Desire WORLD PREMIERE

MUSIC BY Hannah Lash LIBRETTO BY Hannah Lash, with Cori Ellison

Commissioned by Miller Theatre at Columbia University © 2018 Schott Helicon Music Corporation

Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. | Thursday, October 17, 8 p.m.

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OVERVIEW SYNOPSIS NOTES CREATIVE TEAM CAST OVERVIEW

Desire Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. | Thursday, October 17, 8 p.m

The performance runs approximately 65 minutes with no intermission. A flowering garden sets the scene for the world premiere of award-winning composer Hannah Lash’s newest chamber opera. Written for a cast of three singers and string quartet, Desire grapples with the human, personal struggle of trusting oneself in the midst of doubt. The score paints a lush sonic landscape, performed by the adventurous JACK Quartet, and transports audiences to this metaphoric garden of creativity.

Major support for Desire is provided by Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Additional support is provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation.

Desire SYNOPSIS

Present day. Set in a bedroom without definitive boundaries.

A man and a woman lie in bed. The man sleeps, while she lies awake. The woman quietly climbs out of bed slowly, careful not to wake the man.

The woman moves to the outer parts of the bedroom where it is dark. A warm, cavernous environment emerges. She calls out and is surprised to hear an echo. She continues to call out, the echo responds. Is it another person? She discovers curiosities around her and wonders if they may be hiding other secrets. She then discovers a figure who seems to belong to this mysterious space. She gasps at the discovery, and when she asks him who he is, his reply is “The garden. You.” They discover the garden together. She begins to understand this place she is creating. He tells her that when she has finished there will be something extraordinary: light, a song; unspeakable beauty. The figure touches her and they lock eyes. There is energy between them. A bird appears, having been born of their hands. She is overwhelmed by the flowering scent of the garden. She wants to stay in the garden and with him, but backs away, returning to the bedroom.

The man in the bedroom is still asleep. The woman wakes him. He tells her he dreamt that she left, then notices a leaf in her hair. She describes her garden and its beauty. The man cannot understand, and does not believe the garden exists. She pulls him toward the edge of the bedroom to show him. He follows, uncertain.

Returning to the garden, she is shocked to discover it is not as vivid as it was before. The mysterious figure is gone. When she reaches for a flower, it turns to ash. The bird falls to the ground at her touch. She questions herself, wondering what she did to destroy what she has created. Distraught, she insists they leave.

The man tries to comfort her, guiding her back to the bedroom, saying it was just a dream. Angry at his disbelief, she pulls away from him.

A faint light in the garden draws the woman back. The figure is there sitting on a stone. She interro- gates him, questioning what happened and why the garden as she knew it was gone. He doesn’t have an answer. They connect again, but this time is different, darker and more urgent.

The man in the bedroom is upset to see the woman is gone. He searches for the garden. He finds it and sees the woman and man together. He confronts them. A struggle begins. The man demands that they leave.

The struggle continues and the woman distances herself. She returns to the garden, now bathed in a soft light. They turn to watch her, but do not follow.

She picks up the bird and buries it. A thousand golden birds burst forth and scatter into the air. She sings with joy, with strength as the light continues to grow stronger and the garden is restored.

Desire NOTES

Creating Desire PROGRAM NOTES BY LARA PELLIGRINELLI

“I don’t consider myself a storyteller. I consider myself a maker of metaphors and an asker of questions.”

— Hannah Lash

A shadowy bedroom with cracked, distressed walls. A string quartet seated on the stage, bowing delicate figures. An unnamed woman on the verge of discovery; her companions a man, who attempts to enforce his own version of reality, and a mythical being, who helps her uncover a gateway to other worlds. Hannah Lash’s opera Desire is spare in its physical and musical conception, but emotionally expansive, revealing boundless private interiors.

“The idea of allowing an opera to be very intimate, very internal, and not necessarily about spectacle is very beautiful to me,” says Lash. “I love when something is suggested rather than made explicit.”

Desire is fueled by suggestion. The arc of the plot is barely a story, as Lash herself would say. A woman awakens in the night beside her lover. She rises to find herself in a garden, where she is surprised to see that she is not alone. With the aid of a mysterious character – we might think of him as a muse, or even her echo – she unearths natural wonders and brings the space into blossom. But when she returns to the room to tell her lover, he does not believe her. Was the experience just an illusion, a wishful fever dream? When she attempts to show him the garden, it crumbles before her eyes. She must return and restore it on her own.

