This Sunday, September 29 at 2:30 pm at Westworth United Church, Virtuosi Concerts kicks off their 2024-25 season with a concert called Everything is Green.
Featuring the fabulous Looking Glass Ensemble, a creative collective from St. John’s and Toronto, this is an ensemble that melds classical chamber music with contemporary dance. The members of the ensemble are clarinetist Christine Carter, dancer and choreographer Shannon Litzenberger, cellist Vernon Regehr and pianist Gergory Oh. Together, they are performing music from composers such as Vivian Fung, Randall Woolf, Arvo Part, and Beethoven, all the while giving a visual element to the audience through dancer and film.
This is going to be a terrific show and a wonderful way to bring in another exceptional year of Virtuosi concerts and programming.
Christine Carter, and Shannon Litzenberger are the founding members of the Looking Glass Ensemble. The two of them met back in 2019. Litzenberger was invited to Newfoundland to direct a couple of interdisciplinary productions at the Gros Morne Summer Music Festival. As Litzenberger explains “Christine and I met, and the rest is history... the creative collaboration was really rich at that time, and I think we knew that we wanted it to continue,”
The interdisciplinary effect of this collaboration has resulted in the ensemble programming works that not only make use of dance and music, but also poetry and film. And the audience response has been remarkable.
As Christine Carter says, "The audience response has been really warm, and we have intentionally tried to keep the repertoire and what we are doing just really diverse so that it can connect with different people.” Litzenberger expands on this idea by saying, “This whole other arts experience emerges that illuminates the gifts of each of the disciplines, and it creates a unique experience that no discipline alone can offer. I think that is the thing that is so exciting about the kinds of programs we are trying to build with Looking Glass.”
Audiences can see this exchanging of ideas in full effect at Sunday’s concert.
The ensemble will be performing is a wonderful piece by the American composer Randall Woolf. Everything is Green is a work inspired by the poetry of American writer David Foster Walace. The piece makes use of prepared tape, instrumentalist and spoken word. The version audiences will hear on Sunday’s performance will be a version that Woolf himself arranged for Carter.
During the pandemic, Carter was talking to Litzenberger, and the two decided the piece lent itself well to dance, and specifically to a dance film.
The resulting film was made in Saskatchewan. Litzenberger did the choreography and danced the role. As she says, “We did this [the shooting of the film] in a vacated farmhouse in Saskatchewan. This house we were using as our set was frozen in time...it had a very particular aesthetic to it. We filmed a number of scenes and moods and emotional landscapes in different rooms of the house... the film was edited together to shape a bit of a narrative for this female character who is the subject of the poetry.”
This film will be shown on Sunday with the Looking Glass ensemble providing the soundtrack.
Also on the program will be Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s hauntingly gorgeous and meditative masterpiece Spiegel im Spiegel. (Mirror in the Mirror) Litzenberger has created choreography to add to the mood of the music. “The music itself is so beautiful. I didn’t want it to be any more than it absolutely had to be, and so my hope is that the choreography that accompanies this piece will be a kind of way of amplifying the audiences' emotional journey through theses long meditative lines of the music.”
The Looking Glass Ensemble will also be performing music of the fabulous Canadian composer Vivian Fung. Her Billy Collins Suite is inspired by poetry written by the American Poet.
Carter describes the piece, “It’s just such a fun, evocative, whimsical piece! We have so much fun playing it, and the audience also has fun with it. The music is light-hearted. Shannon is narrating the poetry, which is embedded in the works, so the narrator is really the fourth member of the ensemble.”
Rounding out Sunday’s concert will be a performance of Beethoven's trio for clarinet, cello and piano, performed by the three fantastic instrumentalists of the ensemble, clarinetist Christine Carter, cellist Vernon Regehr and pianist Gergory Oh.
Everything is Green as presented by the Looking Glass Ensemble and Virtuosi concerts is sure to be something really special. Don’t be green with envy because you missed it!
For more details on Virtuosi's presentation of the Looking Glass Ensemble click here
