Volti’s first concert of the season, A Close Correspondence, will be shared with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. It’s a natural alliance: Volti joins forces with this group of instrumentalists, renowned for finding provocative and beguiling ways of pairing standard repertoire with new music, for a concert about correspondence. Left Coast will playLeoš Janáček’s “Intimate Letters” string quartet and Volti will sing “A Father’s Love,” the movement from David Lang’s “battle hymns” based on a beautiful goodbye letter from civil war soldier Sullivan Ballou. Together our ensembles present world premieres for string quartet + chamber chorus fromOnur Türkmen (text from a letter of Goethe) and Mark Winges (text from letters of Abelard and Héloïse, Janáček, and Virginia Woolf.)
A letter is meant to be read, connecting the reader with writer. These works, inspired by the dying art of letter writing, are meant to be heard.