Contemporary Classical

Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Mexico

New Music in Morelia

Morelia (in the State of Michoacan, Mexico) will be hosting its Fifth Contemporary Music Festival from June 1-6. Although relatively young, the festival has gathered prestige and generated enthusiasm in the course of a few years, thanks in part to a list of distinguished composers and performers. Just a few names: Helmut Lachenmann, International Contemporary Ensemble, Robert Platz, Nicholas Isherwood, Carlos Sánchez Gutierrez, Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Manuel Rocha, Dynamis Ensemble.

This year Morelia will be listening to some world-renowned composers and performers such as Philippe Manoury (France), Jack Body (New Zealand), S21-well-known Wilfrido Terrazas (Mexico), Orlando Jacinto García (Cuba), Eddie Mora (Costa Rica), Ekaterina Shatskaya (Russia), Iracema de Andrade (Brazil), and Christophe Desjardins (France). Concerts, lectures, and workshops will be given in the course of the week.

If the musical guests intrigue you, it should be mentioned that Morelia is known to be one of the most beautiful cities in Mexico. Its colonial architecture and rich cultural life make it an attractive destination. But now I’m beginning to sound like a promoter of tourism for the State of Michoacán.

The festival is organized by the Government of the State of Michoacán, the Mexican Center for Music and Sound Art (CMMAS, after its spanish abbreviation and whom I thank for the information) and the Conservatorio de las Rosas. It promises to be another interesting edition.

by Iván Sparrow
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, New York

Go Toward the Light

…That would be the light emanating from New York’s P.S. 122 this Friday and Saturday night, where the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), choreographer Yvan Greenberg and stage director Emma Griffin will be partnering with our old (well, young actually) friend Corey Dargel in his latest set of sweetbittersweet songs, Thirteen Near-Death Experiences. Fourty-five minutes ostensibly about hypochondria and, well, death; just like Tristan they’re always at the same time really about love and, well, life.

You could and should have been following the birth of the work through Corey’s special blog devoted to just that; we’ll forgive you this time (and every time, damn it!… though we know you’ll just break our heart again), if you’ll just wander over their way, plunk down your money, and prepare to weep, squirm, sigh and smile. If that weren’t enough, ICE is rounding out the program with three premieres by other young and notable composers; Stephen Lehman, Nathan Davis and Mario Diaz de León. The show’s at 8pm; P.S. 122 is at 150 First Ave. at E. 9th St., NYC; Phone: 212-477-5829.

by Steve Layton
Awards, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Oliveros Wins Big Uptown

Congratulations to PAULINE OLIVEROS. Columbia University announced today that she is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award: a $50,000 prize which recognizes “the lifetime achievement of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance.” The previous award-winner was John Zorn in 2006.

Columbia will celebrate Oliveros with a concert and reception at 8 PM on March 27, 2010 at Miller Theatre.

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Mantra Percussion Premieres

Mantra Percussion has a gig this Tusday in Manhattan–at 8pm at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church (619 Lexington Ave @ 54th).  It sounds like a promising program, with new piece by Eric Km Clark, Aaron Siegel, and Craig Woodward, and a new arrangement of David Lang’s “Little Eye.”  Mantra member Mike McCurdy (how’s that for alliteration?) helpfully put together some audio notes on the program, which you can hear here:

David Lang, Little Eye: http://homepage.mac.com/mccurdymike/Sites/mantra/lang.mp3
Eric Km Clark, Deprivation Music #7: http://homepage.mac.com/mccurdymike/Sites/mantra/clark.mp3
Aaron Siegel, Our Reluctance is Overstated: http://homepage.mac.com/mccurdymike/Sites/mantra/siegel.mp3

Enjoy!

by Galen H. Brown
Contemporary Classical

Xiayin Wang Premieres Works by Hickey, Danielpour

The brilliant young pianist Xiayin Wang will perform back-to-back world premieres of Sean Hickey’s Cursive and Richard Danielpour’s Enchanted Garden, Preludes Book 11, two new works for piano,  in her performance at Alice Tully Hall Monday night, May 18th at 8 PM. Included in the program are works by Haydn, Chopin, Ravel, Scriabin and Liszt. 

