ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Two creative visionaries celebrate the ties that bind in the worlds of music recording and live performance. Famed theater director (and UCLA professor) Peter Sellars and Bob Hurwitz, longtime president of the eclectic and evolutionary label Nonesuch Records, come together to share stories of artistic intersection.

Hurwitz and Sellars have each left an indelible stamp on contemporary music and a wealth of artists who populate it. In a freewheeling conversation they will highlight their work with myriad artists and the ways each has shaped the world of contemporary music.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Robert HurwitzRobert Hurwitz, President of Nonesuch Records, has headed the company since September 1984. From 1975 until that time, he ran the American operations of ECM Records. He has also worked at Columbia Records. Hurwitz grew up in Los Angeles, where he was trained as a pianist, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. He moved to New York in 1971 and has lived there since then. He is married to Carol Peterson, and has two children.

Nonesuch Records, founded in 1964, pursues a broad mission, including classical music, contemporary music, jazz, traditional American and world music, music theater and dance.

Among the artists he has signed or worked with are composers including John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Henryk Gorecki, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla, Steve Reich, Stephen Sondheim and John Zorn as well as performers and songwriters including Björk, Jeremy Denk, Bill Frisell, Richard Goode, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Kronos Quartet, Gidon Kremer, k.d. lang, Audra McDonald, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, Mandy Patinkin, Punch Brothers, Randy Newman, Joshua Redman, Chris Thile, Dawn Upshaw, and Caetano Veloso. During this time, the label’s artist roster has grown to also include Laurie Anderson, The Black Keys, the Buena Vista Social Club, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Ry Cooder, Emmylou Harris, Youssou N’Dour, Rokia Traore, and Wilco, among many others.

Sun, Dec 7Schoenberg Hall

8pm

Bob Hurwitz & Peter Sellars:A Connected World in Music

RUNNING TIME: Approximately one hour;

No intermission.

MEDIA SPONSOR:

MESSAGE FROM THE CENTER: In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Peter Sellars talked about traveling to Africa to collaborate with singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. He recalled sitting under mango trees working with traditional African musicians.

“It couldn’t have been more African,” he said. “Except it’s diffi cult to know what African, or Western, means any more. A few minutes after I started talking to the kora player, we realized we had both worked with the Berlin Philharmonic. And that was kind of perfect. The world really was connected.”

The world really is connected. And music is one of the powerful threads that keep the world, its inhabitants, its potential for creativity and empathetic evolution, so connected.

Connections are important. Much of what we do in the arts is about connections, about building bridges and opening doors that allow people and thoughts to enter and take new shapes.

With music, we often can’t individually know the full depth or fl exibility of our connective tissue. That’s where people like Robert Hurwitz enter our lives, unseen, unknown, but defi nitely felt.

He is a music lover of impeccable and eclectic taste who has touched the lives of music lovers worldwide whether they recognize his name or not by applying that impeccable and eclectic taste in music with incredible integrity of purpose and artist-centered focus to uphold Nonseuch Records, “a label without a label.” Nonesuch marked its 50th Anniversary this fall with a series of concerts at BAM. Hurwitz has been at the helm for 30 of those years.

A lengthy list of Nonesuch artists have appeared on the UCLA campus as part of this nearly 80-year tradition in performing arts presentation from Philip Glass Kronos Quartet and Laurie Anderson to most recently the aforementioned Rokia Traoré.

Peter Sellars is another impeccable artist. His connective ties to this University run deep, having taught as a professor in the UCLA World Arts and Cultures department for years.Sellars has introduced hundreds of UCLA students to artists, to music, to exciting and innovative ideas about the theater and what it can be.

We are very proud to bring together tonight these two thought leaders, these two thoughtful infl uencers of art and culture.

We owe them much. Thank you for being here with us to welcome them. Enjoy.

Hurwitz has produced recordings by Caetano Veloso, Stephen Sondheim, Astor Piazzolla and Teresa Stratas, and was the producer of the 1993 motion picture George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker. Nonesuch releases have won 42 Grammy awards during his tenure. Three eminent new-music organizations in New York City, The Kitchen, the American Music Center, and Bang on a Can, have all honored Hurwitz’ achievements.

In addition to his work at Nonesuch, Hurwitz has served on the boards of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation, the New Music Distribution Service, and the Charles Ives Foundation. Hurwitz has been a speaker at symposiums for National Public Radio, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Chamber Music America. He also has taught a course at The New School since 2006.

A number of profi les on Nonesuch have spoken of Hurwitz’s achievements at the label. The Boston Globe stated, “Under Robert Hurwitz, Nonesuch Records has been an oasis of artistic excitement. When one picks up a Nonesuch CD, there is a sense of occasion, the feeling that the artists in question have been assembled not as an exercise in star power, but as an exercise in artistic exploration.” The New York Times said, “...(Hurwitz’s) results have achieved remarkable critical acclaim as well as commercial success. If that wide-ranging program (of Nonesuch’s) sounds like what major labels are suddenly up to, it is because those labels have set out to fi nd the formula for Nonesuch’s success.” And The Independent (London), in a profi le of Hurwitz, wrote, “Nonesuch is full of surprises. A record label whose ambitions lie in creating trends…in my dictionary, the word ‘nonesuch’ is defi ned as a ‘matchless person or thing.’ It’s an old word, an archaic word. An idealistic word. And Nonesuch, the label, is nothing if not idealistic.”

