Sunday, May 26, 2019

UKSUS CD out! now!

 Buy it!

The UKSUS CD is officially out today, available in all your favorite places, digital and physical. For you who still live in this world, I would encourage buying the object itself, a beautiful hardbound book with CD enclosed, designed by Karen Johnson. And the performers, they who bring the magic: Bryan Nies conducting, the vocally resplendent (Opera News) Laura Bohn and powerful Nikola Printz, the handsome and extravagantly transgressive tenor (Los Angeles Times) Timur Bekbosunov, Bob Ernst!, and the ensembles from the US and Austria. 



Who can forget Richard Klammer singing the Divan Song (included on the CD), here accompanying scenes from the cast featured on the CD: 

A feverish mashup of artistic and political history, commentary on vinegar and meatballs, and non sequiturs, all set to Wold’s tangy, versatile score (San Francisco Chronicle), it combines the stories of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU with equally absurd scenes from his life in Stalin's Soviet Union. 

What is amazing about the OBERIU is that, while living in abject fear and panic under Stalin, they laughed and laughed and laughed, loved wordplay and nonsense, rejoiced in absurdity, and held onto that love and joy and laughter to very end, to their ambiguous deaths in custody of The State, the secret police, the NKVD.
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