Spears, Balliet, and Hall: New Vintage Baroque and Eliza Bagg

Greg Spears’s Wolf in Skins and  

Doug Balliett’s Bacchus

performed by New Vintage Baroque

together with

Emily Hall's Life Cycle

performed by Eliza Bagg, Ashley Bathgate, & Vicky Chow

Sunday, December 13th, 2015 | 12 NoonNational Sawdust | 80 North 6th St, Brooklyn, NY 11249MATA presents Radical Pairings: a mix of baroque and gallant-inspired works by Greg Spears and Doug Balliett performed by New Vintage Baroque, together with Emily Hall’s expressive, very much contemporary, song-cycle, Life Cycle, performed by soprano Eliza Bagg, accompanied by Vicky Chow and Ashley Bathgate.A moving meditation on the joys and fears of motherhood, Emily Hall’s Life Cycle sets text by the acclaimed British author Toby Litt. Of its premiere, Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of London’s Southbank Centre, wrote: “Life Cycle was touching, sometimes searing in its delicate exposure of the pain and loss that can surround child birth. Both the music and the libretto left the audience feeling they’d had an important shared experience.”Bookending the cycle New Vintage Baroque – praised by the New York Times for its “buoyant pulse” and “appealing energy” — will perform two works scored for baroque instruments and voices: a suite from Greg Spears’ elegant Wolf in Skins inspired by the medieval Welsh epic, the Mabinogion, and Doug Balliett’s “rap-cantata” Bacchus, a wild traversal of the Greek myth, with a text inspired by Ovid.