BOX OFFICE 202.785.9727
Strathmore and Washington Performing Arts present
TERENCE BLANCHARD
With The E-Collective, Turtle Island Quartet & Andrew F. Scott
FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES: OPERA SUITE IN CONCERT
Featuring special guests
Friday, April 26, 2024, 8:00 p.m.
The Music Center at Strathmore
In September 2021, The Metropolitan Opera reopened after being closed for over a year and kicked off its season with Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones—the first work by an African-American composer in the institution’s 138 years (the work was commissioned and premiered by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis). Based on the best-selling 2014 memoir of Charles M. Blow, a journalist for The New York Times, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, the opera explores Blow’s struggles to transcend and overcome a cycle of violence in his life and family.
Fire Shut Up In My Bones, Blanchard’s second “opera in jazz,” is a cultural flashpoint that affirms opera and classical music as inclusive spaces. This concert production, a collaboration between Blanchard and the E-Collective, David Balakrishnan and his two-time Grammy-winning Turtle Island Quartet, and visual artist Andrew F. Scott, features excerpts from the opera performed by the composer, an ensemble, and two guest singers. Together, the music and video projections provide audiences with a deeper understanding of Blanchard’s artistic vision and the gravitational pull of the moment that he has created.
Fire Shut Up in My Bones includes mature themes and language.
This performance is co-presented with Strathmore.
This performance is made possible through the generous support of the following sponsors: Susan S. Angell, Dallas Morse Coors Foundation for the Performing Arts, Rudy Burwell and Mona Mohib/Encompass Supply, Thomas J. Kim and John F. Olson, and Jenny Bilfield and Joel Phillip Friedman.
Washington Performing Arts’s classical music performances this season are made possible in part through the generous support of Betsy and Robert Feinberg.
Special thanks to the following lead supporters of Washington Performing Arts’s mission-driven work: Jacqueline Badger Mars and Mars, Incorporated; D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; and the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs Program and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
