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.
Melville and the Great White Whale: Aurea Ensemble in Concert
Classical string quartet Aurea Ensemble play their own tribute to Moby-Dick, “Melville and the Great White Whale,” which features Beethoven, Webern, sea shanties, and other nautically evocative music along with readings from the novel and from Melville’s correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated his masterpiece.
Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy
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.