New Music

Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi, Eco Ensemble,
and yMusic

WEST COAST PREMIERE

Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi

An American Modern Opera Company Production

Fri, Sep 27, 8pm, Zellerbach Hall

Zack Winokur, director
Julia Bullock, soprano
Conor Hanick, piano
Bobbi Jene Smith, choreographer and dancer
Or Schraiber, choreographer and dancer

Harawi, an American Modern Opera Company production, realizes Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for voice and piano in a newly physicalized and dramatized dimension featuring company members soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, and choreographer/dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, with direction by Zack Winokur. Moving from duet to quartet, the production breaks open Messiaen’s cycle, connects the relationship between movement and music, and grapples with the intensity of love and loss in the human experience.

Leadership support for the 2024-25 Julia Bullock residency at Cal Performances is provided by Michael P. N. A. Hormel.

An Illuminations: “Fractured History” event.

Eco Ensemble

Best of Berkeley

David Milnes, director
Sat, Feb 1, 8pm, Hertz Hall

The UC Berkeley Music Department’s ensemble in residence devotes its winter concert to works by alumni of the university’s prestigious composition program, praised by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a constant source of challenging and arresting new compositions.” In recent seasons, the adventurous ensemble has performed the music of visiting composers Kaija Saariaho and Toshio Hosokawa, as well as faculty members Ken Ueno, Edmund Campion, and Cindy Cox to great acclaim. This season, director David Milnes leads the group through acoustic and electroacoustic works by recent and distant graduates, including Jimmy López Bellido and Mason Bates, among others.

WORLD PREMIERE

yMusic Performs a World Premiere by Gabriella Smith

Sat, Mar 8, 8pm, Zellerbach Playhouse

Praised by NPR Music as “...deeply, profoundly skilled,” yMusic continues its long collaborative relationship with composer Gabriella Smith with an ambitious new project. A composer with an ecologist’s soul, Berkeley native Smith traveled the world recording underwater environments, from coral reefs to tidepools, freshwater marshes to the open ocean, to create her latest work for the adventurous ensemble. The new score, a blend of acoustic performance with raw and processed field recordings, is Smith’s invitation to the listener to commune and connect with the fragile beauty of the natural world threatened by climate change. “Magnificent and mind-blowingly original...her [music] speaks for itself—eloquently, ferociously and with a palette of instrumental sounds that land as both familiar and strikingly new” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Have you ever heard any of these other well-known pieces by Oliver Messiaen?

Quatuor pour la fin du temps
Turangalîla Symphony
La nativité du Seigneur
All of the above!

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