Concert season 2024/25

Ensemble Dal Niente presents a three-part concert series with world premieres by Hilda Paredes, Wang Lu, Igor Santos and Aida Shirazi as well as three works rarely heard in the USA by Liza Lim, Luis Fernando Rizo Salom and Fausto Romitelli. The series, which is funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, pays tribute to Dal Niente’s almost 20-year history with a programme that conceptually revolves around place, time and belonging.

In its first concert, Dal Niente will premiere an intermedia piece by Wang Lu (China/USA). In this work, Wang Lu will explore art forms that emerged around and because of the 8th century Silk Road, a cultural and material trade route that ended in Xi’an, the composer’s birthplace and childhood home. The score will build on folk music and techniques from instruments that share common roots along the Silk Road (e.g. plucked instruments such as the Egyptian lute, the Turkish ud, the Chinese konghou), incorporate phonemes and elements of languages along the route and, in the composer’s words, “celebrate fundamental humanistic connections made through art, sound and adventurous experimentation in the fusion of sound and cultural worlds.”

The second concert will feature two world premieres, one by Hilda Paredes (Mexico/UK) and one by Aida Shirazi (Iran/USA). For this project, both composers will set texts by Iranian poets to music for soprano and mixed ensemble. Hilda Paredes’ work focuses on the poetry of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1934-1967). Farrokhzad became known as a protest poet because he gave Iranian women a voice. Aida’s work is based on the poem The Mirror by the contemporary Iranian poet Granaz Moussavi, whose work sheds light on the cultural and social oppression of women in Iran. Through the setting, Aida aims to “deconstruct and distort the words, which allows me to explore the poetic aspects of The Mirror and go beyond the immediate meaning of the words to convey their impact more deeply. The repetitive gestures, which transform and erode over time, mimic mirror shards that reflect a distorted image of the poet.”

At the closing concert, Dal Niente will premiere a work by Igor Santos (Brazil/USA) for mixed ensemble alongside US premieres by Luis Fernando Rizo Salom and Liza Lim, both rarely heard in Chicago. Igor’s work will “continue my exploration between found sounds (ordinary, everyday sounds) and live instrumentalists. It will also delve into the realm of microtonal composition, specifically through an obbligato microtonal keyboard part. Furthermore, this work uses found materials to reference my Brazilian heritage and question the colonial roots of classical music.”

Further information:
dalniente.com

Dates

October 19, 2024
Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago

February 23, 2025
Constellation, Chicago

June 7, 2025
Nichols Concert Hall, Evanston, Illinois