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NEWS The Latest from the LA Phil
of Szymanowski’s Król Roger.
Yankovskaya recently conducted Carmen at Houston Grand Opera, Don Giovanni at Seattle Opera, Pia de’ Tolomei at Spoleto Festival USA, Der Freischütz at Wolf Trap Opera, Ellen West at New York’s Prototype Festival, and Taking Up Serpents at Washington National Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival. On the concert stage, her recent engagements include Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Omaha Symphony, and Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields with Bang on a Can All-Stars at Carnegie Hall.
An alumna of the Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors and the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, Yankovskaya has served as assistant conductor to Lorin Maazel, assisted Vladimir Jurowski via a London Philharmonic fellowship, and was featured in the Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview. She is a two-time recipient of the Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Award.
MICHELLE BRADLEY
Michelle Bradley, a graduate of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, is beginning to garner great acclaim as one of today’s most promising Verdi sopranos.
In the 2021/22 season, Michelle Bradley made her debut with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in the title role of Tosca and returned to the Metropolitan Opera as Liù in Turandot. In concert, she debuted with the San Francisco Symphony in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and with the Atlanta Symphony in Act III of Aida. She was also heard in recital for the San Diego Opera. Other projects include a debut with the San Francisco Opera and returns to the Metropolitan Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, all in leading roles.
Previously, Michelle Bradley made debuts with the Vienna State Opera as Leonora in Il trovatore (a role debut), the San Diego Opera in the title role of Aida, and returned to the Metropolitan Opera for its New Year’s Eve gala as Liù in Act II of Turandot. She appeared in solo recital at the Kennedy Center and performed Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with the New World Symphony. Bradley made a string of notable debuts in Frankfurt as Leonora in a new production of La forza del destino, in Nancy and Erfurt as Aida, and at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in staged performances of Verdi’s Requiem. In concert, she debuted in Paris in Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time with the Orchestre de Paris under Thomas Adès, sang in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and appeared in recital under the auspices of the George London Foundation in Miami and New York City.
Bradley is the 2017 recipient of the Leonie Rysanek Award from the George London Foundation, the 2016 recipient of the Hildegard Behrens Foundation Award, and a first-place winner in the Gerda Lissner and the Serge and Olga Koussevitzky vocal competitions. She is the 2014 grand-prize winner of the Music Academy of the West’s Marilyn Horne Song Competition and received her Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance from Bowling Green State University.
MICHELLE CANN
“A compelling, sparkling virtuoso” (Boston Music Intelligencer), pianist Michelle Cann made her orchestral debut at age 14 and has since performed as a soloist with numerous orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.
A champion of the music of Florence Price, Cann performed the New York City premiere of the composer’s Piano Concerto with The Dream Unfinished Orchestra in July 2016 and the Philadelphia premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in February 2021.
Highlights of her 2021/22 season included debut performances with the Atlanta, Detroit, and St. Louis symphony orchestras, as well as her Canadian concert debut with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. She also received the 2022 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization, and the 2022 Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award. Embracing a dual role as both performer and pedagogue, Cann holds teaching residencies at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and the National
Conference of the Music Teachers National Association.
Cann regularly appears in solo and chamber recitals throughout the U.S., China, and South Korea. Notable venues include the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Barbican (London). She has also appeared as co-host and collaborative pianist on NPR’s From the Top.
An award winner at top international competitions, in 2019 she served as the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s MAC Music Innovator in recognition of her role as an AfricanAmerican classical musician who embodies artistry, innovation, and a commitment to education and community engagement.
Cann studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music, where she holds the inaugural Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies. Her professional artist management is provided by Curtis.
NATHANIEL GUMBS
Nathaniel Gumbs is a native of the Bronx, NY, and has performed throughout the U.S. and abroad, including Antigua, St. Thomas, Ghana, Paris, and Munich. He currently serves as Director of Chapel Music at Yale University, where he works with students, faculty, and guests to coordinate music for three worshiping communities: the University Church in Battell Chapel and at Yale Divinity School in both Marquand Chapel and at Berkeley Divinity School.
Gumbs earned his undergraduate degree from Shenandoah Conservatory in Virginia, his Master of Music degree from Yale University, and in 2021 completed a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the Eastman School of Music. His principal teachers include Steven Cooksey, David Higgs, and Martin Jean.
