Everything Rhiannon Giddens does is a success: the American folk singer has long been recognised as an author, presenter and composer of music for film, ballet and opera – she was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for her opera »Omar«. With the Silkroad Ensemble, of which she is the artistic director, Giddens presents excerpts from »Omar« and the ballet »Black Lucy and the Bard«.
Created together with Michael Abels, »Omar« tells the story of the scholar Omar ibn Said, who was abducted from what is now Senegal and enslaved in the United States. Giddens combines bluegrass, gospel, spirituals and African as well as Arabic influences into a musical language that celebrates spiritual strength and cultural identity – what The New York Times described as »an effortless ideal of the American sound«.
»Black Lucy and the Bard«, composed together with her long-time artistic collaborator Francesco Turrisi, is based on Caroline Randall Williams’s poetry collection »Lucy Negro, Redux«, which reimagines Shakespeare’s sonnets from the perspective of a Black woman. In arrangements for piano quintet, members of Giddens’s Silkroad Ensemble now present both works as part of her »Reflektor« festival.
PERFORMERS
Mazz Swift violin
Tim-Erik Winzer viola
Karen Ouzounian violoncello
Shawn Conley double bass
Lara Downes piano
PROGRAM
»Omar and Lucy, Black Stories Real and Imagined«
The Music of Rhiannon Giddens featuring members of the Silkroad Ensemble
