The Modern Music Ensemble (Cristina Valdés, director), in collaboration with students and faculty from the School of Drama, present a unique performance of four seminal works of John Cage, all performed simultaneously.
Program
Sofia Gubaidulina - Dots, Lines, and Zigzag for bass clarinet and piano
Cameron DeLuca, bass clarinet; Jiaxuan Wu, piano
Hilda Paredes - Canciones sobre poemas de Eduardo Hurtado
Claire Wei, flute/piccolo; Cameron DeLuca, clarinet/bass clarinet; Soledad Mayorga Maldonado, soprano; Jiaxuan Wu, piano
- Intermission -
John Cage:
Winter Music
Zixi Fu, piano; Boheng Wang, piano; Jiaxuan Wu, piano
Four6
Minh-Thi Butler, oboe; Kyle Grant, alto saxophone; Soledad Mayorga Maldonado, soprano, Brayson Young, drums
Atlas Eclipticalis
Grace Playstead, flute; Cameron DeLuca, clarinet; Taylor DeCastro, violin
Variations III
Zo Eisenbrey, Jeffrey Fracé, Taylor McWilliams-Woods, Sebastián Bravo Montenegro, Natalia Poliakova, Sebastian Wang, actors (Jeffrey Fracé, director).
Biographies
Jeffrey Fracé is a veteran theater artist with more than 100 professional credits as an actor, director, writer, or producer. Best known as an actor, he is a former Associate Artist of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, performing, touring, and teaching with the company for over 10 years. Recent performance credits include The War of the Worlds Radio Play with SITI Company, Father Comes Home From the Wars with UW Drama, Home with Doug Varone and 11 Comets with Rachael Lincoln at Meany Theatre, The Life Model at On the Boards, Betrayal at North Coast Rep in California, and Rapture, Blister, Burn; Celebration and Old Times (Pinter Festival); and Lieutenant of Inishmore, all at ACT Theatre in Seattle. Other credits include the Kennedy Center, New York Shakespeare Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Nashville Shakespeare Festival, Stonington Opera House, Cleveland Public Theatre, Chopin Theatre Chicago, La MaMa ETC and the Iberoamericano Festival of Bogota. His directing credits include Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet for Stonington Opera House; Mother Courage and Her Children and 1984 for People's Branch Theatre; Romeo & Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream for Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre; Don Giovanni for New York Repertory Ensemble. His original work/devised performance credits include 11 Comets at Meany Theater; The Life Model at On the Boards; 10 Real Star Acts at Stonington Opera House; and Once Upon a Time 6x in the West, Harp Song for a Radical, Barbarians and Untying My Cement Shoes for UW Drama; plus, independently produced adaptations of King Lear, and Camus’ The Stranger. He is a founding member of the award-winning ensemble Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant, writing for and performing in their original shows in New York and nationally. Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, he worked in Chicago for four years before relocating to New York City, where he received his MFA from Columbia University. He is now based in Seattle, where he teaches acting, directing, movement, and devising theater at University of Washington.
Recently hailed by Fanfare Magazine as “excellent” and “clearly sensitive,” Cuban-American pianist Cristina Valdés is known for presenting innovative concerts with repertoire spanning over 300 years. A fierce advocate for new music, she has premiered countless works, including many written for her. She has performed across four continents and in venues such as Lincoln Center, Benaroya Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, Roulette, Miller Theatre, Jordan Hall, and the Kennedy Center. Ms. Valdés has appeared both as a soloist and chamber musician at festivals worldwide including New Music in Miami, the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva in Mexico City, Brisbane Arts Festival, the Festival of Contemporary Music in El Salvador, Havana Contemporary Music Festival, and the Singapore Arts Festival.
An avid chamber musician and collaborator, Ms. Valdés has toured extensively with the Bang On a Can “All Stars”, and has performed with the Seattle Chamber Players, the Mabou Mines Theater Company, the Parsons Dance Company, and Antares. Her performances on both the Seattle Symphony’s Chamber Series and [UNTITLED] concerts have garnered critical acclaim, including her “knockout” (Seattle Times) performance of Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and her “arrestingly eloquent performance” of Dutilleux’s Trois Preludes (Bernard Jacobson/MusicWeb International).
Ms. Valdés has appeared as concerto soloist with the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Philharmonic, the Lake Union Civic Orchestra, Johns Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, the Binghamton Philharmonic, NOCCO, Philharmonia Northwest, the Eastman BroadBand, and the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, amongst others. In 2015 she performed the piano solo part of the Ives 4th Symphony with the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Ludovic Morlot, which was later released on CD to critical acclaim and made Gramophone’s list of Top 10 Ives Recordings. Other recent recordings include Orlando Garcia’s From Darkness to Luminosity with the Málaga Philharmonic on the Toccata Classics label, and the world premiere recording of Kotoka Suzuki’s Shimmer, Tree | In Memoriam Jonathan Harvey. She can also be heard on the Albany, Newport Classics, Urtext, and Ideologic Organ labels.
In recent seasons she gave performances of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3, the world-premiere performance of Carlos Sanchez-Guttierez’s Short Stories for piano and string orchestra with the Orquesta de Cámara de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and the US Premiere of Under Construction for solo piano and tape playback by Heiner Goebbels at Benaroya Hall. Last season included a wide variety of performances including Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the premiere of her own composition Sketches of an Anniversary Prelude for trumpet and piano, and the premiere of composer Jeremy Jolley’s (contro-)clessidra IV for piano and electronics written especially for her.
Since 2006 she has made her home in Seattle where she has been an integral part of the new music scene. Ms. Valdés founded the SLAM Festival, a new music festival dedicated to the music of Latin-American composers, and is a core member of the Seattle Modern Orchestra - the only large chamber orchestra in the Pacific Northwest solely dedicated to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. With the Seattle Modern Orchestra, she has premiered works by Anahita Abbasi, Darius Jones, Wang Lu, Kaley Eaton, Jeremy Jolley, and Yigit Kolat, amongst others.
Ms. Valdés received a Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, and a Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts from SUNY Stony Brook. While at Stony Brook, she was a recipient of the Thayer Minority Fellowship, a member of the Stony Brook Graduate Piano Trio, and a winner of the Concerto Competition. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the University of Washington, where she teaches piano and is the director of the UW Modern Music Ensemble.