Peter SellarsOpera, theater, and festival director Peter Sellars is one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the performing arts in America and abroad. A visionary artist, Sellars is known for groundbreaking interpretations of classic works. Whether it is Mozart, Handel, Shakespeare, Sophocles, or the 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, Peter Sellars strikes a universal chord with audiences, engaging and illuminating contemporary social and political issues. Sellars has staged operas at the Glyndebourne Festival, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Netherlands Opera, Opéra National de Paris, Salzburg Festival, San Francisco Opera, and Teatro Real, among others, establishing a reputation for bringing 20th-century and contemporary operas to the stage, including works by Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, and György Ligeti. Inspired by the compositions of Kaija Saariaho, Osvaldo Golijov, and Tan Dun, he has guided the creation of productions of their work that have expanded the repertoire of modern opera. Sellars has been a driving force in the creation of many new works with longtime collaborator composer John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoff er, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, and A Flowering Tree. A staging of their latest work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, was seen in the U.S. and in Europe early in 2013.

Recent Sellars projects have included a critically acclaimed concert staging of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra performed in Salzburg and Berlin, a staging of Nixon in China for the Metropolitan Opera, and new productions of Handel’s Hercules in Chicago and Vivaldi’s Griselda in Santa Fe. Desdemona, a collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and Malian composer and singer Rokia Traore, was performed in several major cities in Europe and the U.S. and presented in London as part of the Cultural Olympiad. In 2012, Sellars staged a double bill of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Stravinsky’s Persephone for Teatro Real in Madrid. For the 2013 Manchester International Festival, he staged Michelangelo Sonnets,

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COMING UP AT CAP UCLA

a program of Shostakovich and Bach. His most recent production, The Indian Queen, combining Purcell music, text, and dance, had its premiere at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre and was presented subsequently by Teatro Real.

Sellars has led several major arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals; the 2002 Adelaide Arts Festival in Australia; and the 2003 Venice Biennale International Festival of Theater in Italy. In 2006 he was Artistic Director of New Crowned Hope, a month-long festival in Vienna for which he invited international artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to create new work in the fi elds of music, theater, dance, fi lm, the visual arts, and architecture for the city’s celebration of Mozart’s 250th birth anniversary.

Sellars is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and Resident Curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize, the Sundance Institute Risk-Takers Award, and the Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was recently honored by the American Academy in Rome and Opera News magazine.

The Rokia ConnectionBy Jessica Wolf

One of the most recent examples that have connected the worlds of Nonesuch Records to the theater stage is Rokia Traoré, the luminous and soon-to-be-superstar singer-songwriter from Mali.

Rokia rocked the Royce Hall stage September 26 with her full band, performing tracks from her most-recent album Beautiful Africa, released by Nonesuch in September 2013, and about which Uncut Magazine said: “Traoré’s sinuous voice sits at the centre of a hybrid maelstrom that combines the raw, earthy source of Malian rhythms with snarling rock guitars and pneumatic garage energy,” and called it “the record fans of her explosive live shows always hoped she would make and a career highpoint.”

Several years ago Peter Sellars began working with Traoré as he set to work creating Desdemona, his collaboration with Toni Morrison, which premiered in Vienna and New York 2011 and London in 2012. For this compelling reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello, Traoré wrote original songs and lyrics in her native Bambara language, corresponding from Mali with Morrison in New York via email and MP3 downloads to turn the legendary author’s text into music.

“I’m calmer with someone who understands me,” Traoré told the New York Times of her working relationship with Sellars. “The world in which my music moves is not easy. You have to spend time with it.”

Between Sellars and Hurwitz there are exponentially greater opportunities for all of us to spend time with the music of this remarkable artist, who charmed Royce Hall audiences in her recent debut. We hope to see much more of her.

An evening with

Gregory PorterSat, Jan 17 at 8 pmRoyce Hall

GUARDIANBaret Fink

CHAMPIONThe Feintech FamilyDr. Audree FowlerFariba Ghaff ariDeborah IrmasDiane KesslerRenee & Meyer LuskinGinny ManciniKathleen & John QuisenberryMaxine & Gene RosenfeldDr. Richard RossShirley & Ralph ShapiroDr. Allan Swartz & Roslyn Holt-SwartzDiane Levine & Robert WassRon WatsonMimi & Werner Wolfen

