FALL 2021
LETTER FROM THE VICE PROVOST FOR THE ARTS
Dear friends, Returning to live performance after eighteen months brings a rush of feelings. I can think of no better way to bring our community back together than through the joy of music. This fall, we offer 16 exuberant and emotional presentations, including four free shows at American Tobacco Campus. With deep gratitude for the collective hard work it took to bring us here, I say: Welcome back live! While stages were dark, Duke Performances transformed. Eight artists performed from their homes for the April-June 2020 livestream series. Our staff collaborated with local film teams in Durham and around the country to produce 36 performance videos. We worked with Durham Public Schools to create free virtual "field trips. All of these activities helped sustain artists through the height of COVID-19. As we emerge from the pandemic, Duke Performances will continue to evolve. I am excited to announce Duke Performances is aligning with Duke Arts, the university’s arts initiative. Over the 2021-2022 season, we will be working behind-the-scenes to ensure that the best of Duke Performances programming, commissions, artist residencies, and community engagements grow stronger with the support of a larger staff, more central university resources, and increased connection with our academic curriculum. Thank you for your support of the live arts at Duke and in Durham!
JOHN V. BROWN VICE PROVOST FOR THE ARTS
DIRECTOR OF THE JAZZ PROGRAM PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF MUSIC
IMANI WINDS REVOLUTIONARY AKA
THE CIVIL RIGHTS PROJECT SUN, SEP 12 | 7 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
After a yearlong postponement, the barrier-breaking, repertoire-expanding wind ensemble Imani Winds will return to Durham. This fall’s offering, Revolutionary aka The Civil Rights Project, thematically organizes several commissions from the past dozen years around the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Following an arrangement of Sam Cooke’s plaintive and pointed “A Change is Gonna Come,” we hear Frederic Rzewski’s “Sometimes,” commissioned by and premiered at Duke Performances in 2015 in celebration of the legacy of historian John Hope Franklin. Vijay Iyer’s “Bruits,” composed in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s 2012 killing, features pianist Cory Smythe and treats “the murderous consequences of the stand your ground law,” while Jason Moran’s “Cane” — a reference to his ancestral home near the Cane River in Louisiana — explores the impact of slavery within his family history. The evening rounds out with Imani co-founder Valerie Coleman’s “Bronzeville,” an invocation of three poems by Chicago literary legend Gwendolyn Brooks. How has this past year of relative isolation evolved your collaborative relationship as a quintet? What would a “typical” Imani Winds rehearsal look like at the height of pandemic-enforced lockdowns, and how has it felt to come together again in-person? Like most ensembles, we had to really sit down and do a lot of thinking and almost reinvent what it meant to work together as a chamber music group during the pandemic. For the majority of the time, we did not meet in person, as we were all very hunkered down being as safe as possible and looking out for our families. So really all of our work was remote and we were focusing on business and artistic planning-related things. We were able to do some remote recording work, and that was a nice way to be able to make music together virtually, but of course we missed playing together immensely. When we were finally able to play together it was really an emotional experience; Imani Winds is such a family, and it felt like coming home. We are so lucky to be able to be back together playing again!
Read the full Imani Winds interview at dukeperformances.duke.edu/blog
THE
GORIES THU, SEP 16 | 8 PM MOTORCO MUSIC HALL
Tickets: $25, $10 Duke Students
“We are coming to your town / we’re gonna mess your head around!” is a lyric more taunting than threatening when sung with the yap-yell of “Hey Hey, We’re the Gories,” the introductory track from the eponymous band’s 1991 record I Know You Be Houserockin’. The garage punk trio — made up of guitarists Mick Collins and Dan Kroha and drummer Peggy O’Neill, and playfully named in homage to the fictional band from the television sitcom Gidget — led the eastern Michigan rock renaissance in the late 1980s with a signature fuzzy blend of blues and “rustbelt rock.” True to the phrase, each Gories lick and rumble clangs and jolts like city machinery; urban legend claims their first recordings were conducted in a tin shack. Revived in 2009 after disbanding nearly two decades earlier, The Gories make a rare appearance in Durham for what is sure to be a cathartic blowout.
