Cellist Seth Parker Woods Announces 2022-2023 International Season Highlights

Cellist Seth Parker Woods announces his 2022-2023 season. Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres. His projects delve deep into our cultural fabric, reimagining traditional works and commissioning new ones to propel classical music into the future.

Highlights of his upcoming season include the world premiere of a new version of his evening-length, multimedia tour de force Difficult Grace at 92Y, UCLA, and Chicago's Harris Theater; curating and performing a program honoring the centennial of composer George Walker at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.; the world premiere of Freida Abtan's My Heart is a River, commissioned by the Seattle Symphony; and a world premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir at Carnegie Hall as part of Claire Chase's Density Series. The Great Northern Festival in Minneapolis will co-present Woods in his critically acclaimed performance installation, Iced Bodies, in which Woods, in a wetsuit, plays an obsidian ice cello.

Recital appearances this season include concerts with pianist Andrew Rosenblum at Dumbarton Oaks in D.C. and The Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills, and a return to his former home of Brussels with a solo recital at Das Haus. He also tours to Washington Performing Arts, Krannert Center, Stanford Live, California Center for the Arts, Count Basie Center for the Arts, Auburn University, and Emory University with the Chad Lawson Trio. In addition, Woods will hold residencies at Montclair State University and Oberlin Conservatory. The season will also see the release of a new solo album on Cedille Records and the soundtrack of the PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust - a film by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein - to which Woods contributed.

Woods' season begins on September 10, 2022 performing with the Chad Lawson Trio at the University of Illinois' Krannert Center. Their program includes re-imaginings of many of the beloved Chopin etudes. Woods and the Trio will also tour to Stanford Live on October 21, 2022 and the California Center for the Arts on October 23.

From September 11-15, 2022, he records the music of Difficult Grace in Chicago for his sophomore solo CD of the same name, to be released in 2023 on Cedille Records.

Seth Parker Woods is featured in the soundtrack of the new PBS documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, released nationally on September 23, 2022. This three-part, six hour series examines America's response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. The soundtrack features Woods with violinist Johnny Gandelsman in Ernest Bloch's Prayer (From Jewish Life, No.1).

Woods curates a concert profile honoring the centennial of the birth of the great Washington D.C.-born composer, George Walker (1922-2018) on November 6, 2022 at the Phillips Collection. Part of the Collection's Leading International Composers series, A Celebration of the Music of George Walker features Woods alongside a chamber ensemble of pianists Natalia Kazaryan and Andrew Rosenblum; violinist and George Walker's son, Gregory Walker; and clarinetist Zachary Good in a celebration of Walker's trailblazing career as the first African-American to appear in performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra and to receive a doctoral degree from Eastman School of Music. Despite Walker's many achievements, much of his chamber music is not widely known, inspiring Parker Woods to become an advocate for his music. George's son, Gregory, will perform Bleu for unaccompanied violin (2011) and joins pianist Kazaryan for the Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1979). Parker Woods performs the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1957) with pianist Andrew Rosenblum. Clarinetist Zachary Good will perform Walker's Perimeters (1966) and joins Kazaryan and Rosenblum in his Five Fancies for Clarinet and Piano Four Hands (1975).

He returns to Belgium for a solo recital at Das Haus on November 12, 2022. His concert will include selections from his solo show, Difficult Grace, by Nathalie Joachim, Monty Adkins, Alvin Singleton, Chinary Ung, and a newly commissioned work by Devonte Hynes, aka Blood Orange. Woods has performed extensively with Belgium's ICTUS Ensemble.

On November 19, 2022, New York City's 92Y presents Woods in the world premiere of a new version of his concert-length project, Difficult Grace. First performed in Seattle in 2020, Difficult Grace has now expanded to a collaboration with acclaimed choreographer-dancer Roderick George. The breathtaking multimedia work, anchored by stories from the Great Migration, features Woods in the triple role of cellist, narrator and movement artist aided by film, visual art, the poetry of Kemi Alabi and Dudley Randall, and music written for and with Woods by Freida Abtan, Monty Adkins, Fredrick Gifford, Nathalie Joachim, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. This production also includes newly commissioned music by Ted Hearne and Devonté Hynes, a.k.a. Blood Orange. Difficult Grace is an evocative, theatrical, genre-bending production reflecting on immigration, displacement, and self-discovery.

Difficult Grace travels to the University of California Los Angeles for its west coast premiere on December 4, 2022 and Chicago's Harris Theater on April 20, 2023.

Woods opens 2023 with collaborator Spencer Topel for a January 28, 2023 performance of their critically-acclaimed, interactive performance installation, Iced Bodies for cellist and electronic instrumental ice sculpture, co-presented by The Great Northern Festival and the Weismann Art Museum in Minneapolis, MN. Iced Bodies features Woods, in a wetsuit, playing an obsidian ice cello as the sounds from the ice are mixed in real time and bounce across seven panes of glass distributed around the gallery. Inspired by Jim McWilliam's 1972 piece called Ice Music for London and premiered on the 45th anniversary of the original work, Iced Bodies seeks to dramatize the ephemerality of matter in phase transition, via the inherent vulnerability of a melting ice sculpture - with its eventual destruction - serving as commentary to shine light on overlooked and undocumented cases of mental disability within underrepresented populations.

Woods says, "Voice-hearing and undiagnosed schizophrenia in the African American community is linked to incidences of police brutality and prison abuse across the United States... This work serves as an ode to these struggling minds, and bruised, tattered, and broken bodies on display... In addition to sounds captured and activated through the ice, a disembodied male voice is heard reciting poetic phrases sonically-diffused on spatialized glass sculptures. These sounds serve as sonic feedback loops, evoking the isolation and neglect of voice-hearers battling mental disorders. The audience at the end is left to revel in the visual image of freed bodies, represented by shards of ice, electronic entrails, and the sounds of an unrestrained voice liberated from the ice, symbolized by the performer clutching a sound emitting transducer." Iced Bodies programmatically engages the cellist by supplanting the cold body - the frozen body - of those lost to mental illness and violence in the African American community, with that of the ice cello.

On February 24, 2023, Woods performs the world premiere of a new, extended version of Freida Abtan's My Heart is a River, commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, at Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center in Benaroya Hall. Freida Abtan's music uses spectral processing to transform the sounds of the cello into immersive media choreography - specially created for Octave 9, where Woods served as Artist-in-Residence and Creative Consultant from 2018-2020.

Woods embarks on a spring tour with pianist Andrew Rosenblum to Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C. on February 12 and 13, 2023; St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, TN on March 3, 2023; and The Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills on March 9, 2023. The duo's program will feature works by Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn, Chinary Ung, Florence Price, Jeffrey Mumford, and George Walker.

Later that month, a tour begins with the Chad Lawson Trio to New Jersey's Count Basie Center for the Arts on March 16, 2023; Washington Performing Arts in D.C. on March 18, 2023; Auburn University in Alabama on March 24, 2023; and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia on March 25, 2023.

Seth Parker Woods' season closes on May 25, 2023, performing the world premiere of a new work by composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, part of Claire Chase's Density Series. Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Density x is the culmination of Chase's six-concert, citywide reflection on 10 years of her Density 2036 project, and will feature Woods alongside Chase on flutes, cellist Katinka Kleijn, pianist Cory Smythe, and Levy Lorenzo on live electronics.

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