January 22, 2015

Programming Announced for Lincoln Center Festival 2015

Lincoln Center Festival

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Eileen McMahon 212-875-5391

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PROGRAMMING ANNOUNCED FOR

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2015

20th Season of festival to run from July 6 through August 2, 2015

 

New York, NY, January 22, 2015 — Nigel Redden, Director of Lincoln Center Festival, today announced the line-up for the 20th edition of the Festival, which runs from July 6 through August 2, 2015. The Festival will unfold in six venues on and off the Lincoln Center campus. There will be a total of 58 performances by artists and ensembles from Germany, China, England, Ireland, Russia, USA, and Japan.

 

The festival opens on July 6 with Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton, a multimedia orchestral experience of specially created suites from a majority of the film collaborations by the legendary composer and visionary director, combined with montages of film clips, sketches, drawings and storyboards edited by Burton. John Mauceri, one of the world’s foremost conductors of live film music, will lead a full orchestra and choir, with Danny Elfman making a special guest appearance. Audience members are encouraged to come to the performance dressed as their favorite character from the films.  There will be eight performances in Avery Fisher Hall through July 12.

 

Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, returns for a fourth engagement at the Festival with artistic director Garry Hynes’s staging the North American premiere of DruidShakespeare: The History Plays, playwright Mark O’Rowe’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s four history plays that make up the key foundational narrative of the English monarchy—Richard II,Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, and Henry V.  Performances will be in the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, July 7 – 19, with four marathon performances over the two weekends and two-part performances on consecutive weeknights.

 

The National Ballet of China and National Ballet of China Symphony Orchestra will perform two full-evening story ballets representing distinctly different periods in Chinese history: The Peony Pavilion, a romance based on a 400-year-old epic masterpiece of Kunqu opera, choreographed by Fei Bo; and, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, The Red Detachment of Women, the first ballet created in the new nation, the People’s Republic of China, choreographed by Li Chenxiang, Jiang Zuhui, and Wang Yangiao.  There will be three performances of The Peony Pavilion and two of The Red Detachment of Women, July 8 – 12 in the David H. Koch Theater.

 

Lincoln Center Festival is made possible with support by American Express and major support provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Cleveland Orchestra returns to Lincoln Center with four concerts July 15–18 in Avery Fisher Hall led by its esteemed music director Franz Welser-Möst, highlighted by two performances of a concert version of Richard Strauss’s rarely-performed opera Daphne, as well as two additional orchestral programs featuring music by Beethoven, Strauss, Messiaen, and Dvorák.

 

Cheek by Jowl director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod reignite the savage comedy of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry’s 1896 proto-surrealist and absurdist comedy about a scheming, murderous yet ridiculous dictator, in a contemporary production set in a chic French apartment featuring an ensemble of

French actors affiliated with the Cheek by Jowl company. This is Donnellan and Ormerod’s second Lincoln Center Festivalproduction. In 2009 they memorably staged the Chekov International Theatre Festival production of Pushkin’s Boris Godunovwith a cast including actor Yvgeny Mironov (see Miss Julie below). There will be five performances of Ubu Roi, July 22?26, at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College.

 

Renowned Russian actors Chulpan Khamatova and Yvgeny Mironov will make a rare New York appearance when they star in August Strindberg’s drama Miss Julie, staged by iconoclastic German director Thomas Ostermeier, known for his provocative and stylishly contemporary stagings of Ibsen’s plays in recent years. Mironov, a hugely popular stage and film actor who was in the 2009 Festival production of Boris Godunov staged by Declan Donnellan, is also artistic director of the Theatre of Nations, Moscow. Ostermeier’s production of Miss Julie premiered there in 2011.  The play was adapted by Russian playwright Mikhail Durnenkov and is set in modern day Russia. Using contemporary language, the adaptation takes on the same themes of class warfare that appear in Strindberg’s original 1888 Swedish text. There will be six performances at New York City Center, July 27 – August 2.

 

Legendary director Yukio Ninagawa celebrates his 80th birthday with a return to Lincoln Center Festival for the U.S. premiere of his production of Haruki Murakami’s internationally best-selling novel, Kafka on the Shore, starring actors Rie Miyazawa,Naohito Fujiki, and Nino Furuhata. The play is about two journeys.  In one, the teen-age hero, Kafka Tamura—who has adopted the name of the great writer whose work is filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation—packs his backpack and, with his alter-ego/companion Crow, flees his home in an attempt to escape his father’s Oedipal curse. At the same time, an old man, Nakata, suffering from an inexplicable childhood affliction that stole his memory, is compelled to set out on a voyage for reasons he does not understand. Their odysseys entwine in modern-day Japan.  There will be four performances, July 23?26 at the David H. Koch Theater.

 

The Ruhrtriennale’s production of Harry Partch’s music theater spectacle Delusion of the Fury will receive its U.S. premiere in a co-production by Lincoln Center Festival, Holland Festival, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and the Ruhr. Heiner Goebbelsreturns to the Festival to direct this maverick composer’s work, considered his magnum opus. Ensemble Musikfabrik is bringing a complete set of Partch instruments which the ensemble has recreated for these performances. There will be two performances, July 23 and 24, at New York City Center.

 

Rezo Gabriadze and his acclaimed puppet-theater troupe from the Republic of Georgia, The Gabriadze Theatre, make their fourth Festival appearance with Ramona, the story of two ill-fated steam engines who fall in love in the USSR.  This humorously stark tale of compassion and loss is accompanied by music inspired by Georgian folk songs. As is the case with all of Gabriadze’s previous puppet plays, Ramona is produced on a small scale with extraordinary puppets and sets made from such commonplace objects as string, bits of cloth, twigs, and wire.  There will be ten performances, July 27? August 1, in the Clark Studio Theater.

Yarn/Wire, the Queens-based chamber quartet, part of a new wave of young contemporary ensembles specializing in the performance of 20th- and 21st-century music for piano and percussion, will make its Lincoln Center Festival debut on July 15 in the intimate Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse with a concert dedicated to contemporary music commissioned for the group by a new generation of young French composers. The program offers world premieres by composers rarely heard in the United States: Misato Mochizuki, Raphaël Cendo, and will also feature new work by the acclaimed Tristan Murail, one of spectral music’s principal founders and theoreticians, resulting in a survey of important recent trends in French contemporary classical music.

 

Said Mr. Redden, “For 20 years Lincoln Center Festival has been recognized in the U.S. and abroad for presenting some of the broadest and most original performing arts programs in New York. Work by the leading artists of our time has graced the stages of Lincoln Center and venues across the city.  This summer we welcome back Garry Hynes and the Druid Theatre Company; Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra; Yukio Ninagawa and his eponymous theater company; director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod; Heiner Goebbels and Ensemble Musikfabrik; director Rezo Gabriadze and The Gabriadze Theatre; and the great Russian actor, Yvgeny Mironov.  They join other artists stretching the boundaries of performance who will be appearing at the Festival for the first time.”

 

Tickets: Lincoln Center Festival packages go on sale on January 23 to Friends of Lincoln Center and to the general public on February 2. Single tickets for the entire festival go on sale to Friends of Lincoln Center on March 23 and the general public on starting March 31. For more information and to buy tickets, visit LincolnCenterFestival.org or go to the Avery Fisher or Alice Tully Hall box offices, or call CenterCharge, 212-721-6500.

 

Programs, artists and ticket prices are subject to change.

 

Support by American Express

 

Major Support provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

 

Lincoln Center Festival 2015 is also made possible by The Shubert Foundation, Nancy A. Marks, LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust, Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, The Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, The Katzenberger Foundation, Inc., Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia, Jennie and Richard DeScherer, Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater, Great Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and Friends of Lincoln Center.

 

Public support for Festival 2015 is provided the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Endowment support is provided by Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Nancy Abeles Marks.

