Above: performance photo by Rob Davidson
Author: Shoshana Klein
Monday February 26th, 2026 – Lisa Bielawa’s “thing” that I know her for (other than being a performer in the Philip Glass ensemble) is large-scale choral work, and pieces she puts together remotely. During summer 2020, she was doing these broadcasts where she would take people’s voice recordings and musical snippets and weave them all together into a new piece every week. I was involved with one or two through the festival that I was running – it was a really meaningful moment of togetherness during isolation. She also has done a lot of other large-scale works bringing large groups of people together to perform.
This was the first time I’d seen her chamber works live and also heard her perform her own music. The first piece, “Incessabili Voce” started with only Lisa on stage – a small group of instrumentalists played off stage and slowly entered, and left as the piece ended. She’s a really powerful singer – I guess that’s not surprising since she’s been in the Philip Glass ensemble since 1992, but hearing her in a different context showed off more of her skills and range vocally.
Her bio talks about growing up with new music and early music and not much in between, which felt particularly exemplified in the first piece, which went back and forth between early choral music and newer techniques.
The second piece on the program was called Balloon Variations, which was a premiere and a “study” for an opera she is writing. The opera is based on a true story of the first woman who went up in a hot air balloon, who happened to be an opera singer – she sang an Aria from the balloon. In this piece, some of the instrumentalists played guitars as well as their other instruments – in some cases, holding them at the same time which seemed extremely precarious but didn’t result in any disasters. The whole thing was definitely whimsical (there was also a power drill involved) and at one point the ensemble got the audience to participate by singing the word “balloon” in a simple phrase (so maybe it really is a mass choral piece like those I remember hearing about).
The structure of these composer portraits is that they have a little Q&A with the composer after intermission. It was a particularly good one, in which Lisa talked about how she likes to bring the audience in with a moment of joy and how it opens everyone up. Just the simple act of getting people to sing “balloon” on two notes – which did bring a smile to my face. In the last piece, Graffiti dell’amante – we voted on the order of the movements. The piece was arranged in a way that the movements were not in any particular order and we got to decide how they were performed. It was a love story, and the movements had names like absence, desire, forgiveness, and ravishing. It was an interesting and delightful process and I thought that the audience didn’t put it in a very interesting order. That said, it was a good piece and I really like the mechanism that the story is different each time. The texts drew from a wide range of sources.
I was surprised that there weren’t more people at the concert, since Lisa has brought so many different people into her work and has such a name for herself in so many different spaces. I expected lots of old collaborators to be there. That said, there were a couple of prominent people in the music world that I spotted and I’m sure I didn’t recognize them all. The concert was a good reminder of how much I like Lisa and her music – I’m glad I remembered enough to go uptown on a Thursday!
~ Shoshana Klein
Oberon's Glade 