Breck Create and National Repertory Orchestra Present
Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project
Underwritten by Paul Finkel and Barbara Strauss
At the dawn of the 21st century, humanity has arrived at an extraordinary Crossroads - a time and place where scientific ability to identify unprecedented risk intersects a societal inability to respond.
The Crossroads Project fuses original music with art, imagery, and science to create live performance experiences that address global sustainability and provide a path toward meaningful response.
Featuring physicist Dr. Robert Davies and the Fry Street Quartet, Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project confronts a planet under siege and a future in peril – inspiring audiences to change the course.
Watch the trailer
Meet the Creative Team
ROBERT DAVIES, PHYSICIST + EDUCATOR
A physicist and educator at Utah State University, Rob’s work focuses on global environmental change, sustainable human systems, and critical science communication ― which is to say, scientific storytelling for critically important stories. His unique position is jointly sponsored by USU’s College of Science, the Caine College of the Arts, and the USU Ecology Center. Rob has served as an officer and meteorologist in the U.S. Air Force, worked for NASA on the International Space Station project, and taught on the faculty of three universities. His scientific work has included research into interactions of spacecraft with the space environment, the fundamental nature of light and information, and Earth’s changing climate.
Fry Street Quartet
This remarkable quartet-hailed as “a triumph of ensemble playing” by the New York Times-is a multi-faceted ensemble taking chamber music in new directions. The quartet has reached audiences from Carnegie Hall to London, and Sarajevo to Jerusalem, exploring the medium of the string quartet and its life-affirming potential with “profound understanding…depth of expression, and stunning technical astuteness”(Deseret Morning News).
With a discography that includes a wide range of works from Haydn and Beethoven to Stravinsky, Rorem, and Kaminsky, the quartet is known for being “Equally at home in the classic repertoire of Mozart and Beethoven or contemporary music,” (Palm Beach Daily News). The FSQ has commissioned and toured new works by a wide range of composers, including commissions by composers Clarice Assad, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Laura Kaminsky. After morethan60 performances in three different countries, Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project continues to resonate with audiences. A collaboration with physicist Dr. Robert Davies, this fresh approach to communicating society’s sustainability challenges draws upon all the senses with a unique blend of science and art. A film version of the project was released in fall of 2020.
The quartet’s touring history includes performances at major venues, festivals, and distinguished series including Carnegie Hall, the New School and Rockefeller University in New York, Guarneri Hall and the Jewel Box series in Chicago, Chamber Music Columbus, the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, the Theosophical Society in London, the Mozart Gemeinde in Klagenfurt, Austria, and the Fujian Grand Theatre, Xiaoshan Grand Theatre and Shanghai Oriental Art Center in China. The quartet also enjoys a continuing residency with the Salt Lake City-based NOVA series, where they are currently serving as Music Directors.
The Fry Street Quartet holds the Dan C. and Manon Caine Russell Endowed String Quartet Residency at the Caine College of the Arts at Utah State University.
Robert Waters, Violin
Rebecca McFaul, Violin
Bradley Ottesen, VIola
Anne Francis Bayless, Cello
National Repertory Orchestra Alum
LAURA KAMINSKY
COMPOSER: RISING TIDE
Laura Kaminsky is a composer with “an ear for the new and interesting” whose works are “colorful and harmonically sharp-edged” (The New York Times) and whose “musical language is compounded of hymns, blues, and gestures not unlike Shostakovich’s” (inTune). Social and political themes are common in her work, as is an abiding respect for and connection to the natural world. The visual is made manifest in sound, with color and image often serving as the underlying inspiration.
REBECCA ALLAN
VISUAL ARTIST
Rebecca Allan is a New York-based painter whose work centers on landscape and themes of music. Rivers, tributaries, and coastal regions of the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and northern England are the artist’s primary sites of investigation and inspiration. Exhibited nationally and abroad for more than 25 years, Allan’s work attempts to express, in abstract and painterly terms, the fragility of our ecosystems, and the unpredictability of nature’s cycles.
GARTH LENZ
PHOTOGRAPHER
Garth Lenz is an internationally renowned environmental photographer who examines contrasts between the industrialized and natural landscape. The range of his photographic subjects has included the impacts of industrial logging on forests, and the world of modern fossil fuel production and its associated impacts on the landscape. Recent projects have addressed mountaintop removal coal mining, shale gas production, and the Alberta Tar Sands. His work has appeared in leading editorial publications including, Time, GEO, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times.
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