Stories for Ocean Shells  - A concert and CD release party!
Stories for Ocean Shells is the title of a new album on Cantaloupe Music, and is the brainchild of Australian composer Kate Moore and American cellist Ashley Bathgate, who have been collaborating since 2009. As the lives of these two artists from opposite corners of the world collide, intersect, and intertwine in strange and unexpected ways, wordless tales of travel, love, sadness, and beauty are told in a cycle of six works for solo cello. This album, and this concert, seek to communicate to the audience how a beautiful partnership, even oceans apart, can offer entirely new world views and perspectives, as well as an opportunity for quiet self-reflection.

Premieres
Deliquescent (world premiere), by Douglas Cuomo, was written for his father in the last days of his life. It’s an experience in quiet and subtle concentration—a consideration of our experience of time, stillness, anticipation, and what remains after something is gone. 
Flash Crash (NY premiere), by Jascha Naverson, uses data from high-frequency trading algorithms as raw material for a synth-drenched space odyssey.   

Bach Unwound
Ashley will also perform selected works from her Bach Unwound project - a collaboration with the Brooklyn-based composer collective Sleeping Giant (Timo Andres, Chris Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein, and Andrew Norman) create an entirely new series of reflections inspired by the Unaccompanied Cello Suites of J.S. Bach.
Sleeping Giant represents a young, stylistically diverse, and daring composer-collective well-suited to redefine the cello as a solo instrument. Each member of Sleeping Giant will compose one movement of the new suite, basing it loosely on a corresponding movement of their choice from the original Bach suites, but free to use the music as an inspiration for expressing and expanding his personal compositional voice.