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Friday, April 29 & Saturday, April 30, 2022, 8:00 p.m.
Beowulf
Benjamin Bagby, voice and medieval harp
 In a tour de force of storytelling, medieval music scholar and performer Benjamin Bagby demonstrates how music supports the recounting of the story of Beowulf. This epic tale of heroes and monsters was written down over a thousand years ago, but it may in fact be much older, and Bagby declaims the entire tale, from start to finish. The famed warrior comes alive as Bagby sings, speaks, intones and howls the story at us, in Anglo-Saxon, accompanying himself on medieval harp and with projected English supertitles.
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The New Yorker calls Rolf Schulte “one of the most distinguished violinists of our day.” This concert brings together a chain of solo violin music about memory – Elliott Carter’s wispy Mnemosyne, his Four Lauds, written in memory of composers he had known, and Stravinsky’s Élègie, which Schulte played at Carter’s memorial service. Interleafing with these are the movements of a piece from Western classical music’s collective memory, Sonata No. 2 in A minor, by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Composer and pianist Michael Harrison’s deep training in both Western and Indian classical musics has led him to become a pioneer in the world of just intonation. The piano is normally tuned so that the intervals between each note are equal, which is physically not natural; just intonation seeks to return tuning to its natural roots, in which musical intervals reflect their origins in perfect mathematical proportions. For this concert our piano will be retuned every day for a week before the concert, so that it will stay true to the mindbending sound world of this intense, hypnotic masterpiece.
Born in Tehran and raised in the United States, Mahan Esfahani is one of the most acclaimed harpsichordists in the world today. A scholar as well as a performer, Esfahani is equally at home in music of the ancient past and pieces being written right now. This concert will include both new and old works, and will highlight intricate and virtuosic compositions by two titans of Elizabethan music, John Bull and William Byrd.
In 2015, Haitian-American composer, singer and flutist Nathalie Joachim decided to compose new music that would explore her connections to her immediate family, to her heritage, and to her artistic roots. The result is Fanm D'Ayiti (Women of Haiti), a collection of songs that weave together her own family stories with powerful tributes to three pioneering Haitian female musicians—Carole Demesmin, Emerante de Pradines and Toto Bissainthe. With the collaboration of Chicago’s Spektral Quartet, Joachim has created a song cycle of immense poignancy and beauty, for which they were recognized when the commercial recording was nominated for a Grammy Award just this past year.
