2007-08 Season

Artists in Exile

Sunday, April 6, 2008
Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
University of Maryland
College Park, MD

Aligned with Joseph Horowitz’s forthcoming book Artists in Exile (HarperCollins February 2008), this program explores the impact of immigration on two major German and Austrian composers.  Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera epitomizes his Berlin style.  His little-known Walt Whitman Songs, a grateful wartime tribute to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, are breezy Broadway ballads.  Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, composed in Los Angeles, is (again) a grateful wartime tribute to FDR composed in English, and all the more moving for applying the Expressionist idiom he brought with him from Austria. With the participation of baritone Chris Pedro Trakas in “Mack the Knife,” the Whitman Songs, and the Ode, and the Left Bank String Quartet.

Chávez and Revueltas Revisited

Friday, March 14, 2008
The Library of Congress
Coolidge Auditorium
Washington, DC

Part of a week-long Revueltas/Chavez festival curated by PostClassical Ensemble, including films at the National Gallery, a conference, and a kick-off event at which PostClassical Ensemble performed Xochipili by Carlos Chavez.

If there is a Latin American composer whose “time has come” it is surely Silvestre Revueltas. For one thing, Revueltas is the composer who most resonates with the charismatic Mexico of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. For another, he is the rare 20th century composer whose voice is both original and instantly recognizable. A program incorporating popular song and poetry as part of a four-day Library of Congress festival: “Two Faces of Mexican Music: Chávez and Revueltas Revisited.”

Eugenia León, vocals.

Free to Sing: The Story of the First African-American Opera Company

February 16, 2008
The Music Center at Strathmore
Bethesda, MD

A concert version of the first American operetta (1866); a smash hit in its day, linked to a history of the first African-American opera company, which toured this work.

A Double Passion: Music and Books from Spain

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The Organization of American States
Washington, DC

Presented by the Permanent Observer Mission of Spain

PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez

Works by Spanish composers: Gaos, Montsalvatge, Falla

The City

Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007
Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
University of Maryland
College Park, MD

The City, the classic American documentary film made for the 1939 World’s Fair with a script by Lewis Mumford, is a vivid argument for the Garden City movement. It features the first and by far the most remarkable of Aaron Copland’s eight film scores, called by Mark Swed of The Los Angeles Times “an astonishing missing link not only in the genesis of Copland’s Americana style but in American music and cinema.”  See the film and—for the first time anywhere—hear the full score in live performance. With commentary by the legendary documentary filmmaker George Stoney.  John Basinger, narrator.