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When Blessings Brighten: The Cemetery Project Concert & Tour
Friday, March 18, 2022 from 6-8:30 pm
(Tour: 6-6:30 pm; Concert: 7-8:30 pm)
Free with advanced registration.
Recommended for ages 12 and up.
Join us for the world premiere concert performance of Ian Wiese’s When Blessings Brighten featuring the Essex Piano Trio. Begin the evening with a tour of the nearby Charter Street Cemetery to visit epitaphs that inspired the compositions, then take in the beautiful music in PEM’s Morse Auditorium.
The Essex Piano Trio will present its Cemetery Project as the culmination event of PEMs exhibition The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming, which closes March 20. Through the performance of both vocal and instrumental music, the Cemetery Project continues and augments the themes of the exhibition by exploring ancestral links to New Englanders beyond the hysteria of the witch trials and to the ravages of war and the wasted human potential in the 20th century and beyond.
Essex Piano Trio
The multimedia musical program features the premiere of the How Blessings Brighten for tenor and trio by Massachusetts composer Ian Wiese, with guest tenor Antanas Meilus. The 2019 work, inspired by epitaphs on gravestones in the Charter Street Cemetery, is presented as a companion piece to Nicholas Slonimsky’s Gravestones at Hancock, N.H (1946) with the Largo from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio as an instrumental interlude between.
Please note: Sensitive images will be shown during the six-minute performance of the Shostakovich piece as part of a multimedia presentation. Photographs of the Siege of Leningrad document battlefield preparation and destruction, as well as the horrific experience of people (including children) affected by war. These images are directly related to the composition being performed. The program is recommended for ages 12 and up. Audience members will receive verbal warning prior to this segment of the performance.
The members of the regionally recognized Essex Piano Trio (Ashley Offret, violin, Beverly Soll, piano and David Cabral, cello) are all from Essex County communities along the North Shore of Massachusetts.
Tour space is limited. Reservations for tour and concert are required.
Masks are encouraged to participate in this program. Please check our safety protocols for the most up-to-date information.
This program is made possible by the Lowell Institute.