A chamber ensemble from Michigan’s Lansing Symphony Orchestra will perform Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat and Michael Daugherty’s Dead Elvis on April 26 at Lansing Community College’s Dart Auditorium. For the performance, musicians will be joined by actors from the Lansing-based BoarsHead Theater, who will play the roles of the soldier, devil, and narrator in the Stravinsky piece. Dead Elvis (1993) is written for the same group of seven instruments—violin, bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, and percussion—as L’Histoire du Soldat. Daugherty says he wrote Dead Elvis as a companion piece to the Stravinsky work, telling the story of a rock star who sells out for wealth and fame, analogous to Stravinsky’s soldier, who sells his soul to the devil. LSO Music Director Timothy Muffatt will lead the Daugherty work, in which Michael Kroth, LSO’s principal bassoon, will appear as an Elvis impersonator accompanied by a chamber ensemble, wearing an Elvis suit as part of his performance.
Posted April 14, 2009
Photo of Timothy Muffatt courtesy of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra
