the Park Avenue Armory, music director for the world premiere of Lang’s The Mile-Long Opera, directing 1,000 voices on the High Line in Manhattan, as well as chorus master for the New York Philharmonic for world premieres by Lang and .

19/20 SEASON 41 Michael Gordon (Composer) Over the past 30 years, Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles and major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio and kaleidoscopic works for groups of identical instruments. Transcending categorization, his music represents the collision of mysterious introspection and brutal directness.

This season, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players with Roomful of Teeth and Splinter Reeds premiere the concert-length In a Strange Land; the Strings of Autumn festival in Prague features Gordon as composer-in-residence and perform Timber plus all of Gordon’s string quartets; the percussion/piano/bass trio Bearthoven premieres a new work, and The Crossing with cellist Maya Beiser premieres Gordon’s autobiographical A Travel Guide to Nicaragua, about his childhood growing up in Central America.

Gordon’s recent works include a new chamber version of his opera Acquanetta, commissioned/premiered by Beth Morrison’s PROTOTYPE Festival in NYC; 8 commissioned by the Amsterdam Cello Octet, the latest addition to Gordon’s concert-length music for multiples; Big Space, commissioned and presented by the BBC Proms; a concert-length work for choir, Anonymous Man, commissioned/premiered by The Crossing; and three new works for orchestra – Natural History, written for the 100th Anniversary of the United States’ National Parks and premiered at Crater Lake in Oregon; Observations on Air, a concerto for bassoon for soloist Peter Whelan, commissioned by The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; and The Unchanging Sea, a piano concerto for Tomoko Mukaiyama with a new film by Bill Morrison commissioned/premiered by the Seattle Symphony and the Rotterdam Symphony. Gordon and Morrison’s other collaborations include the Decasia, Dystopia, Gotham and El Sol Caliente.

Gordon’s discography includes The Unchanging Sea, Clouded Yellow, Sonatra, Natural History, Timber Remixed, Dystopia, Rushes, Timber, Weather, Light is Calling, Decasia, (purgatorio) POPOPERA, Van Gogh, Trance, and Big Noise from Nicaragua. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His music is published by Red Poppy Music (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Maya Beiser (Cello) Avant-garde cellist and multifaceted artist Maya Beiser defies categories. Hailed for her “stirring emotional power” by The New York Times, she has been called a “cello rock star” by Rolling Stone and praised as “a force of nature” by The Boston Globe. Raised on a kibbutz in the Galilee Mountains in Israel by her Argentinean father and French mother, Beiser was discovered at the age of 12 by the late violinist . Eschewing the traditional trajectory of a classical musician, she passionately forges her artistic path through uncharted territories, bringing a bold and unorthodox presence to contemporary classical music.

Beiser is a featured performer on the world’s most prestigious stages including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Kennedy Center, BBC Proms, London’s Southbank Centre, Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican, Sydney Opera House, Barcelona’s L’auditori, Paris’ Théâtre de la Ville, Stockholm Concert Hall, and in major venues and festivals across five continents. Among the wide range of artists she has collaborated with are , , Erin Cressida- Wilson, , Shirin Neshat, , Lucinda Childs, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Mark Anthony Turnage, David Lang, Bill Morrison and Wendy Whelan.

Beiser’s vast discography includes 12 solo albums. Her recent albums, TranceClassical and Uncovered, reached number one on the classical music charts. Her latest album delugEON, deconstructs the classical canon, embedding her multitrack cello arrangements within environmental sounds of a melting planet. She is the featured soloist on many film soundtracks, including an extensive collaboration with and Carter Burwell. Beiser is a United States Artists (USA) Distinguished Fellow in Music and a 2017 Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT. Her 2011 TED Talk has been watched by over one million people. Beiser is a graduate of . mayabeiser.com

42 ANNENBERG CENTER PRESENTS