April 15, 2013
The Los Angeles Times says about Isherwood’s performance:
…a devastating and incomparably cathartic performance…
…One of the 10 best classical music events of 2011 in LA…
Mark Swed LA TIMESI am seeking gold from the very strangest and most marvelous stones with composer Veronika Krausas, developing our intimate new opera project: The Alchemy Suite, commissioned by the extraordinary baritone Nicholas Isherwood and produced in Los Angeles by Vera Icon Productions and Catalysis Projects.
I’m completing the texts and libretto – a trilogy for the alchemical magicians of Tibet, Iran, and France.
In a few weeks, I’ll start suspending turtle bones from monofilament and making the performance projections. It’s one of the oldest methods of soothsaying known to humanity, and I’m fortunate that so many comrades have been donating their found turtle bones. Do you have any? If so, please email my studio at studio@quintanwikswo.com.
PERFORMANCES:
May 31, 2013
Theatre de la Main d’Or – Paris, France
April 20, 2013
Monk Space, Los Angeles, USA
August 16, 2013
Musee d’Art Modern, Ceret, France
Saturday, April 20, 2013 8:30pm
East Meets West: An Evening with Nicholas Isherwood
The concert features the bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, with works by Ho Chung Shih, Giacinto Scelsi, Artyom Kim, N’Guyen Thien Dao, Isherwood and Veronika Krausas with text by Quintan Ana Wikswo.
MONK SPACE
4414 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90004
$25/$15 (general/students & seniors) available at the door or online
Limited Seating – get tickets NOW
BROWN PAPER TICKETS:
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The music draws on the vibrant and ancient legacy of art-making at the crossroads of “the Orient” and “the Occident” – exploring works by Westerners inspired by the East and Easterners who create art in the Western tradition. These contemporary and avant-garde works explore exoticism and mysticism, occultism and alchemy, experimentation and exploration between artists.
The evening features the official world premiere of The Alchemy Suite, with music by Veronika Krausas (music) and text & film projections by Quintan Ana Wikswo. The songs feature the King Blood Drinker, a Tibetan soothsayer whose turtle bones foretell the future; the apocryphal 15th-century mystic chemist Basil Valentine, and the legendary alchemist Marium Prophetissima, who invented Caput Mortuum, or death’s head, chemicals mixed from powdered mummies – as well as the basic instruments of modern chemistry.
NICHOLAS ISHERWOOD (baritone)
Nicholas Isherwood’s first experience as a stage director was Bruno Maderna’s opera Satyricon at the Carré St. Vincent in Orléans, France in 1990. He supervised the lighting, staging, costumes and programming of his sextet, VOXNOVA, from 1992-2008, notably directing Luciano Berio’s A-ronne in Alicante, Reims, Paris, Royaumont, Perpignan and Togamura, Japan.
Isherwood has directed student productions of Adriano Banchieri’s La Pazzia Senile, John Cage’s Song Books, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Am Himmel Wandre ich…, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at SUNY at Buffalo, Calarts and the University of Oregon.
Professional productions include Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón in Fontenay, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Am Himmel Wandre ich… in Paris, Bari (Teatro Petruzzelli), Utrecht, Amsterdam, Torino, Steier (Steierischer Herbst), Berlin (Deutsche Oper), Macerata, Mexico City (Musica y Escena), Guanajuato (the Festival Cervantino) and Reims (the CNAT), John Cage’s Song Books at the Théatre de Bourgogne in Dijon and the Théatre Sylvia Monfort in Paris and Mauricio Kagel’s Phonophonie in Paris (Salle Olivier Messiaen), Venice (Teatro Fondamenta Nuova), Torino (Teatro Regio), June in Buffalo, Mexico City (Musica y Escena), Paris (the Salle Olivier Messiaen) and at the Stuttgart Opera.
After taking a summer course on the “commedia dell’arte” with Antonio Fava in Regio Emilia, Isherwood has become increasingly interested in this art form. He has acquired a collection of masks and directed student productions of Adriano Banchieri’s La Pazzia Senile and Luciano Berio’s A-Ronne in traditional “commedia” style.