 

MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center

 

Movado is an Official Sponsor of Lincoln Center

 

United Airlines is the Official Airline of Lincoln Center

 

WABC-TV is the Official Broadcast Partner of Lincoln Center

 

William Hill Estate Winery is the Official Wine of Lincoln Center

 

Artist Catering provided by Zabar’s and Zabars.com

 

MORE ABOUT THE PRODUCTIONS

 

DANCE

 

National Ballet of China

Feng Ying, director and artistic director

National Ballet of China Symphony Orchestra

Zhang Yi, musical director/conductor

Liu Ju, resident conductor

July 8?12, 2015

David H. Koch Theater (Broadway at 63rd Street)

 

The Peony Pavilion

A ballet in two acts and six scenes

Adapted from a story by Tang Xianzu

Produced by Zhao Ruheng

Adapted and Directed by Li Liuyi

Composer, music arrangement and orchestration: Guo Wenjing

Choreography by Fei Bo

Scenery by Michael Simon

Costumes by Emi Wada

Lighting by Michael Simon and Han Jiang

Assistant to composer: Chen Xinruo

Stage designer assistants: Sandra Draschaft and Gong Xun

 

Main Characters:

Du Liniang: Zhu Yan, Wang Qimin, Cao Shuci, Wang Ye

Liu Mengmei:  Ma Xiaodong, Li Jun, Sun Ruichen

Flower Goddess Liniang: Zhang Jian, Lu Na

Kunqu Liniang: guest Kunqu Opera Singers to be confirmed

Black and White Ghosts: Yu Bo, Hu Dayong, Zhang Xi, Zheng Yu, Wang Jiyu, Wu Sicong

Infernal Judge: Li Ke, Zhou Zhaohui, Li Zhuangzhuang

 

The Red Detachment of Women

Adapted from the movie of the same name, screenplay by Liang Xin

Choreography by Li Chengxiang, Jiang Zuhui, and Wang Xixian

Composed by Wu Zuqiang, Du Mingxin, Dai Hongwei, Shi Wanchun, Wang Yanqiao

Theme song, The Song of Detachment, composed by Huang Zhun

Stage design by Ma Yunhong

Lighting design by Liang Hongzhou

 

Main Characters:

Qionghua: Zhang Jian, Lu Na, Zhu Yan, Li Jie, Hou Shuang

Hong Changqing: Zhou Zhaohui, Li Ke, Tong Jinsheng, Zhang Tiao

Company Commander: Lu Na, Lu Di, Li Jie, Yu Yang

Xiao’e: Wang Qi, Wang Ye, Sun Xiaoqian

Xiao Pang: Wang Hao, Zheng Yu, Guo Xiaotian

Comrade in Arms: Zhu Yan, Zhang Jian, Lu Na, Hou Shuang

Nabatian: Li Ke, Zhou Zhaohui

Lao Si: Jiang Wei, Li Jun, Liu Kai

 

A wealthy young woman falls asleep alongside a peony pavilion and dreams of meeting a young scholar. Centuries later, in the same country, a farmer’s daughter fulfills her dream by joining the worker’s revolution as a soldier.  These are the uniquely Chinese stories that will unfold on the stage of the David H. Koch Theater when the combined forces of the National Ballet of China (NBC) and National Ballet of China Symphony Orchestra perform two full-evening ballets representing distinctly different periods in Chinese history: The Peony Pavilion, a romance based on a 400-year-old epic masterpiece of Kunqu opera,  and the 1964 The Red Detachment of Women, the first full-length Chinese ballet created in the new nation, the People’s Republic of China.

 

The Peony Pavilion, one of the most famous love stories in the Chinese canon, was written as an opera by Tang Xianzu in 1598, the same year as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, to which it is often compared.  Teenager Du Liniang falls asleep in her garden and dreams of meeting Liu Mengmei.  She dreams that they fall in love, but when she awakens she becomes lovesick and dies. Her ghost descends to the underworld where it is decided that she was indeed supposed to marry Liu.  She returns to the garden and asks Liu to exhume her body and return her to life, but when he does, he is arrested for being a grave robber.  He is pardoned by the emperor.

 

Tang’s 20-hour opera was staged in a landmark production for Lincoln Center Festival 99 by Chen Shi-Zheng. The NBC version, as choreographed by Fei Bo, is told with a tapestry of western and far eastern dance conventions. The music is a soundscape, arranged and orchestrated by composer Guo Wenjing, whose chambers operas The Night Banquet and Feng Yi Ting were presented at the Festival in 2002 and 2012, respectively.  For The Peony Pavilion he weaves together his own original music with works by Claude Debussy (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun, La mer), Maurice Ravel (Daphnis et Chloéand Ma mère l’oye), Ottorino Respighi (Feste Romane and Pini di Roma), Gustav Holst (The Planets), and Sergei Prokofiev (Scythian Suite). The ravishingly beautiful production is designed by Michael Simon, whose simple-seeming sets — a giant swing-like platform, some bales of twigs, a few massive silken blossoms — are shaped and dramatized by his and Han Jiang’s virtuoso lighting. The lustrous silken costumes are by Emi Wada. The ballet was premiered in 2008 by the NBC at Tianqiao Theater, Beijing, China. The ballet was then invited to Hong Kong Arts Festival and was performed by NBC in Edinburgh Festival in August, 2011.

 

Fei Bo, Resident Choreographer of the National Ballet of China, is from a family of traditional opera practitioners. Fei Bo began studying Chinese traditional dance in 1992. He began choreographing at the age of 16 and started to learn modern dance choreography at Beijing Dance Academy in 1998. He joined the National Ballet of China in 2002 and has since created many pieces for the company. Since the age of 24 he has collaborated with such renowned choreographers as Philippe Decouflé and Akram Khan. He won the award for best choreography at the International Ballet Competitions held in Helsinki, Shanghai and Beijing, as well as the best modern dance prize at USA YAGP.

 

When performing around the world, he tries to use eastern perspectives to converse with western art. He was invited by the Hong Kong Ballet to create the piece A Room of One's Own. In 2011, he helped former Royal Ballet principal dancer Tamara Rojo, who is currently the artistic director of the English National Ballet, to create a solo dance piece, Life is A Dream. This collaboration was made into the documentary Fusion Journey, by CNN. In 2012 he was invited to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to stage one of his pieces. In addition to The Peony Pavilion, his choreography includes Bolero, A Room of One's Own, Confucius 2012, Hamlet, On the Road, Once Upon A Time, Over There, Pisces, and Sacrifice.

 

NBC celebrates the 50th anniversary of The Red Detachment of Women, which at its premiere in 1964 represented a milestone in dance in China.  The most popular ballet to emerge from China’s Maoist revolution, it has been performed more than 4000 times throughout China, as well as in many countries around the world. This visually stunning work in which the dancers are clad in Mao suits, bayonets and ballet slippers, takes place during the political chaos just prior to the Communist takeover (1927-37). In a marriage of Cultural Revolution principles and pirouettes, Red Detachment tells the story of a peasant girl who rises from servitude to join a crusading, all-female battalion of Red Guards to defeat the evil landowner who once enslaved her.

 

The ballet was based originally on a novel by Liang Xin, which was subsequently made into a feature film.  The idea to adapt it as a ballet grew out of a 1963 forum on literature and art, when the late Premier Zhou Enlai declared that the subjects for new works of art should come from the revolution, the people, and the spirit of the nation. In February 1964, NBC choreographer Li Chengxiang led a team to Hainan Island, where the novel was set, to gather materials and inspiration for a new production. The ballet premiered in September 1964 at Bejing’s Tianqiao Theater as The Red Detachment of Women. A 1971 film version of the ballet remains popular to this day. During the era of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), NBC was only allowed to stage Chinese works. Among them, The Red Detachment of Women and the other work, The White-Haired Girl (created by Shanghai Ballet), were the two most frequently performed ballets. The Red Detachment of Women toured China’s countryside throughout the 1960s and began touring abroad in the 1970s. 

 

The Red Detachment of Women combines the vocabulary of ballet and Chinese dance elements in distinctive ways. The work is devoid of some classic ballet idioms, like the male-female pas de deux with its lifts and supported turns, because Chairman Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, felt these did not reflect Chinese culture.  NBC last performed an excerpt of the work in the USA in 2011.

 

Founded in December 1959, The National Ballet of China gathers all of its outstanding artists from professional academies. Under decades of loving care and support from the government and friends of all social sectors, the Company never ceased enriching its solid Russian foundations with works of different schools and styles. The Company’s repertoire includes world classics like Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Giselle, Carmen, Onegin, and The Little Mermaid, in addition to its original creations,The Red Detachment of Women, The New Year Sacrifice, Yellow River, Raise the Red Lantern, The Peony Pavilion, and The Chinese New Year. By staging western ballets and creating works of its own with distinct national characteristics, the Company found a successful path for the development of Chinese ballet fusing styles of the classical and the modern, in addition to cultures of the nation and the world.

 

Over more than 50 years, the Company has proudly made achievements in training performers, stage productions, in addition to ballet promotion and education. Numerous ballet dancers, choreographers, musicians and stage artists have won major international awards, and made collaborations with international stars in their fields. The Company has a repertoire of nearly 200 ballets, some of which have been honored as Classic Chinese Art Works, and have enjoyed international fame.

