Release Date: October 16,2018
Tell-Tale Heart opening Fuze series Nov. 3
“The Tell-Tale Heart,” a musical ghost story for Halloween, opens Tuesday Musical’s 2018-19 Fuze concert series on Saturday, Nov. 3, 7:30 p.m. at EJ Thomas Performing Arts Hall in Akron.
Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, composer-pianist Gregg Kallor created the piece and will perform it with cellist Joshua Roman and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. The concert will begin with additional works by Kallor, Brahms, Schumann and Niles.
"In composing my musical adaptation,” explains Kallor, "I wanted to pull us deeply into the narrator’s world so that we experience the events as she relives them, and feel what she feels: the hypnotic pull of the old man’s glass eye, pride in how meticulously the atrocious crime is planned and carried out, pity for her victim, giddy excitement and demonic pleasure.”
Kallor, whose music fuses classical and jazz, is Tuesday Musical’s first composer-in-residence. He is also the inaugural composer-In-residence at SubCulture in New York City, named one of Time Out New York's best new music venues. In 2014 he joined Yo-Yo Ma, Joyce DiDonato, Sharon Stone, Jamie Barton, Isabel Leonard, Ansel Elgort and other musicians and actors to record An AIDS Quilt Songbook: Sing for Hope to raise funds for cure-focused AIDS/HIV research.
Roman, named a TED Senior Fellow in 2015, recently played Mason Bates’ Cello Concerto with four different orchestras: the Portland, Berkeley, Spokane, and Memphis symphonies. The concerto is dedicated to Roman, who gave its “world-class world premiere” (Seattle Times) with the Seattle Symphony in 2014, and has since performed it with orchestras around the U.S. His adventurous spirit has led to collaborations with artists outside the music community, including his co-creation of “On Grace” with Tony Award-nominated actress Anna Deavere Smith, a work for actor and cello that premiered in February 2012 at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. His outreach endeavors have taken him to Uganda with his violin-playing siblings, where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers and displacement camps.
Cano has given more than 100 performances at The Metropolitan Opera. This season she returns there as Emilia in Otello and Meg Page in Falstaff, and makes her role debut as Offred in Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale with Boston Lyric Opera. Also this season, she joins tenor Matthew Polenzani and pianist Julius Drake at Carnegie Hall and will return to Chamber Music of Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall for a performance of Ravel's Sheherazade and Falla's Psyche.
To create a more intimate experience, seating for this concert will only be in the orchestra section. Tickets are $45, $40 and free for all students of any age. They are available in advance at www.tuesdaymusical.org or 330-761-3460, and at the door that evening.