There have been comings and goings at Stanford Live: Executive Director Chris Lorway announced his departure, so the coming 2023–2024 season will be the last he planned. Deborah Cullinan, who became Stanford’s Vice President of the Arts at Stanford in February 2022 (coming over from her CEO position at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), will be interim chief of Stanford Live this season.
Lorway’s final season will be filled with highlights, including a major commission from Akram Khan, Jungle Book Reimagined (Dec. 2 and 3), a dance/theater production “reinventing the journey of Mowgli through the eyes of a climate refugee.” Also, Kronos Quartet premieres a work by Gabriella Smith on a program called Five Decades, Jan. 27; LA Master Chorale brings Peter Sellars’ Music to Accompany a Departure north on April 27, and Claire Chase and JACK Quartet bring in a new Terry Riley composition on May 8.
Speaking of reimagining, filmmaker and visual artist Wu Tsang debuts MOBY DICK; or, The Whale on Nov. 8. Conceived with the collective Moved by the Motion, this is a feature-length, silent-film telling of Herman Melville’s novel, which includes original music composed by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee with Asma Maroof, performed live by the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
NEA Jazz master, educator, composer, and author Terri Lyne Carrington presents her Grammy-winning New Standards project highlighting compositions by women on Jan. 25. On Jan. 26, bassist Linda May Han Oh will perform with her new group, and saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin will perform music from Pursuance, her latest album of standards by both Alice and John Coltrane, on Jan. 27.
In the interstices between classical, new music, and jazz fits Wild Up’s Julius Eastman festival, Feb. 9–10. It seems the perfect repertoire for Christopher Rountree’s genre-defying group, even more so with Stanford students joining the ensemble to perform some of the scores most identified with the Eastman revival, including Gay Guerilla and Femenine.
Other Stanford Live dates to mark in your calendar:
- Joshua Redman Group, with Gabrielle Cavassa (Sept. 22), opens the Stanford Live season with music from the saxophonist’s latest album, Where Are We.
- Gregory Maqoma’s Broken Chord (Oct. 26), a Stanford commission from the South African choreographer. The piece is based on a South African choir’s tour through North America and England in the 19th century and the racism they confronted.
- Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein (Nov. 4–5) intertwines Mary Shelley’s classic horror tale with Shelley’s biography, through shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and live music.
- Silkroad with Rhiannon Giddens in American Railroad (Nov. 15): a performance about the cultural diffusion resulting from the many communities working on the Transcontinental Railroad.
- El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered (Dec. 13), conceived by soprano Julia Bullock for the American Modern Opera Company, is a chamber ensemble arrangement, by Bullock’s husband Christian Reif, of Peter Sellars and John Adams’s oratorio celebrating Latin American poets and the lives of women.
- Living Earth Show: Lyra (Jan. 18–20), based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The show is a collaboration between the new music duo of Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson and Post: ballet, with choreography by Vanessa Thiessen, music by Samuel Carl Adams, and cinematography by Benjamin Tarquin.
- Acclaimed harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and Banff International String Quartet Competition winners (2019) Viano String Quartet, come together for a concert featuring the premiere of a new Gavin Bryars work written for Esfahani (Jan. 28).
- Sasha Cooke and St. Lawrence String Quartet perform Gustav Mahler’s Rückert Lieder during her recital with pianist Laura Dahl (Feb. 8).
- Sphinx Virtuosi (March 13): the flagship performance group of the Sphinx Organization, the nonprofit dedicated to providing a runway for Black and Latino musicians to make careers in classical music, plays music that will be new to most audience members.
- Book of Mountains and Seas (April 6–7). This new work by composer Huang Ruo and puppeteer/designer/director Basil Twist “is a modern take on ancient Chinese creation myths, first transcribed in the 4th Century BCE, yet strikingly relevant to our current struggle with climate change.”
- Samara Joy (May 22): The star jazz vocalist sings from the Great American Songbook.
