Following up on last season’s “Good-bye, Sailor” and 2014’s “Rich and Strange,” we invite you to a third program of music and words produced for Twenty Summers by M.T. Anderson, National Book Award–winning author of Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad. Our theme this year is the role of the rustic and the rural in the American imagination. The Aurea Ensemble, praised by theHuffington Post for its “intensity, superb sound, precision, and musicality that makes everything soar,” will play fiddle-tunes, hymn-tunes, and modern pieces based on traditional Americana. Movements for string quartet—culminating in Ben Johnston’s deeply moving Quartet No. 4 (“Amazing Grace”)—will alternate with excerpts from works by Robert Frost, John James Audubon, S. J. Perelman, and others, to be read by M. T. Anderson and Twenty Summers cofounder Julia Glass.
Goodbye, Sailor: An Evening of Words and Music
An evening of classical music and readings about nautical wanderlust. The musical performance by L’Académie chamber orchestra featured dramatic pieces by Henry Purcell, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Marin Marais, and others. Literary excerpts, ranging from Homer to Robert Browning, were read by National Book Award–winning authors M. T. Anderson and Julia Glass.
An Evening of Writerly Conversations
Fantasy, Reality, and Bookcraft: The Art of World Building.” Gregory Maguire, author of the Oz-inspired series The Wicked Years, and National Book Award–winning young-adult author M. T. Anderson (Feed; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing) discuss their lives, their craft, and their upcoming books in a staged conversation moderated by Katherine Howe, New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.