Riots and Prayers

Music by Daniel Bernard Roumain

Riots and Prayers is a work for large orchestra and an array of ‘Speakers’.

Speakers can speak in any language and be drawn from the local community; amateur or professional musicians; dancers, sign language artists, or any movement artists; painters or visual artists; pre-recorded video moments or live, on-line talking heads; members of the orchestra who would like to speak and/or play a short solo on their instrument; members of the Board or administrative staff; solo, small groups, singers, vocalists, or ensembles improvising their parts with the orchestra; the conductor or assistant conductor(s); young children or senior citizens; the able or disabled; or anyone who has a deep need to say or express themselves — with their orchestra — within a moment of music, trust, and collective expression.

Speaker for the world premiere featured speakers from the AFL-CIO, King Street Center, Outright VT, St. Albans & singer/songwriter Dwight Ritcher.

Love Trilogy & Airborne lines and Rumbles

Music By Marie Samuelsson, performed with Malmö Symphony and Nordic Chamber Orchestra.

Composer Marie Samuelsson has in three orchestral works, The Love Trilogy for Orchestra, taken up the concept of love from different perspectives. The last part, The Eros Effect and Solidarity, will now have its American premiere. The piece contains musical quotes from Parts 1 and 2, but in a new context. The music fluctuates between vigorous lines and forward-driven collective sonorities, changing over to a more tentative, fragmentarily questioning and whispering music. Solidarity in collective movements and man ́s yearning for freedom are the themes here. The texts are inspired by The Eros Effect -the title of an article by George N. Katsiaficas about how human emotions can be gathered into affectionate, collective and social peace movements, characterised by solidarity.

The Nordic Chamber Orchestra, with Sarah Ioannides conducting, premiered the work in October 2016 in the city of Sundsvall in northern Sweden. Part 1, Aphrodite –Fragments by Sappho, was composed for mezzosoprano and orchestra and contains texts about sensual love. Part 2, the clarinet concerto A New Child of Infinity, has the love of a child as a theme and is dedicated to Marie Samuelsson ́s two sons. The music is published by Gehrmans Musikförlag.

Bleeding Pines

Music By David Serkin Ludwig

Songs from the Bleeding Pines is an oratorio for singers, chorus, and orchestra based on a play by Ray Owen. The play tells the story of conservationist Helen Boyd Dull, who in 1904, saved an ancient stand of longleaf pines after encountering workers bleeding the trees of their resin for the turpentine industry. Once among the greatest forests, 90 million acreas of longleaf were lost to logging and turpentining by the early 1900s. The trees that Helen preserved are now the world’s oldest longleaf pines, surviving because of her faith and commitment – a traveler who fell in love with the woods and fervently protected the land.

“The Bleeding Pines” is altogether a powerful, painterly piece, starkly conveying both the destruction and the hope of salvation that humans hold over nature and themselves.” – Rosemary Ponnekanti, Sound Magazine