Carl Sagan inspired a new oratorio for Philharmonia Baroque
Nicholas McGegan and Philharmonia Baroque team up again with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.
One of the most unusual — and rewarding — musical pairings on last season’s music calendar came about when conductor Nicholas McGegan teamed up with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. The music director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra introduced two new vocal works by Shaw, and those who were there to hear Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sophie von Otter sing them are still talking about the beauty of the performances.
Now McGegan is conducting another Shaw piece — one that promises an even bigger, and perhaps more significant, impact.
“The Listeners,” a new oratorio commissioned by Philharmonia and composed by Shaw, is making its world premiere on the Baroque ensemble’s season-opening program. Featuring the orchestra, Bruce Lamott’s Philharmonia Chorale and five vocal soloists, the program, titled “A Cosmic Notion,” also includes Handel’s “Eternal Source of Light Divine” and Suite from “Terpsichore.” Performances are in Berkeley, San Francisco and Palo Alto.
Composed in 10 movements, Shaw’s oratorio is inspired by Carl Sagan’s Golden Record, which the late astronomer and astrophysicist created in tribute to the wonders of astronomy and space travel.
Shaw’s new work also says much about the growing relationship between the music world’s early and contemporary disciplines. Time was that the boundaries between the two were clearly drawn and strictly enforced. But according to bass-baritone Dashon Burton, one of the singers appearing in this weekend’s premiere, that was then, and this is now.
“We’re so much more connected than we used to be,” the New York-based Burton explained in a recent interview, “and that just brings about so many more opportunities to be curious.”
Burton, who, like Shaw, is a founding member of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, said that “The Listeners” is, in a sense, an ode to curiosity.
The Golden Record — literally, a disc that was attached to the Voyager spacecraft and sent into space in 1977 — included music, images and audio recordings of voices in 55 languages. It was a message to unknown recipients from the planet Sagan called “this little blue dot.”
Shaw’s score incorporates texts by Tennyson, Renaissance poet William Drummond, American poets Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton and Afro-Caribbean poet Yesenia Montilla, along with actual audio recordings from the Golden Record.
“With all its different texts, different colors and fascinating use of the voice that Caroline knows so well, it’s an incredibly moving testament to the universal power of music,” said Burton. “I mean that in every sense of the word. Pun intended — it’s one of the most universal pieces of music I’ve come across in a very long time.”
Burton, a native New Yorker who grew up star-gazing from his home in the Bronx — his mother bought him a telescope when he was still in elementary school — originally intended to follow in Sagan’s footsteps. In college, he studied astronomy and music. Music won out, and today he sings a wide range of works, from Baroque masterpieces to ink-still-wet premieres. But he still keeps his eyes to the sky.
“For me, everything that’s in astronomy is in music,” he said. “Astronomy is music. It’s the music of the planets and of the stars and the galaxy.”
Although Roomful of Teeth sings music by a number of 20th- and 21st-century composers, Shaw’s music occupies a special place in his life.
“She’s one of the deepest and most direct composers I’ve ever had the chance to work with,” Burton said. “She can distill music to its absolute essence. That’s the joy we’re always seeking, whether we’re just listening to music, or if we’re lucky enough to perform music. That distillation of music is the joy.”
For Burton, new approaches to presenting music have opened frontiers.
“Good music is good music,” he said. “One of the tenets of Roomful of Teeth is to find the old-growth forest in the human voice.
“It you just continue to be curious enough, you can find immense treasures there – an entire universe of color, expression, beauty, passion and intimacy.”
Contact Georgia Rowe at growe@pacbell.net.
‘A COSMIC NOTION’
Philharmonia Baroque debuts Caroline Shaw’s “The Listeners”
When and where: 8 p.m. Oct. 17 at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco; 7:30 p.m. Oct. 18 at First United Methodist Church, Palo Alto; 8 p.m. Oct. 19, and 4 p.m. Oct. 20 at First Congregational Church, Berkeley
Tickets: $32-$120; 415-392-4400; www.philharmonia.org.