Silkroad Ensemble Heroes Take Their Stands
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Friday, May 3, 2019, 8pm Zellerbach Hall Silkroad Ensemble Heroes Take Their Stands e Silkroad Ensemble Jeffrey Beecher, bass Nicholas Cords, viola Sandeep Das, tabla Haruka Fujii, percussion Johnny Gandelsman, violin Colin Jacobsen, violin Kayhan Kalhor, kemancheh Karen Ouzounian, cello Aparna Ramaswamy, Bharatanatyam dancer Shane Shanahan, percussion Kojiro Umezaki, shakuhachi Kaoru Watanabe, shinobue, nohkan flutes, taiko, narimono Wu Man, pipa Wu Tong, sheng, suona Ahmad Sadri, creator Colin Jacobsen and Kayhan Kalhor, music directors Cal Performances’ 2018 –19 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. 18 Heroes Take Their Stands “To live successfully in a cosmopolitan society, we must develop skills to see another’s culture as our own.” — Ahmad Sadri, creator, folklorist Elektra e Oresteia , 5th century BCE Pauchi Sasaki, composer Nomi Sasaki, co-direction, script, art design, and Chinese black ink animation Juan Carlos Yanaura, co-direction, animation, and post production Omar Lavalle, 3D scanning and sculpture design June Snow e stand of Dou E, 13th century Kaoru Watanabe, composer and co-conception Wu Man, creative director and co-conception Arjuna’s Revelation e Bhagavad Gita , 2nd century BCE Colin Jacobsen, composer Aparna Ramaswamy, choreographer Moderato 400 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Holt Street Baptist Church, 1955 Jason Moran, composer Lucy Raven, video e Prince of Sorrows e stand of Siavosh from e Shahnameh , 10th century Kayhan Kalhor, composer Hamid Rahmanian, designer and director Qmars Kamali, animation Syd Fini, illustrator Mohsen Ebadi, calligraphy A production of Fictionville Studio Recorded music by Navid Afghah, tombak Siamak Jahangiri, nay Amir Mardaneh, vocals Additional music and arrangements by Ljova Tonight’s performance will last approximately 90 minutes. ere will be no intermission. 1 PROGRAM NOTES About Silkroad needed music, stories, lore, and faith to con - Yo-Yo Ma conceived Silkroad in 1998 as a template how one goes about taking a stand for reminder that even as rapid globalization re - what is just and right. ere is a timelessness sulted in division, it brought extraordinary and universality to answers to humanity’s great - possibilities for working together. Seeking to est questions; no matter how far in the past or understand this dynamic, he began to learn across the globe they may have occurred, there about the historical Silk Road, recognizing in is always more to learn from moral and ethical it a model for productive cultural collaboration, dilemmas such as these. for the exchange of ideas and tradition along - At its essence, Heroes Take eir Stands is side commerce and innovation. And in a radi - about the experience of being fearlessly human: cal experiment, he brought together musicians having independent opinions, making ethical from the lands of the Silk Road to co-create a decisions, and showing courage and integrity new artistic idiom, a musical language founded when one’s loyalty to an immemorial institution in difference, a metaphor for the benefits of a is challenged. Tonight’s performance is made up more connected world. of a suite of five figures across time and around Today, these Grammy Award-winning artists the world derived from mythology, folklore, seek and practice radical cultural collaboration history, religion, drama, epic, and oratory. We in many forms, creating and presenting new have interpreted these five singular moments of music, teacher and musician training work - heroic insight and response in a performance shops, and residency programs in schools, for the present day. Each musical composition museums, and communities. has a different form of artistic counterpoint Silkroad has recorded seven albums. Sing Me to amplify the experience we want you, our Home , which won the 2016 Grammy for Best audience, to share. As Silkroad has distilled World Music Album, was developed and re - the spirit of these five heroic stands into this corded alongside the documentary feature performance, we invite you to immerse your - e Music of Strangers , from Oscar-winning selves in these timeless stories and continue the director Morgan Neville. conversation about their meaning and rele - Silkroad gratefully acknowledges the support vance for today’s world. of individuals, foundations, and corporations, —Jeffrey Beecher, Nicholas Cords, including the National Endowment for the & Shane Shanahan, Arts, the Barr Foundation, and Hyosung Corp - Co-Artistic Directors, Silkroad oration. To learn more about Silkroad, please visit A Note from Ahmad Sadri silkroad.org on the web and @silkroadproject Human societies have used folklore and tradi - on social media. tion as means of sharing, reinforcing, and per - petuating values, and conveying deeply held An Invitation moral and ethical norms. e protagonists As individuals, our layered web of duties—to we encounter in the suite of five performances the self, to family, to communities, to society, to