Prior to his position at Yale, Gumbs served as Director of Music and Arts and Church Organist at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC, where he led several hundred volunteer musicians and staff in four choirs and other ensembles. He has also been a frequent guest musician at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and served as organist and clinician for the Hampton University Ministers’ Conference.
In 2017, The Diapason magazine recognized Nathaniel as one of 20 outstanding organists under 30 for his achievement in organ performance and church music. In 2018, Nathaniel curated the opening Hymn Festival (Singing Diverse Music in The New Church) for the Hymn Society’s annual conference.
JASMIN WHITE
This season marks Jasmin White’s European debut as a member of the premier Opernstudio at Volksoper Wien, where she will be performing as Mary in Der fliegende Holländer, Third Lady in Die Zauberflöte, and Public Opinion in Orpheus in the Underworld. Other debuts of note include Porgy and Bess with the Metropolitan Opera, Kate in The Pirates of Penzance with Cincinnati Opera, and Dryad in Ariadne auf Naxos with Lakes Area Music Festival.
A recent graduate of the Artist Diploma in Opera Studies program at the Juilliard School, White was awarded the Richard F. Gold Career Grant from the Shoshana Foundation in recognition of their artistic development. While at the Juilliard School, White performed a variety of roles, including alto soloist in Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, mezzo-soprano soloist in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Frau Reich in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, La Gelosia in Orfeo (Rossi), and Disinganno in Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno.
White’s performances that were affected by the pandemic include Lucy in Tobias Picker’s Awakenings with Opera Theater of Saint Louis, King Egeo in Handel’s Teseo with the Juilliard School, and concerts with Oratorio Society of New York.
Hailing from Grand Ronde, Oregon, White is a graduate of the Master of Music in Voice program at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Bachelor of Music in Vocal Arts program at the University of Southern California.
Isabelle Demers
Isabelle Demers, organ
J.S. BACH, Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor, BWV 1067 Arr. I. DEMERS (c. 20 minutes) Ouverture Rondeau Sarabande Bourrée I & II Polonaise & Double Menuet Badinerie
ALKAN Douze études pour les pieds seulement (c. 11 minutes) 5. Moderato 2. Adagio 12. Tempo giusto
W. ALBRIGHT Flights of Fancy: Ballet for Organ (c. 7 minutes) Ragtime Lullaby Shimmy
HEILLER Tanz-Toccata (c. 5 minutes)
INTERMISSION
FRANCK Chorale No. 2 in B minor (c. 13 minutes)
STRAVINSKY, Three Movements from Petrushka (c. 16 minutes) Arr. I. DEMERS Russian Dance Petrushka’s Room The Shrovetide Fair
SUNDAY
NOVEMBER 6, 2022 7:30PM
Michael Wilson is Walt Disney Concert Hall Organ Conservator.
Manuel Rosales and Kevin Cartwright are principal technicians for the Walt Disney Concert Hall organ.
This performance is generously supported by Mari L. Danihel.
Programs and artists subject to change.
AT A GLANCE
Québec native and Associate Professor of Organ at her hometown’s McGill University, Isabelle Demers is a graduate of the Juilliard School. Her recital traverses more than 400 years of music, with her own transcriptions of music by Bach and Stravinsky bookending smaller works by Charles Alkan, Michael Praetorius, and William Albright. Demers commemorates the 100th anniversary of the death of César Franck with a performance of the second of his stirring Three Chorales, composed only months before his death in 1890.
—Thomas Neenan
The four orchestral suites by J.S. Bach (1685–1750) were originally entitled Ouverture. The name was borrowed from the title of the first movement— an overture in the French style: a regal and stately opening in duple meter followed by a second, quicker section in contrasting meter. In Bach’s suites, the overture is followed by a series of two-part dance movements, all in the same key but in contrasting tempi, meter, and style, and often featuring a variation on itself, known as a double. The types of dance pieces that found their way into baroque suites are large and varied but some, like the rondeau and sarabande, are almost always present. Other, less standard dance forms make appearances on a more random basis and are known as galanteries. The B minor suite includes two of particular interest. The polonaise, as the name suggests, hails from Poland. Like Chopin’s later versions for piano, Bach’s Polonaise has a distinctive long-short figure (dotted eighth—16th) in triple meter. The Badinerie borrows its name from a French word for “banter” or “jesting.” It is quick and jovial and, in the B minor suite, a showpiece for solo flute.
