Skip to main content
Browse by:
GROUP

Ciompi Quartet: "A Forest Unfolding"

Ciompi Quartet: "A Forest Unfolding"
Friday, April 07, 2023
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Duke Performances Spring 2023 Season

A Forest Unfolding is the brainchild of eight writers and composers who were inspired by scientific research into the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees. Environmentalists Bill McKibben and Joan Maloof joined forces with novelists Joan Maloof and Richard Powers (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory) to select a range of prose and poetry on the relationship between people and trees. These words were set to music by composers Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner, Stephen Jaffe and David Kirkland Garner in a linked cycle of recitatives and arias, narrated by Nnenna Freelon.

Our resident ensemble, Ciompi Quartet, brings this unique project to Duke Performances, alongside a work by John Luther Adams, another composer preoccupied with the natural world. The Wind in High Places sees the quartet exploring natural harmonics and open strings to create ethereal, open sonorities that show the full capabilities of the raw sounds of each instrument. Rounding out the program is Dvořák's Silent Woods, a work that evokes the atmosphere of the Bohemian Forest in which the composer was so fond of hiking.