Dramatic Oratorio by Julia Wolfe with 146 Young Singers
About the event
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra is a guest with a work by Saturday Matinee composer-in-residence Samy Moussa. Furthermore, it presents the Dutch premiere of an impressive oratorio, Fire in my mouth by Julia Wolfe, in its home city and at the Matinee, featuring 146 young singers. Commemoration and indictment
With the large-scale oratorio Fire in my mouth, Julia Wolfe commemorates the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. It was a fire in a textile factory in Manhattan in which 146 young, mostly migrant women perished. With choir, orchestra, and video, Wolfe weaves archival texts, memories, folk songs, and protest songs into both a monument and an indictment of exploitation and indifference. A masterpiece that can be counted among the canon of the 21st century. "' Fire in my mouth' tells the story of women who persevered and endured difficult circumstances, women who led the fight for reform in the workplace," says Julia Wolfe.
Inner night
Where Wolfe looks back on what became a turning point in the social history of New York, Samy Moussa focuses on the inner night in the Dutch premiere of his orchestral work Nocturne. Not an impressionistic image of the night, but a psychological space with a center of gravity in the lower registers, so that 'the few clear moments become all the more exceptional'. An American critic called the work 'an orchestral adagio that inevitably brings to mind a 21st-century Wagner'.
