Poetry & Music
Steeplechase Arts has created an evening-length concert and reading event featuring the poetry of Jody Gladding and the music of Damon Ferrante. Exploring the places where language and landscape converge, three singers, a clarinetist, and classical guitar duo bring this dramatic setting of Gladding's highly innovative, dynamic, and lyrical poetry to life. Themes of nature and the strata of meaning and consciousness wend their way through this expansive, mobile-inspired work.
"Informed by ecopoetics and the ephemeral, Gladding creates open, collaborative poems often engaged with translating--to a precise syntactical degree--the interactions between life and art." The Poetry Foundation
"Ferrante's music is focused and colorful with an unexpected, decidedly poetic touch." Tim Smith, The Baltimore Sun
"Mr. Anderson and Mr. Fader played the work from memory, and gave an impressive account of it." The New York Times
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Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. Her work explores the places where language and landscape converge. She has published three collections of poems, most recently Translations from Bark Beetle, and has translated thirty books from French. Her awards and honors include MacDowell and Stegner fellowships, the French-American Foundation Translation Award, Centre National du Livre translation grants, a Whiting Writers Award, and Yale Younger Poets Prize.
Damon Ferrante is a Simkins Award-wining composer, guitarist, and music writer. He has had performances throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, most notably, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, and Guild Hall. Over the next year, he will be on tour in the US, Spain, France, Italy, and Greece for performances of his music. He has been the subject of feature articles in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, The East Hampton Star, and Johns Hopkins Magazine, and has appeared several times on National Public Radio. Ferrante has taught on the music faculties at Seton Hall University and Montclair State University.
American soprano Sarah Cullins recently returned to the US after an exciting 10-year career in Bogotá, Colombia. She divides her time between singing Latin American and Spanish repertoire with her husband, guitarist Daniel Gaviria, in their duo 8 Cuerdas and as part of the quartet The Piazzolla Project, as well as performing opera, oratorio and symphonic works.
Allison Devery, soprano, has been described as, “brilliant, nuanced, and lyrically expressive.” Equally at home in classical and musical theatre genres, past performance highlights include key roles in Le Nozze di Figaro, Candide, La Clemenza di Tito, Orpheus in the Underworld, The Mikado, Once Upon A Mattress, and Guys & Dolls. She has also performed lead roles in two Canadian premieres (Thyrsis and Amaranth, The Harpies) and one world premiere (The Sailorboy and the Falcon) with Stephanie Blythe.
Steven Klimowski, clarinet/bass clarinet studied at the Manhattan School of Music and SUNY at Purchase while studying with Leon Russianoff. In 1987 Klimowski founded the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. He has played with the Vermont Symphony and the Vermont Mozart Festival. Steve is currently the principal clarinet with the Burlington Chamber Orchestra and the Opera Company of Middlebury and plays with Raising Cane the Vermont Symphony’s woodwind trio. He is the adjunct clarinet teacher at the University of Vermont, Saint Michael’s College and Middlebury College. Mr. Klimowski has twice been honored with an individual artist'sfellowship from the Vermont Council on the Arts and received its Citation of Merit.