World Renowned Composer Huang Ruo Premieres Multimedia Opera, ANGEL ISLAND At BAM, January 11-13

Starting in 1910, many immigrants who journeyed to America were processed at an immigration station on Angel Island, located in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Until a fire led to its closure in 1940, the station primarily functioned as a detention center, where half a million people from 80 countries were held under barbaric conditions—some for weeks, others for years. The majority of these detainees were Chinese migrants, who were banned from entering the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, with few exceptions.

 

Making his BAM debut, acclaimed Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo revisits this chapter of American history in Angel Island - for Voices and String Quartet, a poignant multimedia experience that blurs the boundaries of opera and theater. In collaboration with the Del Sol Quartet, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and archival filmmaker Bill Morrison, Huang Ruo and director Matthew Ozawa weave a powerful requiem from the century-old poetry engraved on the detention center's walls by some of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants who were incarcerated and subjected to dehumanizing horrors. This production is a stirring plea for care and empathy as well as a visceral, clear-eyed tribute to the rebellion and resilience of those who passed through and perished at Angel Island.

 

Composer Huang Ruo is a vibrant and inventive musical voice that draws equal inspiration from Chinese ancient and folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, noise, natural and processed sound, rock, and jazz to create a seamless, organic integration using a compositional technique he calls “Dimensionalism.” Huang Ruo's diverse compositional works span orchestral, chamber music, opera, theater, and dance, to cross-genre, sound installation, architectural installation, multimedia, experimental improvisation, folk rock, and film. His music has been premiered and performed by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, National Polish Radio Orchestra, Santa Fe Opera, Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Royal Danish Opera, Asko/Schoenberg, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, etc. His opera An American Soldier (with libretto by David Henry Hwang) received its world premiere at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 2018, and was named one of the best classical music events by The New York Times. His recent new opera M. Butterfly (with libretto by David Henry Hwang) received its world premiere with the Santa Fe Opera in 2022. Book of Mountains and Seas (with puppetry by Basil Twist) has been touring the world with BMP since its creation. He served as the first composer-in-residence for Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam, and was the visiting composer for the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in Brazil. Huang Ruo is a composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music in NY. He was selected as a Young Leader Fellow by the National Committee on United States–China Relations in 2006.

 

Matthew Ozawa is a stage director, artistic director and educator who is one of the preeminent creative forces in the opera world today. Ozawa is a master storyteller, whose “strikingly spare productions” (The New York Times) are “a vivid demonstration of what opera is all about” (Opera News). His productions consistently “deliver brilliance on all fronts” (Chicago Tribune) and are filled with “breathtaking imagery” (Broadway World). Ozawa is the Founder and Artistic Director of Mozawa, a Chicago-based incubator advancing collaborative art and artists. Also a proponent of arts education, Ozawa served three years as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, School of Music, Theatre & Dance. In 2022, he was named the Chief Artistic Administration Officer of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

 

Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) identifies emerging and established composers who experiment, innovate, and take artistic risks to evolve opera-theater and music-theater into the future. With a focus on the cultivation of the next generation and diversification, BMP serves as a launching pad for the future artistic leaders in the field. Through the commissioning, development, production, and touring of new works, BMP aims to expose audiences around the world to relevant contemporary American chamber opera and music-theater works of the highest caliber.

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