Of Cursive,  Hickey says “The piece begins with a seven-note ostinato in the right hand which serves as a fixed idea throughout the entire work. But the nature of this falling pattern is such that it immediately spawns other related figures. The piece concludes with a flurry of arpeggiation and hand over hand runs, as if this were the denouement of an agitated story, written in a florid prose.”

Danielpour says of Enchanted Garden:  “The “garden” in question refers to the garden of the mind. In [this] second book, the preludes are evocative of memories in real life, which, when recalled, have their own “dreamlike” quality. To the philosopher, the question, “what is reality” will come to mind, while to musicians and music lovers, both our dreams and realities celebrate life.”

Wang’s debut CD on Naxos arrives May 26th and is devoted to the piano works of Alexander Scriabin arcing his early, middle and late period compositions. 

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Next Up is First Things First

All the talk last week was for Darcy James Argue’ s Secret Society CD and release gig. The show got rave reviews, the CD’s winging its way into the world, and that’s swell. But I want to do it all over again this week, for another New Amsterdam release that I think is every bit a magical in its own way:

I first pointed you to the amazing young violist Nadia Sirota here back in 2006. I said she was “fast track” but totally fresh then; the track, if anything, has only gotten faster but the freshness has remained through it all. Her crazy performance schedule has included The Meredith Monk Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Continuum, ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), yMusic, and the Wordless Music Orchestra, Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Stars of the Lid, The Swell Season, Sam Amidon, Doveman, Bryce Dessner, Gabriel Kahane, and Valgeir Sigurðsson, Grizzly Bear, Ratatat, Doveman, and My Brightest Diamond. Not only that, she also daily co-hosts WNYC’s Overnight Music show!

But now it’s her chance to shine on her own. Next week New Amsterdam is releasing Nadia’s first solo CD, appropriately titled First Thing First. All of the composers represented (Nico Muhly, Judd Greenstein, Marcos Balter) as well as the perfomers (cellist Clarice Jensen and the Chiara Quartet — which happens to have as violist Nadia’s brother Jonah!) are her personal friends. As much as a setting out, it’s a celebration of an intimate web of personal relations and creative energy.

Just as with DJA last week, Galapagos Gallery (located in DUMBO, 16 Main Street, corner of Water Street) is hosting a release show this Friday, May 15th at 8pm, tickets $12. Two of the composers (Nico & Judd) All of the composers and all of the CD’s performers will be on hand, so you can’t get a better experience than that.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Orchestral, Orchestras, San Francisco

SF Symphony serves up Mason Bates world premiere

[Ed. note: Polly Moller is not just busy telling you about concerts like the one below — while she’s out there pushing for the other guy, I want to mention the she herself has what looks like a great gig, with Pamela Z and Jane Rigler, May 17th at the Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa Street (between Harrison & Alabama), SF. tickets are $10, and you can see more here. Go, Polly! …OK, on with the show…]

Mason BatesSequenza21 readers are a quirky and unpredictable bunch.  But I’m willing to bet that any of them who show up on Wednesday, May 20, Friday, May 22, or Saturday, May 23 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco will not spend the first half fidgeting around, waiting for the marvelous Yuja Wang to take the stage, so they can text their friends about what kind of gown she’s wearing.  No, our readers will be on the edges of their seats ready for the world premiere of The B-Sides by Mason Bates!

The internet got a taste of Bates’ new work on April 15th, when the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, led by San Francisco’s own Michael Tilson Thomas, played the final movement, “Warehouse Medicine”, in Carnegie Hall.  Bates explains in the program notes that his five-movement piece is “informed by the grooves of electronica as well as the modern masters of orchestral sonority, and might also be said to inhabit the ‘flipside’ of the symphonic world – a place where drum-n-bass rhythms meet fluorescent orchestral textures.”

