| Date: | October 05, 2022 |
| Time: | 7:30 - 9:00 PM |
| Venue: | Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech |
| Organizations: | Francesco Turrisi, Rhiannon Giddens |
| Cost: |
Adult Tickets (based on seat location): • Category A: $45.00 • Category B: $35.00 • Category C: $20.00 Students with ID and Youth 18 & Under: $10.00
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| Description: |
The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech presents Grammy winner Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi in concert on Wednesday, October 5, 2022. Acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens excavates the past and reveals bold truths about our present. The MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient collaborates with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi and her band to forge exultant sounds from the lullabies, ballads, and folk songs of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland. The duo most recently won a 2022 Grammy for Best Folk Album for their stirring work, "They’re Calling Me Home". Giddens and Turrisi recorded "They’re Calling Me Home" during the COVID-19 lockdown in Ireland, where they both live when they aren’t on tour. The two expats found themselves exploring the emotions brought up by the moment and decamped to Hellfire, a small studio on a working farm outside of Dublin, to record the 12-track album over six days. The work speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical "call home" of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis. They’re "Calling Me Home" is the follow-up to Giddens’ 2019 album with Turrisi, "there is no Other". The duo earned a Grammy nomination for the album, which is at once a condemnation of "othering" and a celebration of the spread of ideas, connectivity, and shared experience. The acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she has been nominated for six additional Grammys for her work as a soloist and collaborator. She was most recently nominated for her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, there is no Other (2019). Giddens’s forthcoming album, They’re Calling Me Home, is a twelve-track album, recorded with Turrisi in Ireland during the recent lockdown; it speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis. Giddens’s lifelong mission is to lift up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. Pitchfork has said of her work, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration,” and Smithsonian Magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black.” Among her many diverse career highlights, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House, served as a Carnegie Hall Perspectives curator, and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. Her critical acclaim includes in-depth profiles by CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among many others. Giddens is featured in Ken Burns’s Country Music series, which aired on PBS in 2019, where she speaks about the African American origins of country music. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, and co-produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019), which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival. As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville. Links: • https://www.rhiannongiddens.com/ • https://www.facebook.com/RhiannonGiddensMusic • https://www.twitter.com/RhiannonGiddens • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTQvn1-6IhiMo994ivalgmA • https://www.instagram.com/rhiannongiddens/ Grammy award winning multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi has been defined a “musical alchemist” and a “musical polyglot” by the press. He left his native Italy in 1997 to study jazz piano and early music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where he obtained a Bachelor and a Master’s degree. Since 2004 he has been working successfully as a freelance musician. He has released five critically acclaimed albums as a leader and two as co-leader (“Tarab” a cross boundary innovative ensemble that blends Irish and Mediterranean traditional music, and “Zahr” a project that looks at connections between southern Italian traditional music and Arabic music). His latest piano solo album “Northern Migrations” was described as “delicate, wistful and wholly engrossing” by the Irish Times. Francesco is also a member of the celebrated early music ensemble L'Arpeggiata. With l'Arpeggiata he has performed at the most important classical music festivals in Europe and around the world (Turkey, Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, Brasil, Colombia) and has recorded for Warner, Virgin, Naive and Alpha. Since 2018 he collaborates with American grammy award winning singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, on a duo project that seamlessly combines music from the Mediterranean with music from the African diaspora in the Americas. In 2019 Giddens and Turrisi released their critically acclaimed duo album “there is no Other”. The album single “I’m on my way” was nominated for a 2020 Grammy Award. Their 2021 second duo album “They’re calling me home” was nominated for two Grammy awards and won as best folk album at the 2022 Grammy awards. Francesco currently performs on piano, accordion, harpsichord, organ, various lutes, cello banjo, frame and goblet drums. Links: • https://www.francescoturrisi.com/ • https://www.facebook.com/francescoturrisimusic • https://www.twitter.com/fraturrisi • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Q_pINyeXVntgGZ3BFfgLg • https://soundcloud.com/francesco-turrisi Adults tickets range from $20.00-$45.00 depending on seat location and tickets for students with ID and youth ages 18 & under are $10.00. To purchase tickets online, visit: https://tickets.artscenter.vt.edu/online/mapSelect.asp?doWork::WSmap::loadMap=Load&createBO::WSmap=1&BOparam::WSmap::loadMap::performance_ids=A52438CC-AD1D-4276-9F30-1EFC9ACAF477. For more information, visit: https://artscenter.vt.edu/performances/giddens-turrisi.html or https://www.facebook.com/artscenteratvt or https://www.instagram.com/artscenteratvt/ or call 540-231-5300. |