 

As a renowned company with sound international influence, the National Ballet of China serves as an excellent cultural envoy and important window of the nation, to spread the essence of Chinese culture. Meanwhile, it has also been endeavoring to present high standard performances to the Chinese audience, and promote the art form in universities, communities and among children. In accordance with its motto “United, Pragmatic, Self-independent, and Enterprising,” the Company members are following in the steps of their hard working predecessors, and making enormous strides to realize their progressive dream.

 

Performance schedule:

The Peony Pavilion: July 8 at 8 PM; July 9 at 7:30 PM; July 10 at 7:30 PM.

Running time: approximately one hour and 32 minutes, with one intermission.

The Red Detachment of Women: July 11 at 8 PM and July 12 at 2 PM

Running time: approximately two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission

 

 

MUSIC

 

Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton

July 6 –12, 2015

Eight performances, Avery Fisher Hall

Music composed and arranged by Danny Elfman

Films and artwork by Tim Burton

John Mauceri, conductor

Sandy Cameron, violin

Special Guest Appearance by Danny Elfman

 

Lincoln Center Festival opens with Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton, a unique program of specially-created suites from many of the film collaborations by the legendary composer and visionary director, enhanced by visuals on a big screen of film clips, sketches, drawings and artwork edited by Burton. For nearly 30 years Elfman and Burton have collaborated on some of the most popular films of our times, including Batman, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, andAlice in Wonderland, among others.  John Mauceri, one of the world’s foremost conductors of live film music, will lead an 87-piece orchestra and 45-person choir.  Danny Elfman will make a special guest appearance singing his songs from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Violinist Sandy Cameron will perform the Edward Scissorhands Suite, written especially for her by Elfman. This concert, which premiered at London’s Royal Albert Hall, has been performed, seen and heard by more than 100,000 people around the globe in nine countries, including Tokyo, Switzerland, and Prague, and these Lincoln Center shows will be the New York premiere performances.

 

Beginning with his first score for Tim Burton’s  Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, four-time Oscar nominee Danny Elfman has scored a broad range of films, including:  Milk, Good Will Hunting, Big Fish, Men in Black, Edward Scissorhands, Wanted, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mission: Impossible, Planet of the Apes, A Simple Plan, To Die For, Spider-Man (1 & 2), Batman,Dolores Claiborne, Sommersby, Chicago, Dick Tracy, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Alice in Wonderland. Most recently he provided the music for David O. Russell’s award-winning American Hustle & Silver Linings Playbook, Tim Burton’sBig Eyes, Sam Raimi’s Oz: The Great and Powerful, Rob Minkoff’s Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and the upcoming Fifty Shades of Grey and The End of The Tour.

 

A native of Los Angeles, Elfman grew up loving film music. He travelled the world as a young man, absorbing its diverse musical influences. He helped found the band Oingo Boingo, and came to the attention of a young Tim Burton, a native of Burbank, California, who asked him to write the score for his debut film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, in 1985. The score was a revelation, and an instantly identifiable musical personality had arrived. Over the years, the two men have forged one of the most fruitful composer-director collaborations in film history.

 

In addition to his film work, Elfman wrote the iconic theme music for the television series The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives. He also composed a ballet, Rabbit and Rogue, choreographed by Twyla Tharp; a symphony entitled Serenada Schizophrana, commissioned by American Composers Orchestra, which premiered at Carnegie Hall; an overture called The Overeager Overture, commissioned by John Mauceri for his farewell concert with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in 2006; andIris, a Cirque du Soleil show.

 

Tim Burton has enjoyed great success in both the live-action and animation arenas. Most recently Burton directed and produced the critically acclaimed Big Eyes. Earlier in 2012 Burton directed the animated film Frankenweenie and the gothic thriller Dark Shadows, based on the cult favorite television show. He also produced the fantasy horror Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter which was directed by Timur Behmambetov. In 2010, he directed Alice in Wonderland, an epic fantasy based on the classic story by Lewis Carroll. The film earned more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, making it the second-highest-grossing release of 2010. Alice in Wonderland also received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy, and won two Academy Awards, for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. Burton was previously honored with an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature for the 2005 stop-motion film Corpse Bride, which he directed and produced. He earlier received BAFTA Award and Critics’ Choice Award nominations for Best Director for the acclaimed fantasy drama Big Fish. More recently, Burton won a National Board of Review Award and garnered Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice Award nominations for his directing work on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which also won the Golden Globe for Best Film – Musical or Comedy. Burton began his film career in animation, and, in 1982, directed the stop-motion animated short Vincent, narrated by Vincent Price, which was an award-winner on the film festival circuit. He made his feature film directorial debut in 1985 with the hit comedy Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. In 1988, Burton helmed the inventive comedy hit Beetlejuice. He then directed the action blockbuster Batman, which became the top-grossing film of 1989 andBatman Returns. In 1990, Burton directed, co-wrote and produced the romantic fantasy Edward Scissorhands, starring Johnny Depp. Their subsequent collaborations include the Burton-directed films Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, adapted from the classic tale by Washington Irving, and the worldwide smash Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was based on Roald Dahl’s beloved book, and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

 

John Mauceri is the recipient of a Grammy, Tony, Olivier, and three Emmy awards.  He has conducted at the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Teatro alla Scala, Deutsche Oper (Berlin), the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, all the major London orchestras, as well as l’Orchestre Nationale de France and the Israel Philharmonic. He is the Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, which was created for him in 1991 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, and conducted there for 16 seasons to a combined audience of four million people.

 

Mr. Mauceri has made over 80 commercial recordings, including the world premiere of Danny Elfman’s Serenada Schizophrana. The recent release of Music for Alfred Hitchcock has been unanimously praised and includes many first recordings of performing editions made by Mr. Mauceri. In 2015 he will perform Danny Elfman’s music in Adelaide, Paris, and Denver.

 

On Broadway, he was co-producer of On Your Toes and served as musical supervisor for Hal Prince’s production of Candide, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance with Bernadette Peters. He also conducted the orchestra for the film version of Evita. He served as music director of the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy for three years after completing seven years as music director of Scottish Opera, and is the first American ever to have held the post of music director of an opera house in either Great Britain or Italy. He was music director of the Washington (National) Opera as well as Pittsburgh Opera, and was the first music director of American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall after its legendary founding director, Leopold Stokowski, with whom he studied. For fifteen years he served on the faculty of his alma mater, Yale University, and returned in 2001 to teach and conduct the official concert celebrating the university’s 300th anniversary. For 18 years, Mr. Mauceri worked closely with Leonard Bernstein and conducted many of the composer’s premieres at Bernstein’s request.

 

Deeply committed to preserving two American art forms, the Broadway musical, and Hollywood film scores, he has edited and performed a vast catalogue of restorations and first performances, including a full restoration of the original 1943 production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, as well as performing editions of Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess, Girl Crazy and Strike up the Band, Bernstein’s Candide and A Quiet Place, Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, and film scores by Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman and Howard Shore. As one of two conductors in Decca Records’ award-winning series “Entartete Musik,” Mauceri made a number of historic first recordings of music banned by the Nazis. The intersection of the “degenerate composers” of Europe and the refugee composers of Hollywood is the subject of much of his research and his writings. In addition, Mr. Mauceri has conducted significant premieres of works by Verdi, Debussy, Hindemith, Ives, Stockhausen, and Weill. From 2006-2013 he served as chancellor of the University of North Carolina’s School of the Arts.

 

Performance schedule: July 6 at 8PM; July 8 at 7:30 PM; July 9 at 7:30 PM; July 10 at 7:30 PM; July 11 at 2 and 8 PM; July 12 at 2 and 8 PM.

Running time: approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission.

 

***

 

The Cleveland Orchestra

Franz Welser-Möst, music director

July 15–18, 2015

Four performances at Avery Fisher Hall (Broadway at 65th Street)

 

July 15, 2015, 7:30 PM

Strauss: Daphne (Opera in One Act), Op. 62 (in concert)

Regine Hangler, soprano (Daphne) (New York Debut)

Nancy Maultsby, mezzo-soprano (Gaea)

Andreas Schager, tenor (Apollo) (New York Debut)

Norbert Ernst, tenor (Leukippos) (New York Debut)

Ain Anger, bass (Peneios)

Sung in German with English subtitles

 

July 16, 2015, 7:30 PM

Messiaen: Hymne

Messiaen: Chronochromie

Dvorák: Symphony No. 5 in F major, Op. 76

 

July 17, 2015, 7:30 PM

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral" in F major, Op. 68

Strauss: Symphonia domestica, Op. 53

 

July 18, 2015, 7:30 PM

Strauss: Daphne (Opera in One Act), Op. 62 (in concert)

Regine Hangler, soprano (Daphne)

Nancy Maultsby, mezzo-soprano (Gaea)

Andreas Schager, tenor (Apollo)

Norbert Ernst, tenor (Leukippos)

Ain Anger, bass (Peneios)

Sung in German with English subtitles

 

The Cleveland Orchestra, led by music director Franz Welser-Möst, returns to Lincoln Center Festival with four concerts focused on the exploration of the relationships between nature and humanity. Considered one of the world’s most highly regarded music ensembles, the Orchestra will offer two performances of Richard Strauss’s rarely-performed ”bucolic tragedy”Daphne, highlighting Franz Welser-Möst’s passion and expertise in the operatic repertory, along with two additional programs featuring works which probe our understanding of the natural world by Messiaen, Dvorák, Beethoven, and Strauss.

 

Richard Strauss’s seldom performed, one-act opera, Daphne, is among the great works of the composer’s later period. With a libretto by Joseph Gregor, the work was premiered in 1938, and retells the story of the beautiful nymph Daphne, with a plot derived from the familiar myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Daphne, an outsider who cherishes the beauty of nature, where she feels most at home, is loved by the simple shepherd Leukippos and the god Apollo. But, when Apollo betrays her trust and kills his rival, Daphne is inconsolable. Apollo is moved by Daphne’s profound grief and grants her immortality by transforming her into a laurel tree. This operatic gem has been called one of Strauss’s supreme love letters to the soprano voice.

 

The Daphne cast features many rising stars, including soprano Regine Hangler, in her New York debut, who will sing the title role and will also take on the role this spring in Cleveland at the Orchestra’s home, Severance Hall and in Berlin, in addition to a part in the Vienna State Opera’s production of Elektra. Joining Ms. Hangler, the cast includes: acclaimed mezzo-soprano Nancy Maultsby as Daphne’s mother Gaea; tenor Andreas Schager (New York debut) as Apollo; tenor Norbert Ernst (New York debut) as Leukippos; and bass Ain Anger, known for numerous Wagner roles, as Daphne’s father, Peneios. Also featured are baritone Christopher Feibum, tenor Matthew Plenk and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as shepherds, and soprano Lauren Snouffer as a maid.

 

Between the two performances of Daphne, The Cleveland Orchestra will present two concerts which will complete their Lincoln Center Festival engagement. On July 16 they will perform Messiaen’s Hymne, Chronochromie, a large orchestral work with experimental techniques which explore both time and color, and Dvorák’s pastoral Symphony No. 5, which paints a picture of the Czech composer’s countryside homeland. The following evening’s performance on July 17, pairs Beethoven’s masterful Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” with a Strauss tone poem, his Symphonia domestica, an autobiographical multi-movement symphonic work from 1902 about a day in the life of the composer and his wife.

 

As it nears the centennial of its founding in 2018, The Cleveland Orchestra is undergoing a new transformation and renaissance. Universally-acknowledged among the best ensembles on the planet, the entire institution is working together on a set of enhanced goals for the 21st century — to develop the youngest audience of any orchestra, to renew its focus on fully serving the communities where it performs through engagement and education, to continue its legendary command of musical excellence, and to move forward into the Orchestra’s next century with a strong commitment to adventurous programming and new music. The Cleveland Orchestra divides its time across concert seasons at home in Cleveland’s Severance Hall and each summer at Blossom Music each summer.  Additional portions of the year are devoted to touring and to a series of innovative and intensive performance residencies.  These include an annual set of concerts and education programs and partnerships in Florida, and recurring residencies at Vienna’s Musikverein, Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival, and New York’s Lincoln Center Festival. Under the leadership of Franz Welser-Möst, now in his 13th season as the ensemble’s music director, The Cleveland Orchestra is acknowledged as among the world’s handful of best orchestras.  Its performances of standard repertoire and new works are unrivalled at home in Ohio, in residencies around the globe, on tour across North America and Europe, and through recordings, telecasts, and radio and internet broadcasts.  The Cleveland Orchestra last appeared at Lincoln Center Festival in 2011 with concerts pairing the music of John Adams and Anton Bruckner, and at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival in 2013.

 

The 2014-15 season marks Franz Welser-Möst’s 13th year as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, with a long-term commitment extended through 2022.  He holds the Kelvin Smith Family Endowed Music Director Chair.  Under his leadership, the Orchestra is renowned among the world’s greatest ensembles, acclaimed for its musical excellence, and a champion of new composers and innovative programming.  In Cleveland, Franz Welser-Möst has led an acclaimed series of opera performances each season during his tenure in Cleveland, including opera-in-concert presentations and a three-season cycle of fully staged Zurich Opera productions of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas.  In May 2014, an innovative presentation of Janácek’sThe Cunning Little Vixen mixed live singers with projected action animation, to national and international attention. As a guest conductor, Mr. Welser-Möst enjoys a close and productive relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic.  Recent performances with the Philharmonic include a critically-acclaimed production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the 2014 Salzburg Festival as well as appearances as New York’s Carnegie Hall, at the Lucerne Festival, and in concert at La Scala Milan.  From 2010 to 2014, Mr. Welser-Möst served as general music director of the Vienna State Opera, He previously served a decade-long tenure with the Zurich Opera, culminating in three seasons as general music director.   Mr. Welser-Möst’s recordings and videos have won a series of international awards and two Grammy nominations.  His Cleveland Orchestra recordings include live video performances of Bruckner Symphonies Nos. 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 and together they are in the midst of new project to record the major works of Brahms.

 

Performance schedule:

Daphne: July 15 at 7:30 PM; July 18 at 7:30 PM

Running time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes with no intermission.

 

Messiaen: Hymne & Chronochromie, Dvorák: Symphony No. 5: July 16 at 7:30 PM

Running time: approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes, with one intermission

 

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral”, Strauss: Symphonia domestica: July 17 at 7:30 PM

Running time: approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, with one intermission

 

The Lincoln Center Festival 2015 presentation of the Cleveland Orchestra is made possible in part by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

 

***

 

Yarn/Wire

July 14, 2015, 6:00 PM

Up Close with the Artists in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse (165 W. 65th Street, 10th floor)

Featuring the composers and members of Yarn/Wire

 

July 15, 2015, 8:00 PM

One performance in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse (165 W. 65th Street, 10th floor)

Misato Mochizuki: new work (2015)

Raphaël Cendo: new work (2015)

Tristan Murail: new work (2015)

 

Yarn/Wire, the Queens-based chamber quartet specializing in the performance of 20th- and 21st-century music for piano and percussion, will make its Lincoln Center Festival debut on July 15 with a concert dedicated to contemporary music by a new generation of French composers. The evening offers world premieres by composers rarely-heard in the United States: Misato Mochizuki, Raphaël Cendo, and a new work from Tristan Murail. Murail is the leading exponent of “spectral” music and student of Olivier Messiaen, known as a composer who has challenged accepted ways of writing music. The program results in a survey of some important trends in French contemporary classical music.

 

Yarn/Wire is a versatile chamber quartet made up of percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg and pianists Laura Barger and Ning Yu, focused on contemporary repertoire. The unique instrumental combination serves the ensemble well in both traditional performance practice and with emergent stylistic forms. Founded in 2005 at Stony Brook University on Long Island, the ensemble frequently presents world and U.S. premieres by leading international composers, greatly expanding the repertoire for this particular instrumental arrangement, and has garnered acclaim for its adventurous programs.

 

Tokyo-born Misato Mochizuki (b.1969) writes music with magical rhythms, unusual sounds, and stylistic freedom, combining western traditions and her own sense of breathing. Her catalogue consists of some 40 works, including 12 pieces for ensemble. She obtained a Master’s degree in composition at the National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo) in 1992. She moved to Paris  where she was awarded first prize in composition at the CNSDM Paris, studying with Paul Méfano and Emmanual Nunes (1995), followed by IRCAM’s Composition and Computer Music program (1996-97) with Tristan Murail. Between 2011 and 2013. Misato Mochizuki was composer-in-residence at the Festival international de musique de Besançon. Since 2007 she has been professor of artistic disciplines at the Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, and has been invited to teach composition at Darmstadt, the Amsterdam Conservatory and elsewhere. In addition, Mochizuki writes about music and culture, reflecting on the role of the composer in today’s society, in her own column for the renowned Yomiuri Shimbun, the most widely read daily newspaper in Japan.

