(PRINCETON, NJ) -- On Sunday, January 31 at 4 pm, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra (PSO) presents Three Songs featuring 5-time Grammy Award-winning soprano Dawn Upshaw performing Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, written for her by Osvaldo Golijov. The concert’s program finds inspiration in a variety of cultures with Zoltán Kodály’s Dances of Galánta and W.A. Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony. Conducted by Music Director Rossen Milanov, the PSO will also perform Music Alive: New Partnerships Composer-in-Residence Jing Jing Luo’s Tsao Shu. Ms. Luo’s residency is sponsored by a grant program of New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras. Tickets range from $30 to $75.
Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire. In 2007, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, the first vocal artist to be award the five-year “genius” prize. In 2008, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Most recently, she received the 2014 Best Classical Vocal Solo Grammy for Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks on the ArtistShare label.
Rossen Milanov describes Ms. Upshaw as “one of the most important vocal artists and influential vocal teachers of our generation. She brings to the art of singing not only beauty of voice and virtuoso technique, but a deep interpretation of text, creating a perfect marriage between poetry and music.”
Ovaldo Golijov’s Three Songs reflects musical sounds and poetry of his native Argentina and his family’s Western European roots, showcasing Ms. Upshaw’s linguistic versatility through texts in Yiddish, Galician, and English. Ms. Upshaw premiered each of the songs individually and in a combination orchestrated by Golijov for a commission to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2002.
Composer Zoltán Kodály’s Dances of Galánta is the result of a lifelong fascination with the musical styles of his native Hungary, and integrates melodic strands and rhythmic patterns of folk songs with Modernist sound. Preceding Kodály by a century, Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 in D Major, known as the “Prague,” notably represents the composer’s unique blend of lyricism and counterpoint.
Jing Jing Luo, born in Beijing, China, is a prolific composer and performer with a distinctive musical language. She has received a commissioning award from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, two from the Rockefeller Foundation, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, among others. The American Academy of Arts and Letters praised her music as “…expressive, a fascinating mixture of sources, and exciting virtuosity,” stating that Ms. Luo is continually “refining her special language with each new score.”
During her residency with the PSO, Ms. Luo will discuss her commitment to traditional Chinese calligraphy and its relationship to her composition Tsao Shu, named after the most simplified and yet most abstracted form of calligraphy known as “grass style” or “running script.” The Residency includes a January 20 PSO Soundtracks appearance at the Princeton Public Library to discuss her calligraphy and a January 30 PSO Behind the Music talk on her compositional process at the Arts Council of Princeton. A meeting with participants in the Princeton Adult School’s VIP Pass program, PSO rehearsal attendance, the PSO concert and pre-concert talk, and a workshop with students responding to her work as part of their participation in the PSO BRAVO! Listen Up! creative response program will also take place.
Ms. Luo’s residency is made possible through Music Alive: New Partnerships, a residency program of New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras. This national program is designed to establish new relationships between composers and orchestras, and to help orchestras present new music to the public and build support for new music within their institutions. Leadership funding for Music Alive is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music and The ASCAP Foundation Bart Howard Fund.
For more information visit princetonsymphony.org.
Photo courtesy of jingjingluo.com
