The world premiere of Crossings, a new work by Bay Area composer Eric Tuan based on four international stories of the immigrant experience, highlights Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir’s Making History-New Works program to be given April 12, at 7:30 pm at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. Conducted by Piedmont Choirs founding Artistic Director Robert Geary, the program also features guest artists, St. Catherine’s College Girls Choir from Cambridge England, directed by Edward Wickham, and works my Meredith Monk, Marck Winges, Pekka Kostianen, Peter Knell, Peter Toth and a premiere by Sue Bohlin.
Incoming Piedmont Choirs Artistic Director Eric Tuan’s Crossings is an interdisciplinary four-movement choral work exploring the experiences of refugees across time and geography. The work situates the stories of four different refugee communities in musical dialogue, while the performers enact their own physical journey of displacement through the performance space.
Tuan highlights the voices of four different refugee communities, ranging from ancient Israel to contemporary California. The work opens with a setting of poetry from Javier Zamora’s collection Undocumented, depicting his grandmother’s farewell as the poet flees violence in El Salvador for the United States. The second movement, The Caravan, narrates the family history of one of our choristers, whose great-grandmother left Hungary in a migrant caravan at the end of the Second World War. The work uplifts the words of interned Japanese-American poets in the third movement, Barbed Wire Fence, before turning to the voices of the ancient Hebrews fleeing Egyptian slavery in From Desert Wastes. This final movement sacralizes the refugee experience by situating it within the context of the psalms, a book of devotional poetry common to both Jewish and Christian traditions.
Presented by Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir.
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Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/12/19
7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Cost
$15-$35
Location
First Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing Way
Berkeley
Contact:
info@piedmontchoirs.org
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