Category: Events and Performances

This Sunday night, September 30, 2012, The Box Is Empty can be heard on Kinetics Radio.  KR will be broadcasting TBIE’s June 29 performance of Nat Evans’s Hear No Noise, with Maria Mannisto Soprano and yours truly conducting.  Word on the street is we will be in the first hour of the program, so tune in between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. pacific.  Check out video of the performance here.  You can read a review of Nat’s piece and our performance here.

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The Box Is Empty is pleased to bring you a third concert of premiers and new works. “Live at the Century Ballroom” will include works by Bang on a Can founder Michael Gordon, the Dutch multi-media composer-director Michel Van Der Aa, and American up-and-comers Scott Gendel, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Seattle’s own Nat Evans.

This concert experience will be a different one. Century Ballroom will be serving drinks (so don’t forget your ID!), and we are going to give the music a little bit of breathing room. There will be time between works to chat, meet the musicians, grab a drink, and relax. So, come for a night with friends, and come to hear a night of wonderful new music!

Program:

Gordon – Four Kings Fight Five

Evans – Hear No Noise *World Premier*

Kirsten – L’ange pâle *West Coast Premier*

Van der Aa – Here (In Circles) *US Premiere*

Gendel – For Lotte, Asleep *World Premier*

Personnel:

Andrew Agnell, percussion : Ivan Arteaga, clarinet : Abbey Blackwell, basses : Jared Borkowski, guitar : Jeremiah Cawley, conductor : Alisyn Christensen, oboe: Alex Ho, cello : Elizabeth Jolly, flute : Maria Mannisto, voice : Brian Pfeifer, percussion : Erik Reed, trumpet : Mara Sedlins, violin/viola : Evan Smith, clarinets : Adrian Swan, sound : Alina To, violin : Olivia Thomas, viola : Melissa Thorne, keys

Join Vespertine Opera Theater in its daring and intimate production of Francis Poulenc’s gripping psychodrama, La Voix Humaine, performed in English.

In this one-act, one-woman show, a young lady has a telephone conversation with her ex-lover, over the course of which she becomes increasingly destitute, spiraling eventually into a deep psychosis. Accompanied by Francis Poulenc’s at once lavish and brutal music, famed poet, filmmaker, and artist Jean Cocteau’s story comes to vivid life. Experience this rarely performed opera in a fiercely intimate and personal setting in the Downstage at the Stone Soup Theater located in Wallingford, with only two performances! Friday, May 25th at 8:00pm, and Sunday, May 27th at 4:00pm. Tickets are $15, $10 for seniors and students.

Starring Tess Altiveros-Ritter as Elle. Directed by Dan Miller, Designed by Victor Steeb, Music Direction by Jeremiah Cawley, accompanied by Minjie Bao. Lighting design by Marnie Cumings and Evan Anderson, Stage Managed by Laura Judson.

L’Asie d’aprés Tiepolo by Hugues Dufourt

Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman

For its season finale, Seattle Modern Orchestra will present two pieces where the ideas and emotions unique to the visual arts are transformed into music. Themed Music on Paintings, this concert features two works of contemporary music for ensemble inspired by strikingly divergent paintings. To start the program, French composer Hugues Dufourt’s L’Asie d’aprés Tiepolo (2009) reflects on Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Allegory of the Planets and Continents (1752), while the second half features the celebrated Rothko Chapel (1971) by American composer Morton Feldman.

On May 5th composer Nat Evans will present a program of recent West Coast music by Evans, Christopher Roberts, and Jim Fox that explores the aesthetics of nature and place.

Composer-performer Christopher Roberts will play Last Cicada Singing, his serene, entrancing suite of four pieces for solo qin, the zither-like traditional Chinese poet-scholar’s instrument, which he mastered while living in Taiwan. Recently released on the Cold Blue label, Last Cicada Singing is very unusual music—often mimicking nature’s sounds, as is the tradition with qin music, yet seeming at times Feldmanesque, at times almost delta-blues-like, too.

Nat Evans will present Still Life with Transmigration, a new work that delves into the very essence of place and sound by coupling field recordings, conch shells, and other natural objects with the sounds of three live trombones.

Penned in the winter of 2011–12, Jim Fox’s The pleasure of being lost is a suite of five short piano pieces/meditations designed to be performed with or without a “tape” backdrop. This performance, its premiere in solo form, and will be played by new-music-champion pianist Cristina Valdes.

Stuck Elevator is a comic-rap-scrap-metal-operatic musical prompted by the real-life experience of a deliveryman who gets trapped in an elevator after delivering a routine order of shrimp fried rice.

Working at Happy Dragon Restaurant in the Bronx, our hero pays a $60,000 debt to smugglers for his passage from China to the United States; from a country touted as the next global economic superpower to a country founded on the ideals of democracy and freedom. After 81 hours, he emerges transformed.

Follow the saga of this undocumented Chinese immigrant/indentured slave in 21st century America.

CREATIVE TEAM

Byron Au Yong (music)

Aaron Jafferis (words)

IN DEVELOPMENT

Stuck Elevator is a project of Creative Capital, produced by Beth Morrison Projects.

The newly founded Solaris Vocal Ensemble, under the direction of faculty member Giselle Wyers, premieres three new works for voices and electronics by composers Anne Le Baron, Ingram Marshall, and Frances White. The ensemble also premieres a newly commissioned arrangement of Procession by Meredith Monk. Composers will be present at the performance. This concert is made possible by a grant from the UW Royalty Research Foundation.

The Box Is Empty, Seattle’s newest contemporary music ensemble, performs its second concert this January: David Lang’s Pulitzer-prize-winning the little match girl passion (Northwest premiere) and Steve Reich’s Proverb. We begin with Proverb, which quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein,  “How small a thought is takes to fill someone’s whole life!”  The little match girl passion answers with the touching story of Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl, who slowly freezes to death as she lights match after match desperately trying to keep warm.  Come hear these beautifully minimal settings of a haunting winter’s tale.

With Maria Mannisto and Christina Siemens, sopranos; Kathea Yarnell, alto; Mark Leuning and Brian Winnie, Tenors; Tim Blok and Yigit Kolat, electric organs; Becca Baggenstoss and Denali Williams, percussion.  Jeremiah Cawley, conductor.

O(PA)PERA is a live music-installation that combines displaced musicians, handmade paper, flashing lights, seismic waves and a chaotic supermoon in a magical, musical, mystical experience. Performing from the heart of a gigantic paper tent, a quartet sings and plays erhu, violin, cello, toy pianos, bamboo, cassette tape players, percussion and typewriters.

Co-created by composer/performer Byron Au Yong and director/conceptual/installation artist Roger Benington, O(PA)PERA investigates ephemera and responds to Luminous: The Art of Asia amidst the earthquakes and tsunamis around the Pacific Rim. The audience gathers around the installation for this performance that cycles numerous times.

Please note that there will be standing room only, due to the immersive nature of this performance.

Tickets may be purchased at the Ticketing Desk at any of SAM’s three sites or over the phone with a credit card by calling the Box Office at 206.654.3121.

With Ivan Arteaga, Holly Carlton, and Jay Gillespie, saxophones : Nicole Herrald, Chris McGann, and Erik Reed, trumpets: Steve Herrald, Jen Hinkle, and Masa Ohtake, trombones : Amanda Harris, piano : Maria Mannisto, amplified voice : and Evan Woodle, percussion