VERONIKA KRAUSAS (composer)
Composer Veronika Krausas has had her works performed internationally. The Globe & Mali (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 had commissions and performances by the Penderecki String Quartet, San Francisco Choral Artists and the Alexander String Quartet, Ensemble musikFabrik, Esprit Orchestra, The Vancouver Symphony, ERGO Projects, Continuum Music, Toca Loca, and Motion Music. She has music composition degrees from the University of Toronto, McGill University in Montreal, and a doctorate from the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.Krausas has directed, composed for, and produced multi-media events that incorporate her works with dance, acrobatics and video. Her chamber opera The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was premiered at the New York Opera’s VOX 2008 festival. It was staged and won both the Best Opera and Best Performance for The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth with soprano Michelle Jasso at Goat Hall Productions Works for Opera (San Francisco – 2009). A full production was mounted in Los Angeles in August 2010 to sold out audiences.In 2008 she organized a concert and CD release for The Player Piano Project, a collection of works for player piano by 22 composers from 6 countries.
In February 2009 the Penderecki String Quartet gave the US Premiere of midaregami, her work for string quartet and mezzo-soprano, at REDCAT Theater in Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. A commission for the 25th Anniversary of the San Francisco Choral Artists and the Alexander String Quartet, using text by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, premiered in May 2011 in San Francisco. It was released on CD with Foghorn Classics with Ferlinghetti reciting the poetry.
Her chamber orchestra work analemma is an official selection of the US for the 2012 World Music Days in Belgium.
Of Lithuanian heritage, she was born in Australia, raised in Canada, and lives in Los Angeles. Krausas is an Assistant Professor in the Composition Department and the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Theory at the Thornton School of Music, on the advisory council of Jacaranda Music, an associate artist with The Industry, a lecturer at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and an artist with Catalysis Projects.
QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO (concept, libretto, film projection)
Quintan Ana Wikswo‘s artistic and intellectual practice is located at the intersections of literature, film, photography, queer and feminist theory, new media, human rights, and performance collaboration with composers and choreographers. Her cross-disciplinary projects integrate her original texts in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and libretto, as well as her original alternative process photography, 35mm films, and live performance works.
Recognized for her exploration of new forms, hybrids, and cross-pollinated collaborative discovery, Wikswo’s singular vision and process crosses disciplines and defies distances between past and present, analog and digital, the anachronistic and the avant-garde.
Much of Wikswo’s work surrounds gender, sexuality and the politics of eroticism, exploring the ways in which states, governments and institutions exert power and control over bodies, minds, and their expressions. Her projects – typically created using salvaged military communications equipment – navigate known, unknown, and imagined worlds, including obscured and unmarked sites where crimes against humanity have taken place.
In 2013, Creative Capital awarded Wikswo with a multi-year grant for her transdisciplinary work in Emerging Fields. In addition, Wikswo has received major fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yaddo, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation, ARC/Durfee, Djerassi, the Puffin Foundation, Ucross, the Millay Colony, Villa Montalvo, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus, and more.
Her works are exhibited, published and performed around the world, including two major solo museum exhibitions in New York City (2011-12) and Germany (2013). Wikswo’s works have premiered internationally at institutions including the University of Southern California, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Lyon Musée des Moulages, Dixon Place, the Jewish Museum of Munich, Schloss Plüschow, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Beyond Baroque, Cornelia Street Cafe, MicroFest, Boston Court Performing Arts Center, California State University at Fullerton, the University of Maryland, Yeshiva University Museum, Kebbel Villa, The Composer’s Project, the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM), the National Center for Music Creation (GRAME), and in multiple galleries in Los Angeles and around the world.
A prolific writer across forms, her short stories, poems and essays appear regularly in magazines and journals including Tin House, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, WITNESS, New American Writing, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Folio, Sidebrow, and more. Her works are also published in artist’s books, exhibition catalogues, and anthologies such as One Blood: The Narrative Influence (University of Alaska Press). Multimedia DVDs include The Anguilladae Eaters (Catalysis Projects), Prophecy of Place (Yeshiva University Museum), Waterland (Vera Icon), and Apostrophe Catastrophe (Catalysis Projects).