About this National Sawdust+ Performance
On Tuesday, February 13, National Sawdust+ hosts the release party of Season Four of “Mozart in the Jungle!” The festive evening will showcase live music commissioned by the Golden-Globe award-winning Amazon Original Series as well as colorful commentary from showrunner Will Graham, who will be interviewed along with MITJ artists by the show’s Creative Consultant (and NS+ Curator) Elena Park. Audiences will get a sneak peek at clips from the new season, which premieres on Prime Video on February 16, including scenes shot inside National Sawdust.
Composers Caroline Shaw (a character in Season Four) and Missy Mazzoli will perform, as well as an ensemble of musicians who will play their music and a piece by Laura Karpman. Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler will share excerpts from Paola Prestini’s “Listen, Quiet,” and Metropolitan Opera star Susanna Phillips will sing Nico Muhly’s haunting Amy Fisher Aria, “performed” last season by Monica Bellucci (“La Fiamma”) and Gael Garcia Bernal (Maestro Rodrigo de Souza) on Piazza San Marco in Venice.
National Sawdust+ is a lively performance and conversation series in which luminaries from across disciplines share their passion for music and explore ideas, making surprising connections. The series taps artists and thinkers from theater, film and visual art, literature, science and beyond, to create insightful programs that reflect their own interests. Whether through live performances, conversations, or readings, each program has its own alchemy, engaging the audience in new and unexpected ways. Often topical, and always imaginative, National Sawdust+ is an ideal space for those with curiosity, adventure, and vision.
Stream Season Four of “Mozart in the Jungle” starting February 16, 2018 on Prime Video.
About the Artists
Caroline Shaw
Caroline Adelaide Shaw is a New York-based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She is the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for the Dover Quartet, the Calidore Quartet, the Aizuri Quartet, FLUX Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Anne Sofie von Otter, The Crossing, Roomful of Teeth, yMusic, ACME, ICE, A Far Cry, Philharmonia Baroque, the Baltimore Symphony, and Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. In the 2017–18 season, Caroline’s new works will be premiered by Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Britten Sinfonietta, TENET with the Metropolis Ensemble, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, and Luciana Souza with A Far Cry. Future seasons will include a new piano concerto for Jonathan Biss with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and a new work for the LA Phil. Caroline’s scoring of visual work includes the soundtrack for the feature film To Keep the Light as well as collaborations with Kanye West. She studied at Yale, Rice, and Princeton, and she has held residencies at Dumbarton Oaks, the Banff Centre, Music on Main, and the Vail Dance Festival. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin.
Missy Mazzoli
Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York). Her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, pianist Emanuel Ax, Opera Philadelphia, LA Opera, Cincinnati Opera, New York City Opera, Chicago Fringe Opera, the Detroit Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, JACK Quartet, cellist Maya Beiser, violinist Jennifer Koh, pianist Kathleen Supové, Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, the Sydney Symphony and many others. Her second opera, Breaking the Waves, a collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects, premiered to great acclaim in Philadelphia in September 2016 and as part of New York’s Prototype Festival in January 2017. The work was described as “among the best 21st-century operas yet” (Opera News), “savage, heartbreaking and thoroughly original” (Wall Street Journal), and “dark and daring” (New York Times). From 2012-2015 Missy was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia, Gotham Chamber Opera and Music Theatre-Group, and in 2011/12 was Composer/Educator in residence with the Albany Symphony. Missy was a visiting professor of music at New York University in 2013, and later that year joined the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music, a division of the New School.
Upcoming projects include Missy’s third opera, Proving Up, commissioned by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and New York’s Miller Theatre. Proving Up will premiere in January 2018 at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, in April 2018 at Opera Omaha, and in September 2018 at Miller Theatre. A collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek and based on a short story by Karen Russell, Proving Up offers a surreal and disquieting commentary on the American dream through the story of a Nebraskan family homesteading in the late 19th century. Missy also recently created orchestral arrangements for the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, which will premiere as part of the LA Philharmonic’s Iceland Festival in April 2017, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The coming season will also include performances of Missy’s first opera, Song from the Uproar at Cincinnati Opera, and Missy will perform live sets on piano, keyboards and electronics at venues including the Palm Springs Art Museum and Brooklyn venue Roulette. Along with composer Ellen Reid and in collaboration with the Kaufman Music Center, Missy recently founded Luna Lab, a mentorship program for young female composers ages 13-19.
Jeffrey Zeigler
Jeffrey Zeigler is one of the most versatile cellists of our time. Acclaimed for his independent streak, he has commissioned over three dozen works, and is admired as a potent collaborator and unique improviser. Zeigler has been described as “fiery,” and a player who performs “with unforced simplicity and beauty of tone” by The New York Times.
Jeffrey Zeigler was the cellist of the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet for eight seasons. During his tenure, Zeigler had the opportunity to collaborate with a wide range of luminaries from John Adams to Noam Chomsky, from Damon Albarn (Gorillaz) to Trimpin and from Henryk Gorecki and Steve Reich to Tom Waits.
Since moving on from Kronos, Zeigler has enjoyed a wonderfully multifaceted career which has led to collaborations from Yo-Yo Ma and Laurie Anderson to Hauschka and Roomful of Teeth, from Philip Glass and Foday Musa Suso to John Corigliano and Vijay Iyer, from Tanya Tagaq and Terry Riley to Vladimir Feltsman and John Zorn. Zeigler has also collaborated with members of the Eroica Trio and the Cleveland and St. Lawrence Quartets.
Susanna Phillips
Alabama-born soprano Susanna Phillips, recipient of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010 Beverly Sills Artist Award, continues to establish herself as one of today’s most sought-after singing actors and recitalists. This spring, she returns to the Met for a tenth consecutive season, singing the role of Musetta in La Bohème, the role of her company debut. In recent seasons at the Met, she has performed as Clémence in the Met premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de Loin, conducted by Susanna Mälkki; Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus; and Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte (in what The New York Times called a “breakthrough night”); among many other appearances.
Highly in demand by the world’s most prestigious orchestras, her 2016-17 engagements included a return to the San Francisco Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting a program of American songs, Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate and his Mass in C Minor with Jane Glover and the Music of the Baroque, the Britten War Requiem with Kent Tritle and the Oratorio Society of New York, as well as Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with Robert Spano leading the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She also performed at Carnegie Hall for a special concert performance as Stella in Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Renée Fleming – a role she went on to perform, to rave reviews, at Lyric Opera of Chicago; she also appeared as Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes with the St. Louis Symphony. A fervent chamber music collaborator, Ms. Phillips recently teamed with bass-baritone Eric Owens for a recital of all Schubert which they have taken on tour in Chicago with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, at the Gilmore Festival, and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Additional recital engagements included chamber music concerts with Paul Neubauer and Anne Marie McDermott, an appearance at the Parlance Chamber Music Series with Warren Jones, the 2014 Chicago Collaborative Works Festival, the Emerson String Quartet in Thomasville, Georgia with Warren Jones and colleagues from the Metropolitan Opera, and at Twickenham Fest, a chamber music festival she co-founded in her native Huntsville, Alabama. The soprano also made her solo recital debut at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall with pianist Myra Huang.
In 2005, Ms. Phillips won four of the world’s leading vocal competitions: Operalia (both First Place and the Audience Prize), the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, the MacAllister Awards, and the George London Foundation Awards Competition. She has also claimed the top honor at the Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition, and has won first prizes from the American Opera Society Competition and the Musicians Club of Women in Chicago. Ms. Phillips has received grants from the Santa Fe Opera and the Sullivan Foundation, and is a graduate of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Opera Center. She holds both a Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School and continues collaboration with her teacher Cynthia Hoffmann.
A native of Huntsville, Alabama, over 400 people traveled from her hometown to New York City in December 2008 for Ms. Phillips’ Metropolitan Opera debut in La Bohème. She returns frequently to her native state for recitals and orchestral appearances.
Will Graham (Showrunner, "Mozart in the Jungle")
Will Graham is the Showrunner of Golden Globe-winning Amazon show Mozart in the Jungle, and has written and directed several of its episodes. He is also the creator of The Onion News Network, for which he won a Peabody Award. He was an Executive Producer for Salem Rogers for Amazon, and before that a Consulting Producer on Alpha House starring John Goodman. On the feature side, Will wrote and directed the short film, Homeschooled, which stars Liev Schieber and Naomi Watts, and was released as part of the Farrelly Brothers-produced film, Movie 43.
National Sawdust+ Curated by:
