Verb Ballets and BlueWater Chamber Orchestra Join Forces to Create BUILDING BRIDGES TOGETHER

Verb Ballets and BlueWater Chamber Orchestra have joined forces to create, Building Bridges Together, a captivating collaboration designed, performed, and filmed specifically for virtual performance. This uniquely Cleveland-born partnership combines the evocative dancers of Verb Ballets under the leadership of Producing Artistic Director, Dr. Margaret Carlson and Associate Artistic Director, Richard Dickinson, MFA with the virtuosity of BlueWater under its Artistic Director, Daniel Meyer. The combined program will be a visual cinematic experience, providing an intimate view from the vantage point of the artists unlike any stage performance. Featured repertory includes Heinz Poll's Adagio for Two Dancers set to Albinoni's Adagio and Broken Bridges by Michael Escovedo set to Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony. BlueWater will also play Anton Webern's Langsamer Satz in a stand-alone performance. It's an evening of connecting to the heart; a perfect respite for these emotionally challenging times. The private virtual performance will premiere on November 21, 2020 at 7:00pm.

The program features Albinoni's Adagio in G minor for strings and organ. Albinoni's Adagio may not be by Albinoni at all. The music is purported to have been rediscovered and edited by Italian Remo Giazotto, but it is likely that Giazotto took cues from an Albinoni fragment to create an entirely new composition. Styled to sound like a work emerging from the Italian Baroque, the Adagio prominently features the organ and a solo violin, set against a larger body of string players. The prevailing melody, while certainly influenced by the Baroque master, can easily stand among the finest of a much later generation of operatic masters, including Puccini and Mascagni. This neo-Baroque composition is a gentle and ethereal work. Verb Ballets will perform Heinz Poll, Adagio for Two Dancers, a breathtaking duet that highlights luxurious partnering, with lifts that make for ravishingly sculpted closeness to the score. The ballet was choreographed in 1973 for Ohio Ballet and remounted with permission of Jane Startzman. The couple featured in gold unitards is seamlessly beautiful, dancing under gorgeous lighting meant to evoke the image of dancing under the light of a cathedral window.

Verb Ballets revives Broken Bridges by former company dancer and choreographer Michael Escovedo. The haunting ballet is set to Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony in C minor Op. 110A. This beloved score intensifies this somber tonality offering a passing glimpse of major-key optimism, but that hope inevitably returns to the gloomier minor. Escovedo choreographed this piece as a tribute to his grandmother, Bridgett Escovedo, who passed away in 2017. In the ballet, he honors his late grandmother who suffered from mental illness, which left the relationships in the family strained, especially the relationship between Escovedo and his mother after he became her caregiver when she developed Alzheimer's disease later in life. Broken Bridges explores this family dynamic through the ominous and intense score of Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony in C minor Op. 110A. This major-minor conflict pervades through, reflecting the musical torment of a troubled family dynamic. Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich poured his feelings into his searing String Quartet No. 8, on the heels of visiting a devasted Dresden, Germany. At times despondent, shocking and deeply soulful, Shostakovich's music points inward and autobiographical as he embeds his own initials into the fabric of the music. Performed here in a full string orchestra arrangement, the addition of double basses provides a sonic depth and density that adds to the weight of the music and its pathos.

As the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra's stand-alone work, Anton Webern's Langsamer Satz is a musical love-letter, born of an emerging relationship between the composer and Wilhelmine Mörtl in 1905. Inspired by the composer's tutelage under Arnold Schoenberg, Langsamer Satz can be considered a study of his montor's1899 masterpiece for strings, Transfigured Night. Dense in its use of chromaticism and rich romantic era harmonies, Webern's single-movement work for string quartet is a study in how elegantly and unabashedly music can emerge from a compact format. Unpublished in Webern's lifetime and not given an opus number, Langsamer Satz is presented in this performance in an alternate version for string orchestra. Widely regarded as an early twentieth century gem, this work brims with a wealth of musical inspiration, complexity and heartfelt melody.

Due to closures of theatres and prohibited gatherings of large crowds caused by COVID-19, Verb Ballets and BlueWater Chamber Orchestra came together to bring new orchestral and dance experiences to the community. Both companies are committed to presenting work while ensuring a safe environment for its dancers and musicians while following all health recommendations by the State.

On November 21, 2020 at 7:00pm Verb Ballets and Bluewater Chamber Orchestra present Building Bridges Together. Tickets prices are: individual adult $25, individual senior $20, individual student/child $10 or family $50.

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