Life After Death
With Eliza Bagg (voice), Naomi Woo (conductor, piano), Ellis Ludwig-Leone (composer, piano), and chamber ensemble
Produced by Liquid Music
A night of haunted and transcendental works: a musical séance in time for Halloween 2025.
Program:
Charles Ives: Unanswered Question (6’)
Ellis Ludwig-Leone: Hexentanz (5’)
David Lang: Death Speaks (26’)
Rosemary Brown, Franz Liszt & Franz Schubert: solo piano works
Brown: Grübelei, inspired by Liszt (3’)
Liszt: 12 Études d’exécution transcendante, No. 6 Vision (Lento) (6’)
Brown: Moment Musical in F minor, inspired by Schubert (5’)
Schubert: Impromptu no. 2 in E flat Major (5’)
Ellis Ludwig-Leone: Threshold (12-15’)
Beginning with Charles Ives’ famously existential Unanswered Question, the night will take a supernatural turn with Ludwig-Leone’s Hexentanz, or Witch Dance, which takes inspiration from ancient ritual dance circles meant to heighten extrasensory perception and summon the spirits of the dead. David Lang’s acclaimed Death Speaks follows, a song cycle that channels the personified voice of Death, with text assembled from every instance in Schubert’s songs where the dead send a message to the living. Then we will hear music by Rosemary Brown, a composer and medium who channeled the spirits of Schubert, Liszt, and others in the 1970s to create new piano works “dictated” to her by the ghosts of those composers. Brown’s works will be juxtaposed with selections by Schubert and Liszt. The program will culminate in the world premiere of a new commissioned work for voice and large ensemble by Ludwig-Leone, inspired by the testimony of Rosemary Brown in her memoir Unfinished Symphonies, where she describes the “fantastic beauty” of the spiritual realm.
The program speaks to the relationship between past and present, and the haunting ways in which our influences, mentors, and inspirations affect our lives. Ludwig-Leone, influenced by Lang, influenced by Schubert. Ludwig-Leone, channeling Brown, channeling Liszt. Ghosts haunt and inspire in equal measure, sometimes it’s the same thing. This evening of supernatural music invites the audience to heighten their senses and tune into the voices from the other side.
Ludwig-Leone, Bagg, and Woo met in 2008, when they were teenagers at Yale University. Since then they have maintained a constant musical relationship, most recently teaming up on Ludwig-Leone’s “ingenious, gorgeous” (The New Yorker) opera The Night Falls, which premiered in 2023.
About the Artists
Eliza Bagg is an experimental musician, performing as a vocalist in contemporary opera along with composing her own work. She has collaborated with prominent avant-garde artists, from singing in Meredith Monk’s opera Atlas with the LA Philharmonic to touring with Roomful of Teeth and premiering music at Carnegie Hall. Her singing has been called “ethereal” and “luminous" by The New York Times and “gossamer” by The New Yorker.
Bagg is known for her unique performance and improvisational practice, and frequently develops new work in collaboration with composers, including David Lang, Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe, Gabriel Kahane, Ellen Reid, Ted Hearne, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and John Zorn.
Bagg has sung as a soloist with major symphonies including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She has performed lead roles in new operas with The Komische Oper Berlin, Prototype Festival, The Industry, Opera Philadelphia, Wild Up, and others, and has performed at venues around the world from the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and the Concertgebouw to De Doelen and Big Ears Festival.
Canadian conductor & pianist Naomi Woo is a widely sought-after symphonic and operatic conductor and educator and the Music Director of NYO Canada. Beginning with the 23-24 season she is the Artistic Partner of Orchestre Métropolitain Montréal and joins the Philadelphia Orchestra as assistant conductor for the 24-25 season. The 2022 winner of the Canada Council’s prestigious Virginia Parker Prize, Naomi is a member of Tapestry Opera’s Women in Musical Leadership program and was chosen by her mentor Yannick Nézet-Séguin as a member of the Orchestre Métropolitain’s inaugural orchestral conducting academy. She was a resident of the 2022 Women Opera Makers Workshop at the Festival Aix-en-Provence, and, in 2018, was accepted into the first training course for women conductors at the National Opera Studio, hosted by the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Royal Opera House.
Influenced by a lifelong love of storytelling and myth, Ellis Ludwig-Leone (b. 1989) writes music that is distinguished by its narrative sweep and attention to subtle changes in emotional valence. Lauded by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino for his “knack for simultaneously expressing beauty and crisis,” Ludwig-Leone combines lush, naturalistic textures with moments of thorny complexity to create works that walk the fine line between euphoria and dread.
Since coming to international attention as the songwriter behind the celebrated indie band San Fermin, Ludwig-Leone has spent the greater part of the last decade composing works for many of today’s contemporary classical luminaries.
False We Hope, his first album of recorded compositions, was written for Attacca Quartet and vocalist Eliza Bagg and arrived in 2023 via Better Company Records. Described as “a thought-provoking sonic journey across a strange and extraordinary soundscape” (OperaWire), False We Hope has had recent performances at Big Ears Festival, Birds of Paradise Festival, Við Djúpið Music Festival, and more. 2023 also saw the premiere of The Night Falls, a dance-opera with music by Ludwig-Leone, lyrics by Ludwig-Leone and Karen Russell, and direction and choreography by Troy Schumacher (New York City Ballet), at PEAK Performances at Montclair State University. Praised for Ludwig-Leone’s “ingenious, gorgeous score” (The New Yorker), The Night Falls was named one of The New York Times Best Dance Performances of 2023. He is a recipient of residencies from MacDowell and Banff Centre for the Arts. Together with his bandmate Allen Tate, Ludwig-Leone is a founding partner of Better Company Records, a Brooklyn-based label with an emphasis on collaboration.