America Sings a Siren’s Song: Cutting Edge Concerts and the Cygnus Ensemble

[Image: Nehemiah Luckett. photo: Theo Tamirat  |  Statue of Liberty]

Four composers from diverse backgrounds – Samuel Adler, Victoria Bond, Dina Koston, and Nehemiah Luckett – offer very personal interpretations of the dreams that have lured immigrants from all around the world to America’s shores. Performed by Ensemble Cygnus and singers.

For 250 years, brave souls seeking freedom from persecution and a better way of life heard America’s siren call and crossed treacherous seas and unforgiving terrain to claim their piece of the American dream. Each of the four composers on this program has interpreted that journey in their own way.

Nehemiah Luckett, a composer working at the intersection of the sacred and the secular, returns to the festival with Let It Be Told to the Future World: Reckoning with the American Experiment at 250. Commissioned for The Village Trip by the ASCAP Foundation's Charles Kingsford Fund, it places Thomas Paine’s revolutionary cry — “These are the times that try men’s souls”— in conversation with 250 years of American testimony. Through texts by writers and thinkers often pushed to the margins of the national story, the piece becomes a reckoning with founding ideals, inherited crises, and the unfinished work of democracy.

Samuel Adler, now 97 and an inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and recipient of the Aaron Copland Award for Lifetime Achievement, looks to the stars in his work, Between Lyra and Pegasus, commissioned for the festival by the Cygnus Ensemble.

Victoria Bond, a renaissance woman who has enjoyed a long career as composer, conductor, lecturer, and artistic director of Cutting Edge Concerts, brings the words of James Joyce's Ulysses to life in her setting of the "Sirens" episode, for four singers, narrator, and Cygnus.

And the late Dina Koston is represented by her Quartet for Strings Bowed and Plucked, also written for Cygnus. Koston was co-director, with pianist Leon Fleisher, of the Theater Chamber Players of Washington, DC.

• Amy Justman, Soprano
• Devony Smith, Mezzo-Soprano
• Emmanuel Chumaceiro, Narrator
• Maximillian Jansen, Tenor
• Patrick Wilhelm, Baritone

Cygnus Ensemble:

• William Anderson, guitar, and mandolin
• Oren Fader, guitar
• Tara Helen O'Connor, flute
• David Fulmer, violin
• Megan Wojtyla, oboe