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–1888) was active in Paris during the heyday of Chopin and Liszt, who considered him a friend, colleague, and artistic rival. He entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of six and won many awards, enjoying wide acclaim by the late 1820s. Around the time of Chopin’s death in 1849, Alkan began to retreat from public performance, devoting himself more to composition. Like Chopin, Alkan composed collections of etudes that go far beyond the intended purpose of a “study” piece. And like Chopin, Alkan had a close relationship with the Parisian piano manufacturer Érard, which supplied him with a pedal piano, for which the collection Douze études pour les pieds was composed.
William Albright (1944–1998) attended the Juilliard Preparatory School from the age of 14 and went on to earn degrees from Eastman and the University of Michigan. He studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen on a Fulbright Scholarship and was a disciple of American composer and teacher Ross Lee Finney. He wrote a large body of music for organ and piano, spanning the stylistic spectrum from ragtime to the avant-garde. “Flights of Fancy: Ballet for Organ” is an often-tongue-in-cheek nod to popular music that, after a “Curtain Raiser,” includes a Tango, Ragtime, “Shimmy” and March, dubbed “The A.G.O. (American Guild of Organists) Fight Song.”
In 1851, the French-speaking Belgian César Franck (1822–1890), became titular organist at the church of Saint-Jean-SaintFrançois-au-Marais in Paris. The church had recently accepted delivery of a new organ by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and the instrument inspired a wellspring of creativity in its new custodian. “It’s like an orchestra!” Franck is said to have remarked. In 1858, Franck moved to the larger SainteClotilde, which received one of Cavaillé-Coll’s masterworks and was inaugurated by Franck and L.J. Lefébure-Wély the next year. With access to the large three-manual instrument with its extraordinary palette of colors, Franck entered a period of intense compositional activity, producing masterpieces for organ, orchestra, chamber ensembles, and voice. He also became a musical ambassador for Cavaillé-Coll, performing on older instruments, premiering new ones, and advocating for future projects in large and small parishes.
Franck’s place in French musical culture was solidified in the early 1870s when he was named professor at the Paris Conservatoire and the Société Nationale de Musique. He fostered a generation of young French composers determined, according to the
tenets of the Société, to break French compositional practices free from what historian Richard Taruskin calls “the Offenbachian bacchanale of the Second Empire; and [in the wake of the humiliating FrancoPrussian War] to overtake and surpass the achievements of German ‘absolute’ instrumental music.” Taruskin further remarks that “never was the music of any country so thoroughly transformed by an inferiority complex.”
The Trois Chorals were composed near the end of Franck’s life, in 1890. They are austere works and exemplify Franck’s profoundly personal and cerebral approach to the handling of musical materials such as harmony and form.
More than a century after their premieres, Igor Stravinsky’s three landmark ballets from the 1910s (The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring) still manage to sound fresh and modern. As a student of Nikolai RimskyKorsakov, Stravinsky (1882–1971) acquired his teacher’s love of Russian folksong and mastery of orchestral color. The Firebird (1911) introduced many techniques that the young composer would develop over the next two decades, in particular a driving approach to rhythm that was frequently complex, and the use of melodic “cells” that are freely transformed and repeated to form the basis of larger structures. Petrushka (1911) built on the achievements of The Firebird and went far beyond it in rhythmic and harmonic complexity. In 1921, Stravinsky transcribed three dances from the ballet for his friend, the great Polish pianist and longtime Los Angeles resident Arthur Rubinstein. The dances are adapted from different tableaux, as Stravinsky called the various scenes: the vibrant “Russian Dance” that helps set the mood for the Shrovetide festival near the beginning; the music that accompanies a scene in “Petrushka’s Room”; and later festivities related to “The Shrovetide Fair.”
—Thomas Neenan
ABOUT THE ARTIST
ISABELLE DEMERS
With playing described as having “bracing virtuosity” (Chicago Classical Review) and being “fearless and extraordinary” (Amarillo-Globe News), Isabelle Demers has enraptured critics, presenters, and audience members around the globe. Her 2010 recital for the International Society of Organbuilders-American Institute of Organbuilders convention “left the entire congress in an atmosphere of ‘Demers fever.’” That same year, her performance at the Washington, D.C., national convention of the American Guild of Organists caused the standingroom-only audience to call her back to the stage five times.
She has appeared in recital throughout Europe, Oman, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. Highlights include performances at the Maison Symphonique (Montréal), the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), City Hall (Stockholm), the Forbidden City Concert Hall (Beijing), and St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey (London).
