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City of Liverpool: Sgt. Pepper at 50 Festival

City of Liverpool: Sgt. Pepper at 50 Festival

Pepperland (world premiere)

Royal Court Liverpool

1 Roe Street, Liverpool — England

Performances Times

May 25, 2017

7:00 pm

May 26, 2017

7:30 pm

May 27, 2017

2:00 pm, 7:30 pm

Works Performed

The City of Liverpool kicks off its Sgt. Pepper at 50 Festival, a summer-long tribute to the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with Pepperland, a new evening-length work by Mark Morris.

Pepperland features an original score by composer Ethan Iverson inspired by the songs “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, “With a Little Help From My Friends”, “A Day in the Life”, “When I’m Sixty-Four”, “Within You Without You”, and “Penny Lane”. An unprecedented chamber music ensemble of voice, theremin, soprano sax, trombone, piano, organ, harpsichord, and percussion will tease out and elaborate on Sgt. Pepper’s non-rock and roll influences. Arrangements of half a dozen songs from the album will intermingle with Pepper-inspired original pieces intended especially for Morris’ profound understanding of classical forms: Allegro, Scherzo, Adagio, and the blues.

“ This great album set a radical new direction for popular music and thought. I was just a child. 50 years later, with contemporary eyes and ears, we are presenting a comment and a rethinking of this profound cultural artifact with all of the imagination, surprise, humor, and bizarrity intact.” — MARK MORRIS

Pepperland is a Mark Morris Dance Group production in association with American Dance Festival, Durham, North Carolina; BAM, Brooklyn, New York; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity with the Sony Centre, Toronto, Canada; Cal Performances, UC Berkeley, California; The City of Liverpool, England, U.K.; Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; International Festival of Arts & Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut; The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; La Jolla Music Society, La Jolla, California; Meyer Sound, Berkeley, California; Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle, Washington; UCSB Arts & Lectures, Santa Barbara, California; White Bird, Portland, Oregon.

Music commissioned by the Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation.
Original music by The Beatles. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission from Sony ATV Music Publishing.

This engagement is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Howard Gilman Foundation.