THEMES OF IMMIGRATION & MIGRATION ARE CENTRAL TO PHAN'S PERFORMANCES THIS FALL
Following a return to live, in-person performances this past summer, celebrated tenor Nicholas Phan begins the 2021-22 season with both live and virtual chamber performances focusing on themes of immigration and migration. Highlighting his exploration of these themes is a tour of the United States with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider for performances of Nico Muhly’s new song cycle, Stranger, and the tenth Collaborative Works Festival of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago (CAIC), where he serves as curator and performer for three concerts in the festival’s 2021 iteration, Strangers in a Strange Land. Soon thereafter he celebrates his first musical holiday season in two years with performances of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah with the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, the San Francisco Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He caps his calendar year making his debut with the Seattle Symphony for their New Year’s Eve concerts.
Nico Muhly’s Stranger
Phan launches his season September 20, joining the string quartet Brooklyn Rider to perform the New York premiere of Nico Muhly’s new song cycle, Stranger, for a program at Music Mondays in New York City. When the same forces performed the world premiere of the work in January 2020 as part of the Emerging Voices project with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Philadelphia Inquirer raved: “Muhly is usually impressive, but this is a piece you can take to your heart, especially in the well-studied, beautifully polished performance by Brooklyn Rider and Phan at his articulate best.”
In the piece, Muhly juxtaposed settings of accounts of immigration through Ellis Island with settings of texts protesting the United States’ Chinese Exclusion policies of the late 19th century. The composer explains:
“These texts are not meant to address some generic sense of the American immigrant experience, but rather serve as an attempt to navigate different kinds of shared American stories, from the confrontational (forced assimilation) to the practical (eye exams at the border) and make the connection between oppressive 19th-century immigration policies and those being advocated in the U.S. even now.”
Phan and Brooklyn Rider recorded the work in the spring of 2020, and the recording is scheduled to be released on Avie Records in the spring of 2022 as part of an album exclusively devoted to the music of Nico Muhly featuring Phan and a variety of other collaborators.
Phan and Brooklyn Rider will also perform the piece at San Francisco Performances in its West Coast premiere (Oct 21), as well as in Boston (Nov 12) and Scottsdale, AZ (Nov 14). In New York and San Francisco, they will perform Stranger alongside songs by Thomas Campion and Rebecca Clarke, and in Boston and Scottsdale alongside Trois valses anglaises, a new arrangement of songs by Rufus Wainwright,.
2021 Collaborative Works Festival: Strangers In A Strange Land
Founded in 2010 by Phan along with Chicago-based pianists Shannon McGinnis and Nicholas Hutchinson, “CAIC has emerged as one of the classiest vocal performance options in the city” (Opera News). In October, Phan curates and performs in the tenth iteration of the Collaborative Works Festival, CAIC’s themed, annual focus on vocal chamber music. The 2021 Collaborative Works Festival: Strangers In A Strange Land explores themes of immigration and migration in song.
The Festival’s opening program, Songs of the New World (Oct 7), will showcase songs about the immigrant experience. In addition to the Midwest premiere of Muhly’s Stranger, songs by composers Errollyn Wallen, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Missy Mazzoli, Mohammed Fairouz, and Ian Cusson will be featured on this program alongside those of Franz Schubert, who wrote many songs on the themes of wandering and pilgrimage. The Festival’s second concert,Strangers (Oct 8), will feature songs by composers who immigrated to the United States, including Irving Berlin, Rebecca Clarke, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Chen Yi, and Kurt Weill. Also featured on this program will be songs by Florence Price, who moved to Chicago from Arkansas as part of the Great Migration. The final performance of the Festival, The Songs We Carried (Oct 9), will examine the ways in which song is both an important method of cultural exchange and an art form that many rely on to preserve their cultural identity upon arriving in a new location. The program will feature folk song arrangements by Benjamin Britten, Béla Bartók, Rebecca Clarke, and Percy Grainger; songs heavily influenced by folk elements by Gabriela Lena Frank and Alberto Ginastera; and spiritual arrangements by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and Julia Perry.
In addition to Phan, the 2021 Collaborative Works Festival will feature performances by a diverse line-up of singers and instrumentalists including soprano Helen Zhibing Huang, mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms, bass Anthony Reed, the Avalon String Quartet, violinist Adriane Post, and pianists Yasuko Oura, Ronny Michael Greenberg, and CAIC co-founder Shannon McGinnis.
CAIC plans to present the 2021 festival performances in an online/in-person hybrid format, with live, in-person performances as allowable according to state and city health regulations combined with delayed broadcasts of captured performances on CAIC’s streaming platforms throughout the months of October and November.
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