BENEFACTORAnonymousGail & James AndrewsBarry BakerDr. Peter & Helen BingMary Farrell & Stuart BloombergValerie & Brad CohenDr. Ellen Smith Graff & Fred CowanJohn LiebesEdie & Robert ParkerJaclyn B. RosenbergAlan M. Schwartz Anne-Marie & Alex SpataruDeedee Dorskind & Bradley Tabach-BankJoyce Craig & Beryl WeinerPatty & Richard WilsonKaryn Orgell WynneMarcie & Howard Zelikow

PATRONAnonymousBarbara AbellDrs. Helen & Alexander AstinAnna Wong Barth & Donald BarthNancy Berman & Alan BlochNadege & Jay CongerDr. Lee & Ann CooperBeth Rudin DeWoodyDr. Bruce & Barbara DobkinLaura DonnelleyMary & Robert EstrinBillie & Steven FischerPatricia & William FlumenbaumDr. Irene Goldenberg

The boards of CAP UCLA and Design for Sharing would like to thank all the members who have made a choice to jointhem in supporting arts education and the art of performance at UCLA.

This listing represents memberships from July 1, 2013-December 1, 2014. If you have questions or would like further information on how you can support CAP UCLA please contact Yvonne Wehrmann at membership@cap.ucla.edu or (310) 794-4033.

Judy Abel & Eric GordonDr. Jerry Markovitz & Cameron JobeDr. Lewis & Sandra KanengiserThe Karsten FamilyJoseph KaufmanMilly & Robert KayyemJoanne Knopoff Dr. Sheelagh Boyd & Larry LayneRonald Johnston & Joan LesserLeslie White & Al LimonSusan & Leonard NimoyGreyson Bryan & Katie MarsanoSarah & William OdenkirkClaude PetiteRonnie RubinSuzie & Michael ScottAbby SherSrila & Man Jit SinghCarolyn & Lester SteinCarol & Joseph SullivanDr. Elwin & Ann SvensonSue & Doug UpshawMichael Sopher & Debra VilinskyCarla Breitner & Gary Woolard

SUSTAINERAnonymous Robert AndersonKathleen Flanagan & Keenan BehrleJacquelynn & Roland BeverlyDr. Thomas & Lily BrodRoberta ConroyHelene & Prof. Edwin CooperDr. Fereshteh & Khossrow DibaJennifer & Royce DienerLinnea DuvallWendy-Sue Rosen & Thomas FreemanCarol GeeLinda & Stanley GoodmanLori & Robert GoodmanPattikay & Meyer GottliebAnn & William HarmsenLois HaytinLisa & Steven HiltonDaniel Lukas & Anne JarmainFiona & Michael KarlinTamara Turoff KeoughSusan LevichBea & Leonard MandelMargalit & Mel Marshall

Sandra Klein & Donald McCallum Linda McDonough & Bradley RossJoanne & Gil SegelMuriel & Neil Sherman Laurie & Rick ShumanJennifer SimchowitzDonna Dees & Timothy TobinAlice & Norman TulchinWilliam TurnerStephanie Snyder & Michael WarrenJoan & Joe WertzBonnie & Paul YaegerDr. Albert & Marilouise ZagerCarol & Stuart Zimring

PARTNERAnonymousDr. Yoshio & Natsuko AkiyamaLeslee Hackenson & Roger AllersSylvia & Joseph BalbonaRosanna BogartRonald & JoAnn BusuttilCity National BankOlga Garay & Kerry EnglishSherry & Matthew FrankCaryn Espo & David GoldJackie & Stan GottliebCarol & Irving GreinesLinda Essakow & Stephen GuntherDr. Robin Garrell & Dr. Kendall HoukMarti KoplinMorelle Lasky LevineBernard & Peggy LewakMerle & Gerald MeaserLeslie MitchnerPhylis NicolayevskyLynda & Stewart ResnickBernard “Bud” Heumann & Patricia RosenburgRita RothmanMartha Kaufman & Michael Skloff Laurie & Rick ShumanAndrea Weiss & Jerry WhitmanSamantha & John WilliamsJan & Steve WinstonArline Zuckerman

ADVOCATEAnonymousDiane & Noel ApplebaumSusann & Stephen Bauman

Dr. Scott Beasley & Digna BeasleyLinda Engel & Alan BenjaminBunny Wasser & Howard Bernstein Marjorie BlattStephanie & Harold BronsonGlenn & Madelynne CardosoRene CruzStephen DavisDr. Glorya DixonLorenzo DoumaniSue & David EisnerDr. Paul & Patti EisenbergLinda & David EllisWilliam EscaleraSandra & Neil GafneyEliane Gans-OrgellDeborah GluskerDavid GrayHanna HeitingLinda JangerJoan Simon & Alan KennedyKerry KorfAliza & Michael LesserHon. Sherrill LukeLaura & James MaslonLaurie McCrayPaulette & Ronald NessimAnne OsbergLinda PetersonNancy & Brad RosenbergCaron & Colin SapireJohn SchwartzAnne & Dan SimonHarlan & Randi SteinbergerMary Lou & William SteinmetzRobert SuiterRobert UhlNancy & Alan VoorheesHarold Williams

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