The Unlearning by Theresa Wong
I've been listening to Theresa Wong's new CD The Unlearning, her first for John Zorn's Tzadik label, pretty much nonstop for the last week or so. She beautifully bends her cello and her voice around original compositions inspired by Goya's war etchings (a few of which I coincidentally just saw in Chicago) accompanied by the always-amazing Carla Kihlstedt. The two women's voices alternately blend and fray, and Kihlstedt contributes her virtuosity on the violin to help create a sparse and unsettling environs that evokes the Hannah Arendt quote inside the CD booklet: "Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent." It is my fervent hope that Wong and Kihlstedt will at some point perform this suite in its entirety somewhere in the Bay Area, even though I know they're both busy working on a million other projects.
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