VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2
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WINTER 2015
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DUNSINANE Reimagining Macbeth ALSO IN T HI S I S S U E • Emil Unplugged: A Student of the World • Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem • The Lamentation Project • Meet CPA’s New Director of Programming
CAROLINA PERFORMING ARTS C R E AT E | P R E S E N T | C O N N E C T
Siobhan Redmond as the cunning Lady Macbeth. PHOTO BY S IMON MURPHY.
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t has become something
a student. He is always
of a tradition in Chapel
learning”
Hill: every two years, the
When Kang came
Silk Road Ensemble (SRE)
to Chapel Hill, he knew
performs in a sold-out
immediately he wanted
Memorial Hall. Emil Kang
Ma to be included in the
recalls being a bit nervous
programming. “The
though in advance of the
first time he was here
Ensemble’s first performance
was with a quartet. It
with Carolina Performing
was Yo-Yo’s first string
Arts (CPA) in 2010. “It
quartet appearance in
was August and completely
A B O V E : Emil Kang and Yo-Yo Ma during Kang’s tenure with the Seattle Symphony.
outside of our season, before school even started. Our audience was meeting all of
“ Yo -Yo i s f ir s t and foremo s t a s tudent . He i s alway s le arning .”
twenty years,” recalls Kang. The group spent four days in Gerrard Hall to give Ma time to practice
these musicians for the first time, he explains. “But of course,
after his two-decade hiatus. For Kang, this was another example
they blew everyone out of the water.”
of CPA’s commitment to supporting great artists. “It was an
SRE has been making that impression in venues across the
important achievement for us to provide those circumstances—
world for fourteen years. A collective of renowned musicians
to give Yo-Yo Ma the time and space to be able to rehearse and
from over twenty countries, the ensemble is committed to
rediscover.”
fostering greater understanding between Eastern and Western
Some of the marketing decisions in those early days of
cultures, an imperative symbolized by their name. While
CPA make Kang chuckle. “The program was called Yo-Yo
best known for innovative and moving concerts, community
Ma and Friends, which to me sounds like Elmo and Friends,” he
outreach, education, and research are also important parts of
recalls. The title would be prescient though since the other three
SRE’s ongoing mission.
musicians were members of Brooklyn Rider, the string quartet
Kang, who has known Yo-Yo Ma for twenty years, is not
that now makes its own regular appearances in Memorial Hall
at all surprised that this classical cellist took on a project far larger
and in classrooms across campus. Because of Ma’s push to bring
in scope than the musical canon for which he gained worldwide
them to his first CPA performance, Brooklyn Rider has truly
fame. While at the Seattle Symphony, Kang brought Ma’s early
become a friend to CPA and the larger UNC community.
cross-genre collaborations to town. “I watched him talk to
It is a connection for which Kang is grateful. “I think that
people about the connections among cultural traditions and why
symbolizes what Yo-Yo does. He wants everyone to be
he thought they were meaningful. Yo-Yo is first and foremost
elevated. He elevates others.”
— Aaron Shackelford
• T H E S I L K R OA D EN S EM B L E RE T U RN S TO M EM O R I A L H A L L O N F R I DAY, F EB RUA RY 27, A N D B R O O K LY N R I D ER P ERFO RM S O N S AT U RDAY, M A R C H 28 . •
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ARTS@THECORE
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KPO Photo
Marion Valentine
Cross-Campus Conversations: The Lamentation Project
A B O V E : The 2013 world premiere of Nacho Duato’s Rust at Memorial Hall.
A B O V E : Peggy Lyman Hayes performs Martha Graham’s Lamentation.
