Wild Up
Christopher Rountree, conductor
Julius Eastman’s Femenine
Saturday, March 9, 2024, 8pm
Zellerbach Playhouse
Leadership support for LGBTQ+ programming at Cal Performances is provided by Michael P. N. A. Hormel.
Cal Performances is committed to fostering a welcoming, inclusive, and safe environment for all—one that honors our venues as places of respite, openness, and respect. Please see the Community Agreements section on our Policies page for more information.
This program will be performed without intermission and last approximately 70 minutes.
From the Executive and Artistic Director
We continue our extraordinary 2023–24 season with a schedule of performances that would be the envy of any performing arts presenter in the nation. I’m especially proud that the legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida will return to campus this month as Artist in Residence, for two special concerts—March 17 with tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, and March 24 with the acclaimed Mahler Chamber Orchestra in piano concertos by Mozart and an orchestral work by Jörg Widmann—as well as additional opportunities for the campus and wider Bay Area community to engage with her singular artistry. We are also very excited to welcome the return of one of the crown jewels in American dance, The Joffrey Ballet, which this year celebrates the renewal of a multi-season residency at Cal Performances with its first full-length narrative ballet, Anna Karenina, at Zellerbach Hall (Mar 15–17).
The iconic Elevator Repair Service theater company visits from New York with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Mar 1–3), its lean and elegant production about a historic 1965 debate between the progressive queer Black writer and activist James Baldwin and the “Father of American Conservatism,” William F. Buckley, Jr. And, the Bay Area’s beloved Kronos Quartet celebrates its 50th year of reinventing the string quartet for our global, connected, contemporary world with a special concert featuring a world premiere commissioned from Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini, who will join the Kronos members onstage as a performer (Mar 2).
We’ll enjoy an artfully curated program by the brilliant young pianist Conrad Tao (Mar 3); the Cal Performances debut of a particularly exciting young string ensemble, the Isidore String Quartet (Mar 5); and the West Coast premiere of Ki moun ou ye (Who are you?), an immersive staged song cycle by composer, flutist, and vocalist Nathalie Joachim (Mar 7). Joachim’s piece is set on the remote Caribbean farmland where her family has lived for generations, and travels deeper into the Haitian heritage introduced on her Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti recording.
In other genres, the June Award-winning group OKAN demonstrates what can happen when you take a classically trained percussionist from Santiago de Cuba, add a one-time concertmaster from Havana’s Youth Orchestra, and stir in the sounds of Caribbean folkloric and dance music in the context of Toronto’s vibrant immigrant music community (Mar 8); and Wild Up, the dazzling Los Angeles contemporary music collective, reminds us how new a 50-year-old music score can sound with its presentation of Julius Eastman’s ecstatic, jubilant, and hypnotic Femenine. And finally, we can’t wait for the Cal Performances debut of Ema Nikolovska, a young mezzo-soprano on the rise and in demand in international opera houses and concert halls; born in North Macedonia, raised in Toronto, and based in Europe, Nikolovska visits with a program featuring songs by Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Debussy.
Even as all these remarkable performances take place on the UC Berkeley campus, the Cal Performances team is hard at work planning for the mid-April announcement of our 2024–25 season. Trust me when I promise that we have a truly exceptional schedule planned for you, an example of which was last month’s sneak-peak announcement of the Maria Manetti Shrem and Elizabeth Segerstrom California Orchestra Residency, when Cal Performances and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County will bring the world renowned Vienna Philharmonic, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and pianist Yefim Bronfman to California in March 2025.
Finally, thank you for joining us today at Cal Performances! We’re delighted to spend this time together, celebrating the very best in live music, dance, and theater.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
We continue our extraordinary 2023–24 season with a schedule of performances that would be the envy of any performing arts presenter in the nation. I’m especially proud that the legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida will return to campus this month as Artist in Residence, for two special concerts—March 17 with tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, and March 24 with the acclaimed Mahler Chamber Orchestra in piano concertos by Mozart and an orchestral work by Jörg Widmann—as well as additional opportunities for the campus and wider Bay Area community to engage with her singular artistry. We are also very excited to welcome the return of one of the crown jewels in American dance, The Joffrey Ballet, which this year celebrates the renewal of a multi-season residency at Cal Performances with its first full-length narrative ballet, Anna Karenina, at Zellerbach Hall (Mar 15–17).
