Passionate Geometries

The artist collective Nomads NYC presents “Passionate Geometries” a 53-year retrospective concert of the creative work of composer Richard Cameron-Wolfe, featuring eight challenging contemporary works – three premieres and five first stagings, the evening offering a provocative interplay of art-forms: visual art [by Kevin Teare], chamber music, drama, opera, dance, and poetry/literature. The evening features fourteen outstanding New York City contemporary performing artists plus special guests from New Zealand, Russia/Kazakhstan, Boston, and Los Angeles.

The program opens with Iris – scuro/chiaro for piano – in memory of pianist Menahem Pressler, performed by his former student Gayle Blankenburg. Next is the micro-opera A Sound-Shroud for Bill Knott - portraying the iconoclastic American poet as he confronts his mortality (featuring Butoh dancer Mariko Endo); then the cello-piano duet Time Refracted (possibly abstract, possibly not). The first half concludes with Heretic, a micro-opera for guitarist, inspired by Arthur Machen’s haunting 1907 novel The Hill of Dreams, performed by Aaron Larget-Caplan.

The second half begins with Cameron-Wolfe’s 1970 micro-opera MeMarie, sung by Nina Berman; written just after the passing of Marie, his beloved grandmother. Next is the dance duo Lilith - in Alisher Khasanov’s provocatively eccentric choreographic reinterpretation of the legend; then the US premiere of Cameron-Wolfe’s 2023 microtonal guitar sextet Arcturus – 36 strings traversing the outer limits of tonality. The evening concludes with the micro-opera Passionate Geometries - in which a discouraged young poet is taunted and ultimately inspired by her Muse, liberated.