he campus of UNC-Chapel Hill is not as large as it sometime seems. The walk from the north end of Franklin Street to the UNC Hospital complex on the south end is less than a mile. Yet for students and faculty alike, the distance between an undergraduate course on poetry and the clinical training of a thirdyear medical student can seem vast. One of the main goals of Arts@TheCore is to help close this distance. Dedicated to integrating the performing arts with the academic mission of the University, Arts@TheCore brings together faculty from across campus for conversations inspired by the Carolina Performing Arts (CPA) season. “When faculty gather around the table, new ideas and connections start popping up everywhere,” says Joy Kasson, Mellon Distinguished Scholar for Arts@TheCore. This semester, CPA is bringing together faculty from creative writing, English, American studies, social work, medicine, and nursing to discuss how they and their students encounter the concepts
of loss and grief. Dubbed The Lamentation Project, the ongoing conversation examines how both art and medicine respond to tragedy as well as how we understand and recover from loss. Humanities and medical faculty alike have shared poems, performances, and personal stories that have inspired their work and their own lives. The result is new connections among disciplines that rarely interact. The dialogue allows faculty to see how the arts as well as the insights of their peers in other departments can contribute to their teaching. Cross-campus conversations also appeal to CPA’s artists. The name of the project comes from Lamentation, an iconic solo piece by modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. For the group’s first meeting in September, faculty were joined by Janet Eilber, artistic director and former dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Eilber shared with faculty how dancers, including Graham herself, have approached the challenge of expressing grief and loss through movement. In
turn, Eilber listened to faculty in pastoral care and writing share their strategies for helping students express their feelings and ideas. These conversations provided faculty greater insight into how a performance and dance itself might inform the education of their professional and undergraduate students. These meetings have also been invaluable for members of the Graham Company, who will perform at Memorial Hall on April 14 and 15. The expertise and knowledge shared by UNC’s faculty provided Eilber and company dancers new perspectives on their choreography and may have even sparked a few ideas for future projects. One of the pieces the company will perform in April—Rust by the celebrated choreographer Nacho Duato—addresses the challenging topics of torture and human rights. Commissioned by CPA in 2013, Rust will offer another opportunity for faculty to tackle difficult topics with their colleagues and students in compelling and fresh ways. — Aaron Shackelford
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he English composer Benjamin Britten considered War Requiem “a call for peace” and one of his most important works. Completed in 1962 for the re-consecration of Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed during a World War II bombing raid, the piece is a large-scale requiem mass for choir, organ, full orchestra, chamber orchestra, and soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists. A pacifist, Britten was outraged over the slaughter of war and dedicated the masterpiece to four friends who had fought in World War I. This March, Carolina Performing Arts will collaborate with the UNC Symphony Orchestra and Carolina Choir to present War Requiem with the world-renowned soloists Christine Goerke (soprano), Anthony Dean Griffey (tenor), and Nathan Gunn (bass-baritone). Tonu Kalam, music director and conductor of the UNC Symphony Orchestra, describes War Requiem as “one of those iconic works that sits almost by itself in the genre.” Its uniqueness comes not only from Britten’s powerful score, but the structure of the composition. Upending the requiem form, Britten intersperses the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead with nine poems by Wilfred Owen, a leading poet of World War I who was killed just a week before the Armistice. Kalam will lead the one-hundred-member UNC Symphony as they undertake what he sees as an important experience for any student musician. “The piece is eighty-five minutes long and very difficult. It’s one of the more challenging things I’ve ever done, and I did opera for ten years,” explains WINTER 2015
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Kalam. In addition to Britten’s highly complex musical score, the orchestra students also face the challenge of performing with a choir and soloists. “Working with singers is different,” says Kalam. “The breathing changes and you’re using a text rather than the abstraction of notes on the page.” For Kalam, one of the lessons the students must learn will be their place within the emotional structure of the music. That task is even more difficult as the choir will not be there to guide them during early rehearsals. “A work like this will take them a while to get into.” “The piece is eighty-five minutes long and very difficult. It’s one of the more challenging things I’ve ever done, and I did opera for ten years.” — TONU K AL AM When Britten premiered War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Even a long accidental pause on the live BBC broadcast—delayed because the audience was still filing into the cathedral—was treated as a brilliant silence by listeners. The work’s anti-war message tapped into the growing peace movements in the 1960s, and it became so beloved that Igor Stravinsky once muttered that to criticize the piece would be “as if one had failed to stand up for God Save the Queen.” The sheer size and complexity of War Requiem means live performances are relatively rare, but of course that is part
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L E F T : UNC Symphony Orchestra. B E L O W : Tonu Kalam. B O T T O M : The remains of England’s Coventry Cathedral following the World War II bombing.
