Join us for on May 24 and 25 at Augustana Lutheran Church or Wicker Park Lutheran Church for an evening of works by living female composers exploring the Pygmalion myth.
Once upon a time, Pygmalion, disgusted with the unbecoming women who surrounded him, carved his own perfect embodiment of femininity. That domineering hand continues to sculpt today, using far more insidious tools than a hammer and chisel to create inflexible molds that reduce woman to a singular, acceptable archetype. un/becoming unites the voices of female composers and performers to challenge restrictive definitions of femininity and to liberate Pygmalion’s statue so that she may sculpt her own fate.
featuring
Harrah Friedlander, director
Ilana Goldstein, Elenna Sindler, and Michaella Cipriani, vocalists
Alexandria Hill, violin, and Denielle Wilson, cello
Brian Gale, actor
music by
Selections from Cipher, Kate Soper
Mangetsu, Susan Botti
Selections from One Art, Juliana Hall
Aus den Visionen der Hildegard von Bingen, Sofia Gubaidulina
Selections from From the Grammar of Dreams, Kaija Saariaho
Davids Nimm, Karin Rehnqvist
Selections from Three Heavens and Hells, Meredith Monk
Selections from In spring, Juliana Hall
Rhapsody, Jessie Montgomery
Selections from How to Build a Person, Libby Larsen
Not Hands Like Mine, Hannah Kendall
$20 / $15 students and seniors
7pm, May 24, 2019
Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park
5500 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
unbecoming-HP.brownpapertickets.com
7pm, May 25, 2019
Wicker Park Lutheran Church
1500 N Hoyne Ave, Chicago, IL 60622
unbecoming-WP.brownpapertickets.com
performer bios
Chicago-based soprano Harrah Friedlander earned her Master’s degree from Northwestern University where she notably appeared in Little Women (Amy) and Albert Herring (Emmie Spashett). Currently, she is the Assistant Artistic Director of the new music coalition, NON:op Open Opera Works and is a performing member of Opera on Tap. She has developed productions at Northwestern and beyond, including Menotti’s Old Maid and the Thief, Weill and Brecht’s Mahagonny Songspiel, Donizetti’s Rita, and recitals celebrating the works of female composers. Beyond Chicago, Harrah performed at the Opera NEO festival in San Diego, Bach’s Coffee Cantata at the Aspen Music Festival and with Rhode Island’s Narrangasset Bay Symphony.
Ilana Goldstein, mezzo-soprano, originally hails from Providence, RI. This is Ilana’s second NON:op production, previously seen in Frontier Feminists. Recent opera appearances include Opera Atelier’s Pygmalion and Actéon; a “Night at the Opera” concert with the Narragansett Bay Symphony; Hindemith’s Hin und zurück (Helene); and John Musto’s Later the Same Evening (Rose Segal). In addition, Ilana performs regularly with Music of the Baroque and the Grant Park Music Festival Chorus. Passionate about new music, recent highlights include the premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my Mouth with the Crossing Choir and the New York Philharmonic; Another woman of another kind by Richard Beaudoin with flutist Claire Chase; and taking part in the inaugural season of Chicago-based contemporary music choir Stare at the Sun. When not singing, Ilana moonlights as a violinist and plays with the Lakeview Symphony. She also crochets stuffed animals and has recently been dabbling in calligraphy. Ilana received her Masters degree in Voice and Opera from Northwestern University.
Elenna Sindler, born and raised in the Chicago area, is a student at Northwestern studying voice, composition, and gender studies. She is currently working as the composer and music director for A Red Orchid Theatre’s spring production of Killing Game by Eugene Ionesco. She also recently had the opportunity to premiere a new work by Hannah Selin with the Brooklyn Metro Chamber Orchestra. She has performed original compositions through the Chicago Arts Initiative, with the mentorship of Jesse Langen (Dal Niente) at music festivals EarTaxi, Omaha Under the Radar, at the Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, Germany) with Studio MusikFabrik and at MCA Chicago with Eighth Blackbird. A versatile singer of many styles, she won a YoungArts Merit Award for Popular Voice and wrote and self-released her own album at 17 titled “When I Was.”
Michaella Cipriani is a 2018 graduate of Northwestern where she studied opera and mechanical engineering. While at Northwestern, she directed and produced student operas including Die Zauberflöte and Dido and Aeneas (which Harrah directed!) and co-wrote the libretto of an original opera based on children’s campfire stories called How to tell a Scary Story. She was on a team of students that designed a Mars habitat for NASA’s design competition but she thinks living on Mars sounds terrible and she would rather stay on earth. She is passionate about presenting historical music in new contexts and is currently writing an English adaptation of Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre’s cantata Judith for performers at London’s Royal Academy of Music. She enjoys dancing poorly to music by Trixie Mattel and George Frideric Handel and cooking the two recipes she knows by heart, which are chicken & kale soup and Hungarian stuffed cabbage.
Alexandria Hill is a violinist based in Chicago, Illinois. She teaches and performs frequently throughout the city for ensembles such as the Matt Jones Orchestra, 5th Wave Collective, and Chicago Solisti. Alexandria has performed on stages in Austria, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.
Denielle Wilson, from Lithonia, Georgia, is currently a cellist with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and maintains a private studio of cello students in Evanston, Illinois. She is a recent graduate of Northwestern University, having completed her studies in music education and cello performance with Hans Jørgen Jensen and Wei Yu. Her summer musical experiences include the Interlochen Arts Camp, Bowdoin International Music Festival, Franklin Pond Chamber Music, Meadowmount School of Music, Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Grant Park Music Festival. She and her two siblings form the Wilson Trio, a piano trio that has presented free community concerts over the years since 2007. She is very active within her local church family, and her favorite past-time (at the moment) is reading.
Brian Gale is very excited to have this unique opportunity to work with NON:op and the many talented musicians in un/becoming. Not a musician himself, Brian has done theatrical performances throughout Chicago including May Day, a devised piece by Zach Weinberg and Anna Gelman based on a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also worked with Zach on his original play Love In A Maze based on the novel Fantomina by Eliza Haywood. Both of these works were produced through the Prop Thtr in Chicago, but Brian has also worked with Theater-Hikes in Chicago, performing redacted works of Shakespeare, Dumas, and Greek mythology at parks across Chicagoland, inducing the Morton Arboretum. He is a graduate of Oberlin College.