UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L) will present the world premiere of “Everything Rises,” a new work commissioned by A&L and created by Jennifer Koh and Davóne Tines, 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 12 in Campbell Hall. The program is part of the 2021-22 Creating Hope initiative and Justice For All series.
“Everything Rises” is an original staged musical about reclaiming agency through ancestral memory. Featuring music, projections, and recorded interviews, the show centers the need for artists of color to be seen and heard through connection and the creation of a new artistic space.
Created by an all-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) creative team, the project reclaims violinist Jennifer Koh and bass-baritone Davóne Tines’ narratives about who they are and how they became the artists and the visionary forces that created this work.
“A long-standing artist with A&L, Jennifer Koh is one of today’s most skilled violinists and a creative mind who makes surprising and potent connections through her music,” said Celesta M. Billeci, A&L’s Miller McCune executive director.
“We are proud to commission ‘Everything Rises,’ her new project with another visionary artist, Davóne Tines,” Billeci said. “Koh and Tines are both commanding artists in their own right, lauded not only for their immense talent but also for using their art to push their fields — and our culture — forward.
“Arts & Lectures is honored to be able to support this powerful, complex collaboration that sheds light on our collective heritage as individuals and as a nation, bringing together our past, our present, and perhaps most poignantly, our future.”
Recognized for her virtuosity and technical assurance, Koh is a forward-thinking artist dedicated to exploring an eclectic repertoire while promoting diversity in classical music.
Tines, lauded as a “depths-plumbing bass-baritone” by The New York Times, is building an international career commanding a broad spectrum of opera and concert performance.
“Everything Rises” is a multimedia collaboration born from the artists’ desire to understand themselves as the descendants of refugees and slaves and reveal a universal history shared by immigrants and minority Americans.
The performance will be followed by a Q&A with the artists.
“Everything Rises” is produced and commissioned by ARCO Collaborative with co-commissioner UCSB Arts & Lectures. Learn more at www.arcocollaborative.org.
Born in Chicago of Korean parents, Koh began playing the violin by chance, choosing the instrument in a Suzuki-method program only because spaces for cello and piano had been filled. She made her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11.
She has been honored as “A force of nature” by the American Composers Orchestra and Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year.
Koh was a top prize winner at Moscow’s International Tchaikovsky Competition, winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
She holds a BA in English literature from Oberlin College and studied at the Curtis Institute, where she worked extensively with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir.
Learn more at www.jenniferkoh.com.
Tines is artist-in-residence at Michigan Opera Theatre — an appointment that will culminate in his performance in the title role of Anthony Davis’ “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” in the spring — and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale’s first creative partner.
Tines’ ongoing projects include Recital No. 1: MASS, a program exploring the mass woven through Western European, African-American, and 21st-century traditions, with performances this season at the Ravinia Festival; in Washington, D.C., presented by Washington Project for the Arts; and at the Barbican in London.
He also performs Concerto No. 1: SERMON — a program he conceived for voice and orchestra that weaves arias by John Adams, Anthony Davis, Igee Dieudonné and Tines himself, with texts by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou — with the Philadelphia Orchestra and BBC Symphony.
Tines is a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, recognizing extraordinary classical musicians of color. He also received the 2018 Emerging Artists Award from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and is a graduate of Harvard University and The Juilliard School.
Learn more at https://alsoanoperasinger.org/.
Tickets are $35 for general public, free for UCSB students (current student ID required). For tickets and more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures, 805-893-3535 or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.