Opus One Premieres with Festival Napa Valley Yang Bao's “Sol One” for Piano and Orchestra with Immersive Sound Installation. The site specific composition by Festival Napa Valley’s 2023 Maria Manetti Shrem Daniel Brewbaker Composer Prizewinner, Yang Bao, imagines humans as an interplanetary species exploring the profound connections we share with nature, our planet, and our own existence. The live performance merges piano and orchestra with an immersive sound installation, transforming Opus One Winery into a monumental soundscape. Driven by Bao's concept of "Infinity Music," the composition mutates and refracts infinitely according to the progression of time and chance, inviting the audience to experience this work both linearly and spatially. Ming Luke leads Festival Orchestra Napa. This concert is a part of the California Festival, a statewide celebration of new music.
About Festival Napa Valley
Festival Napa Valley celebrates music’s unmatched power to uplift and inspire. Napa Valley’s flagship festival presents international stars and emerging talent during the summer season in Napa and year-round on iconic stages in the Bay Area and beyond. With inspiring education programs for youth and seniors, tuition-free academies for vocalists and instrumentalists, and scholarships for talented students, Festival Napa Valley plays a vital part in creating a thriving, healthy, and engaged community.
About Yang Bao
Yang Bao is a cross-disciplinary artist, composer and pianist based in New York, classically trained in piano performance at The Juilliard School and New England Conservatory of Music. Bao’s multi-media works create an experiential “synthesis of the arts” that is precise in texture while hypnotizing in motion. Inspired by classical music and post-human minimalism, his sensory-based “physical music” condenses complex emotions into poetic fables.
About Festival Orchestra Napa
Festival Orchestra Napa is an all-star ensemble that brings together principal players from major international orchestras and faculty from renowned colleges and conservatories, together with participants from the Frost School of Festival Napa Valley's Blackburn Music Academy. Centered around a core of Frost School of Music faculty, the orchestra also includes hand-picked musicians from ensembles such as the San Francisco Symphony, MET Opera Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Houston Symphony, and Atlanta Symphony, among others.
About Ming Luke
With the “energy, creativity and charisma not seen since Leonard Bernstein” and “vibrant,” “mind-blowing,” and “spectacular” conducting, Ming Luke is a versatile conductor that has excited audiences around the world. Highlights include conducting the Bolshoi Orchestra in Moscow, performances of Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella at the Kennedy Center, his English debut at Sadler’s Wells with Birmingham Royal, conducting Dvorak’s Requiem in Dvorak Hall in Prague, recording scores for a Coppola film, and over a hundred performances at the San Francisco War Memorial with San Francisco Ballet.