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Volti -- San Francisco's new-music chamber chorus, founded and led by Robert Geary -- won one of six $50,000 music commissioning grants awarded by The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The commission grant will support the premiere of a major performance piece, "Pandora's Gift," by Volti's resident composer Mark Winges, with a libretto by San Francisco poet Denise Newman.
The piece will be written for the combined forces of Volti's 20 adult singers and the 30 to 40 children of Ensemble, the top performing choir from Geary's Piedmont East Bay Children's Choirs. Winges says:
The Pandora myth is a powerful one, and open to many different nuances: Is curiosity a bad thing (because it leads to unleashing bad things)? Is hope, because it’s the last thing left in Pandora’s box, the tiny thing that keeps us going, or is it "last" because it’s the most powerful thing there is?
I’m really looking forward to exploring how we shape the various elements of this project as Denise Newman crafts her words and as I work with the singers, their placement and how the move in they performance space. From a purely sonic standpoint, I’m really excited about combining the timbres of both young and adult voices.
Volti will premiere the first movement of the 30-minute piece in concerts November 21 in San Francisco and November 23 in Berkeley. The full piece will be presented at Z Space in San Francisco in May 2015, with diretion/choreography by Erica Chong Shuch.