Britt Festival presents West Coast Premiere of Guggenheim Fellow Lisa Bielawa’s Send the Carriage Through
Photo by Desmond White available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/lisa-bielawa
Britt Festival presents West Coast Premiere of Guggenheim Fellow Lisa Bielawa’s Send the Carriage Through
Britt Festival Orchestra
Conducted by Music Director Teddy Abrams
Saturday, June 24, 2023 8pm
Britt Pavilion | 350 First St. | Jacksonville, OR
Tickets: www.brittfest.org/performance/beethoven-5-alexi-kenney-23/
Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net
Jacksonville, OR – 2023 Guggenheim Fellow Lisa Bielawa’s latest orchestral work, Send the Carriage Through, will have its West Coast premiere on Saturday, June 24, 2023 at 8pm, presented by the Britt Music and Arts Festival and performed by the Britt Festival Orchestra led by Music Director Teddy Abrams. The program also includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Barber’s Violin Concerto, featuring violin soloist Alexi Kenney.
Lisa Bielawa wrote Send the Carriage Through for the Louisville Orchestra, where Teddy Abrams also serves as Music Director, as part of her Creators Corps residency with that orchestra. Bielawa is one of three composers who temporarily relocated to Louisville, Kentucky, to make new orchestral and community-based work as an active, engaged member of the community, as part of the orchestra’s new Creators Corps program.
Inspired in part by Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral processional, Bielawa describes Send the Carriage Through as, “a gift of gratitude to the players of the Louisville Orchestra and a celebration of Teddy Abrams’ own open-hearted vision of leadership as a connection and invitation.”
The Queen’s meticulously choreographed funeral initially inspired her work on the piece. Bielawa says, “[Queen Elizabeth II] had in fact ‘composed’ the whole pageant herself, down to every detail – and there she was, at the center of it all, yet absent from it. As I watched the astounding choreography of the procession, I ruminated: ‘What does the way we enshrine people who are gone, especially great leaders, say about us?’ … What began as a rumination on greatness and mortality took on more and more playfulness and joy as the weeks and months went by, and my relationship with Louisville – the city, its Orchestra, its audience and community – became more and more colorful and engaged. I began to celebrate the exhilaration of music-making as a team sport, a kind of relay race in which one could literally ‘pass the baton,’ sometimes leading, sometimes following.”
Lisa Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. In 1997 Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival.
During her Guggenheim Fellowship period this year, Bielawa is primarily working on two projects – a new opera, La Ballonniste, and a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings. La Ballonniste is an opera in three acts inspired by the life of Elisabeth Thible, an opera singer who was the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon, with libretto by Claire Solomon, dramaturgy by Cori Ellison. Bielawa’s book will share remembrances and observations gathered from her decades of wandering, offering cultural moments in the global continuum frozen in time.
In addition to Send the Carriage Through, Lisa Bielawa’s recent premieres all celebrate the musical relationships and community that have become a hallmark of her work:
On April 15, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), led by Artistic Director Gil Rose, gave the New York premiere of her piece In medias res at Carnegie Hall, as part of the orchestra’s 25th anniversary celebration. Bielawa was the BMOP Music Alive Composer-in-Residence from 2006-2009, and wrote this work inspired by the bonds she forged with her fellow musicians. The San Francisco Chronicle praised the work’s “superb combination of rhythmic exuberance, melodic grace and textural inventiveness.”
On April 23, the Louisville Orchestra presented the world premiere of Louisville Broadcast, an iteration of Bielawa’s ongoing Broadcast series focused on the city of Louisville. Over 500 professional, student, and amateur musicians from throughout the area joined together to perform Bielawa’s 45-minute piece, turning two historic locations – Shelby Park and Big Four Bridge – into vast musical canvases, with listeners walking freely among the performers.
From May 17-19, the Louisville Orchestra gave the premiere performances of Bielawa’s new piece Home, co-composed with Lindsey Branson, on tour to three Kentucky cities – Harlan, Prestonburg, and Pikesville. Bielawa met Branson, a singer/songwriter and graduate of the Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Musicon a recent trip to Hazard, KY, in the Appalachian mountains. They created the piece in an organic and intuitive process over the next weeks, resulting in a joyful shared musical performance work for full orchestra and unlimited musicians from the rich traditions of the region.
For more information about Lisa Bielawa, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.
For information about Teddy Abrams, please visit www.teddyabrams.com
For information about the Britt Music and Arts Festival, please visit www.brittfest.org/about-britt