FEATURED PERFORMERS
Caroline Shaw, Artistic Director
Gabriel Kahane, singer-songwriter
PROGRAM
KAHANE: Winter Song
SHAW: And So
SHAW: in manus tuas
KAHANE: Baedeker
KAHANE: To Be American
SHAW & KAHANE: Hexagons*
After more than a decade of musical friendship, composer-performers Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane come together for their first large-scale collaboration, a deeply immersive and thought-provoking performance inspired by the literary genius of Jorge Luis Borges.
Hexagons is a new work inspired by the magical realism of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.” In this enigmatic narrative, Borges conjures a captivating and perplexing universe where the notion of infinity collides with the fragility of human understanding. Randomly arranged books, each containing exactly 410 pages, fill the Library of Babel’s infinite expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, encompassing all knowledge that currently exists or may exist in the future while paradoxically offering no true enlightenment. Shaw and Kahane invite audiences to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from a life oversaturated in information.
*Commissioned by Newman Center for the Performing Arts, San Francisco Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Wigmore Hall, and the Patricia Reser Centerfor the Arts
Philharmonic Society of Orange County’s co-commission is generously underwritten by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting
SPONSORS
Festival Underwriters:
John ‘Chimo’ Arnold and Friends in Memory of Diane Arnold
Hung Fan and Michael Feldman
Joan Halvajian
Jelinek Family Trust
Betsy and Gary Jenkins
Phillip N. and Mary A. Lyons
Lauren and Richard Packard
Christopher Quilter
Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting
City of Laguna Beach
Please note that online sales for this concert will close at 12pm on Sunday, February 16. Please go to the Laguna Playhouse Box Office to purchase tickets after this time.