Celebrity Series of Boston
Gary Dunning, President and Executive Director
Presents
Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan
Friday, November 3, 2017, 8pm — Sanders Theatre
Joan Osborne video preview
(Boston) Celebrity Series of Boston will present Joan Osborne Sings the Songs of Bob Dylan on Friday, November 3, 2017, at 8pm at Sanders Theatre, Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, Harvard University, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge.
Tickets start at $30, and are available online at www.celebrityseries.org, by calling CelebrityCharge at (617) 482-6661 Monday-Friday 10:00 a.m.- 4:00 p.m.
This performance marks the Celebrity Series debut for Joan Osborne.
Joan Osborne unleashes her sizable gifts as a vocalist and interpreter upon Bob Dylan’s celebrated canon. The seven-time Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling singer and songwriter, whom The New York Times has called “a fiercely intelligent, no-nonsense singer,” winds her supple, soulful voice around Dylan’s poetic, evocative lyrics, etching gleaming new facets in them along the way.
Unconstrained by any notion of trying to imitate or surpass Dylan, Osborne is free to play with the songs’ arrangements, a process that was also enabled by the virtuosity and versatility of Osborne’s collaborators, guitarist Jack Petruzzelli (Patti Smith, The Fab Faux) and keyboardist Keith Cotton (Idina Menzel, Chris Cornell). In Osborne and her musicians’ hands, Dylan’s songs take on varied new shapes.
The Kentucky native famously got her start performing her own songs in New York City’s downtown rock clubs, around the time that she began to rediscover Dylan’s work with Oh Mercy. “When you’re playing in the nightclub scene in Greenwich Village, his trail is everywhere, and not just because he played in the same places, but because people still perform his music every night. He’s part of the American musical education you get, whether you’re learning about him in some music conservatory or by playing in bars five nights a week. During those years, I started to become more familiar with his music. And at the point when I was starting to arrange my own stuff and make my own recordings, hearing records like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ or ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ I thought, ‘Wow, that just has such an immediacy and freshness. How did he do that?’ It’s interesting to dig into it from that aspect, when music is your livelihood.”
Program to be announced from the stage.
About Celebrity Series of Boston
Celebrity Series of Boston was founded in 1938 by pianist and impresario Aaron Richmond. Over the course of its 79-year history, Celebrity Series has presented an array of the world’s greatest performing artists, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arturo Toscanini, Ignace Paderewski, Artur Rubenstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Andrés Segovia, Kirsten Flagstad, Marian Anderson, Luciano Pavarotti, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, Ballet Russe De Monte Carlo, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the New York City Opera Company.
From orchestras and chamber ensembles, vocal and piano music, to dance companies, jazz, spoken word, and more, Celebrity Series has been bringing great artists to Boston’s major concert halls for nearly eight decades. The Celebrity Series of Boston believes in the power of excellence and innovation in the performing arts to enrich life experiences, transform lives and build better communities. Through its Arts for All! community programs, the Celebrity Series seeks to build a community of Greater Boston where the performing arts are a valued, lifelong, shared experience–on stages, in schools, at home– everywhere.
The Celebrity Series of Boston, Inc. receives generous support from Leslie & Howard Appleby, Amy & Joshua Boger, the Barr Foundation, the Boston Cultural Council, The Boston Foundation, the Stephanie L. Brown Foundation, The Catered Affair, Susanne Marcus Collins Foundation, Deloitte LLP, Donna & Mike Egan, Foley & Lardner LLP, the French-US Exchange in Dance, Gabor Garai & Susan Pravda, David & Harriet Griesinger, Zachary Haroutunian and the Garbis & Arminé Barsoumian Charitable Foundation, Paul L. King, the Liberty Mutual Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, Eleanor & Frank Pao, The Peabody Foundation, Melinda & James Rabb, the Cynthia and John S. Reed Foundation, the Royal Little Family Foundation, the Stifler Family Foundation, Mrs. Belinda Herrera Termeer, Michael and Susan Thonis, Tufts Health Plan, Nancy Richmond Winsten, Anonymous, and many others.
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