Frank’s Sandbox Premiere with Mei-Ann Chen

PROGRAM

Lili Boulanger arr. Jonathan Posthuma
D’un matin de printemps (Of a Spring Morning) (5 min)

Gabriela Lena Frank
Ballad of John James Audubon and the Runaway: An American Tragedy Ignored and Retold (20 min) (World Premiere, SPCO Commission)

Gabriela Lena Frank, Sandbox Composer and dramaturg
J. Drew Lanham, librettist
Mei-Ann Chen, conductor
Federico De Michelis, baritone

Ottorino Respighi
Gli Ucceli (The Birds) (18 min)

Astor Piazzolla
Sinfonietta (17 min)

Approximate length 1:30

Experience the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with Sandbox Composer-in-Residence Gabriela Lena Frank, the SPCO and The Great Northern. As a composer, Frank’s body of work centers climate change, community, and the role of the artist in stewarding change in the face of a heating planet.

Her Sandbox premiere is similarly ecologically fixated, ruminating on the legacy of John James Audubon, the French American writer and ornithologist who inspired the modern conservation movement. In collaboration with poet and librettist J. Drew Lanham, whose essay “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?” inspired this project, Frank grapples with the idea of complicated legacies, the “consequences of entangled histories,” and how they shape the present. In this new song cycle for baritone and chamber orchestra, Ballad of John James Audubon and the Runaway: An American Tragedy Ignored and Retold, Frank and Lanham tell the lesser-known story of Audubon and his legacy of racism.

Ballad of John James Audubon and the Runaway: An American Tragedy Ignored and Retold was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation, Library of Congress and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra with support from Justus and Elizabeth Schlichting. We are deeply grateful for a generous bequest from The Robinson Family that helped make this performance possible.

SPCO Sandbox Composer Residencies are made possible with generous project support from: Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, David and Karen Olson Family Foundation, Justus and Elizabeth Schlichting, Nara Fund, New Music USA. Learn more at thespco.org/sandbox.

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Single tickets and member tickets will go on sale in August.