MasterVoices Continues Season With the New York City Premiere of TO MY ARMS / RESTORE

MasterVoices continues its 2023-24 season on March 22-23 at NYU Skirball and reunites with its frequent artistic collaborator, choreographer Doug Varone, and his company, Doug Varone and Dancers, for the New York City Premiere of Varone’s To My Arms / Restore. This intimate and explosive two-part work is presented by NYU Skirball and is set to a suite of exquisite operatic arias by Handel and his breathtaking choral masterwork Dixit Dominus.

Part 1: To My Arms features eight dancers and a score of Handel arias sung by five soloists accompanied by musicians from the period-instrument orchestra New York Baroque Incorporated, conducted by MasterVoices artistic director Ted Sperling. In Part 2: Restore, the MasterVoices Chorus will join the dancers, orchestra, and soloists in performing Handel Remixed, the Baroque piece Dixit Dominus layered with electronic beats by Festival Voices and Nico Bentley to create a sound world more commonly heard in clubs around the globe.

To My Arms / Restore (New York City Premiere)

Friday, March 22, 2024, 7:30 pm

Saturday, March 23, 2024, 7:30 pm

NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place

Conceived and choreographed by Doug Varone

G.F. Handel: arias from Alexander Balus, Atalanta, Giulio Cesare, Orlando, Samson, Scipione, Semele, Serse, Teseo, and his choral work Dixit Dominus.

Festival Voices and Nico Bentley: Handel Remixed

MasterVoices Chorus

Ted Sperling, conductor

Doug Varone and Dancers

New York Baroque Incorporated

More about To My Arms / Restore

To My Arms / Restore embodies Doug Varone’s decades-long choreographic fascination with the deeply emotional and the immensely physical, two aspects that are on full display and resonate in the rich dances crafted by Varone for this two-part work. Set to excerpts of operatic arias and duets by Handel and featuring five vocal soloists and a chamber ensemble, To My Arms (Part 1) builds a rich and distinct landscape of love and loss within a suite of eleven dances, evoking a strange otherworld of intimacy. In stark contrast, Restore (Part 2) is a visceral, tactile, and unsparing movement that explodes across the stage, revealing a new and wide-open terrain of physicality. It is driven by the 21st century sound of Festival Voices and composer Nico Bentley’s Handel Remixed, a score that fuses the fundamentals of Handel’s 18th century choral work Dixit Dominus, his earliest surviving autograph, with beats more commonly heard in clubs around the globe; the result of which is a marriage between a score and a dance that is unabashedly glorious.

Award-winning choreographer and director Doug Varone works in all genres of the performing arts, including film, as well as in fashion. His New York City-based Doug Varone and Dancers company has been commissioned and presented to critical acclaim by leading national and international venues for three decades, and his dances have been staged for more than 75 college and university programs in the U.S.A. For MasterVoices, Varone has created choreographies for its stagings of Kurt Weill; Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart’s Lady in the Dark; and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which he also directed. His Metropolitan Opera credits are Salome, with its Dance of the Seven Veils for singer Karita Mattila; the world premiere of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy; Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, designed by David Hockney; and Berlioz’s Les Troyens. He directed multiple premieres for American opera companies and his numerous theatre credits include choreography for Broadway, Off-Broadway, and theaters across the country.

In 1707 George Frideric Handel was a young man of 22 when he wrote his masterpiece Dixit Dominus. He had already earned recognition as an opera composer in his native Hamburg. He traveled to Rome, where, in spite of being a Lutheran, he gave a spectacular organ recital at the Arch Basilica of St. John Lateran and soon secured the patronage of three cardinals. Dixit Dominus, a psalm setting using the Latin text of Psalm 110, was most likely composed under the patronage of Cardinal Carlo Colonna, as one of a large set of probably eight pieces for Vespers celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in April 1707 at the Church of St. Maria di Monte Santo, one of the “twin churches” in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. Later in his composing life, Handel re-used music from Dixit Dominus in several of his well-known operas and oratorios.

Innovative electronic music producer, DJ, and performer Nico Bentley is based in London. Along with choral conductor Gregory Batsleer and the Pencil Collective, he premiered his new version of Dixit Dominus at London’s Handel Festival 2019, shedding new light on Handel’s choral masterwork.

Tickets priced at $45 are on sale online at nyuskirball.org, at the NYU Skirball box office, 566 LaGuardia Place, New York, or by calling (212) 998-4941.

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