LBMF: CHRIS THILE & FRIENDS

Mandolin virtuoso and Festival Artistic Director Chris Thile closes out the 20th anniversary of the Laguna Beach Music Festival with a unique musical experience featuring vocalist and flutist Nathalie Joachim, award-winning violinist Tessa Lark, and virtuoso bassist Michael Thurber. This program will begin with selections from Nathalie Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti (Women of Haiti), an evening-length work for voice, flute, string quartet and electronics. Fanm d’Ayiti is a celebration of some of Haiti’s most iconic yet under recognized female artists, as well as an exploration of Joachim’s Haitian heritage. The project features original songs incorporating the recorded voices of Joachim’s grandmother and the girls choir of her family’s home farming village of Dantan; new arrangements of songs by some of the greatest known female voices in Haitian history; and recorded interviews with these

artists about their lives fighting for social justice and uplifting the people of Haiti. The second half of the program will feature Tessa Lark, violin and Michael Thurber, double bass, with music from their new album Invention. Invention explores the Two-Part Inventions of J.S. Bach which illuminate the full expressive possibility for two musical voices. In the spirit of these Inventions, Lark and Thurber have 'invented' their own set of duos which will be performed alongside Bach’s works. Just as Bach's Inventions are explorations in counterpoint, these duos explore the full range of what is possible for their specific two voices: violin and