of its appeal. For the students in the production, it is a unique opportunity to experience how such a major undertaking comes together. Instrument groups will practice individually, and it will be weeks before any of them hear the entire piece. “It will be a process that will start slowly by bits and pieces,” Kalam explains. “The continuity will be awkward as a learning process, but the students will learn this is how music works sometimes. We put things together in blocks that don’t always line up. But then it grows into something recognizable.” “I’ve only heard the work live once in my life, and it was a powerful experience. I think the audience will feel a real emotional impact by the end of the performance.” — TONU K AL AM
The Carolina Choir will be rehearsing independently, preparing the Latin text and Owen’s poetry that weaves into the demanding score. “They will need singing with the utmost beauty, intensity, and sincerity,” Britten wrote as he developed the piece. One of the students who will be involved in the performance, Charlotte Jackson, is a senior vocal major who looks forward to the opportunity to work with world-class soloists Griffey, Goerke, and Gunn. “Having the opportunity to perform with some of the finest artists of our time is an overwhelming privilege,” Jackson says. “I have followed the career of many of these artists as a young opera singer and will enjoy every minute collaborating with them on this important work.” Jackson looks ahead to that moment when all the pieces of War Requiem come together on stage. “It is so important for singers to work with other instrumentalists,” she notes. “It increases our sensitivity to each other while performing, which betters all of us as artists.” As a senior applying to music conservatories, Jackson appreciates the chance to work with her peers in the orchestra. “The UNC Symphony Orchestra is phenomenal, and I look forward to learning from and building on their great musicianship under the baton of Tonu Kalam.” The March 5 performance will also be a special night for Kalam. “I’ve only heard the work live once in my life, and it was a powerful experience,” he says. “I think the audience will feel a real emotional impact by the end of the performance.” — Aaron Shackelford CAROLINAPERFORMINGARTS.ORG
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ave you ever finished the end of a gripping story and wondered what happened next? This feeling was the impetus behind acclaimed Scottish playwright David Greig’s Dunsinane, which opens where Shakespeare’s powerful tragedy Macbeth leaves off. “Macbeth is about the toppling of a king, but I found I was interested in what happened after the king was overthrown,” explains Grieg. At the beginning of Dunsinane, the tyrant Macbeth is dead, and the English army that ended his reign is attempting to restore peace to the kingdom by installing a new ruler. When the commanding officer reaches Macbeth’s fortress at Dunsinane, however, he discovers a significant obstacle—the cunning and power-hungry Lady Macbeth. Suspected to have committed suicide, the queen turns out to be alive and in hiding and living under her given name of Gruach. “She believes that her clan, her faction, should be in charge, and it is her right to be queen,” explains Greig. And Gruach will go to any length necessary to see that her fifteen-year-old son inherits the throne. The opportunity to resurrect Lady Macbeth was a rich inspiration to Greig, considered Scottish theatre’s most eclectic and prolific writer. “Who could resist the chance to revisit Lady Macbeth,” Grieg asked, “one of the greatest characters in all drama?” The opportunity to inhabit the role of the mysterious, icy queen is equally irresistible to actors. Siobhan Redmond, the actress who originated the role, says “We think we know who Lady Macbeth is, but this gives us a different slant on her and that’s very refreshing. It’s a great privilege to be a part of.” Though set in eleventh-century Scotland, Dunsinane draws from the present as much as it does from the past. The play poses several questions that are relevant to contemporary conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. What happens after the fall of a dictator? What is it like to be a young soldier fighting in a war that is not well understood and for which there is little support at home? What does it means to be an unwelcome outsider in a foreign land? These questions are familiar territory for the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). The company’s first visit to Chapel Hill in February 2011 was with a “Loading Dock” presentation of Black Watch, an unforgettable and intense play by Gregory Burke based on interviews with former British soldiers who had served in Iraq. In 2012, NTS returned to Chapel Hill with another work by Greig, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. The play was presented at Top of the Hill’s Back Bar and was another huge
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Richard Campbell
H
Jason Ma
MACBETH
A B O V E : Darrell D’Silva as the English commander Siward. L E F T : Siobhan Redmond as Gruach.