Demers is in continual high demand by her colleagues, as witnessed by performances for numerous regional and national conventions of the American Guild of Organists, the Institute of Organ Builders and International Society of Organbuilders, the Royal Canadian College of Organists, and the Organ Historical Society.
She has released three CD recordings on the Acis and Pro Organo labels. In 2018, she appeared as solo organ accompanist in an Acis recording of Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem with the Baylor University Choir, recorded at Duruflé’s church in Paris.
A native of Québec and a doctoral graduate of the Juilliard School, Demers is Associate Professor of Organ at McGill University (Montréal). She was formerly the Joyce Bowden Chair in Organ and Head of the Organ Program at Baylor University (Waco, Texas).
Demers is represented in North America exclusively by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, LLC.
concertartists.com
For a list of the Walt Disney Concert Hall organ stops, please turn to page P7.
Rock My Soul Festival Bryan, Bonds & Price
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Jeri Lynne Johnson, conductor Julia Bullock, curator Danielle Ponder, vocalist
FRIDAY
NOVEMBER 11, 2022 8PM
Courtney BRYAN Sanctum (c. 13 minutes)
VARIOUS
Songs to be announced from the stage (c. 20 minutes)
Danielle Ponder
PRICE INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 3 in C minor (c. 30 minutes)
Andante; Allegro
Andante ma non troppo
Juba: Allegro
Scherzo. Finale
Programs and artists subject to change.
Official and exclusive timepiece of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The Rock My Soul Festival is generously supported in part by Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa.
SANCTUM
Courtney Bryan (b. 1982)
Composed: 2015
Orchestration: 3 flutes (2nd = piccolo, 3rd = alto flute), 3 oboes (3rd = English horn), 3 clarinets (2nd = E-flat clarinet, 3rd = bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd = contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 2 percussion (I = snare drum, 3 tom-toms (small, medium, large), bass drum, slapstick, 2 rattles; II = triangle, bell, 3 cymbals, 2 caxixi (large), bell (large, like church bell), recorded audio track, and strings
First LA Phil performance:
November 11, 2022, Jeri Lynne Johnson conducting
Courtney Bryan composed Sanctum in 2015 while working on her postdoctoral degree in African American studies at Princeton University. As part of her research, Bryan was exploring the holiness preaching tradition as inspiration for this piece, in particular the sermons of Pastor Shirley Caesar— known as “the first lady of gospel”—and Reverend C.L. Franklin—a Detroit-based minister and civil rights activist who was also the father of Aretha Franklin.
Bryan explains in a 2021 interview with Oberlin Conservatory that Sanctum started taking a new direction in reaction to high-profile cases of police brutality that were in the news. The first was the story of Marlene Pinnock, a Black woman who was filmed by bystanders as she was being beaten by a California Highway Patrol officer on the side of a freeway in Los Angeles. As Bryan was working on Sanctum, Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, which resulted in widespread protests and in many ways started the modern Black Lives Matter movement.
Sanctum emerges out of recordings from holiness sermons, chants used in Ferguson protests, and a heartbreaking interview with Pinnock, who was asked by a reporter what her reaction was to seeing the video of her beating for the first time. Bryan said the recordings helped determine the tempo and key of the music she composed over them. There are also two main melodic themes that further set the emotional landscape of the piece. The first melody that’s heard early in the brass suggests a forward motion and unrest while the later melody is delicate, which Bryan said she “composed while thinking about the strength and vulnerability of [Pinnock] sharing what happened to her.” Yet another theme emerges from a recorded sermon that quotes the text of Charles Albert Tindley’s hymn Stand By Me. Bryan in turn quotes the melody of that hymn tune, suggesting the call to stand together by protestors in reaction to the ongoing brutality. —Ricky O’Bannon
SYMPHONY NO. 3
Florence Beatrice Price (1882–1953)
Composed: 1938-39
Orchestration: 4 flutes (4th = piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd = English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd = bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 5 percussion (tambourine, snare drum, cymbal, bass drum, triangle, crash cymbals, wood block, sandpaper, castanets, slapstick, gong, orchestral bells, xylophone), harp, celeste, and strings
First LA Phil performance:
November 11, 2022, Jeri Lynne Johnson conducting
One might expect the historic premiere of Florence Price’s First Symphony by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 to have won her a modicum of access to that orchestra and others for her later compositions—but that was not the case. Her First Symphony remained unpublished until 2008, her Second Symphony is missing, and her Fourth Symphony (1945) went unperformed in her lifetime and unpublished until 2020. How could the work of such a brilliant and significant symphonist remain so obscure for so long?