Desire is brimming with attraction, and yet the magnetic forces at play are not those of a romantic triangle. Rather, the piece is a metaphor for the creative process, dispelling illusions of what it means to encounter inspiration and overcome self-doubt. The departure to the garden mirrors the way a woman might slip into her imaginative life, wrestling with the pull of the domestic sphere despite her wishes to pursue her own artistic vision. The message is ultimately one of empowerment and self-reliance.

Although Desire’s themes clearly place it in a long and distinguished lineage of feminist works descended from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, it is unusual material for opera. The genre is still dominated by male composers and perspectives; grand productions of 19th-century fare continue to loom large at prevailing institutions. Perhaps it is unsurprising then that Lash has sought her inspiration elsewhere. She describes her influences as vocal works that tend towards the dramatic, but are not explicitly theatrical.

Historically, they lie at opposite ends of opera’s evolution. On the one hand, Lash admires works from the dawn of the art form: Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea, as well as the oratorios of Giacomo Carissimi and Heinrich Schütz. In addition to their extraordinary focus, she says the music and story in these works “come together in such a way that neither feels as though it is embellishing the other one.”

On the other hand, Lash also reveres early modern opera, including Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1893), based on Maeterlinck’s symbolist play about a love triangle and evoking dream states through music; Béla Bartók’s

Desire NOTES CONT.

Bluebeard’s Castle (1918), a psychological drama about the secrets of the soul; and Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead (1930), an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s autobiographical novel about his time in a Siberian prison camp, a setting conducive to exploring remorse, empathy, and forgiveness. In all of them, the characters’ inner lives take precedence over external drama.

In terms of her contemporaries, Lash belongs to a generation of composers in their 30s and 40s refashioning an unwieldy genre into agile chamber pieces, Missy Mazzoli, David T. Little, Du Yun, and Ellen Reid central among them. Librettist Royce Vavrek, a highly sought after partner in these circles, bears mentioning as a creative force in his own right.

An upsurge in new works has been enabled by opportunities to create them, through workshops and commissioning grants, as well as a rise in small, experimental opera companies and festivals. But opera’s contemporary appeal to composers likely goes beyond a need to update the form. It may very well be driven by a more fundamental impulse to tell stories, which has manifested itself across creative arenas: we see it in the New New Journalism; the rise of memoir as a formidable genre; a second golden age of radio and its extension through podcasting; a renaissance in television dramas through their serialization on streaming services; and, perhaps, most importantly, the ways in which social media has allowed us to perform our own stories while consuming those of others. We feel compelled to tell them and share them. After all, we live in an age of ubiquitous self- documentation.

While Lash has been swept up in this wave, she has positioned herself in opposition to it. “It’s not about stories for me,” she says. “My operas don’t tend to be narratives. In that way, I feel that I’m a bit of a rebel in my generation— that I don’t fit in. I’m constantly trying to stand firm in a current that’s rushing in a direction I’m not compelled to go in.”

If Desire can be considered an anti-narrative, its characters are vessels for larger themes and ideas as in Debussy’s symbolist work that Lash so admires. In that sense, Desire may also belong to countercurrents in recent literature through “autofiction,” first-person narratives by authors such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner that appear to be fiction, but are really autobiographical, blurring the lines between author and character. Writer Rachel Cusk, of the critically acclaimed Outline trilogy, goes so far as to assert that character no longer exists. Viewing human experience laterally, she insists that what we perceive as subtleties of self are never truly individualistic, but traits we share. Once we dispel the myth of our own uniqueness – and our flaws that provide the roots of conflict – traditional conceptions of dramatic form collapse.

Desire does not invoke the personal in its own nevertheless subjective construction. And Lash, who says the work is based on her own life, has declined to speak in specifics about its autobiographical aspects. She argues that Desire is more meaningful in abstraction, which lends the piece greater universality.

For example, the man, a baritone, the most common male voice type, is prototypical for his gender. He speaks in an everyday kind of language, and his vocal lines, which are deliberate and limited in range, follow suit. He embodies the expectations faced by our female protagonist through his insistent practicality. In contrast, the muse, a countertenor, an unusual, otherworldly voice type that upsets gender binaries, soars above her, his clarion pitches

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referencing ancient musical modalities. He speaks in more poetic language, representing the freedom to let your imagination run wild. The woman is any of us who longs to flex her creative muscles while the world presses in.