SAT, SEP 25 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
Praised by The New York Times for their “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct” and by the LA Times for their balance of “intellect and expression," the Calidore String Quartet make their Duke Performances debut with a program of deeply moving works. They open with one of Haydn’s finest quartets, written during a time of intense emotional rigor when the composer and his fellow musicians were living and working far from their families. It was a period of great compositional development that deviated from his previous styles and explored notably darker moods. The Calidores then introduce Mendelssohn’s first mature — and deeply passionate — string quartet, written when he was just eighteen years old. They then move into more familiar territory
with a one of Beethoven’s late quartets. In February this year, the ensemble embarked on a project to record all Beethoven’s string quartets for Signum Records, following the great composer’s 250th anniversary in 2020. PROGRAM Haydn: String Quartet, op. 20, no. 4 Mendelssohn: String Quartet, op. 13 Beethoven: String Quartets, op. 131
CIMAFUNK THU, OCT 21 | 8 PM
VON DER HEYDEN STUDIO THEATER RUBENSTEIN ARTS CENTER Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
SAT, SEP 28 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $25, $10 Duke Students Reserved Seating
In 2016, Afro-Cuban funkster and cultural ambassador Cimafunk began his solo career. Cimafunk — an ode to his Cimarones heritage rooted deep in the sixteenth-century lore of enslaved Africans escaping their Spanish captors — was joined by an elite group of fellow Cuban musicians to record his 2017 debut album, Terapia (meaning “therapy”), which became widespread in his homebase of Havana as a revolution of a new Afro-Cuban music genre exuding all of the robust and festive hallmarks of rhumba, bolera, James Brown, Fela Kuti, and more. While most of Cimafunk’s zest is propelled by irresistible, upbeat, funk anthems, it can also seduce with the occasional ballad. Witness in person what The New Yorker describes as Cimafunk’s “uncanny ability to control the energy in the room” at this Duke Performances appearance, which could very well live up to the meaning of cimarrón — “wild” and “untamed.”
SAT, OCT 23 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
Longtime audience favorites of the Chamber Arts Society, the Belcea Quartet return with a program which places the cello front and centre. Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 was written towards the end of his life, when he was heavily in debt and had the opportunity to write a handful of quartets for the King of Prussia, an amateur cellist. As a result, the cello is given expansive, cantabile melodies. This is also the case in Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 14, written in tribute to the Beethoven Quartet’s cellist, Sergei Shirinsky. Listen out for the continually recurring motif, which becomes part of the lively dance movement. In Shostakovich’s signature style, the piece spells out the name of the cellist in the notes, "Serezha" — the friendly form of the name "Sergei." The Belceas then bring
things to a conclusion with Brahms’s C Minor Quartet, which they have recorded twice before, the second of which won them the Diapason d’Or de l’Année. PROGRAM Mozart: String Quartet No. 23 in F Major K. 590 Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 14 Brahms: String Quartet, op. 51, no. 1
WORLD PREMIERE
CHRIS PATTISHALL ZODIAC COMMISSIONED BY DUKE PERFORMANCES FRI, NOV 5 & SAT, NOV 6 | 8 PM
VON DER HEYDEN STUDIO THEATER RUBENSTEIN ARTS CENTER Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