Price’s letters answer that question plainly. She repeatedly tried to persuade conductor Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951) to program her music—in vain. One of her letters to him, dated 5 July 1943, describes the difficulties she faced outright:
To begin with, I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content; until you shall have examined some of my work? … As to the handicap of race, … I should like to be judged on merit alone—the great trouble having been to get conductors, who know nothing of my work … to even consent to examine a score.
Fortunately, Price’s Third Symphony did not go entirely unheard in her lifetime: It was performed by Valter Poole and the Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra on 6 and 8 November 1940. Those performances were a success, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reported enthusiastically on the work in her syndicated newspaper column, My Day—but that was not enough to rescue the work from the oblivion to which the “handicaps” of its composer’s race and sex doomed it. It was not heard again in her lifetime and remained unperformed until 2001 and unpublished until 2008. Only now is it beginning to be heard in concert halls with any regularity.
Nevertheless, Florence Price’s Third Symphony towers over its surviving predecessor in originality and maturity of conception—and the composer’s correspondence shows that she understood its significance fully. In a 1940 letter she stated that it was “Negroid in character and expression” but hastened to clarify that it did not merely replicate the African American tradition as it was represented in her First Symphony. The later work, she said, was “a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought with its heritage of that which is past, paralleled or influenced by concepts of the present day” (emphasis added)—a reference to the Third Symphony’s cultivation of dissonant passages, jarring percussion, and other modernist expressive devices that were absent from the First Symphony but central to 20th-century music in general, and to much of Price’s later music.
These descriptions do not just reveal Price’s ideas about the music of this ambitious work. Even more, they reveal that she understood that it signaled a new stage in her development as a composer and paved the way for some of the most important and startlingly original compositions of her entire career.
Price’s Third Symphony is cast in four movements, all pitting traditional African American and modernist elements against each other. The first movement foregrounds 20th-century styles from the outset, beginning with an unsettled slow introduction and moving from there to a turbulent and dissonant main theme, allegro; only with the lush and expansive second theme, entrusted first to the solo trombone, do the flavors of Black vernacular styles come to the foreground. Those flavors launch the tranquil Andante ma non troppo, but the serene beauty of its opening section is repeatedly interrupted by unsettled whole-tone material that reminds us that this is, after all, music of the 20th century, not the 19th. The third movement is an African American Juba dance, but it also includes a blues-influenced theme that introduces a new facet of Black vernacular styles into the symphony. And the scherzo finale is a kaleidoscopic exploration of orchestral virtuosity and swirling colors. Although African American stylistic influences make themselves felt here, on the whole, the turbulence and harmonic adventure of mid20th-century classical music predominate. Time and again, the restlessness promises to subside, and time and again, the barely established calm is broken—until finally Price abandons any attempt to resolve the conflict between the two. The Symphony’s close is a tour de force of swirling, chaotic abandon punctuated by dissonance and chromaticism, and its final bars are a fury of roaring percussion and chordal interjections that finally manage to reclaim the work from turbulence and discord—the conflicting and discordant forces of the musical world, and the African American condition, given eloquent voice in this symphony.
—John Michael Cooper
JULIA BULLOCK
For a biography of curator Julia Bullock, please turn to page P13.
JERI LYNNE JOHNSON
Jeri Lynne Johnson is a multifaceted conductor with eclectic musical tastes for projects onstage and off.
She made history as the first African American woman not only to win an international conducting prize—the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship— but also to break barriers at major orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony, and Weimar Staatskapelle. One such project that underscores Johnson’s musical scope was her collaboration with rapper Jay-Z, singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, and the hip-hop band The Roots at Carnegie Hall. Her engagements in the 2022/23 season include the National Symphony Orchestra, Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Omaha Symphony, Ravinia Festival, New Orleans Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Opera Theater of Saint Louis, and Santa Fe Opera.
Determined to create an ensemble for the 21st century, she formed Philadelphiabased Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, made up of musicians from diverse cultures and ethnicities. Black Pearl’s mission is to transform the modern orchestra from being a gatekeeper into a facilitator of creativity. Since launching the award-winning orchestra in 2008, she has pioneered an approach to community engagement and programming that has been adopted by orchestras across the country.
A graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Chicago, she was awarded the Jorge Mester Conducting Scholarship to attend the Aspen Music Festival. Along the way, she worked with several mentors, among them Sir Simon Rattle, Marin Alsop, and Daniel Barenboim.
Putting to work her 20 years of experience and insight as an African American arts professional, Johnson founded DEI Arts Consulting in 2016, which provides organizations with creative and strategic services grounded in the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
DANIELLE PONDER
American soul singer Danielle Ponder is both empowering and a powerhouse. In 2020, NPR described her music as “anthemic while compassionate; soulful, while bold and strong. She reverberates with a goosebumpinducing passion.” Danielle attended Northeastern University, where she received her Juris Doctorate. For five years, Danielle worked as a public defender, providing criminal defense to the indigent community. While working in that capacity, Danielle also toured Europe and scored an opening spot with George Clinton. In 2018, she made the gutsy decision to pursue her No.1 passion—music. In 2021, Danielle performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, where her performance was hailed as one of the standouts of the festival. 2022 has been a banner year for Danielle, bringing appearances on Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS’ This Morning, tours with Marcus Mumford, Amos Lee, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, and Leon Bridges. Danielle’s debut album, Some of Us Are Brave, was released on September 16 on Future Classic. Danielle continues to advocate for criminal-justice reform and has been an influential leader in the Black Lives Matter movement in Rochester, NY.
Rock My Soul Festival Rhiannon Giddens
Rhiannon Giddens Los Angeles Philharmonic
Jeri Lynne Johnson, conductor
Resistance Revival Chorus
SATURDAY
NOVEMBER 12, 2022 8PM
Programs and artists subject to change.
Official and exclusive timepiece of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The Rock My Soul Festival is generously supported in part by Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa.
RHIANNON GIDDENS
Rhiannon Giddens is the cofounder of the Grammy® Awardwinning string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, in which she also plays banjo and fiddle. She began gaining recognition as a solo artist when she stole the show at the T Bone Burnett–produced Another Day, Another Time concert at New York City’s Town Hall in 2013. The elegant bearing, prodigious voice, and fierce spirit that brought the audience to its feet that night is also abundantly evident on Giddens’ critically acclaimed solo debut, the Grammy-nominated album Tomorrow Is My Turn, which masterfully blends American musical genres like gospel, jazz, blues, and country, showcasing her extraordinary emotional range and dazzling vocal prowess. In February of 2017, Giddens’ follow-up album Freedom Highway was released. It includes nine original songs Giddens wrote or co-wrote along with a traditional song and two civil rights-era songs, “Birmingham Sunday” and the Staple Singers’ well-known “Freedom Highway,” from which the album takes its name.
Giddens’ recent televised performances include The Late Show, Austin City Limits, Later…with Jools Holland, and both CBS Saturday and Sunday Morning, among numerous other notable media appearances. She performed for President Obama and the First Lady on In Performance at the White House: In the Gospel Tradition, along with Aretha Franklin and Emmylou Harris; the program was televised on PBS. Giddens duets with country superstar Eric Church on his powerful anti-racism song “Kill a Word”; the two have performed the song on The Tonight Show and at the CMA Awards, among other programs. Giddens received the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Singer of the Year, as well as the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Bluegrass and Banjo in 2016.
RESISTANCE REVIVAL CHORUS
The Resistance Revival Chorus (RRC) is a collective of more than 60 womxn and non-binary singers who join together to breathe joy and song into the resistance and to uplift and center womxn’s voices. Chorus members are touring musicians, film and television actors, Broadway performers, solo recording artists, gospel singers, political activists, educators, filmmakers, artists, and more, representing a multitude of identities, professions, creative backgrounds, and activist causes. They center womxn in music and address how historically marginalized womxn have been in the music industry. The great artist and activist Harry Belafonte once said, “When the movement is strong, the music is strong,” and they attempt to live up to that call. The RRC calls for justice and equity for womxn across racial, ethnic, economic, sexual identity, and religious lines. They aim to be intersectional in their feminism and reveal that all social justice issues overlap heavily with womxn’s issues; to harness the collective power of womxn to help change the world; to celebrate each other through song; to embrace Toi Dericotte’s idea of “joy as an act of resistance.”
JERI LYNNE JOHNSON
For a biography of conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson, please turn to page P22.