Lash’s interest in this subject matter began long before her commission from Miller Theatre. A garden and its destruction were the central metaphor of her earlier opera Blood Rose (2010), which also featured the performers for whom she has written Desire: contralto Kirsten Sollek and the JACK Quartet. It premiered at the Park Avenue Christian Church, and was also performed at VOX, New York City Opera’s former contemporary opera lab, but Lash has since withdrawn the score from publication. A product of her late 20s, Blood Rose reflected a compositional process that was still evolving. “It was a piece that I absolutely felt had to be written,” she says. “It gushed out of me. And I wasn’t done with this idea.”

Since then Lash has composed three further operas: Violations (2012), Stoned Prince (2013), and Beowulf (2015). When Miller Theatre presented her Composer Portrait in spring of 2016, Lash raised the possibility of creating a new operatic work with executive director Melissa Smey, who had long admired her music. Desire would become the second commission in Miller Theatre’s new Chamber Opera Commissioning Initiative, following Missy Mazzoli’s Proving Up (2018).

“Through Hannah’s dedication to operatic form, she is not only contributing to the revival of contemporary American opera, but to its reinvention for audiences today,” says Smey, “The way she has created engaging vocal works in a theatrical context is unique in today’s new music scene. I’m proud to have the opportunity to support her in this way.”

Although many composers benefit from the creative tension with a librettist, this was Lash’s story, and she felt strongly about writing the text herself. The words are hers and hers alone. Veteran dramaturg Cori Ellison served as a second set of eyes and ears, helping Lash shape her vision in the clearest and most authentic way possible, much like a producer would. “The whole idea of an opera,” says Ellison, “is that you have a story that wants to sing. You want to ensure that there are moments for lyrical expansion. There’s so much color in this story that I encouraged Hannah to take passages and expand them, to sit with an emotion and dig deeper into that feeling.”

Although Desire centers on the woman performed by Kirsten Sollek, who gives its themes a recognizable face, the piece serves equally as a vehicle for JACK. “I wanted to give them as much of the dramatic arc as the singers,” says Lash.

Her relationship with the quartet has been long and fruitful. She and the original members belonged to the same undergraduate cohort at the Eastman School of Music. Composition students were required to wrangle their own performers, and a group of string players emerged, who were consistently interested in playing new music. They performed Lash’s work from the get-go. Earlier this year JACK released Filigree: Music of Hannah Lash (New Focus Recordings); the title composition, Filigree in Textile, was part of Lash’s Composer Portrait, in which she joins the string quartet on harp.

It is no wonder then that she would entrust Desire’s musical heartbeat to JACK, empowering the quartet to offer insight into what the characters are feeling rather than what is merely said or seen on the stage. “It’s a challenging

Desire NOTES CONT.

piece,” says JACK’s violist and executive director, John Pickford Richards, “because we do not stop playing, even when the singers have a break. Our music is a current that is always bubbling underneath.” Lash’s string writing sings, stretching and breaking from tonal language. Dissonances do not resolve, but rather lean on each other purposefully, causing us to question our own sense of a musical center. We enter the garden each time with a fresh shower of pizzicato, tones raining down like petals.

Another challenge of an opera that explores longing and self-doubt is rendering those emotions visible on the stage: the task of director Rachel Dickstein and a creative team that includes set designer Kristen Robinson, lighting designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, and costume designer Kate Fry.

“We started with the idea that this is not a literal space,” says Dickstein. “When we first see the woman and her partner in the bedroom, it’s only a slice of a room. It is more of a psychological space, quite small and contained. Her ‘leaving’ to go to the garden is really just a transformation of the space into what her own thoughts allow her to dream about. We created a visual vocabulary for what her world of creativity would look like using light.” Awakening, the woman discovers one space inside of the other. Rolling away rocks, she uncovers the tendrils of plants, vines that reach for the branches of weeping cherries, and redbuds. Luminous flowers bud and blossom. Golden sunlight dances on the water rippling with the fins of fish. Feathers break from her fingertips, releasing birds in flight. She gives the garden life with her hands, her song bursting forth: “Shards of light broken into the pulse of a thousand living things, fleeting fragrance born of rapture, a thousand leaves unfurl.” If only her liberation could be made permanent and unconditional.

