March 17, 2014
THE ALCHEMIST’S SUITE is a collaboration with my long-term collaborator – composer Veronika Krausas – and bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood. I contributed the concept, libretto/text, and film. A project of Catalysis Projects, it premiered in live performance at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Ceret, France in August 2013, along with performances in Los Angeles at Monk Space and in Paris at Theater de le Main d’Or. Catalysis Projects just released it recently on Vimeo.
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VERONIKA KRAUSAS //
COMPOSER /
Veronika Krausas (composer) has had her works performed internationally, where she is recognized for her innovative use of theatre, acrobatics, and video. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) writes that “her works, whose organic, lyrical sense of storytelling are supported by a rigid formal elegance, give her audiences a sense that nature’s frozen objects are springing to life.” Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times said of her chamber opera “Something novel this way comes.” She has received commissions & been performed by the Penderecki String Quartet, San Francisco Choral Artists and the Alexander String Quartet, MusikFabrik, Musiques Nouvelles (Belgium), Aron Kallay, Steven Vanhauwert, ERGO Projects, the Vancouver Symphony, Esprit Orchestra (Toronto), Toca Loca, and Motion Music. She is a professor and Director of Undergraduate Theory at the Thornton School of Music at USC. www.veronikakrausas.com
NICHOLAS ISHERWOOD
// BASS BARITONE
Nicholas has sung in the world’s leading festivals (Salzburg, Aix, Festival d’Automne, Avignon, Almeida, Biennale di Venezia, Holland Festival, Munich Biennale, Wien Modern, Händel Festivals in Göttingen and Halle, Tanglewood, Ravinia, etc.) and opera houses (Royal Opera House, Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Lyon, Châtelet, Théatre des Champs Elysées, Rome, Torino, Genova, La Fenice, La Scala, etc.), working with conductors such as Joel Cohen, William Christie, Peter Eötvös, Gabriele Ferro, Nicholas McGegan, Paul McCreesh, Zubin Mehta, Kent Nagano, Helmuth Rilling, David Robertson, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and Arturo Tamayo. Isherwood has worked closely with composers such as Sylvano Bussotti, Elliott Carter, George Crumb. Hans Werner Henze, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, Steve Lacy, Olivier Messiaen, Giacinto Scelsi and Iannis Xenakis.
Isherwood collaborated with Karlheinz Stockhausen for 23 years, singing numerous world premieres. He has improvised with Steve Lacy, Joelle Léandre, David Moss and Sainkho Namtchilak. He has made 55 compact discs for labels such as Erato and Harmonia Mundi and has appeared in three films for television. An active pedagogue, he has taught master classes at schools such as the Paris Conservatoire, Musikhochschule Köln, Salzburg Mozarteum and Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi and held positions at SUNY Buffalo, Notre Dame, Calarts and the Ecole Normale de Musique. His book Techniques of Singing was just published by Barenreiter-Verlag. www.nicholasisherwood.com
QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO //
FILM INSTALLATION // LIBRETTO
Quintan Ana Wikswo is recognized for adventurous, challenging cross-disciplinary projects that integrate her original literature, visual art, film installations, and performance works. Her projects – created using salvaged military cameras and communications equipment – navigate known, unknown, and imagined worlds, including obscured and occluded sites where genocide, ecocide, and crimes against humanity have taken place. Wikswo’s artistic and intellectual practice explores the volatile borderlands and lacunae between intimate internal worlds and external geopolitical upheaval, especially those surrounding gender, sexuality, warfare, science and shamanism.
Her collection of stories, poems and photographs THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED US THIS FAR is forthcoming on Coffee House Press (Spring 2015) and other works have appeared in Tin House, Gulf Coast, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and more. She has created twenty-seven film-and-text works for performance collaboration, including four DVD collections of her performance-text-video installations. Her work has appeared in solo museum exhibitions in New York City, France, and Germany, and include a current six-month show at the Jewish Museum Berlin with a catalogue on Kehrer Verlag. She performs regularly in New York City at Dixon Place, (Le) Poisson Rouge, Incubator Arts, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, Cornelia Street, and more; St. Marks in the Bowery/Incubator Arts Project will premiere her two-woman performance piece with Lydia Lunch in April 2014. She has been honored with fellowships from Creative Capital, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. www.QuintanWikswo.com