The BQE
Sufjan will world premiere The BQE, “a symphonic and cinematic exploration of New York City’s infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,” at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 25th Next Wave Festival on November 1-3, 2007. The BQE was commissioned for the festival and the performances will feature new songs as well as selections from his albums. Festival tickets go on sale June 18 while single tickets go on sale Sept 4. For more info go to BAM’s site.
Event Dates: November 1-3, 2007
Press release and information from Brooklyn Academy of Music:
The BQE
Composed and performed by Sufjan Stevens
25th Next Wave Festival Commission
World Premiere
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Ave)
Nov 1–3 at 8pm
Tickets: $20, 25, 35, 50
A prolific singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Sufjan Stevens has earned both critical and popular acclaim for his finely drawn songs and rich musical arrangements. In addition to his delightful live performances, Stevens has released six albums in as many years, among them Michigan (2003) and Illinois (2005) - parts of a proposed song cycle for each of the 50 states.
For his BAM debut, Stevens will world premiere The BQE, a symphonic and cinematic exploration of New York City’s infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the 11.7-mile roadway conceived by Robert Moses and constructed beginning in the late 1930s. Merging a virtual road trip (shot in beautiful 16mm film) with a live band and orchestral ensemble, The BQE discovers abstract patterns and stories in the snaking traffic, stunning city views, potholed pavement, billboards, and badly marked exits. The work, commissioned for the 25th Next Wave Festival, muses on an urban planning project - then controversial, now overcrowded and antiquated - that tore through neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens in a zealous period of urban development.
The performances at BAM will also feature new songs by Stevens and orchestrated selections from his acclaimed albums.
A prolific writer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger, with a penchant for storytelling, Sufjan Stevens‘ work often mixes autobiography, religious fantasy, and American history to create folk songs of epic proportions. His grand proposal to make a record for each of the fifty states has thus far resulted in two critically acclaimed albums, Michigan and Illinois, the latter of which appeared on numerous year-end lists, winning album of the year at the PLUG awards and the Pantheon Prize in 2005. A preoccupation with epic concepts has led to other ambitious collections, an electronic record for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001) and a five-disc Christmas box set released late last year. Sufjan has toured extensively around the U.S. and Europe, performing in a variety of thematic incarnations - the Michigan Militia, The Illinoisemakers cheerleading squad, and more recently as Majesty Snowbird and the Incredible Kite Brigade - traveling from the desert towns of Arizona to the chilly reaches of Iceland. He has also performed at such institutions as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center (with members of the opera orchestra). He has shared the stage with David Byrne, Philip Glass, and Allen Toussaint - a few of his idols. With his step-father Lowell, Sufjan owns and operates the independent record label Asthmatic Kitty, named after Lowell’s beloved cat Sara, who suffers from acute feline asthma. Enthusiastic reviews of Sufjan’s records have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The Observer, The New York Times, and Uncut, which has described his work as “idiosyncratic collections of mini-operettas, musings upon historical figures and legends, evocations of architecture, skylines and landscapes, ruminations upon localized industrial development, rendered in a weird, pan-stylistic blend of alt-country, minimalism and American brass band music, as if John Philip Sousa, Steve Reich and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy had together stumbled across the clippings-file of some mid-west small-town newspaper and decided to set it to music.” That about sums it up.
Music Programming is made possible by a generous grant from The New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Endowment funding has been provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund for Opera and Music-Theater.
25th Next Wave Festival
The Next Wave Festival connects some of the world’s most innovative artists working in music, theater, and dance with New York City’s most curious and adventurous audiences. From October 2 to December 16, the 25th Next Wave Festival offers an extraordinary range of contemporary performance, humanities events, literature, film, and visual art that celebrate the creative voices that will be leading us through the next 25 years.
BQE photo by: archival
BAM photo by: Ryan Padraic
May 31st, 2007 admin
Entry Filed under: Concerts