Description
Reserve your seats by purchasing $6 tickets in advance here. Remaining tickets are free at the door, beginning at 6:30 p.m. on the day of the concert.
PROGRAM
Dai Fujikura: “Being As One”
Dai Fujikura/tauchgold: Borrowed Landscape
The New York City–based BlackBox Ensemble presents a series of performances exploring how objects reflect and shape our relationships to time, culture, and historical memory. The centerpiece of the series is Thursday evening’s performance of Borrowed Landscape, a play by the German playwright duo tauchgold with original music by prominent composer Dai Fujikura. Conceived by tauchgold as a “narratorio”—a dramatic play based on the musical structure of an oratorio—this piece was originally broadcast as a radio play in Germany in 2022. The BlackBox Ensemble presented the staged premiere of this new English translation at New York City’s Noguchi Museum in November 2023.
The narratorio tells the story of three special instruments: a famous Stradivarius walled up for years in a cellar in Budapest, a double bass left behind by a Jewish orchestral bassist fleeing Poland in 1939, and a Baldwin upright piano silenced after the Hiroshima bomb killed its young owner. As the musicians of a trio approach these instruments, which for decades were considered lost, they uncover the stories, secrets, and histories these objects contain.
In the companion program on Wednesday, February 7, the ensemble performs an eclectic selection of contemporary works by Angélica Negrón, Baldwin Giang, Tristan Murail, and George Lewis, curated to reflect the themes of the radio play as well as those of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.
Cost
Reserve your seats by purchasing $6 tickets in advance. Remaining tickets are free at the door, beginning at 6:30 p.m. on the day of the concert.
