World Premiere of Overstory Overture
Joyce DiDonato and the Sejong Soloists, Conducted by Earl Lee
Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center

Overstory Overture is the first glimpse of Machover’s next opera, The Overstory, based on Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name. Overstory Overture is a 35-minute dramatic piece for mezzo-soprano, string orchestra (with keyboard and “wood” percussion) and electronics. The narrative focuses on the character of Patricia Westerford, a scientist who discovers the powerful communication network of trees that suggests an entirely new relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Overstory Overture stars multiple GRAMMY Award-winner Joyce DiDonato (starring in the Met’s production of The Hours in November) as Westerford; she is joined by the internationally renowned chamber orchestra Sejong Soloists, which commissioned the work, conducted by Earl Lee, Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Movement design is by Karole Armitage, a boundary-pushing choreographer known for blending dance, music, visual art and science.

In potently poetic language, Westerford recounts the professional ostracism she faced after publishing her radical discoveries, celebrates the implications of a worldwide network of communicating trees and deplores the destruction that our species visits on the nature that surrounds us. She offers an inspiring vision of a new, more balanced, relationship between the human and the nonhuman, and speaks eloquently about what humans can – must, in fact, urgently - learn from trees about building synergistic, supportive societies. Machover’s score for Overstory Overture creates two parallel narratives: one for the human perspective, represented by Joyce DiDonato; the other, for the “world of trees,” is represented by the instrumental ensemble. At various times, these layers ignore each other or clash or intermingle, and at certain moments, finally merge. Machover’s signature electronics help to make tree communication – flitting fast through the air or delicately pulsating “underground” – palpable, while exaggerating contrasts and building sonic connections between soloist and orchestra.