Tele-operas by Davor Branimir Vincze, Julie Herndon, and Chris Lortie

Tele-operas by Davor Branimir Vincze, Julie Herndon, and Chris Lortie
Date and Time
Friday July 16th, 2021
9:00 - 11:00am
Location
online | Music Biennale Zagreb
About this event

We invite you to the virtual premiere of three tele-operas by Stanford graduate composers Davor Branimir Vincze, Julie Herndon, and Chris Lortie. These chamber operas were composed for the Decoder Ensemble with soloists Jessica Aszodi and Nina Guo, directed by Heinrich Horowitz, and recorded in Berlin in March of 2021 with video by Heinrich Horwitz and Lara Cruz and audio by Anne Taegart and Carlo Grippa. On Friday, July 16 at 9 AM PDT, the three operas will be streamed by Music Biennale Zagreb here.

XinSheng by Davor Branimir Vincze is about an experimental drug with strong regenerative properties and severe side effects, created by a pharmacologist named Fan. Andrei, a young boxer that Fan just fell in love with, gets critically injured in an illegal boxing match in Berlin. Fearing the local authorities, and thus not being able to bring Andrei to a regular hospital, Fan pleads with Anne, a surgeon and her former lover, to operate Andrei in an undercover hangar. Anne is willing to help, but disagrees with Fan about administering XinSheng during the operation. As Fan threatens never to speak to her again should Andrei die, Anne, still in love with Fan, reluctantly agrees, even though she is aware of Fan’s manipulation. 

At That Time by Julie Herndon is a love story about two writers, and the ways in which their creative identities evolve in relation to each other. The piece uses text by Gertrude Stein from the novel that originally brought her fame, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which essentially narrates her partner Alice’s story as if it was Gertrude’s own autobiography. This gesture can be perceived as an ultimate act of love, and also a sort of robbery. Over the course of the piece, Alice is left to find more subtle and subversive ways to express her self and creativity as Gertrude navigates her new-found fame. Symptom of Expression by Chris Lortie is a short film based on Eric Shirlot's poem of the same title that explores the topic of emotional projection and simulation. Visually and sonically, the act of transposing one's self onto another is on display here, asking to what extent we owe our selfhood to one another, and at what cost. 

Event Sponsor
Department of Music, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics