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- This event has passed but will not be forgotten!
Hope and Healing: a “Lifeline Song Cycles” Fundraising Concert
January 28, 2023 @ 7:30 pm
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Inwood Art Works in association with Our Savior’s Atonement present
Hope and Healing: a “Lifeline Song Cycles” Fundraising Concert
Saturday, January 28, 2023 at 7:30pm
$20 Minimum Suggested Donation for Adults $5 Minimum Suggested Donation for children under 18.
Walk-ups welcome.
Our Savior’s Atonement – 178 Bennett Ave, New York, NY 10040
Featuring
THE MERCURY CHAMBER PLAYERS
Paul Brantley, composer and cellist, Steven Beck, pianist, Ariadne Greif, soprano.
Playing the music of J.S. Bach, Bloch, Buxtehude, Hindemith, Sibelius, and the premiere of Paul Brantley’s Four American Songs.
You are cordially invited to attend this beautiful concert by The Mercury Chamber Players who are contributing their artistry to raise funds for a much larger second concert this Spring. This second spring concert — to be announced soon — will present the entire sequence of composer Paul Brantley’s six “Lifeline Song Cycles” — a program that requires a roster of at least four singers and six instrumentalists.
As a bit of background on these Lifeline Song-Cycles, the composer Paul Brantley writes:
“During the five or so months I was recovering from Covid back in mid 2020, my ability to compose — something I have done since I was about 7 — went away. But then a playwright friend sent me this T.S. Eliot poem, ‘Wait Without Hope’:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
And then it was if I discovered that my composer’s ‘pilot light’ was still flickering. Within a few weeks I was making a setting of this poem (using the text as my ‘lyrics’ to be sung) and then set two more poems by Auden and Wallace Stevens. This became my English Lyrics for soprano, clarinet and piano; my first song-cycle. But then I couldn’t stop. I eventually composed five more song cycles — all trios for different combinations of voices and instruments — setting more of my favorite poets: Hölderlin, James Joyce, Machado, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens. ‘Borrowing their energy’ as Oliver Sacks put it. Life-lines.
And so, we invite you to take part in one or both of these concerts of hope and healing… which trace the shared, life-changing experiences, of these extraordinary times.”
All proceeds benefit the concert for The Life-line Song-cycles.
Donations can be made here: http://www.inwoodartworks.nyc/support/donate-now/
Or send check to “Inwood Art Works” at 97 Park Terrace West, New York, NY 10034 with “Lifeline Song Cycle” in the memo.
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Inwood Art Works mission is to create and curate professional performing and visual arts in Inwood and its surrounding community. Aaron Simms, Founder and Executive Producer.