“This is not an untroubled prospect,” Lash warns us. “It cannot be tied up in a bow. In the final scene, as the woman builds a wall around her garden so that neither of the men can get in, we realize that they’re watching her and will not be built out permanently. So the premise of the opera in some sense is tragic. It is a mission that will fail, and yet it is a mission that also needs to be addressed over and over again.”

Lara Pellegrinelli is a scholar and a journalist, who contributes to NPR and The New York Times. She teaches at The New School and Bard’s Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library.

​Copyright © 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, without the prior written permission of the author.

Desire CREATIVE TEAM Daniela Candillari MUSIC DIRECTOR Hannah Lash COMPOSER & LIBRETTIST Kristen Robinson SCENIC DIRECTOR Cori Ellison DRAMATURG Kate Fry COSTUME DESIGNER Rachel Dickstein DIRECTOR Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew LIGHTING DESIGNER

HANNAH LASH, composer & librettist | Hailed by The New York Times as “striking and resourceful…handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed worldwide with commissions from The Fromm Foundation, The Naumburg Foundation, The Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Orchestra of the Swan, Talujon Percussion, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, among many others. Lash has received numerous honors and prizes, including a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize, the Barnard Rogers Prize, and Photo by Kyle Dorosz for Miller Theatre Dorosz Photo by Kyle the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize in Composition. Recent world premieres include Music for Nine, Ringing for harps, keyboards, and percussion, performed at the Music Academy of the West (2018), and Concerto No. 1 “In Pursuit of Flying” for piano and orchestra, performed by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (2018). Other world premieres include Beowolf, a chamber opera in two acts commissioned by Guerilla Opera (2016), Music for Eight Lungs, commissioned by Miller Theatre at Columbia University for Loadbang (2016), Chaconnes, for string orchestra, commissioned by Interlochen Center for the Arts (2016), and Give Me Your Songs, for solo piano, commissioned and performed by Nadia Shpachenko (2016). Lash obtained her Ph.D. in composition from Harvard University in 2010 and currently serves on the composition faculty at Yale University School of Music.

CORI ELLISON, dramaturg | A leading creative figure in the opera world, Cori Ellison is staff dramaturg at Santa Fe Opera, and has previously served in that role at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and New York City Opera. She also teaches dramaturgy for American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program and was the first dramaturg invited to participate in the Yale Institute for Music Theatre. Ellison has been a sought-after developmental dramaturg to numerous composers, librettists, and commissioners, including Glyndebourne, Canadian Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Arizona Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, and Beth Morrison Projects. She has served as production dramaturg for projects including L’incoronazione di Poppea, Cincinnati Opera; Orphic Moments, Salzburg Landestheater, National Sawdust, and Master Voices; Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo, National Sawdust; Ring cycle, Washington National Opera; The Nose, Opera Boston; and Offenbach!!!, Bard Summerscape. Her English- singing translations include Hansel and Gretel, New York City Opera; La vestale, English National Opera; and Shostakovich’s Cherry Tree Towers, Bard Summerscape. She creates supertitles for opera companies across the English-speaking world, and helped launch Met Titles, the Met’s simultaneous translation system. Ellison is a member of the Vocal Arts Faculty at The Juilliard School and Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute.

Desire CREATIVE TEAM CONT.

RACHEL DICKSTEIN, director | An award-winning director, writer, and producer of movement-based theatre, Rachel Dickstein serves as artistic director of Ripe Time, a theatre company devoted to ensemble-based adaptations from literature. Her work includes the critically acclaimed Sleep, based on the book by Haruki Murakami and created with Naomi Iizuka (BAM’s Next Wave Festival); Yale Rep’s NO BOUNDARIES, (Annenberg Center/University of Pennsylvania and the 2019 Prague Quadrennial);The World is Round, based on the book by Gertrude Stein and created with Heather Christian (BAM, Obie Award, Special Citation, finalist for 2014 Richard Rodgers Award);Septimus and Clarissa, adapted by Photo by Todd France Photo by Todd Ellen McLaughlin from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (Joe A. Calloway, Drama Desk, and Drama League Award nominations); and In What Language? by Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd (Asia Society, PICA, REDCAT.) Dickstein made her LA Opera directing debut in 2017 with Thumbprint by Kamala Sankaram (previously staged with PROTOTYPE). Upcoming work includes Obasute by Garrett Fisher and Ellen McLaughlin at PROTOTYPE 2020. She has received commissions from BAM, Center Theatre Group, NYSCA, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, P.S. 122, and the NEA/TCG Director’s Fellowship. Dickstein trained with Dell’Arte International, Complicité, Anne Bogart, Tina Landau, Ping Chong, and Martha Clark. She is currently Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at Purchase College, State University of New York.

