About the Work
The May 9, 2009 performance at Carnegie
Hall marked the work’s World Premiere.
Notes on the
Work
Niña Dance is a song cycle inspired by the unsolved murders and
disappearances of women and young girls in the city of Juárez, Mexico, situated
just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Since 1993, over 600 bodies have
been discovered, and over 1,000 are still missing. Many were students, and most
were maquiladora (duty-free or tariff-free factory) workers. Few arrests have
been made, and the overwhelming majority of the cases remain unsolved. Pink
crosses dot the streets of Juárez to remember the lost. While the murders
(sometimes referred to as femicides) are a particularly sensitive subject in
Mexico, the murder of innocent women occurs throughout other nations around the
world.
Niña Dance is a tribute to and meditation on the memory of the mothers and
daughters who have disappeared without a trace, and a protest to all for whom
their mother’s love was never fully understood.
As the son of two generations of translators (both my mother and her father
translated centuries of German poetry into Russian), and having grown up
listening to classical opera recordings in Russian, I was compelled to set this
song cycle in English, hoping that the words would make a deeper impact on a New
York audience.
Many thanks to Marjorie Agosín and Saúl Yurkievich for their poetry, and to
Cola Franzen and Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman for their equally vivid
translations.
—Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin
About
the Composer
Ljova was born in Moscow in 1978 and moved to New York with his parents,
composer Alexander Zhurbin and writer Irena Ginzburg, in 1990. He divides his
time between performing as a violist in diverse groups ranging from his own
Ljova and the Kontraband, to string quartets, jazz combos and Gypsy bands;
studying and arranging music for Yo-Yo Ma, Kronos Quartet, Jay-Z, and others;
and composing original music for film, TV, dance, and the concert stage.
Ljova is the author of more than 70 compositions for classical, jazz, and
folk ensembles, as well as scores for four feature films and more than a dozen
short films. He is co-founder of Mediant Music, a new company specializing in
music for advertising and media. In 2005, Ljova was one of six composers invited
to participate in the Sundance Institute's Film Composers Lab. His music has
been licensed by the HBO, PBS, BBC, CNBC, and NHK networks, as well as by many
other independent projects. In 2007, Ljova worked as assistant to composer
Osvaldo Golijov on his score to Francis Ford Coppola's film Youth Without
Youth, to which Ljova also contributed an original track, "Middle Village."
In 2008, Ljova was guest faculty at The Banff Centre in Canada, focusing equally
on composition, arranging, and viola performance. Presently, he serves as
Musical Director for Morphoses / The Wheeldon Company.
With his main performing ensemble, Ljova and the Kontraband, Ljova has
appeared at the Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music (as part of the
Sundance Film Festival), New York's Museum of Modern Art, and other venues. The
ensemble released its debut album, Mnemosyne, in 2008 and is the
featured ensemble on Cupcake, a short film which debuted at Tribeca
Film Festival and continues to travel the festival circuit. Kontraband is also
featured on the soundtrack to the upcoming film Serpent's Breath.
Ljova is a graduate of The Juilliard School, where he was a pupil of Samuel
Rhodes (violist of the Juilliard String Quartet). He has won numerous prizes as
a composer and appeared several times as soloist with orchestras, including as a
winner of the Menschenkinder-Preis from RTL TV in Germany. Ljova lives in New
York City with his wife, vocalist and attorney Inna Barmash, and their son,
Benjamin.
Bio
current as of April 2010