Self-taught pianist by three, professional musician by fifteen, teacher to Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis soon thereafter, and later Duke’s first Artist in Residence and Director of the Duke Jazz Ensemble, Mary Lou Williams’s twentieth-century artistic scope was stratospheric. In 1945, she turned toward the stars with the landmark Zodiac Suite, a constellation of jazz tone poems inspired by the astrological signs of her musical contemporaries. Their boundary-breaking, stylistic intertwining — tilting from blues to early swing to jagged jazz harmony — caught the ear of GRAMMY-nominated pianist Chris Pattishall, a fellow musical wunderkind, rising star in the New York jazz scene, and Durham native. Pattishall spent over a decade with Williams’s compositions, expanding and exploding their instrumentation into a full-bodied interpretive album, Zodiac. This world premiere performance, enlivened by sound design from experimental musician and composer Rafiq Bhatia and video projections by artist Kim Alpert, will bring Williams’s work home to Duke and Durham in an unprecedented way. Can you describe the first time you remember Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite catching your ear — your physical surroundings, emotional state, your musical and creative inclinations at the time? What compelled you to eventually devote serious artistic attention to it? I was emerging from the Holland Tunnel into downtown Manhattan in 2011 with local jazz station WBGO on the radio. I was stunned by a song I heard, learning from the announcer that it was “Cancer” from Mary Lou Williams’s Zodiac Suite. This triggered a memory from my teenage years of going to see Geri Allen perform the suite at Duke. I went back to listen to the original studio recordings of the suite and was blown away. The suite reminded me of Bud Powell’s “Glass Enclosure” — a composition that in my opinion defies genre categorization — expanded to a larger scale. I grew up listening to hip-hop and the crate-digger ambition of finding something rare and special resonates with me. I fell in love with the Zodiac Suite and saw that very few musicians were aware of it. What started as the excitement of finding something rare grew into a desire to share how special the music is with as many musicians and listeners as possible.
Read our full interview with Chris Pattishall at dukeperformances.duke.edu/blog
KAYHAN KALHOR THU, NOV 11 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
Three-time GRAMMY nominee Kayhan Kalhor is an internationally acclaimed virtuoso on the kamancheh "little bow," a bowed string instrument with a thousand-year history. Through his many musical collaborations, Kalhor was instrumental in popularizing Persian music in the West and is a creative force in today’s music scene. His performances of traditional Persian music and multiple collaborations have attracted audiences around the globe. He has studied the music of Iran’s many regions, in particular those of Khorason and Kordestan, and has toured the world as a soloist with various ensembles and orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de Lyon. He is co-founder of the renowned ensembles Dastan, Ghazal: Persian & Indian Improvisations and Masters of Persian Music. Kayhan Kalhor has composed works for Iran’s most renowned vocalists Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram Nazeri and has also performed and recorded with Iran’s greatest instrumentalists. He has composed music for television and film and was most recently featured on the soundtrack AT, SEP 28 | 8 PM of Francis Ford Copolla’s Youth Without Youth in a score that he collaborated on with Osvaldo ALDWIN AUDITORIUM Golijov. In 2004, Kayhan was invited by American composer John Adams to give a solo recital at ickets: $25, $10 Duke Students Carnegie Hall as part of his Perspectives Series and in the same year he appeared on a double eserved Seating bill at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, sharing the program with the Festival Orchestra performing the Mozart Requiem. Kayhan is a member of the Silkroad Ensemble (founded by Yo-Yo Ma) and his compositions appear on several of the Ensemble’s albums.
