"A spellbinding performance...Nancy Knowles [sang] a set of medieval and Sephardic wisdom songs with astonishing presence and breath control."   The Falmouth Enterprise

NEWS

Nancy Knowles launches new one-woman show in a pre-debut run at the Seacoast Fringe Festival, Columbus Day Weekend 2011. 

LUNA, a tragicomedy
written and performed by Nancy Knowles

with original score and live accompaniment by Frank Wallace on ten-string classical guitar

Two artists.  Mother and Daughter.  Loss and Survival.

When: October 8 & 9 at 9pm, October 10 at 6pm
Where: Seacoast Fringe Festival, Moffatt-Ladd House,

154 Market Street, Portsmouth NH

NEW Duo LiveOak CD The Great Deep, songs of transition by Frank Wallace, sung by Nancy Knowles, mezzo soprano with Frank Wallace on ten-string guitar by Stephan Connor. Listen to selections below. Purchase CD at Gyremusic.com, or click on BUY buttons below to go to www.CDBaby.com to purchase MP3s or CD.

The Great Deep Collection, set of seven signed postcards, photographs by Nancy Knowles with envelopes.

Click on images to enlarge.

           

The Great Deep CD: An Inside View from Nancy Knowles on Vimeo.

Enjoy Knowles' poetry, singing, and visual art at her BLOG.

About Nancy Knowles

Mezzo-soprano and poet Nancy Knowles has a longstanding reputation for her skillful interweaving of song, poetry and drama both in concert with LiveOak and in her own solo shows. "Knowles' exceptionally beautiful soprano carried the evening in song and declaimed poetry..." -The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Aside from the beauty of her voice, audiences and critics comment most about Nancy Knowles' engaging presence on stage. It comes as no surprise that she's a poet and natural linguist, given her obvious passion for the words, both their meaning and the emotional colors conveyed by their sound. Whether as a singer, poet, visual artist, actress or teacher, a grace and a playfulness in her work reflect the counterpoint of her technique and her down-to-earth humor.

As a mezzo-soprano Knowles performs concerts of contemporary song as Duo LiveOak with guitarist/baritone/composer Frank Wallace. Knowles also performs her own solo shows, ranging from dramatic works, as in her theatrical memoir The House of Fools, which combines her masks, original poetry, and unaccompanied songs from many traditions to her concert of medieval song, Voice of the Rose, the sacred feminine, featuring the unaccompanied songs of medieval Spain, with frame drums, haunting flutes and stories.  [Click to hear flute improvisation, Ondas do Mar.  

Her current solo show is LUNA, a tragicomedy written and performed by Knowles with original score and live accompaniment by Frank Wallace on ten-string guitar.  LUNA is a multidimensional transformative story that combines her multiple talents to offer a window into her mother Phoebe’s final years––a woman who painted her way through multiple tragedies with spirit and humor well into her mid-nineties. As her life shrinks, their whimsical and intimate letters, journals, and conversations on space and grace, loss, love, aging, art and madness tug at their masks, transcend taboos, lay bare their secrets. 

Knowles has toured widely throughout the U.S. and Europe for over

25 years, performing at festivals such as the Holland Festival, the Regensburg Festival, Musica en Compostela, the Boston Early Music Festival, and the Guitar Foundation of America Festival. She can be heard on ten recordings (Titanic Records, Musical Heritage Society Centaur Records and Gyre). Her most recent CD, released in 2011 on Gyre, is Duo LiveOak's The Great Deep:  songs of transition

A poet for almost thirty years, [read her poetry] in her performances with Duo LiveOak Knowles now has the joy of singing her poems in songs written by Wallace as well as collaborating with him in choosing song texts from other poets for his song cycles.  From the late 1970s through the 1990's Nancy Knowles specialized in music of the 12th to 16th centuries, recording and touring throughout the U.S. and Europe with the ensembles LiveOak (Trio LiveOak and LiveOak and Company).  Knowles has studied with Marleen Montgomery, Marcy Lindheimer, Dagmar Apel, Carl Stough, and Roland Seiler.

Having grown up in an artistic family (her mother, Phoebe Knowles, is a painter, her brother is sculptor/painter James Knowles), Knowles' life in the arts began with visual art, particularly photography. Her current work in abstract photography grace the covers of the Frank Wallace Music Editions on Gyre Publications. The principal outlet for her visual skills, however, has been in support of her performing: making masks, sets and costumes for dramatic productions, and doing design work for LiveOak's many enterprises over the years. She lives with her husband Frank Wallace in a 1789 farmhouse in the historic, scenic Monadnock region of New Hampshire. They have two grown sons.

THE HOUSE OF FOOLS (2002)

a theatrical memoir

Please click on image below

to view a slide show of a scene in Knowles' one woman show.
Photographs by Elsa Voelcker
Mask by Nancy Knowles

PHOTOGRAPHY (2005)

Please click on image below

to view Knowles' photo essay

Jardín de Calla:

Peru Revisited (2005)