 

Raphaël Cendo (b. 1975) studied piano and composition at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, where he graduated in 2000. He studied composition at the National Conservatory of Paris in 2003 and completed the course in composition and computer music at IRCAM in 2006. He studied with Gaussin Allain, Brian Ferneyhough, Fausto Romitelli and Philippe Manoury. Cendo has written works for internationally renowned ensembles including The Route, Orchestre National d’Ile de France, the Diotima Quartet, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ictus, Ensemble musikFabrik, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and the Radio Orchestra in Munich. His music has also been performed at international festivals, among them, MITO in Milan, the Venice Biennale, Musica Strasbourg and at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen in Germany. In 2007, Cendo received the Hope Award from the Francis and Mica Salabert Foundation International Composition Competition. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

 

A native of Le Havre, France, Tristan Murail (b. 1947) studied with Olivier Messiaen and won the Prix de Rome in 1971. After two years at the Villa Médicis, he returned to Paris in 1973 and founded the Itinéraire ensemble with a group of young composers and performers. The group became widely renowned for its ground-breaking explorations of the relationship between instrumental performance and electronics. In the 1980s, Murail began using computer technology to further his research into acoustic phenomena. This led to years of collaboration with IRCAM, where he taught composition from 1991 to 1997 and helped develop the Patchwork composition software. Now known as one of the principal founders and theoreticians of the spectral school of music, Mural has taught at numerous schools and festivals worldwide, including at Darmstadt, the Abbaye de Royaumont, the Centre Acanthes and Columbia University in New York. His works have been commissioned and performed by such ensembles as Ensemble Intercontemporain, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic, among many others.

 

Performance schedule:

Up Close with the Artists: July 14 at 6 PM

Running time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes, with no intermission.

New works composed by Misato Mochizuki, Raphaël Cendo, Tristan Murail: July 15 at 8 PM

Running time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes, with no intermission.

 

***

 

Harry Partch: Delusion of the Fury

Directed by Heiner Goebbels

Music Theatre with the Ensemble Musikfabrik

July 23 and 24, 8 PM

Two performances, New York City Center (131 West 55th Street)

Music: Harry Partch

Director: Heiner Goebbels

Sets and Lighting: Klaus Grünberg

Costumes: Florence von Gerkan

Sound: Paul Jeukendrup

Dramaturgy: Matthias Mohr

Musical rehearsal leader: Arnold Marinissen

Assistant choreography: Florian Bilbao

Dramaturgical project development: Beate Schüler

Instrument builder: Thomas Meixner

 

Harry Partch: Bitter Music

Lecture Performance by David Moss

Thursday, July 23, 6:00 PM

New York City Center Studios

 

Heiner Goebbels’ production of Harry Partch’s rarely performed music theater spectacle Delusion of the Fury (A Ritual of Dream and Delusion) will receive its U.S. premiere at Lincoln Center Festival 2015. The visionary work by Partch, considered his magnum opus, was produced by the Ruhrtriennale in collaboration with Lincoln Center Festival and others under the direction of leading German Director Heiner Goebbels during his tenure as Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale. Ensemble Musikfabrik performs the work, with a complete set of his instruments which the Ensemble has built and recreated for these performances. Goebbels’ production integrates Partch’s idiosyncratic music with lighting, movement, and song into a spectacular sound world of lightness and humor that can only be described as out-of-this-world. This marks the second collaboration between Lincoln Center and Ruhrtriennale, the first being the groundbreaking production by David Pountney ofDie Soldaten in 2008.

 

A genre-defying ritual work connecting Japanese Noh theater, and an Ethiopian folk tale, Delusion of the Fury (1965-66) is groundbreaking in its inspirations and soundscape. It was written for the largest arrangement of Partch’s distinct 32 custom-made instruments, with names such as Eucal Blossom, Cloud Chamber Bowls, Quadrangularus Reversum, Marimba Eroica, and Spoils of War. The instruments are part of the stage set, as the composer believed in the importance of a visual component to music performance. Partch’s masterpiece is impossible to perform without the right set of instruments to present his 43-note octave micro-tonal scale. Although Partch’s delicate original instruments still exist, many are not suitable for playing or international travel, so Ensemble Musikfabrik replicated a completely new set, which took nearly three years to craft, for the sole purpose of performing this work.

 

Delusion of the Fury tells a two-part story about murder and reconciliation, featuring tragedy and comedy reminiscent of Greek dramas. Act I, based on Japanese Noh theater, is the story of a dead warrior who returns as a ghost to haunt his murderer. Act II, based on a folk tale from Ethiopia, follows a story rife with misunderstanding, resulting in comical escapades among a group of villagers. Together, the stories illustrate parables of anger and fury in disparate ways. Goebbels has staged these stories with a colorful set and props, including an inflatable mountain, and a flowing river. After last year’s presentation at the Edinburgh International Festival, Delusion of the Fury was named the best live classical music event of 2014 by The Guardian(UK) newspaper.

 

In addition to these performances, the percussionist-vocalist David Moss will host an ancillary event to complement Delusion of the Fury in a lecture and performance preceding the July 23 concert. This one-night only, pre-concert event will feature portions of Harry Partch’s Bitter Music, writings and musical sketches that create a portrait of the pioneering composer’s artistic development from his transient days during The Great Depression in California, Oregon, and Washington.

 

Ever since its formation, Ensemble Musikfabrik has been regarded as one of the leading ensembles for contemporary music. The Ensemble was last heard at the Festival in 2013 in Stockhausen’s Michael’s Reise um de Erde (Michael’s Journey Around the World) in Avery Fisher Hall. Following the literal meaning of its name, Ensemble Musikfabrik is particularly dedicated to artistic innovation. New, unknown, and often commissioned works in unusual media are typical of its repertory. The resulting works, many in close collaboration with their composers, are presented by the Cologne-based international soloist ensemble in up to 90 concerts a year in both Germany and abroad, at festivals, in its own series “Musikfabrik in WDR” and in regular radio broadcasts, recordings, and on CD. The musicians themselves are responsible for making all important decisions. Exploring the capabilities of modern communication forms, and new possibilities for expression in musical and theatrical areas, are focal points for the group. Interdisciplinary projects that can include live electronics, dance, theater, film, literature and artists in various mediums, along with chamber music, and works using open form and improvisation, extend their traditional, conducted ensemble concerts. This body of work and Ensemble Musikfabrik’s superb artistry, have resulted in collaborations with renowned composers and conductors, including Louis Andriessen, Harrison Birtwistle, Unsuk Chin, Péter Eötvös, Brian Ferneyhough, Heiner Goebbels, Toshio Hosokawa, Michael Jarrell, Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, David Lang, Liza Lim, Benedict Mason, Mouse on Mars, Carlus Padrissa (La Fura dels Baus), Emilio Pomàrico, Enno Poppe, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Rundel, Rebecca Saunders, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ilan Volkov and Sasha Waltz. Ensemble Musikfabrik made its Lincoln Center Festival debut in 2013 performing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Michaels Reise um die Erde(Michael’s Journey Around the World).

 

The eccentric and maverick American composer Harry Partch is known for creating unique custom-made musical instruments, composing scores using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and meticulously working with microtonal scales. His mother encouraged him to learn several instruments as a young child, and he began composing by the age of fourteen. Dissatisfied by the quality of his instructors at the University of Southern California’s School of Music, he dropped out of college in 1922. Though he traveled frequently, establishing himself as a transient worker depending on job opportunities, he eventually took up self-study in the libraries of San Francisco, where he discovered Hermann von Helmholtz's Sensations of Tone and devoted himself to music centered on scales tuned in just intonation. He began building custom instruments in the mid-1920s to realize performance of his new musical theories. Later, in 1930, the composer firmly rejected the European concert tradition and burned all his previous compositions. In 1942 he completed one of his signature instruments, the Chromelodeon, a 43-tone reed organ. Like his instruments, the microtonal scales he composed divide the octave into 43 unequal tones, which begin with absolute consonance and gradually progress into an infinitude of dissonance. Partch’s earliest compositions were small-scale pieces meant to be intoned to instrumental backing. Over time they grew in scale, and he began to integrate them into theater productions inspired heavily by ancient Greek theater and the traditions of Japanese Noh and kabuki, where performers were expected to sing, dance, speak, and play instruments.

 

Heiner Goebbels is one of today’s most important exponents of the contemporary music and theater scene. His compositions for ensembles and orchestras are performed worldwide and his music theater works, staged concerts and music theater works were regularly produced by Théâtre Vidy Lausanne and the Ensemble Modern and recently created at the Ruhrtriennale. Goebbels is a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies of the Justus Liebig University in Gießen (Germany) and President of the Theatre Academy Hessen. From 2012 to 2014, he served as the artistic director of the International Festival of the Arts, Ruhrtriennale. Mr. Goebbels has brought a number of productions to Lincoln Center audiences over the years. His first New York production took place at Lincoln Center Festival in 2001 with Black on White, followed by Eislermaterial in 2003, and Eraritjaritjaka in 2006. His I went to the house but did not enter was performed by the Hilliard Ensemble as a part of the 2012 White Light Festival. Songs of Wars I Have Seen had its New York premiere, performed by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, at 2001’s Tully Scope Festival. Stifters Dinge, conceived, composed, and directed by Goebbels, was featured during Lincoln Center’s 2009 Great Performers season at the Park Avenue Armory.