SCHUMANN SAT, NOV 13 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
“Music-making of the highest order,” wrote The Guardian of the three Schumann brothers and violist Liisa Randalu, who together make up the Schumann Quartet. Having trained with the Alban Berg Quartet in Cologne, the close-knit ensemble entered the classical music scene with a fanfare, widely celebrated for their innate musical bond and winning the Newcomer Award at the 2016 BBC Music Magazine Awards. They pick up the baton from the Belcea Quartet in this Chamber Arts Series, playing the second of Brahms’s op. 51, a more expansive, lyrical piece than the first, which pays homage to Bach with contrapuntal textures throughout. Also on the program is Beethoven’s elegant Quartet in A Major, modeled directly on Mozart’s quartet in the same key, and Ravel’s
first and only string quartet, which was written when the composer was completing his studies at Paris Conservatory, repeatedly striving — and failing — to win first place at the Prix de Rome. PROGRAM Beethoven: String Quartet in A Major, op. 18, no. 5 Ravel: Quartet in F Brahms: String Quartet in A Minor, op. 51, no. 2
SAT, DEC 4 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
The first piano duo in history to receive Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant, Christina and Michelle Naughton are stellar orchestral soloists and “master-pianists” (Gramophone), who “have to be heard to be believed” (Washington Post). The pair return to Duke Performances with some of the most dynamic and challenging works in the repertoire, all of which were initially written for other forces: Grieg added the additional second piano part to Mozart’s Sonata No. 16, while Ravel himself transcribed his own orchestral work — originally conceived as a ballet — into a two-piano reduction. When Beethoven refused to translate Große Fuge into a four-hand piano arrangement, the publisher called upon Anton Haim to complete the task. Intensely
disliking the transcription, Beethoven then drafted his own fiendishly difficult arrangement, which the Naughton sisters tackle in this concert. PROGRAM Mozart: Sonata No. 16 in C Major John Adams: Roll Over Beethoven Beethoven: Große Fuge Ravel: La Valse for Two Pianos
WORLD PREMIERE
BIJAYINI SATPATHY ABHIPSAA — A SEEKING
COMMISSIONED BY DUKE PERFORMANCES AND BARYSHNIKOV ARTS CENTER FRI, DEC 10 & SAT, DEC 11 | 8 PM VON DER HEYDEN STUDIO THEATER RUBENSTEIN ARTS CENTER Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
“For four decades,” Odissi dance master Bijayini Satpathy writes, “the Odissi I have known and owned has been someone else’s song, someone else’s making, someone else’s idea, someone else’s feelings and emotions.” Hailed by The New Yorker as “a performer of exquisite grace and technique,” Satpathy spent twenty-five years with India’s famed Nrityagram Dance Ensemble before striking out on her own to create this singular solo work that radically integrates Odissi’s pasts and proposes its possible futures. This December, Durham audiences will be the first to see the result: ABHIPSAA — a seeking, co-commissioned by Duke Performances and New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center. Satpathy boldly explores her solo voice, advancing the vocabulary of Indian classical dance; ABHIPSAA — a seeking pairs Satpathy’s mesmerizing and rigorous choreography with a new musical score. How have you noticed your choreographic impulses evolve between the beginning of this project and the present, when you’ve begun to share the work virtually and, soon, in person? Abhipsaa literally means “seeking.” This is an investigative journey to discover my choreographic instincts. I felt by exploring it through the body, heart, and soul, I would find a few answers. I divided and dedicated one residency each to delve deeper into these realms. As the works take shape and evolve, all they tell me is more about myself, inclinations, comforts, fears, patterns, questions, interests, and truths. I have tried to remain honest in the process, which has left me very vulnerable and humbled.
Read our full interview with Bijayni Satpathy at dukeperformances.duke.edu/blog
CHRISTMAS WITH
THE KING’S SINGERS THU, DEC 16 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
Tickets: $35, $10 Duke Students