that comprise Heroes Take eir Stands were the planet—presents conundrums throughout not born heroes. None of them are superior to our lives. Occasionally, some among us are humankind, nor are they deities or superheroes. forced to make decisions that are world- ey are normal individuals who choose to changing, ones not easily made and rarely act or react in ways that spare others’ lives or obvious. Such decisions require careful con - right profound injustices—and their acts offer sideration and fortitude, for they are oen enduring inspiration for us all. e decisions perilous and come at great cost to the self or they make at these crucial moments in their others. Because of the potential for sacrifice at lives—to do the right thing, to do the just thing, such moments, people throughout history have regardless of the personal consequences— PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES is what makes them heroes. eir examples consumed with the idea of murdering her own demonstrate that each of us is born with a mother because of profound loyalty to her capacity for heroism—and that it is up to each unjustly murdered father: the injustice of his of us to choose to act, to take our stand. death at the hand of her mother’s new lover I have always felt that the sublime essence and fuels Elektra’s quest for justice even when she grandeur of the heroic gesture cannot be truly suspects her own brother—prophesied to captured in words alone. is was my inspira - com plete the deed—is dead. Sophocles has us tion for bringing these stories to Silkroad. pay intimate attention to Elektra’s attempts —Ahmad Sadri to process, understand, and explain her own Creator, Heroes Take eir Stands emotions and convictions to herself as well as April 2019 to the others she strives to convince of her plan’s fairness: her battle is not one fought with horses Heroes Take eir Stands and artillery, but inside herself. In the end, she Each of the five pieces in Heroes Take eir achieves the justice she has long sought, though Stands was developed as part of a “conversation”: the outcome is both blood-soaked and bitter - between director and composer; composer and sweet. Composer Pauchi Sasaki and visual artistic collaborator; musicians and audience; artists Nomi Sasaki and Juan Carlos Yanaura time and place; an historic past and today’s bring us into Elektra’s subjectivity and interior society; physical text and contemporary media; conflict—one deeply resonant with today’s the present setting and the wider world outside struggles with social media, truthfulness, and of it; and between you as an individual and your independent thought—using a combination of life experiences to come. suona , tabla , uchiwa daiko , and augmented ough they share a common theme— reality, among other elements. as well as occasional impressions and motifs— each piece in Heroes Take eir Stands was June Snow crea ted separately, and is capable of standing Written in the Yuan dynasty by Guan Hanqing, alone as a human interpretation and response and also known as “e Injustice to Dou E” and (in a long line of interpretations and responses) “Snow in Midsummer,” this classic subject to a timeless question: How would you act, of Chinese opera is the tale of a widowed in your individual circumstances, in such a child-bride and her mother-in-law. Aer being situation? bullied by a physician seeking to take advantage As each composition has been fully liberated of their social vulnerability, the two women are from its original, written text, none of the five “saved” by a hooligan named Zhang—who then pieces is meant to be a “definitive” retelling of moves into their home uninvited and tries to the story or even of the events to which they force Dou E to marry him. When she refuses, per tain. Rather, Heroes Take eir Stands is a Zhang attempts to murder Dou E’s mother-in- means for bringing this enduring theme alive law—but inadvertently kills his own father, and in the current day: of connecting performers then frames the older woman. Dou E faces a and audiences to epochs and cultures that may choice and stands by her mother-in-law and her lie outside their own, yet timelessly share the bond with her dead husband’s family. Before their same philosophical, moral, and emotional execution, she announces that snow will come in engagement with the vicissitudes of the hu - the midst of summer to mark the injustice and man condition. prove their innocence. Drawing on inspiration from Beijing opera and kabuki theater, com po - Elektra ser Kaoru Watanabe and creative director Wu Among the best-known of the Greek tragedies, Man co-conceived this piece that balances an the story of Elektra is in fact told in many ancient and modern interpretation of Duo E’s different ways. In Sophocles’ version, she is epic through music and calligraphic imagery. 1 PROGRAM NOTES Arjuna’s Revelation his righteous duty; and, because one must e Bhagavad Gita is a part of the Hindu epic heroically confront death in order to transcend Mahabharata —the story of the ri between two the limits of worldly existence.