 

Performance schedule:

 

Bitter Music with David Moss: July 23 at 6 PM

Running time: 1 hour and 5 minutes, with no intermission

Delusion of the Fury: July 23 at 8 PM, July 24 at 8 PM.

Running time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes, with no intermission

 

Produced by Ruhrtriennale – Festival of the Arts. In co-production with Lincoln Center Festival, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and Holland Festival.

Supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) and the Kunststiftung NRW (Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia).

Ruhrtriennale and Ensemble Musikfabrik are supported by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The construction of, and the rehearsals with, the instruments for the performance of Harry Partch’s “Delusion of the Fury” at the opening ceremony of the Ruhr Triennial in 2013 were funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia.

 

The Lincoln Center Festival 2015 presentation of “Delusion of the Fury” is made possible in part by generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia).

 

 

THEATER

 

DruidShakespeare: The History Plays (North American Premiere)

Druid Theatre Company

July 7?19, 2015

Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College (524 West 59th Street)

Richard II, Henry IV (Pts. 1 & 2), and Henry V by William Shakespeare

New adaptation by Mark O’Rowe

Directed by Garry Hynes

 

Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, returns for a fourth engagement at Lincoln Center Festival with the North American premiere of DruidShakespeare: The History Plays, playwright Mark O’Rowe’s new version of William Shakespeare’s four history plays that make up the key foundational narrative of the English monarchy—Richard II, Henry IV (Pts. 1 & 2), and Henry V. O’Rowe’s adaptation, presented as a marathon theatrical experience, or in two consecutive installments, will be a pared down version of the plays enacted by the astonishingly talented Druid Ensemble, a “remarkable company” (The New York Times) of Irish actors.

 

There will be four marathon performances in total over the two weekends and four two-part performances on consecutive weekdays.

 

Helmed by Tony-Award winning director, Garry Hynes, DruidShakespeare: The History Plays features the newly formalized Druid Ensemble, including acclaimed actors Marie Mullen, Marty Rea, Aaron Monaghan, Rory Nolan, Aisling O Sullivan and Garrett Lombard, among others, many of whom are known to New York City audiences from their performances in DruidSynge(Lincoln Center Festival 2006), The Silver Tassie (Lincoln Center Festival 2011), and DruidMurphy (Lincoln Center Festival2012). The ensemble of actors will play a multitude of characters across the four plays. Celebrated actor Marty Rea (last seen at Lincoln Center Festival in 2012 as Michael in Tom Murphy’s plays Conversations on a Homecoming and A Whistle in the Dark) will play Richard II, with Derbhle Crotty as Bolingbroke/Henry IV, and Aisling O Sullivan as Hal/Henry V.

 

An epic story of families and wars and the making of nations, DruidShakespeare: The History Plays is an exploration of English history through an Irish lens. As Shakespeare was writing these plays, Ireland was often the subject of expeditionary forces from England sent to quell Irish rebellions or Irish warlords, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. These expeditions crept into his writing and are referred to throughout Richard II, Henry IV (Pts. 1 & 2), and Henry V. Ultimately Ireland became part of the United Kingdom, and remained so until 1922, when it once again became an independent country (except, of course, for six counties in the north which opted to stay in the United Kingdom).

 

Another connective thread is religious intolerance. Adaptor Mark O’Rowe grew up in the 1970s and 1980s with the Troubles and the issue of religious pressures, issues that were certainly resonant in Shakespeare’s time as well, when Queen Elizabeth I decreed the practice of Catholicism as treason, pronouncing all of her subjects to be Protestant.

 

As the ensemble will perform in their own accents, the performance of Shakespeare with Irish accents “…so familiar and so foreign,” to echo James Joyce, marks these plays as explorations of colonization and conquest, as well as a discourse on honor, class, and ethnicity. Garry Hynes commented, “The question we are asking is how, in the context of the historical relationship between Ireland and England, do we, as Irish artists, produce these plays today?”

 

O’Rowe’s adaptation of the four plays focuses on distilling the narratives into a unified dramatic action. Shakespeare’s original language has been preserved in the piece as has the chronological integrity of the plays. O’Rowe’s modifications of Shakespeare’s work remove ancillary characters and streamline the language to remove stylistic redundancies. The works will be presented on a clean and spare set that will carry through all four plays.

 

Druid Theatre Company excels at presenting world class theater on the international stage as exemplified in previous large scale projects presented at Lincoln Center Festival: DruidMurphy: Three Plays by Tom Murphy (2012), O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie (2010), and DruidSynge (six plays by Synge in 2006), described by Charles Isherwood of The New York Times as “a highlight not just of my theatergoing year but of my theatergoing life,” preceded in New York City by Druid’s four time Tony Award-winning The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh (West End and Broadway  in 1998), and the other two parts of McDonagh’s ‘Leenane Trilogy,’ A Skull in Connemara (2001), and The Lonesome West (1999), among others.

 

“A world-class company rooted in the cultural fabric of Galway,” (The Irish Times) Druid was founded in Galway in 1975 by Garry Hynes, Mick Lally, and Marie Mullen as the first professional theater company in Ireland outside of Dublin, with the belief that great theater should be accessible to all regardless of geographical proximity to a major city. To that end, it has made touring Ireland a priority, expanding their tours internationally and becoming the most well-known Irish theater company in the world. Led by artistic director, Garry Hynes, the first woman to receive a Tony Award for best direction of a play (for The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh), the Company has won over 50 awards internationally.

Irish playwright and screenwriter Mark O’Rowe is best known for his 1999 work Howie the Rookie. Upon its premiere in 1999, the play was awarded an Irish Times/ESB Theatre Award and a George Devine Award for Best New Play as well as the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.  Other plays include From Both Hips (Fishamble, 1997), Made in China (Abbey Theatre, 2001), Crestfall (Gate Theatre, 2003), Terminus (Abbey Theatre, 2007), and Our Few and Evil Days (Abbey Theatre, 2014) and films Boy A (2007), Intermission (2003; IFTA Award Winner) and Broken (2012).

 

Performance schedule: (July 7-10 are preview performances)

First Half: July 7 at 7 PM; July 9 at 7 PM; July 14 at 7 PM; July 16 at 7 PM

Running time: approximately 3 hours and 5 minutes, with intermission

Second Half: July 8 at 7 PM; July 10 at 7 PM; July 15 at 7 PM; July 17 at 7 PM

Running time: approximately 3 hours, with intermission

Marathon: July 11 at 2 PM; July 12 at 2 PM; July 18 at 2 PM; July 19 at 2 PM

Running time: approximately 6 hours and 35 minutes, with intermissions

 

Co-produced by Lincoln Center Festival, Druid Theatre Company, and NUI Galway

 

The Lincoln Center Festival 2015 presentation of DruidShakespeare: The History Plays is made possible in part by generous support from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

***

 

Cheek by Jowl

Ubu Roi

by Alfred Jarry

July 22?26, 2015

Five performances at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College (524 West 59th Street)

Directed by Declan Donnellan

Design by Nick Ormerod

With: Xavier Boiffier, Camille Cayol, Vincent de Bouard, Christophe Grégoire, Cécile Leterme, and Sylvain Levitte

Performed in French, with English supertitles

 

The celebrated team of director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod return to Lincoln Center Festival with their acclaimed Cheek by Jowl French language production of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry’s 1896 proto-surrealist and absurdist comedy about a scheming, murderous yet ridiculous dictator. Given that Jarry wrote the play at 23 as a prank aimed at a detested teacher, Donnellan and Ormerod chose to rekindle Jarry’s outrageous play charting the exploits of the tyrannical King by setting it as the Oedipal fantasy of a camcorder-clutching teenager taking revenge on his parents and their French bourgeoisie world. In the cream-colored dining room of an affluent French couple, an ensemble of six French actors performs Jarry’s grotesque play about the oafish Ubu, who is spurred to kill the King of Poland by his Lady Macbeth-like wife. English supertitles provide translation.