Having initially cut their teeth as six choral scholars at Cambridge’s King’s College in 1968, The King’s Singers have undergone many iterations and personnel changes, all the while maintaining the gold standard in a cappella singing and developing their signature close-harmony style. They’ve also long ripped up the rulebook, bringing together songs both ancient and contemporary, classical and popular, sacred and secular. “The famed King’s Singers’ attention to pin-point pitching, slick ensemble, and deft balances between the voices are present in abundance,” heralded BBC Music Magazine. Their return to Duke Performances is accompanied by a program as wideranging as you would expect, from traditional plainchant to the 1940s Mel Tormé classic, instantly recognizable by its opening line: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” As is King’s Singers’ tradition, the evening will wrap up with an assortment of new surprises and festive favorites. PROGRAM Plainchant: Hodie Christus Natus est Traditional, arr. David Willcocks: Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day Traditional, arr. Goff Richards: La Filadora J.P.E. Hartmann, arr. Bo Holten: Julebudet Til Dem, Der Bygge Gustaf Nordqvist: Jul, Jul, Strålande Jul Traditional, arr. Brian Kay: Gaudete! June Collin: The Quiet Heart Traditional, arr. Edgar Pettman: The Angel Gabriel James Burton: Balulalow Traditional, arr. Charles Wood: Ding! Dong! Merrily On High Urmas Sisask: Heliseb Väljadel Alma Androzzo, arr. Stacey Gibbs: If I Can Help Somebody Quirino Mendoza y Cortés, arr. Jorge Cozátl: Cielito Lindo Mel Tormé, arr. Peter Knight: The Christmas Song Anonymous: Song of the Nuns of Chester Traditional, arr. Henry Hawkesworth: Quelle Est Cette Odeur Agréable? Traditional, arr. Christopher Bruerton: Wither’s Rocking Hymn Traditional, arr. Guy Turner: Dormi, Dormi Traditional, arr. Geoffrey Keating: God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen 18
FREE SHOWS THIS FALL
DUKE PERFORMANCES AT AMERICAN TOBACCO AMPHITHEATER One salve from a locked-down year: a greater appreciation for the many ways we can live, work, and experience the arts in outdoor space. As the seasons tilt from summer to fall, Duke Performances returns to in-person performances for the first time since spring 2020 with a quartet of open-air concerts by acclaimed North Carolina-based artists at downtown Durham’s American Tobacco Campus. Beginning in midSeptember with The Dead Tongues’s folk rock and followed the next week by Rissi Palmer’s “Southern Soul,” the series moves to Skylar Gudasz’s genre-fluid vocalizations and closes the first week of October with The Veldt’s shoegaze-soul. Free and open to all, these shows — think of them as Music in the Gardens, albeit with some different greenery — help open our fall season
in community. Come one, come all, and welcome back live. The Dead Tongues Wed, Sep 15 | 6:30 PM Free & open to the public Rissi Palmer Wed, Sep 22 | 6:30 PM Free & open to the public Skylar Gudasz Wed, Sep 29 | 6:30 PM Free & open to the public The Veldt Fri, Oct 1 | 6:30 PM Free & open to the public
QUARTET SAT, NOV 6 | 8 PM BALDWIN AUDITORIUM
After a year of virtual offerings, Duke’s resident Ciompi Quartet returns in-person with a program of compositions created during the World War II period from three distinct nationalities: Irish-English, Soviet, and German. The evening closes with a rare performance of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings written during the waning months of WWII and widely regarded as an elegy for Germany’s destruction during the war. PROGRAM Metamorphosen — Featuring students from the Duke Chamber Music Program Maconchy: String Quartet No. 4 Prokofiev: String Quartet No. 2 in F Minor Strauss: Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings
CONCERT SERIES Ciompi inaugurates two new series of free one-hour concerts featuring major works for string quartet in informal settings. The October program is presented in recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month. Downtown Classics: Horse & Buggy Press PS118, 118 West Parrish St Oct 12, 5:30 PM | Carlos Chavez Quartet No. 1, Silvestre Revueltas Quartet No. 1 Dec 1, 5:30 PM | Brahms: String Quartet No. 3, op. 67 Lunchtime Classics: Goodson Chapel, Duke University October 13, 12 PM | Chavez Quartet No. 1, Silvestre Revueltas Quartet No. 1 November 30, 12 PM | Brahms: String Quartet No. 3, op. 67
LIVE & ESSENTIAL SPRING 2022 PREVIEW
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DUKE PERFORMANCES STAFF John V. Brown Vice Provost for the Arts 919-684-0540 / jbrown@duke.edu
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Suzanne Despres Director of Artist Services & Production 919-660-3379 / suzanne.despres@duke.edu
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Brian Valentyn Manager of Campus & Community Initiatives 919-660-3175 / brian.valentyn@duke.edu Sibyl Kemp Artist Services & Engagement Coordinator 919-660-8121 / sibyl.kemp@duke.edu Maggie Brandt Development 919-660-3314 / maggie.brandt@duke.edu Jamila Belk Business Manager 919-660-3356 / jamila.belk@duke.edu
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