The iconic Elevator Repair Service theater company visits from New York with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Mar 1–3), its lean and elegant production about a historic 1965 debate between the progressive queer Black writer and activist James Baldwin and the “Father of American Conservatism,” William F. Buckley, Jr. And, the Bay Area’s beloved Kronos Quartet celebrates its 50th year of reinventing the string quartet for our global, connected, contemporary world with a special concert featuring a world premiere commissioned from Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini, who will join the Kronos members onstage as a performer (Mar 2).
We’ll enjoy an artfully curated program by the brilliant young pianist Conrad Tao (Mar 3); the Cal Performances debut of a particularly exciting young string ensemble, the Isidore String Quartet (Mar 5); and the West Coast premiere of Ki moun ou ye (Who are you?), an immersive staged song cycle by composer, flutist, and vocalist Nathalie Joachim (Mar 7). Joachim’s piece is set on the remote Caribbean farmland where her family has lived for generations, and travels deeper into the Haitian heritage introduced on her Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti recording.
In other genres, the June Award-winning group OKAN demonstrates what can happen when you take a classically trained percussionist from Santiago de Cuba, add a one-time concertmaster from Havana’s Youth Orchestra, and stir in the sounds of Caribbean folkloric and dance music in the context of Toronto’s vibrant immigrant music community (Mar 8); and Wild Up, the dazzling Los Angeles contemporary music collective, reminds us how new a 50-year-old music score can sound with its presentation of Julius Eastman’s ecstatic, jubilant, and hypnotic Femenine. And finally, we can’t wait for the Cal Performances debut of Ema Nikolovska, a young mezzo-soprano on the rise and in demand in international opera houses and concert halls; born in North Macedonia, raised in Toronto, and based in Europe, Nikolovska visits with a program featuring songs by Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Debussy.
Even as all these remarkable performances take place on the UC Berkeley campus, the Cal Performances team is hard at work planning for the mid-April announcement of our 2024–25 season. Trust me when I promise that we have a truly exceptional schedule planned for you, an example of which was last month’s sneak-peak announcement of the Maria Manetti Shrem and Elizabeth Segerstrom California Orchestra Residency, when Cal Performances and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County will bring the world renowned Vienna Philharmonic, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and pianist Yefim Bronfman to California in March 2025.
Finally, thank you for joining us today at Cal Performances! We’re delighted to spend this time together, celebrating the very best in live music, dance, and theater.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
About the Program
Something about the identity and presence of Julius Eastman’s music engages us and makes us obsessed. It’s music that lives in the minds of audiences unlike anything else those of us at Wild Up have performed. Since 2013, Wild Up has been delving deep into Eastman’s oeuvre to explore his inimitable compositions and idiosyncratic ways of communicating musical ideas. And most importantly, we are discovering how to carry his music and ideas forward.
Eastman sometimes gifted copies of his musical scores. Now, over three decades since his death, his work is being regifted by those whose lives he touched. For us, to play Eastman’s music is to feel we are in, of, and visiting his world simultaneously. Part of the joy of performing it is accepting that Eastman’s precise intentions for these elusive scores will always remain a mystery—just a little out of reach. Still, in the frenzied ecstasy of performing his work, we feel a little more alive, a little more connected, and a little more free.
Femenine is the epitome of Eastman’s long-form “organic music”—where phrases live inside of phrases, multiple layers ebbing and flowing with the passage of time. Femenine, evolves material based on a two-note, 13-beat “prime” melody—a cosmic clamoring of bells. Simultaneously static and active, Femenine lulls listeners into musical reverie.
The performances reflect a blend of strict adherence to Eastman’s specific instructions with an embrace of individual and collective decision-making within the ensemble, a continuous three-way conversation between Eastman, our individual performers, and the group as a whole.
Wild Up aims to be part of the ongoing social, political, and artistic dialogues and circulation of Eastman’s work. We are grateful for the deep and nuanced exploration of scholars, historians, artists, and critics internationally. Please visit eastman.wildup.org for more information.
—Wild Up, 2024