DANIELA CANDILLARI, music director | A native of Slovenia, Daniela Candillari’s engagements in 2018-19 include her Lyric Opera of Chicago debut, leading Fellow Travelers followed by An American Dream. Additional debuts include the Minnesota Opera leading Fellow Travelers, NOVUS NY’s festival celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, PROTOTYPE conducting Acquanetta, Boston conducting the world premiere of PermaDeath, Asia conducting Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Angel’s Bone in Hong Kong, and Opera Philadelphia conducting Rene Orth’s Empty the House. In summer of 2019 she led the West Coast premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain in a Photo by Damjan Švarc Photo by Damjan new production by director James Darrah at Music Academy of the West. Future engagements include her debuts with Arizona Opera and Cincinnati Opera. A former Fulbright Scholar and a TED Fellow, Candillari holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Universität für Musik in Vienna, an M.M. in Jazz Studies from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and a M.M. and B.A. in Piano Performance from Universität für Musik in Graz.

Desire CREATIVE TEAM CONT.

KRISTEN ROBINSON, scenic designer | Kristen Robinson is a set designer whose recent credits include Così fan tutte, Juilliard Opera (2019); Cyrano, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and Two River Theater (2019); In the Green, a new musical by Grace McLean, Lee Sunday Evans, LCT3 (2019); and Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man, Wilma Theatre (2019). She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Princess Grace Foundation-USA Works-in-Progress Residency with Baryshnikov Arts Center, Heart of Darkness (2016); the Barrymore Award for Outstanding Set Design, Rapture Blister Burn (2015); Princess Grace Award, Pierre Cardin Theater Honor (2013); among others. She received a B.A. in Dramatic Arts and Studio Art from Centre College and an M.F.A. in set design from Yale School of Drama. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Scenic Design, Purchase College.

KATE FRY, costume designer | Kate Fry designs costumes for opera, theater, film, and dance. Recently, Fry’s designs have shown with LA Opera, LA Philharmonic (composer Jacob Cooper), at HERE Arts Center (The Idiot by Robert Lyons and Kristin Marting), and the Spoleto Festival USA (The Little Match Girl, a collaboration with puppeteer Mark Down and director Phelim McDermott). Beyond the stage, Fry’s work ranges from fine art—teaming up with French artist Julien Previeux’s project What Shall We Do Next (winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp)—to film and television, most recently designing costumes for a 1960s-era television pilot, The Picture (directed by David Winkler). Fry’s work has been shown at The Public Theater, NY City Center, Grand Palais Paris, 3LD, La Mama, REDCAT, Prototype Opera Festival, The Bootleg Theater, Honor Fraser gallery, Prague Quadrennial, and the Tribeca Film Festival. She received her M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts.

JEANETTE OI-SUK YEW, lighting designer | Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew is a designer for theater, opera, dance, music performances, and installation. Her designs have been seen in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BAM, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Baryshnikov Arts Center, HERE Arts Center, St. Ann’s Warehouse, La Mama, The Kitchen, Manhattan School of Music, Joyce SOHO, and at ArtsEmerson (Boston), Bard Music Festival, REDCAT (Los Angeles), Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica, CA), and internationally in Havana, Prague, Lima, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Graz (Austria), and Bloemfontein (South Africa). Some of her recent designs and collaborations include Mysterium Novum, The Nouveau Classical Project; The Idiot with Kristin Marting and Robert Lyons; Tan Dun’s Water Passion; Sam Falls’ September Spring; Aya Ogawa’s Ludic Proxy; Caborca’s Zoetrope (Encuentro 2014); Scarlet Ibis and Thumbprint (West coast premiere 2017) with PROTOTYPE; Company XIV’s Rococo Rogue and Nutcracker Rouge (both received various Drama Desk nominations), among others. Yew is a recipient of the Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Award for Ludic Proxy, the NEA/TCG Career Development Program, and the Gilbert Hemsley Jr. Internship for lighting. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and advises at Barnard College.

