Resonance Works presents “To Breathe Free” - March 3rd, 2023

Our tenth season reflects on Resonance Works’ dynamic history and offers a promise for our innovative future. To Breathe Free embodies this with a reprise of Copland’s beloved Appalachian Spring, poignant works by Pulitzer prize-winners Caroline Shaw and George Walker, and a world premiere by Gilda Lyons celebrating Resonance Works’ 10th anniversary.

The Resonance Chamber Orchestra takes the spotlight, echoing our very first season with a performance of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. This dynamic piece hums with the optimism and possibility of building a new life, but also the trepidation of facing an uncertain future. The original version for 13 instruments was written as a ballet for Pittsburgh-born dancer/choreographer Martha Graham, and heightens the parallel threads of American nostalgia and cultural dissent woven throughout Copland’s music.

Conducted by Resonance Works Artistic Director and founder Maria Sensi Sellner, To Breathe Free places this iconic score and George Walker’s beloved Lyric for Strings into conversation with two contemporary works. We are honored to finally present Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands for choir and strings (originally scheduled for March of 2020). Inspired by 17th century Danish composer Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri, To the Hands is a meditation on empathy, refuge, and communal responsibility through a diversity of texts, including a riff on Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, The New Colossus, which is engraved on the Statue of Liberty: “Her beacon hand beckons, give to me all those yearning to breathe free…”

In celebration of our 10th anniversary, we have commissioned Grammy-nominated composer and genre-defying artist Gilda Lyons, a University of Pittsburgh alum, whose music has been described as “powerfully effective” and “masterly.” Her clever and moving “Sourdough: Rise Up” was Resonance Works’ contribution to the inaugural streaming production by the Decameron Opera Coalition, which won multiple awards and has since been inducted into the Library of Congress as a part of their Performing Arts Covid-19 Response Collection. The world premiere of An Anchor in Time, featuring baritone Daniel Teadt, mezzo-soprano Timothi Williams, and the Resonance Chamber Orchestra, looks back through the public record and poetry of the past and forward through the eyes of children as we cross the threshold of this organizational milestone.