• Kronos Quartet performs 9/11-inspired Awakening Nov. 10
• Kronos to perform on Penn State student’s sculpture
• Virsky Ukrainian dancers perform Nov. 17
• Steel Hammer revives John Henry legend Nov. 19

Tickets for all Center for the Performing Arts presentations through April 2010 are on sale. Purchase tickets online; by phone at 814-863-0255 or 1-800-ARTS-TIX; or in person at Eisenhower Auditorium (weekdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.), Penn State Tickets Downtown (weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.), HUB-Robeson Center (weekdays 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.), or the Bryce Jordan Center (weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.). Go to Events for a complete list and description of presentations.

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Kronos Quartet performs 9/11-inspired Awakening Nov. 10

San Francisco’s Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet makes its first appearance at Penn State in more than a decade in the evening-length Awakening, a meditation on redemption that features music from a dozen countries and a guest appearance by the Nittany Valley Children’s Choir. The concert takes place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 10, in Eisenhower Auditorium.

Purchase tickets for the Center for the Performing Arts presentation, which are $36 for an adult, $15 for a University Park student, and $26 for a person 18 and younger.

In Awakening, violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler perform a work inspired by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath. Awakening, which takes its name from a work by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky of Uzbekistan, features music by Argentineans Osvaldo Golijov and Gustavo Santaolalla, Americans Michael Gordon and Terry Riley, and Finlander Aulis Sallinen. Other music comes from composers in Turkey, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, India, and Sweden.

The Nittany Valley Children’s Choir is scheduled to sing Sallinen’s ethereal Winter Was Hard. The presentation also features a metal assemblage created specifically for this performance by Penn State graduate student Joe Netta.

Kronos Quartet has spent more than three decades combining a spirit of exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet. Kronos has performed thousands of concerts, released more than forty-five recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, and commissioned more than 600 works and arrangements from diverse artists.

Gay D. Dunne, M.D., and James H. Dunne, M.D., sponsor the performance. WPSU-FM is the media sponsor. Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring violinist James Lyon, Penn State professor of music, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis. The presentation also includes a post-performance discussion among the quartet and audience members.

Kronos is presented in partnership with Juniata College’s Halbritter Center for the Performing Arts, where the ensemble performs mixed repertoire at 7:30 p.m. Monday, November 9. The quartet conducts a string quartet workshop, which is open to the public, from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Sunday, November 8, in Room 128 of Music Building II on the University Park campus. Harrington, Kronos founder and artistic director, hosts a listening party—focused on the music he’s hearing on his MP3 player—at 7 p.m. Sunday, November 8, at the C. Barton McCann School of Art in Petersburg.

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Kronos to perform on Penn State student’s sculpture

Sparks will be flying—literally—when the Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet collaborates with the work of sculptor and Penn State graduate student Joe Netta in a performance of the evening-length work Awakening at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 10, in Eisenhower Auditorium.

The Center for the Performing Arts presentation features a metal assemblage created by Netta specifically for this performance.

“I am approaching the Kronos Quartet project as a way to create my work on a larger scale and have it interact with a space I am not used to,” Netta says. “I also want to use this opportunity to create a space where movement and sonic resonance can be modified to create sounds I cannot create in my studio. I want the musicians to pull out sounds from the objects I am creating and relate them to the audience.”

Netta, a fan of the San Francisco-based quartet, is a master of fine arts candidate in sculpture at the College of Arts and Architecture’s School of Visual Arts. Charles Garoian, director of the school, and Bonnie Collura, assistant professor of art, recommended Netta for the project. The sculptor gladly accepted quartet’s challenge to create a large structure with four pieces for the musicians to play off.

The assemblage will help the quartet to create a visually diverse experience and allow the Penn State performance to be one of a kind.
“This is going to be a very compelling, multimedia show that will leave audiences inspired by their creativity,” says Amy Vashaw, audience and program development director for the Center for the Performing Arts. “It is a great opportunity to tie a world-renowned group in with the Penn State School of Visual Arts.

