July 19th marks the highly anticipated world premiere of Two Thresholds, a new vocal symphony by composer Matthew Aucoin. Two Thresholds is commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Dortmund Philharmoniker, and the Lakes Area Music Festival, with the generous support of Mike and Margo Oberman. It is a beautiful, complex contemplation of the two thresholds of our lives and the ways in which they echo each other.
Leading the world premiere at the Aspen Music Festival is conductor Cristian Măcelaru; soprano Christine Goerke serves as the featured soloist. For text, Aucoin returns to the poetry of Jorie Graham, which bookends the symphony. Graham was one of Aucoin's mentors at Harvard University, and has served as a frequent source of inspiration for the composer, most recently in Music for New Bodies, his acclaimed collaboration with Peter Sellars.
"Two Thresholds (Symphony) takes an unusual form," notes the composer. "The work begins with a near-miss with death, and ends with a memory, from early childhood, of a first emergence into consciousness, amazement, and wonder at the world. In the first movement, entitled Death [flashed her brights at me], the vocalist contemplates a close call with death, which forces her to wrestle with questions of mortality, purpose and fate."
But instead of finding herself overwhelmed with death, the vocalist feels immense gratitude to be alive, and the audience is allowed to sit in this gratitude in the second movement, left intentionally untitled. In the third and final movement, Cagnes Sur Mer 1950, the vocalist recalls a memory from “the other ‘threshold’: not death but birth, awakening, and emergence. The speaker remembers a moment when she was separated from her mother as a toddler, and in that brief experience of solitude, she experienced the world for the first time before being found once again.
The Aspen Music Festival concert will be broadcast live on Aspen Public Radio starting at 4PM MDT (6PM EST). The broadcast can be found on the radio on 91.5FM and 88.9FM or at aspenpublicradio.org.
For more information, please contact Andrew Stein-Zeller.