The B-Sides is dedicated to MTT, who commissioned it.  The maestro invited the composer backstage during a concert intermission in November 2007, “between Tchaikovsky and Brahms,” Bates recalls.  “He suggested a collection of five pieces focusing on texture and sonority—perhaps like Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. Since my music had largely gone in the other direction—large works that bathed the listener in immersive experiences—the idea intrigued me. I had often imagined a suite of concise, off-kilter symphonic pieces that would incorporate the grooves and theatrics of electronica in a highly focused manner.”

Something else Sequenza21 readers are likely to do, if they attend the Friday, May 22 show, is stick around for Davies After Hours. It’ll be hard to resist, with Bates morphing into his alter-ego, DJ Masonic, and joining SF Symphony Resident Conductor Benjamin Schwartz to host a hybrid concert/reception they call Mercury Lounge: Mercury Soul Comes to Davies. DJs and chamber ensembles will offer their reflections on the night’s concert…which oh, by the way, includes Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Opus 63.

Tickets are available online, and also by phone from the San Francisco Symphony Box Office at (415) 864-6000.

by Polly Moller
CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Other Minds, Recordings

Between the Rocking Cradles

Given the rarity of records and performances of the music of Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) through the 1970s, my first encounters with him were like everyone else: references in the “populist music of the 30s and 40s” section of 20th-century history books, and as arranger of the American version of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera that we all knew from the old (& wonderful) original-cast recording. Works such as his iconic The Cradle will Rock and Airborne Symphony were still talked about, but quite hard to track down and hear. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that revivals and reassesments began, with good biographies coming even later.

Though his trajectory parallels Weill’s or Copland’s in some way, moving from serious, cutting-edge classical to more readily accessible forms derived from popular music and musical theater, Blitzstein stuck with the agitator’s role to the end: works with a strong social message, whether against dictators of fascism or capitalism, and solidarity with the dispossesed and outsider. His reward as a political outsider was to be blacklisted in the red-scare 50s; and as a sexual outsider (though married, Blitzstein was rather openly gay) to be beaten to death in Martinique.

But before all that, there was the 20-something student from a well-to-do Jewish family, studying in Europe with both Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger. This younger self, as John Jannson’s Blitzstein website writes, was “a self-proclaimed and unrepentant artistic snob who firmly believed that true art was only for the intellectual elite. He was vociferous in denouncing composers – in particular Kurt Weill – whom he felt debased their standards to reach a wider public.”

That young, arty-elitist composer is the one that our good friends at Other Minds have set out to document, with a new CD hitting the shelves May 12th. Titled First Life, it contains a number of unpublished and barely-heard works from the late 20s and early 30s, given passionate performances by pianist Sarah Cahill and the Del Sol String Quartet. This is smart and energetic music, filled with then-experimental flourishes, and well worth putting on your shelf or in your playlist.

WNYC’s Sara Fishko recently profiled the CD, as well as the rest of the great Other Minds CD catalog, on her The Fishko Files program; it’s still up for listening here.

by Steve Layton
Chicago, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Percussion, Performers

These Windy City Kids Are Wicked Good

Since 1995 Chicago’s Percussion Scholarship Program has been shaping all kinds of mallet-whackers from grades 3 through 12. The program, under the direction of CSO percussionist Patricia Dash and Douglas Waddell, percussionist with Lyric Opera of Chicago, with amazing direction and arrangements by Cliff Colnot, has been growing something phenomenal. The kids’ musicianship and commitment seems to me every bit as stunning as Dudamel’s Venezuelan El Sistema stuff everybody’s been going gaga over. Don’t believe me? Just take in our young crew’s monster ride through Colnot’s arrangement of Dimitri Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32W2IBkVqUk[/youtube]

Incredible. The group’s big spring concert is coming up again this May 17th, 1:30 pm in Buntrock Hall at the Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Avenue. And it’s free, meaning not much better value can be had for a Sunday’s afternoon.

by Steve Layton