A New Season Begins!
Volti is thrilled to begin our 43rd season with a collaboration with the Del Sol Quartet, the world premiere of Angel Island: Oratorio for Voices and Strings, composed by Huang Ruo. For tickets and more details, click here go to the Del Sol Quartet website. Performances Friday October 22 at the Presidio Theatre and Saturday October 23 on Angel Island.
The music is beautiful; the subject matter serious. Between 1910 and 1940, as new immigrants flowed through the immigration station on Angel Island inside the San Francisco Bay, Chinese immigrants faced massive discrimination because of America’s earliest racist immigration legislation – the Chinese Exclusion Act. Being held for sometimes up to years in brutal conditions at the detention center, many of these immigrants looked for solace by inscribing poetry onto the walls of the center.
Angel Island: Oratorio for Voices and Strings will bring these poems to life in the very space they were created. Composed by Huang Ruo, the 60-minute oratorio for string quartet and chamber choir will weave a story of immigration and discrimination of then and now. The premiere will include TED-style talks with prominent experts in immigration law, civil rights, and Chinese-American cultural history.
Later on in the season, we’ll premiere a work by New York-based composer Jace Clayton, collaborate with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra to premiere a work by Michael Gilbertson, and finish up with a concert of leading-edge vocal music by some of today’s most exciting composers.
Stay with us! Things are interesting, and both music and Volti are unstoppable.
Bob Geary
Artistic Director
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“The Night House” by Yu-Hui Chang
For her Volti commission in 2009, Yu-Hui Chang set two poems by the wonderful poet Billy Collins. Click on the link below to listen to the second of the set. The full piece - "Being: Two Collins Songs" - is on the Volti CD "House of Voices." The CD title is taken from...
Privilege Mvmt 5: We Cannot Leave
Composer, singer, bandleader and recording artist TED HEARNE (b.1982, Chicago) draws on a wide breadth of influences ranging across music's full terrain, to create intense, personal and multi-dimensional works. Ted composed Privilege for Volti in 2009, when he was the...
Ecstatic Meditations: No. 4. How God Answers the Soul
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TURN UP
Robert Paterson’s “Graffiti Canons”
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Ruth Crawford: Three Chants for Women’s Chorus
It’s highly unusual for Volti to sing music written in 1930, but when you listen to this you’ll understand why. We sang this piece at the Bard Music West festival in 2018, “The World of Henry Cowell.” Movement 1, To an Unkind God https://youtu.be/qsFVlKz__cg ...
Pandora’s Gift
Pandora's Gift by Mark Winges Pandora’s Gift is a 35-minute-long staged choral piece composed by Mark Winges, premiered in May 2015 at Z Space in San Francisco by Volti and Ensemble from the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. Libretto by Denise Newman; staging by...