Featured Performers

• Caroline Shaw, Artistic Director
• Gabriel Kahane, singer-songwriter

Program

• SHAW & KAHANE: Hexagons*
• Other works to be announced

After more than a decade of musical friendship,composer-performers Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane come together for their first large-scale collaboration, a deeply immersive and thought-provoking performance inspired by the literary genius of Jorge Luis Borges.

Hexagons is a new work inspired by the magical realism of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.” In this enigmatic narrative, Borges conjures a captivating and perplexing universe where the notion of infinity collides with the fragility of human understanding. Randomly arranged books, each containing exactly 410 pages, fill the Library of Babel’s infinite expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, encompassing all knowledge that currently exists or may exist in the future while paradoxically offering no true enlightenment. Shaw and Kahane invite audiences to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from a life oversaturated in information.

*Hexagons was commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, San Francisco Performances, University Musical Society, Duke University, Philharmonie de Paris, Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Wigmore Hall, and the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.

**Please note that this concert was changed from its original published date in our 2024/25 Season Brochure.

Sponsors

PARTNERS

  

FESTIVAL UNDERWRITERS

Hung Fan and Michael Feldman
Joan Halvajian
Jelinek Family Trust
Betsy and Gary Jenkins
Lauren and Richard Packard
Christopher Quilter
Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting
City of Laguna Beach