Desire CAST

Kirsten Sollek WOMAN Daniel Moody MAN 1 Christopher Dylan Herbert MAN 2

JACK Quartet

KIRSTEN SOLLEK, Woman | Contralto Kirsten Sollek has been called “a true contralto” (The New York Times) with an “elemental tone quality” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Appearances include Bach’s Magnificat,Musica Angelica Baroque; Mary Cleophas in Handel’s Resurrezione, Helicon; Mahler’s Third Symphony, MSU Symphony Orchestra; Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater, Sacred Music in a Sacred Space; Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody, String Orchestra of Brooklyn, The Death Knight in Amy Beth Kirsten’s Quixote; The Dying Cow in Lisa Bielawa’s serial TV opera, Vireo; and Handel’s Messiah, Bach Collegium Japan, Kansas City Symphony, and Minnesota Orchestra. Very active in contemporary music, Sollek has worked extensively with John Zorn, premiering his music in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Israel. She is a regular collaborator with Alarm Will Sound and Ensemble Signal, performing and recording the works of Steve Reich with both groups. Recent engagements include Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass, York Symphony; music by John Zorn, National Sawdust; Art Institute of Chicago; the Frick Collection; the Guggenheim; JazzFest in Sarajevo; and Claude Vivier’s Kopernikus, Planetario Galileo Galilei (Buenos Aires).

DANIEL MOODY, Man 1 | Praised for his “vivid and powerful” voice (The Boston Musical Intelligencer), countertenor Daniel Moody has garnered widespread acclaim for his commanding yet expressive vocal timbre and his breathtaking musicianship. Opera appearances include the title roles in Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo, Arsamene in Xerxes, Lichas in Hercules, Didymus in Theodora, Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, L’Enfant in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges and most recently, Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with Cincinnati Opera. A graduate of the prestigious Yale Voxtet, he has performed as a soloist and with acclaimed orchestras across the country and Photo by Jessica Osber. Photo by Jessica abroad. Moody is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory (B.M.), Yale School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music (M.M.) and has won several awards including the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, George London Award, George London Encouragement Award, Handel Aria Competition, Rochester Oratorio Society Classical Idol, and the Russell C. Wonderlic Memorial Competition.

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CHRISTOPHER DYLAN HERBERT, Man 2 | American baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert performs concerts and opera throughout the world, frequently with his twice GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble, New York Polyphony. Recent engagements in concert and opera include Vivier’s Koperninus (Buenos Aires); Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, Tanglewood; the Cartagena International Music Festival (Colombia); John Cage’s Renga, San Francisco Symphony; the title role in Handel’s Saul, Trinity Wall Street’s Twelfth Night Festival; Schubert’s Lieder, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; a Ginastera centennial celebration with International Contemporary Ensemble; the world premiere of Photo by Laura Rose Photo by Laura Judd Greenstein’s A Marvelous Order, NOW Ensemble; the title role in Pelléas et Mélisande, Floating Opera New York; Montresor in Stewart Copeland’s The Cask of Amontillado, American Modern Ensemble; and collaborations with Mario Brunello, Jeremy Denk, Stefan Jackiw, and Gilbert Kalish, among others. Herbert graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University with a B.A. in Music. He also holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and a D.M.A. in Voice from The Juilliard School. He is an Assistant Professor at William Paterson University.

JACK QUARTET | Hailed by The New York Times as the “nation’s most important quartet,” the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected groups performing today. JACK has maintained an unwavering commitment to their mission of performing and commissioning new works, giving voice to underheard composers, and cultivating an ever-greater sense of openness toward contemporary classical music. In 2018, they were selected as Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year,” named to Photo by Matt Zugale for Miller Theatre Zugale Photo by Matt WQXR’s “19 for 19 Artists to Watch,” and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Additional awards include Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA’s Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, JACK has performed to critical acclaim at at leading venues and festivals around the world.

Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK is focused on new work, collaborating with composers John Luther Adams, Chaya Czernowin, Simon Steen-Andersen, Caroline Shaw, Helmut Lachenmann, Steve Reich, Matthias Pintscher, and John Zorn. JACK recently announced their new Fulcrum Project, an all-access initiative to commission six artists each year, who will receive money, workshop time, mentorship, and resources to develop new work to be performed and recorded by the quartet.

Operating as a nonprofit organization with a commitment to education, JACK is the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music, which will host JACK’s new Frontiers Festival, a multi-faceted festival of contemporary music for string quartet in fall 2019. JACK also has a long-standing relationship with University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring. They also teach at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont for young performers and composers, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, numerous universities including Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Princeton, and Stanford, as well as the Lucerne Festival Academy, of which the four members are all alumni.

Desire