PROTOSTAR INNOVATIVE series

Kronos Five Decades Event

Kronos Quartet and Sam Green: A Thousand Thoughts

Alisa Weilerstein Fragments Ii

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2023 · 7:30 PM

THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

Co-produced with the San Diego Symphony

Renowned cellist Alisa Weilerstein returns for the second installment of her groundbreaking, multi-year project FRAGMENTS. This remarkable concert weaves together the 36 movements of Bach’s solo cello suites with 27 newly commissioned works. The resulting collection is divided into six Fragments, each an hour long and blending five to six composers, to be released independently over several seasons—the first of these graced our stage in the 2022–23 season. Within each Fragment, individual movements from a single Bach suite are thoughtfully integrated with selected new works to create a new emotional arc. Enhanced by responsive lighting and scenic architecture, the music is performed without pause and without a program, making for a wholly original and immersive audience experience.

FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2024 · 7:30 PM

THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground), in collaboration with Emmy Award®-winning writer and editor Joe Bini (Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Grizzly Man), takes the stage with the legendary classical music group Kronos Quartet to create a “live documentary” that chronologically unfolds the quartet’s groundbreaking, continent-spanning, multi-decade career. Wildly creative and experimental in form, A Thousand Thoughts is a meditation on music itself—the act of listening closely to music, the experience of feeling music deeply, and the power that music has to change the world.

ABEL SELAOCOE & MANCHESTER COLLECTIVE SIROCCO

SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2024 · 7 PM

THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

HIROMI: THE PIANO QUINTET FT. PUBLIQUARTET

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2024 · 3 PM

THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

“Selaocoe has tapped into the magic of making every and all music come to life and find meaning and engagement with the audience, with fabulous success.”

Sirocco is a celebration of folk traditions from around the world, led by the inimitable Abel Selaocoe, a musician described as “a star in the making,” (The Arts Desk) and UK-based Manchester Collective for a program that weaves between original settings of African music, Danish folk songs, and classical music like you’ve never heard it before. When this programme toured across the UK and Europe, critics described it as a “deeply moving” and “once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

In the two decades since Hiromi released her stunning debut album Another Mind, the Japanese pianist/composer has blazed an incandescent trail across the jazz scene. Her fertile imagination and boundless creativity seem to ripple out of her as effortlessly as her virtuosic pianism. Equally impressive in acoustic or electric settings, she delves into a different kind of fusion on her latest project that encompasses and eclipses the boundaries of jazz, classical and pop, taking improvisation and composition to new heights of complexity and sophistication.