At Alaska’s Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival on July 30, Robert Franz will conduct the world premiere of Emerson Eads’ Mass for the Oppressed, scored for four vocal soloists, mixed choir, piano, strings, and percussion. The performance will feature the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Orchestra in a program that also includes Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 (“Organ”). Eads, a native of Delta, Alaska and a doctoral conducting student at University of Notre Dame, wrote the mass “as an artistic and personal response to the specific injustice of the incarceration of the Fairbanks Four,” according to a press release. The Fairbanks Four refers to a group of four boys convicted of a 1997 roadside killing in Fairbanks who served time in prison before the convictions were overturned. Franz serves as music director of the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Orchestra as well as music director of the Windsor (Ontario) Symphony Orchestra and associate conductor of the Houston Symphony.
Posted July 29, 2016
