ISTANBUL-May 8 On June 17, 2011, soprano Christie Finn and mezzo-soprano Arlene Rolph, with Istanbul’s groundbreaking Hezarfen Ensemble, premiere Michael Ellison’s newly composed setting of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (2011) on the 39. Istanbul International Music Festival. On a concert entitled The Grammar of Dreams, set in the unusual setting of the heart of an old electricity generating facility Santral Istanbul, the premiere of Kubla Khan marks the first time Ellison’s work has been performed on the world-renowned festival. Coupled with Kaija Saariaho’s Grammaire des Reves (and also including Turkish premieres of Pögun, Sciarrino, and Tanaka) the concert turns Santral Istanbul into the site of a mulit-sensory experience where the audience enters, as it were, directly into the centre of a pulsating brain in the midst of dreams and opium visions, as it were, with the Hezarfen Ensemble.
Michael Ellison 