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Virsky Ukrainian dancers perform Nov. 17

Virsky Ukrainian National Dance Company, a folk dance ensemble based in Kyiv (Kiev) and founded in 1937 by ballet master Pavlo Virsky, performs at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 17, in Eisenhower Auditorium.

Purchase tickets for the Center for the Performing Arts presentation, which are $36 for an adult, $15 for a University Park student, and $26 for a person 18 and younger.

“At root, most folk dances have something to do with making the crops grow. But when theatricalized with a touch of genius and a great deal of creativity, they become part of an international dance repertory,” a New York Times dance critic writes. “To watch the fabulous virtuosity of this company’s young men and women in their vibrantly colored costumes … was, as a cheering audience showed, to appreciate great dancing by any definition. Like Igor Moiseyev, his contemporary in Moscow, … Virsky knew how to capture the essence of folk dances and recreate them for spectators … .”

Ukraine didn’t become an independent country until 1991, but the culture of the Ukrainian people has been evolving for more than a thousand years. The Virsky company embraces the charm, beauty, and folk dance traditions of its homeland and shares them with audiences in the four corners of the world.

Clad in colorful clothing and blessed with grace, the company performs dances filled, in turn, with romance, optimism, humor, and occasional melancholy. Since 1980 Myroslav Vantukh, a choreographic ethnographer, has served as artistic director of the company his mentor created. Under Vantukh’s leadership, the company of eighty-five artists continues to create dances that enrich an already broad and deep repertoire.

Audio description, which is especially helpful to patrons with sight loss, is available for this performance at no extra charge to ticket holders. Designer’s Studio sponsors the performance. The Penn State International Dance Ensemble Endowment underwrites dance presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts. Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.

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Steel Hammer revives John Henry legend Nov. 19

On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, perhaps the most American of holidays, artists from two continents are gathering at Penn State to perform Steel Hammer, a twenty-first-century adaptation of a quintessentially American folktale. New York City’s Bang on a Can All-Stars and Norway’s Trio Mediaeval perform the evening-length Steel Hammer at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, November 19, in Eisenhower Auditorium.

“Steel Hammer is inspired by my love for the legends and music of Appalachia,” notes Pennsylvania-born composer Julia Wolfe, whose earliest musical epiphanies came from her love of American folk music. As a young woman she studied and played the mountain dulcimer—a key component of the Appalachian musical tradition.

“Culling from both the music and oral traditions of the region,” Wolfe continues, “the piece focuses on the legend of John Henry, immortalized for his race against ‘the machine.’ Wielding a steel hammer, he faces the onslaught of the industrial age as his super-human strength is challenged in a contest to out dig an engine. With its over 200 versions and myriad of differing details, the tale has been embraced by a wide variety of American communities in the cause and glorification of the worker.”

Purchase tickets for the Center for the Performing Arts presentation, which are $29 for an adult, $10 for a University Park student, and $19 for a person 18 and younger.

The new-music ensemble Bang on a Can All-Stars—equal parts rock band and amplified chamber group—expands its usual gathering of clarinets, cello, keyboard, electric guitar, bass, and percussion with a chorus of dulcimers, wooden bones, banjo, steel hammers, and other instruments to lay down the musical bed for Steel Hammer.

Bang on a Can was formed two decades ago “as a collective of composers and musicians frustrated by the insularity of the new music scene and by the downtown-uptown divide that defined music in New York,” observes a Chicago Tribune writer.

Trio Mediaeval, known for what a San Francisco Chronicle critic calls an “unerringly precise blend of voices,” sings the narrative for Steel Hammer. “Singing,” the Chronicle writer asserts, “doesn’t get more unnervingly beautiful” than that of Trio Mediaeval. “To hear the group’s note-perfect counterpoint—as pristine and inviting as clean, white linens—is to be astonished at what the human voice is capable of.”

WPSU-FM is the media sponsor. Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.

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