Program:
Michael Gordon Anonymous Man (Midwest premiere)
Gabriel Jackson Rigwreck (Midwest premiere)
Anonymous Man (premiered July 2017) is a concert-length work from Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon. The text is drawn from real life—Gordon's experiences living in a changing neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, meeting his future wife (the composer Julia Wolfe), raising a family, and especially his encounters with two homeless men who lived across the street. The journey includes personal accounts of September 11, the death of one of the homeless men, and the outpouring of sympathy from the community following that loss, finally reaching an epiphany that evokes Lincoln's funeral train arriving on Desbrosses Street, the first stop on its visit to the streets of Manhattan. The interplay of personalities is beautifully rendered in music, springing from Michael’s conversations with the homeless men—serious, funny, mysterious, poetic, and mundane.
For Gabriel Jackson's dramatic setting of Pierre Joris' poem Rigwreck - a study on the power of money - The Crossing is joined by Northwestern's acclaimed vocal ensemble, BCE.
This is the tale of two
One life inside, the other one, outside