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	Photos: Top: Simone Sassen Bottom: Beth Kelly

Readings by writer Cees Nooteboom with music performed by pianist Sarah Rothenberg

Wednesday, March 13, 2002
7:00 p.m.
Harold M. Williams Auditorium

The Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum present the West Coast debut of the internationally performed Self Portrait of an Other. This performance is a collaborative mixed media presentation featuring Dutch writer and former Getty Scholar Cees Nooteboom with acclaimed pianist Sarah Rothenberg. Nooteboom reads sections from his new novel All Souls Day, the story of a cameraman's attempt to cope with the deaths of his wife and child following an airplane accident. The various literary forms are mirrored by the sounds and structure of the music as Rothenberg performs compositions by Dmitri Shostakovich, Toru Takemitsu, Morton Feldman, and Arnold Schoenberg. Together, the readings and the music reflect the passage of time and the role of memory and narrative in confronting traumatic personal loss. This performance was originally commissioned by the Concertegebouw, Amsterdam.

Cees Nooteboom, one of Holland's most famous and most frequently translated writers, was born in The Hague in 1933. In the United States, he is best known for his works of fiction, but internationally, Nooteboom has received wide critical acclaim as a poet, travel writer, playwright, and essayist. He has been compared to such literary luminaries as Aldous Huxley, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Umberto Eco. Eight of Nooteboom's novels and two works of nonfiction have been translated into English and he is the recipient of numerous awards in his native country and abroad.

Pianist Sarah Rothenberg has one of the most distinguished and creative careers of her generation. Noted for her "power and introspection" (Fanfare), she has received international acclaim as a solo recitalist and chamber musician, recording artist, and for the innovative programs that she conceives and directs. Recognized as a visionary artist, over the past five years Rothenberg has created numerous original performance works, including the celebrated Music and the Literary Imagination series linking music to the works of Proust, Kafka, Mann, Akhmatova, and others.