church and state
theatricals

A Standing Witness

Sunday, March 9, 2025, 4:00 pm

Wilshire Ebell Theatre
Los Angeles, CA

with Susan Graham
poems by Rita Dove with music by Richard Danielpour

A Standing Witness is a monumental new collaboration between Grammy Award-winning composer Richard Danielpour and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, created especially for the incomparable mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and the celebrated Music from Copland House ensemble. The soaring music and probing poetry of this epic cycle for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble is a sweeping retrospective tracing enormous social, cultural, technological, and political upheavals in the U.S. since the watershed year of 1968. Rapturously received in premiere performances at Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, University of Chicago, and elsewhere around the U.S., there is no more timely or provocative work for this pivotal moment in American history.

“‘A Standing Witness’ has the potential to become one of the most influential pieces of the 20th-century” (Vermont Public Radio).