 

As they prepare for a dinner party, their son’s acid gaze transforms his parents into the monstrous Père and Mère Ubu.  And as successive dinner guests arrive, in the son’s eye they become participants in an unfolding story of savagery and butchery.  As the dinner progresses,  the home turns into a battlefield, reflecting the boy’s wrath but also depicting the potential violence that lies within us all. The critics in Paris and London cheered the production. “Exhilaratingly fresh…blackly hilarious,” said The Independent while The Guardian praised, “Donnellan gets richly uninhibited performances from his cast…battlefield chaos in a world of civilised chic.”

 

Cheek by Jowl was formed in 1981 by its co-Artistic Directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod.  The company’s manifesto was to re-examine classical texts, avoiding directorial and design concepts, and focus on the actor’s art.  Cheek by Jowl has established an international reputation for bringing “fresh life to the classics using intense, vivid performances like a laser of light to set the text ablaze” (The Guardian). The company performs in English, Russian, and French. In 2007 Peter Brook invited Donnellan and Ormerod to form a group of French actors to perform a French language production of Racine’sAndromaque. Many of the actors in that production are in the company’s current production of Ubu Roi.

 

In 1999 Chekhov International Theatre Festival commissioned Donnellan and Ormerod to form their own company of Russian actors in Moscow.  Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, one of the resulting productions, played at Lincoln Center Festival in 2009, starring actor Yevgeny Mironov, who will return to the festival this summer co-starring in the Theatre of Nations production ofMiss Julie.

 

Cheek by Jowl’s first production was William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, which was presented to acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival.  Soon after the company received invitations to take its productions of Vanity Fair and Pericles to festivals in Europe and the Near East.  In its first London season, 1986, Cheek by Jowl won the Laurence Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer. For that period, more than half of Cheek by Jowl’s plays received Olivier Awards. Over the past 30 years the Company has toured across five continents, creating more than 30 productions. 

 

Writer and dramatist Alfred Jarry filled his brief 34 years on earth with enough writing and louche living to last a far longer lifetime.  Jarry wrote novels, plays, poetry, essays, and speculative journalism, but he is best remembered for his plays about the Ubu legend: Ubu Cocu and Ubu Roi. Jarry’s inspiration for the plays was a short farce called Les Polonais. Jarry revised and reworked the material for the rest of his life.  Jarry is also remembered for coining the term and concept of “pataphysics.”  As he explained it, pataphysics is “the science of the realm beyond metaphysics . . . the science of imaginary solutions.” Both pataphysics and Ubu Roi have influenced artists and writers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, including painters Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, as well as composer Paul McCartney, and filmmaker Tim Burton.

 

Performance schedule: July 22 at 7:30 PM; July 23 at 7:30 PM; July 24 at 7:30 PM; July 25 at 7:30 PM; July 26 at 2:00 PM.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes, no intermission.

 

Co-producers: Cheek by Jowl with Barbican, London, Les Gémeaux/Sceaux/Scène Nationale and Comédie de Béthune, Centre Dramatique National Nord/Pas-de-Calais.

 

***

 

Kafka on the Shore

July 23 – July 26, 2015

Four performances at the David H. Koch Theater (Broadway at 63rd Street)

Based on the work of Haruki Murakami

Adapted for the stage by Frank Galati

Directed by Yukio Ninagawa

 

Starring Rie Miyazawa, Naohito Fujiki, and Nino Furuhata

 

Director Yukio Ninagawa celebrates his 80th birthday with a return to Lincoln Center Festival for the U.S. premiere of his production of Haruki Murakami’s internationally best-selling novel, Kafka on the Shore, starring actors Rie Miyazawa,Naohito Fujiki, and Nino Furuhata. The play is about two journeys.  In one, the teen-age hero, Kafka Tamura—who has adopted the name of the great writer whose work is filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation—packs his backpack and, with his alter-ego/companion Crow, flees his home in an attempt to escape his father’s Oedipal curse.

 

At the same time, an old man, Nakata, suffering from an inexplicable childhood affliction that stole his memory, is compelled to set out on a voyage for reasons he does not understand. Their odysseys entwine in modern day Japan.   Fittingly for Murakami’s dreamlike, metaphorical writing style, Ninagawa has explained in his program notes that he “tried as much as possible to present audiences with multiple-layered sets giving alternative visual information about the labyrinth that was hiding in the text of Kafka on the Shore.”

 

Kafka on the Shore will be seen in London, Japan, Australia, Singapore, and South Korea, in addition to its New York performances.

 

The renowned theater director Yukio Ninagawa is acclaimed for his stunningly beautiful stagings of Shakespeare, as well as for modern Japanese plays. Kafka on the Shore marks his third production at Lincoln Center Festival, following the U. S. premieres of Yukio Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays in 2005, and Hisashi Inoue’s Musashi in 2010.  Ninagawa has worked in the theater since 1955, when he joined the Seihai Theatre Company as an actor. He made his directorial debut with Shinjo Afuruu Keihakusa in 1969, and later set up his own theater companies, Gendaijin-Gekijo and Sakurasha. In 1983, he directed his first European production, Medea. Since then he has staged at least one production a year overseas.  He is a member of the Shakespeare Globe Council at the Globe Theatre in London, and was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002. The recipient of numerous theater and educational awards in Japan, he holds honorary doctorates in the UK from the Universities of Edinburgh and Plymouth. He became an artistic director of Sainokuni Saitama Arts Theater, Japan in 2006, and founded a unique performing group, the Gold Theatre, for people over 55 years of age. That same year he was invited by the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage Titus Andronicus as part of the Complete Works Festival, the only Japanese director participating in that special project.

 

Contemporary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel, was one of The New York Times 10 best books in 2005.   He is known for his dreamlike, surreal narratives influenced by Western culture, including the work of American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler, and Richard Brautigan. Murakami ran a jazz club in Tokyo before publishing his first book, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), which won Japan’s Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers.  This success was followed by two sequels, Pinball and A Wild Sheep Chase, which together formThe Trilogy of the Rat.  Murakami is also the author of the novels Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and the short story The Elephant Vanishes, which was adapted by Simon McBurney’s Complicite theater and given its North American premiere at Lincoln Center Festival 2004.  Murakami’s works have been translated into 50 languages, and his many international literary honors include a Franz Kafka Prize, a Jerusalem Prize, and the Welt-Literaturpreis. In 2011 Murakami donated his winnings from the International Catalunya Prize to the victims of the Hanshin earthquake and tsunami, and to those affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

 

Performance schedule: July 23 at 8 PM; July 24 at 7:30 PM; July 25 at 7:30 PM; July 26 at 2 PM

Running time: approximately 3 hours, with intermission

 

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Theatre of Nations, Moscow

Evgeny Mironov, Artistic Director

Miss Julie

By August Strindberg

July 27?August 2, 2014

Six performances, New York City Center (131 West 55th Street)

Directed by Thomas Ostermeier

Adaptation by Mikhail Durnenkov

Set design by Jan Papplebaum

Performed in Russian with English supertitles

 

Celebrated Russian actors Chulpan Khamatova and Evgeny Mironov — artistic director of Moscow’s State Theatre of Nations, and award-winning star of such films as Valery Todorovsky’s Love (1991), Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun(1995), and the monumental TV adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (2003) — will make a rare New York appearance when they star in August Strindberg’s drama Miss Julie, staged by iconoclastic German director Thomas Ostermeier, known for his provocative and stylishly contemporary stagings of Ibsen’s plays in recent years.  This production, from Moscow’s Theatre of Nations, premiered in Moscow in 2011.  The play was adapted by Russian playwright Mikhail Durnenkov, and hews to the original 1888 Swedish text, but uses contemporary language to characterize life in the new class structure of today’s Russia.  There will be with six performances at New York City Center.

 

Set during a night in and around the kitchen of a large mansion, Miss Julie tells the story of a count’s daughter, who, bored with her life in the aristocracy, becomes the mistress of Jean, an educated servant in her father’s household. What ensues is a struggle for power as the main characters, representing the seemingly outdated and fading class of “haves,” and the rising class of “have nots” fight for dominance in a battle of words, lust, and psychological warfare. Jan Papplebaum’s impressionistic stainless steel set revolves, and the open kitchen has a video screen above it allowing the audience to see every aspect of the struggle between Jean and Julie.

 

Film, TV, and theater star Chulpan Khamatova reprises her role as Miss Julie for the Festival. Miss Khamatova is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2012 Russian Federation National Artist Award for outstanding achievements in film and theatrical arts. Her co-star is two-time Russian Federation State Prize recipient Evgeny Mironov, who previously appeared atLincoln Center Festival 2009 in the acclaimed Chekov International Theatre Festival production of Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod, co-founders and co-Artistic Directors of Cheek by Jowl (see section on Ubu Roi).

