UKSUS CD out! now!

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. 

Amazon | Bandcamp |  iTunes | Spotify | Arkiv Music 

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.

UKSUS 2016 announced!

UKSUS

Aug 30	Tue 8pm	Aug 31	Wed 8pm
Sep 3	Sat 8pm	Sep 4	Sun 2pm

Oakland Metro Operahouse, 522 2nd Street, Oakland CA

TICKETS: UKSUS.ORG

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Directed by Jim Cave • Conductor Bryan Nies
Design Lynne Rutter

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Starring 
Timur Bekbosunov • Laura Bohn • Nikola Printz
Bob Ernst • Roham Sheikhani
accompanied by the orchestra
Beth Custer • Rob Wilkins • Joel Davel • Diana Strong
John Schott • Ela Polak • Lisa Mezzacappa.
 

A phantasmagoria of delights, the music jazzy, racous, but bitterly sweet,UKSUS is the latest by Erling Wold, composer of Certitude and Joy, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, Queer, and Mordake. 

UKSUS is an autobiography of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, a narrative told through their stories and brief lives, as the OBERIU - The Association for Real Art - maintained their love of words and nonsensical art to their deaths in Stalin’s Great Purge, Kharms starving to death in a psychiatric hospital in 1942 after his arrest at the hands of the NKVD.

Kharms was known for decades in Russia as a writer of books for children, even though he hated children and imagined their painful deaths, until his adult works, secreted away by a friend, were rediscovered and reclaimed by a new generation of troublemaker artists who have run afoul of the authorities. Pussy Riot claimed the OBERIU poets, saying they "remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible, and the librettists, artistic descendents of the group, met working in the Moscow theater of Kirill Ganin, who himself was arrested for artistic hooliganism.

Oakland Metro Operahouse is about a 20 minute walk from the 12th Street BART station, and there's a lovely parking garage just across the street.

Other questions: uksus@erlingwold.org