
Astralis Duo: ‘Green. Songs of Nature’
With Green the Astralis Duo presents an evening of music meant to draw the listener’s attention to the nature around us. The works on the program describe the experience of nature bringing thoughts to our minds and evoking feelings in our hearts. The music on the program should inspire us to preserve the natural world for generations to come. Green presents an evening of diverse music for soprano and piano in several languages – German, English, Icelandic and Navajo, written in a multitude of musical styles spanning more than a century, from Romantic to contemporary sounds. The Astralis Duo is made up of soprano Stephanie Aston and pianist Katalin Lukács.
Green includes Alban Berg’s “Seven Early Songs” based on poems by Carl Hauptmann, Nikolaus Lenau, Theodor Storm, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johannes Schlaf, Otto Erich Hartleben, and Paul Hohenberg bearing titles such as “Reed Song”, “The Nightingale,” “Summer Days”; followed by songs composed by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvalsdottir to poems from Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir’s collection “Land of Blue Flames”; “Pears” a conceptual piece by Carolyn Chen, a new song cycle by Julianna Hall “When the South Wind Sings” based on poems by Carl Sandburg, and a new commission from Clint McCallum entitled “Plastic Fish”, which uses the Navajo Code Talkers Dictionary to encode the coordinates of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a continent-sized mass of human waste, composed of mostly plastic and sludge, floating in the Pacific Ocean.
Program:
Alban Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder (1908)
Carolyn Chen: Pears (2007)
Juliana Hall: When the South Wind Sings (2017)
Anna Thorvalsdottir: hvolf (2009)
Clinton McCallum: Plastic Fish (2018) *new commission