Pandora was an important figure in Greek mythology, not merely because of her infamous pithos, a jar (not a box, as often mistranslated) holding all the evils of humanity. Almost forgotten because of the jar/box, which she opened out of curiosity, releasing all diseases and disasters, was the fact that Pandora was the first human female, created on Zeus' orders.
The exceptional San Francisco choral group Volti takes an upbeat look at the legend with Pandora's Gift, the premiere of Mark Winges' "choral performance art piece" on May 16 at Z Space.
Staged by Erika Chong Shuch, the production also includes the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. Volti Executive Director Barbara Heroux says:
The piece explores the beauty, terror, and promise of the Pandora myth through music, poetry, drama, and movement. It was inspired by our production of [David Lang's] battle hymns two years ago. We were really struck by the impact of adding movement and theatrical elements to choral music, and we asked Mark Winges to write us a piece that we could use to continue exploring that path.
The Gerbode/Hewlett Music Commissioning program got excited by it too, and are supporting us with a $50,000 grant for this project.
It’s really a different animal. Watching the singers work with Erika and start to communicate with their bodies and gestures, as well as their voices, is fascinating and gratifying. The kids are absolutely amazing – they just take to it like fish to water. They look like a mini-modern dance troupe."
“Pandora's Gift makes concepts of evil within, evil without, and hope completely contemporaneous. Relevance relevance relevance, it's awesome," says music director and conductor Robert Geary.
The composer's take on the work:
Even though it has the occasional vocal solo, and Erika’s choreography sometimes highlights a single singer or small group of singers, it’s mostly the entire group.
There is no one person representing Pandora. It has more elements of ritual than story, and the genre of unaccompanied choir highlights this. It invites [an audience] into the myth more, giving them the freedom to project their own heart and mind onto the experience as it unfolds."
Denise Newman is the librettist, in her sixth collaboration Mark Winges, who Newman says "chose the subject, which determined the structure of the piece. When he proposed it, I immediately thought to involve the children of the Piedmont Choir in the writing of the second movement when the box is opened and all hell breaks loose."
The Volti program begins with two other world premieres of works by Ryan Brown and L.J .White, winners of Volti’s young composer competition. The audience is invited to a post-concert Inter-ception, an interactive reception to share reactions and observations on the performance, and ask questions of the creative team.