success with CPA audiences. Though the plot of Dunsinane is a far cry from Prudencia’s farcical academic conference on border ballads, the script possesses the same masterful dialogue and poignant humor that Greig brings to all his works. In Dunsinane, Greig weaves an engrossing narrative that throws into question who the kingdom’s rightful ruler is. What begins as a peace-keeping mission to bring order to a community in conflict quickly devolves into further chaos. How does the story end? Join us at Memorial Hall on January 29 and 30 to find out. — Rachel Ash
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T
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he bustling UNC campus and backstage the next ten-and-a-half years, she took on corridors of Memorial Hall are familiar stompmore responsibility within the orchestra’s ing grounds for CPA’s new Director of Proartistic team and discovered her love of gramming Amy Russell. A Carolina alumna programming. who majored in music, Amy remembers perThough classical music is her area forming at Memorial each year as a member of expertise, Amy’s personal playlists are of the UNC Symphony Orchestra and playing incredibly diverse. “My great musical with her rock band in neighboring Gerrard loves are indie rock and contemporary Hall. “We used to sneak into Gerrard at night chamber music—My Brightest Diamond, to rehearse by opening a back window that yMusic, Neko Case, Mogwai, David was unlocked,” she reveals with a smile. Bazan—and icons like David Byrne and Though much has changed since then—beTom Waits. I also love 1960s’ soul—the ginning with more secure windows—she is list goes on,” she says. A longtime fan of thrilled to be back at Carolina and in Chapel CPA, Amy was drawn to the diversity of the Hill. “It’s one of the greatest little big cities programming here and the opportunity on earth.” to work with artists of all genres. “Within Prior to joining CPA in October, Amy each season, there is such variety and oversaw the programming for the North creativity and such an adventurous spirit,” A B O V E : Amy Russell Carolina Symphony as their artistic says Amy. administrator. A lifelong student of classical music, she began As director of programming, Amy is responsible for planning playing the piano at age four, then took up the clarinet and future seasons, nurturing relationships with artists and agents, eventually the bassoon at age twelve. “I was playing clarinet in and facilitating collaborations and commissions. She is currently middle school band like approximately 55 other little girls,” explains finalizing the 2015/16 season and is already exploring some Amy. “Then one day my band director held up a bassoon over his exciting projects for 2016/17. Every conversation, whether it is head and announced, ‘Someone has to play this.’” Amy accepted with an artist, a faculty member, a fellow presenter, or an audience the challenge, and the instrument proved to be such a good fit that member, is a source of potential inspiration for Amy. “Emil and she continued performing through college. It was her bassoon CPA’s supporters have built a place where artists know they can professor at Carolina, John Pederson, who encouraged Amy to apply come and really follow their passion. The possibilities seem to be for an internship with the N.C. Symphony following graduation. Over limitless.” — Rachel Ash
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THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, SHARE YOUR LOVE FOR THE ARTS WITH THE NEXT GENERATION. Help us reach our $25,000 CHALLENGE GRANT with your gift by DECEMBER 31!
Each $40 you contribute to the Student Ticket Angel Fund will underwrite the cost of one student ticket. Make a gift to CPA’s Student Ticket Angel Fund TODAY. www.carolinaperformingarts.org/angel L E F T : Imogen Schofield, Class of 2016 and Memorial Hall regular
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Campus Box 3233 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3233
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Friday, March 20 at 8:00 p.m.
SANAM MARVI
S
SONGS FROM THE LAND OF FIVE RIVERS
ufi/folk singer Sanam Marvi’s performance at Memorial Hall this March will be steeped in the rich musical traditions of the Punjab, a region that straddles the India-Pakistan border. Five rivers flow through Punjab, and their bucolic, ever-changing banks have inspired generations of Sufi poets and the tragic romances of Heer Ranjha, Mirza Sahiban, and Sohni Mahiwal. Born in Hyderabad, Pakistan, Marvi is one of South Asia’s leading young voices. Pakistan’s Daily Times has said of Marvi that she possesses “a voice that pierces right through your heart and a vocal range that can move skies.” She has received similar high praise from India’s Hindustani Times, which called her “one of the finest performers in the Sufi, ghazal, and folk genres.” Immersed in Sufi and Pakistani folk music as a child, Marvi began her musical training at age seven. Her first teacher was her father, the Sufi singer Faqeer Ghulam Rasool, who brought the young Marvi with him to performances at Sufi shrines across Pakistan. The two would sing together outside the Radio Pakistan building with the hope that passersby would discover Marvi’s talent and help secure her first big break. Her voice found the audience she had been seeking in 2004 thanks to a regional Sindhi radio channel (Sindh is south of Punjab and where Marvi grew up). She then gained a national stage with appearances on two Pakistani television programs and began to popularize the folk songs she loves among Indian and Pakistani youth. With each performance, Marvi brings new life and her own modern sensibility to age-old Sufi and Pakistani music. CALL THE BOX OFFICE TODAY (919/843-3333) TO RESERVE YOUR SEATS FOR THIS “DON’T-MISS” PERFORMANCE.
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Carolina Performing Arts / The Porthole Building / 134 East Franklin St. / CB 3233 / Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3233 / carolinaperformingarts.org