May 4: The National Arts Centre Presents The Trojan Women by Lisa Bielawa – Featuring Members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra as part of WolfGANG Sessions
Photo by Desmond White available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/artist-profiles/lisa-bielawa
The National Arts Centre Presents The Trojan Women by Lisa Bielawa
Featuring Members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra as part of WolfGANG Sessions
Saturday, May 4, 2024 at 9pm
CLUB SAW | 67 Nicholas Street | Ottawa, ON
Tickets and More Information
“Bielawa’s music is thoughtful and approachable. She’s a voice in what you might call the new accessible avant-garde.” – Gramophone Magazine
Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net
Ottawa, ON – Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa –– described as “a dynamic and innovative composer” by The Boston Globe –– will have her work for string quartet, The Trojan Women, performed by members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra at Ottawa’s Club SAW on Saturday, May 4, 2024 at 9pm as part of NAC’s WolfGANG Sessions. The concert will also include Dinuk Wijeratne’s The Disappearance Of Lisa Gherardini and David Bruce’s Gumboots. The performance will be broadcast live, available free of charge and on-demand at www.nac-cna.ca/en/event/36177.
Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. 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. In 1997, Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival.
In 1999, Bielawa composed a continuous score for Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women for a production directed by JoAnn Akalaitis. The following year, a string quartet based on some of the musical material from that score, which was premiered in 2000 by the Miami String Quartet at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. She also composed a version of the work for string orchestra, which was commissioned and premiered by the String Orchestra of New York City (SONYC). The string quartet version of The Trojan Women premiered nearly 21 years ago to date, on May 10, 2003 at the MATA Festival, in New York City.
Bielawa says of the work:
“The special musical challenge of this project was to identify and convey, in three movements, three variegated forms of grief, each one a consequence of one woman's particular sufferings: ‘Hecuba,’ ‘Cassandra,’ and ‘Andromache.’ These women lost husbands and sons in the notorious brutality of the Trojan War. Each time I revisited the piece as it evolved from music for the theatre, to string quartet, and finally to string orchestra, I was informed by a slightly different understanding of the nature of public and private grieving. Euripides’ eulogy to the fallen Troy takes its place alongside the picture of Jerusalem in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, W.G. Sebald’s searching inquiries into the rubble of Dresden, or the jarring pictures we see daily in the media.”
More about Lisa Bielawa: During her 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship period, Lisa Bielawa is working primarily 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.
Bielawa consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin in San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the coronavirus lockdown, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents, through her project, Broadcast from Home. In 2022, Bielawa was selected for a residency with the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps, during which she wrote new orchestral and community-based works to engage the Louisville community.
Bielawa’s music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO in Houston, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more.
She received a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser, created with librettist Erik Ehn and director Charles Otte. Vireo was filmed in twelve parts in locations across the country and features over 350 musicians. Vireo was released on CD/DVD in 2019 (Orange Mountain Music). Bielawa is also recorded on the Tzadik and BMOP/ sound labels, among others.
For more information about Lisa Bielawa visit www.lisabielawa.net.
For information about The National Arts Centre Orchestra visit: www.nac-cna.ca/orchestra