Tuesday 25 November 2014, 8pm
The late, great, pioneering American contemporary composer, Robert Ashley, sadly passed away earlier this year but we were lucky enough to host a mesmeric three-day residency with him at OTO in 2012 that will live long in the memories of all those lucky enough to attend. Tonight, the acclaimed baritone and long-time champion of new music, Thomas Buckner presents a program of pieces written especially for him by Robert Ashley in their 30+ years of working together. Works include the stand-alone pieces ‘World War III, Just the Highlights’ and ‘Tract’, and two completely re-conceived concert versions of arias from the opera “Atalanta, Acts of God”: ‘The Producer Speaks’, and ‘Mystery of the River’.
Programme:
Mystery of the River (2014)
The Producer Speaks (1991)
Tract (2010)
World War III Just the Highlights (2013)
For more than 40 years, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. Buckner has collaborated with a host of new music composers including Robert Ashley, Noah Creshevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff and many others. He has made appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Herbst Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Ostrava Days Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Buckner is featured on over 40 recordings, including 6 of his own solo albums. His most recent solo recording “New Music for Baritone & Chamber Ensemble” includes works by Annea Lockwood, Tania Leon, and Petr Kotik. He also appears in the newly released CD/DVD “Kirili et le Nymphéas (Hommage à Monet)”. This recording documents the latest in his ongoing series of collaborations between the sculptor Alain Kirili and improvising musicians and dancers. For the past twenty years, Buckner has co-produced the Interpretations series in New York City. He also created the Mutable Music record label to produce new recordings and reissue some important historic recordings, previously unavailable in CD format.
Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. He pioneered opera-for-television.The operatic works of Robert Ashley are distinctly original in style, and distinctly American in their subject matter and in their use of American language. Fanfare Magazine calls Ashley's Perfect Lives "nothing less than the first American opera...", and The Village Voice comments, "When the 21st Century glances back to see where the future of opera came from, Ashley, like Monteverdi before him, is going to look like a radical new beginning." A prolific composer and writer, Ashley's operas are "so vast in their vision that they are comparable only to Wagner's Ring cycle or Stockhausen's seven-evening Licht cycle. In form and content, in musical, vocal, literary and media technique, they are, however, comparable to nothing else." (The Los Angeles Times).
