GOAT HALL PRODUCTIONS
Fresh Voices XIV
Festival of New Works
July 11-12, 2014
8:00PM
TAKEN
San Francisco
Community Music Center
544 Capp Street,
San Francisco,
CA
PROGRAM
Helena Michelson
It Isn't Music That...
John G. Bilotta
Rosetta's Stone
Richard Bagwell
To Hell with Heroes
Aldan Jenks
Ghost Songs
Yvonne Freckman
Close Encounters of the Hillbilly Kind
Mark Alburger
Abducted by Aliens
PROGRAM NOTES
IT ISN'T MUSIC THAT
Helena Michelson is active as a composer and pianist and is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It Isn't Music That.... is set to poems by Paul Eluard (1895-1952), the great Surrealist poet, and here translated by Richard M. Weisman.
ROSETTA'S STONE
John G. Bilotta was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, but has spent most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rosetta's Stone is a collaborative opera-in-progress conceived by Oded Ben-Horin for multiple artists.
TO HELL WITH HEROES
To Hell with Heroes is Richard Bagwell's first opera.
GHOST SONGS
Alden Jenks is currently professor of composition at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Ghost Songs are settings of texts by Charles Simac who was born in Belgrade in 1938.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE HILLBILLY KIND
Yvonne Freckman is a composer, pianist, and avid promoter of new music.
Close Encounters of the Hillbilly Kind is a comedic portrayal of a young woman waiting for a bus, who meets a Kentucky hillbilly who is hell-bent on taking her to the Hilton.
ABDUCTED BY ALIENS
Mark Alburger is an eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities.
Abducted by Aliens, Op. 222, is star-charted over Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, with additional ISO's (Identified Sounding Objects) including Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, Claude Debussy's Nocturnes, Zoltan Kodaly's Hary Janos, Jacapo da Bologna's Non al suo Amante, Dave Grohl's Times Like These (Foo Fighters), Alexander Courage's Star Trek, Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1, Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, Camille Saint-Saens's Danse Macabre and Carnival of the Animals, George Crumb's Black Angels, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Igor Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles, W.A. Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio, Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, and Gustav Holst's The Planets -- all subject to various comedic / eclectic / minimalist observations.
THE SINGERS
Megan Conroy, Soprano
Ross Halper, Tenor
Nathan Marken, Lyric-Baritone
Harriet March Page, Mezzo-Soprano
Cass Panuska, Soprano
David Parr, Bass-Baritone
Indre Viscontas, Soprano
Wayne Dexter Wong, Bass-Baritone
THE MUSICIANS
Eic Gaenslen, Cello
Keisuke Nakagoshi, Piano
Robert Satterford, Horn
Monica Scott, Cello
Mary Tanios, Violin
Joffria Whitfield, Soprano Saxophone
***
Amazing series of performances -- very fulfilling and gratifying -- after a day which includes getting hirsuitedly "alienized",
heading there,
and doing dress rehearsals of all --
120th day of summer inland, high 86 (70th at 80-or-better), though a modest 72 in the City,
towards the
end of the
illumined, fog-filligreed night...
