The celebrated opera director, artist and Hudson resident R. B. Schlather mounts a one-day-only, five-hour intimate performance installation of David Lang’s Pulitzer-winning 2008 piece The Little Match Girl Passion on Sunday, August 20, at The School, the Kinderhook location of Chelsea gallerist Jack Shainman. The piece will be performed numerous times between 12 noon and 5 p.m., with 15-minute breaks for the performers, culminating in a final performance at 4:15 p.m. This micro-production, or “staging rehearsal” in the words of the producers, is framed as more a performance-art gallery piece, offering music as living sculpture and an unfiltered look into the production process.
Bang on a Can founder Lang’s exquisite oratorio The Little Match Girl Passion is based on the classic Danish parable by Hans Christian Anderson. While Lang is known primarily for a contentious and noisy fusion of chamber and street, The Little Match Girl Passion is a work of great, reflective subtlety and contrapuntal chant qualities, falling somewhere between Renaissance madrigals and colloquies of birds. It is performed here by soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, countertenor Brennan Hall, tenor Karim Sulayman, bass Zachary James and percussionist Michael Zell, with costumes by Schlather’s regular collaborator Terese Wadden. This production is scheduled to be presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2016.
This performance is free and open to the public. The School is located at 25 Broad Street in Kinderhook. For more information, visit www.jackshainman.com. For more on R. B. Schlather, visit www.rbschlather.com.
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