 

Thomas Ostermeier is the artistic director of Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, one of Europe’s leading venues for contemporary theater. Through innovative productions of works by playwrights as diverse as Marius von Mayenburg, Sarah Kane, and Henrik Ibsen, Ostermeier is considered to be one of the leading voices in contemporary theater. He has a singular directorial style that is lauded throughout Europe and the US. Since 1999, Ostermeier has served as the resident director and an artistic director of the Schaubühne. In 2004, Ostermeier was appointed associate artist for the Festival d’Avignon. In 2009, his production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman won the Grand Prize of French Critics and his production of Hamlet was honored with the Barcelona Critics Prize. His productions of Nora (A Doll’s House), Hedda Gabler, and Hamlet have toured internationally to festivals and theaters all over the world. Ostermeier was named an Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2010.

 

Theatre of Nations is a unique structure within the system of the Russian cultural institutions. In terms of the scope and versatility of its activities, it has no analogues in the practices of the national theatre. Founded in 1987 under the name of the Theatre of Friendship, it was renamed in 1991 into the State Theatre of Nations.

 

The Theatre of Nations develops and implements a variety of theatre programs, organizes and holds national and international festivals, presents the best Russian and foreign productions of all genres and trends, produces its own performances, and pursues the ultimate goal of becoming the center for bringing up a new generation of theater practitioners.

 

The regular festival programs of the Theatre of Nations include the [email protected] project, Another Theatre from France Festival, Theatres of the Small Towns of Russia Festival, and its satellite program of supporting theatres of the Russian towns. The Theatre of Nations also organizes the TERRITORI? International Festival and School of Contemporary Performing Arts.

 

The activities of the Theatre of Nations are in many ways exclusive. Thus, it introduces the Russian audiences to works created by outstanding members of the European theater community. These include the mono-play Vladimir or the Flight Cut Short by French theatre and film star Marina Vlady and Faust-Fantasy after Johann Wolfgang Goethe staged and performed by one of the present-day’s greatest European directors, Peter Stein.

 

Another creative project of the Theatre of Nations, One Play Festival, was timed for the 120th anniversary of the premiere of Chekhov’s Ivanov at the famous Korsh Theatre in Moscow that now accommodates the headquarters of the Theatre of Nations.

 

The Theatre of Nations dedicates a significant part of its artistic life to its own productions. It is currently working on Pushkin’s fairy tales directed by Robert Wilson which premieres in June 2015, and Ivanov, directed by Luc Bondy which premieres in April 2015, and recently produced Hamlet/Collage, directed by Robert Lepage. Its repertoire boasts a variety of genres and names of stage directors, including performances by such artists of European fame as Alvis Hermanis (Latvia), Eimuntas Nekrosius (Lithuania), Thomas Ostermeier (Germany), Javor Gardev (Bulgaria), Russian director Andrey Moguchy, as well as performances by young directors Nikita Grinshpun, Tufan Imamutdinov, Timofei Kulyabin, and Dmitry Volkostrelov, most of whom made their professional debut on the Theater of Nations stage.

 

The Theatre of Nations has been constantly touring, in most cases, as a member of the major Russian and European theatre festivals. Performances by the Theater of Nations have repeatedly received various prestigious awards and honors.

 

Performance schedule: July 27 at 7:30 PM; July 28 at 7:30 PM; July 29 at 7:30 PM; July 31 at 7:30 PM; August 1 at 7:30 PM; August 2 at 2 PM.

Running time: approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission.

 

The Lincoln Center Festival 2015 presentation of “Miss Julie” is made possible in part by generous support from the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater.

 

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The Gabriadze Theater (Tbilisi, Georgia)

Ramona (North American Premiere)

July 27—August 1, 2015

10 Performances, Clark Studio Theater (165 West 65th Street)

Rezo Gabriadze, director

Performed in Georgian with English supertitles

 

Lincoln Center Festival 2015 welcomes the return of Rezo Gabriadze and his acclaimed marionette theater troupe from the Republic of Georgia. Gabriadze, a master of stage magic, is internationally celebrated for his works of fantasy and wit that are filled with beautiful, elliptical melancholy. They will be presenting Ramona, the story of two trains who fall in love. His company made its New York debut at Lincoln Center Festival 2002 with two of his signature works, the elegiac The Battle of Stalingradand The Autumn of My Springtime, to critical and audience raves. Gabriadze returned to the Festival in 2004 with his play,Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov as a man who tries to turn himself into a car, and again in 2010 with a reprise of The Battle of Stalingrad.

 

Like Gabriadze’s previous puppet plays, Ramona is produced with extraordinary marionettes, gifted puppeteers, and sets from such commonplace objects as string, bits of cloth, twigs, and wire. It tells the story of two ill-fated steam engines, Ramona and Ermon, who fall in love in the USSR. As the dashing locomotive Ermon chugs across Siberia, Ramona, a shunting engine (only able to move 300 meters in either direction), must remain in a small train station in Rioni. Through a heartrending series of events, ever-romantic Ramona and heroic Ermon keep missing each other, deeply saddening the other characters, who include a runaway hen, a wild boar, and a circus troupe. This humorously stark tale of compassion and loss is accompanied by music inspired by Georgian folk songs.

 

The Gabriadze Theater was founded in 1981.  Besides designing, constructing, and directing works of puppet theater. Rezo Gabriadze, a 78-year-old artist, has been a writer, sculptor, graphic artist, journalist, theater and film director, builder, and forester. Gabriadze’s exhibits have been shown in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Lausanne, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and other cities. He was a participant in Munich’s From Einstein to Tarkovsky exhibit. His paintings, graphics, and sculpture pieces are found in numerous state and private collections in the United States, Russia, Germany, Israel, Japan, and France. He counts among his awards: Commander, French Order of Arts and Letters. His other prizes include the Golden Mask, the Triumph, the Golden Sofit and many more. For his film work, Rezo Gabriadze has won the Grand Prize of the International Moscow Film Festival and the Nike Prize, among others.

 

Gabriadze’s native Georgia is the small country in the Caucasus Mountains that even in the darkest Soviet times was known for endowing its inhabitants with a strong visual sensibility and vivid sense of humor. In an interview in a St. Petersburg theater journal Gabriadze said, “I am sustained by the tiniest, the most miniscule details — pauses between words, music, silence, the wind and random glances.”  Of Gabriadze, Peter Brooks said: “He is a creator of great ingenuity. His imagery is deeply personal and it brings to the theatre a quality of poetic and transcendental realism for which I know no equivalent…”

 

Performance schedule: July 27 at 7 PM; July 28 at 7 PM; July 29 at 6 and 9 PM; July 30 at 6 and 9 PM; July 31 at 6 and 9 PM; August 1 at 3 and 7 PM.

Running time: approximately one hour and 15 minutes, with no intermission.

 

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Now in its 20th season, Lincoln Center Festival has received worldwide attention for presenting some of the broadest and most original performing arts programs in Lincoln Center’s history. The Festival has presented nearly 1,371 performances of opera, music, dance, theater, and interdisciplinary forms by internationally acclaimed artists from more than 50 countries. To date, theFestival has commissioned more than 42 new works and offered some 142 world, U.S., and New York premieres. It places particular emphasis on showcasing contemporary artistic viewpoints and multidisciplinary works that challenge the boundaries of traditional performance. LincolnCenterFestival.org

 

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) serves three primary roles: presenter of artistic programming, national leader in arts and education and community relations, and manager of the Lincoln Center campus. A presenter of more than 3,000 free and ticketed events, performances, tours, and educational activities annually, LCPA offers 15 series, festivals, and programs including American Songbook, Avery Fisher Artist Program, Great Performers, Lincoln Center Books, Lincoln Center Festival,Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Lincoln Center Vera List Art Project, Midsummer Night Swing, Martin E. Segal Awards, Meet the Artist, Mostly Mozart Festival, and the White Light Festival, as well as the Emmy Award-winning Live From Lincoln Center, which airs nationally on PBS. As manager of the Lincoln Center campus, LCPA provides support and services for the Lincoln Center complex and the 11 resident organizations.  In addition, LCPA led a $1.2 billion campus renovation, completed in October 2012. For more information, visit LincolnCenter.org or AboutLincolnCenter.org

 

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Documents

• Lincoln Center Festival 2015 Announcement [PDF]

Web Links

• Lincoln Center Festival
• VIDEO: Lincoln Center Festival 2015 "Gabriadze Theatre: Ramona"
• VIDEO: Lincoln Center Festival 2015 "National Ballet of China: The Peony Pavilion"
• VIDEO: Lincoln Center Festival 2015 "National Ballet of China: The Red Detachment of Women"

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