Contemporary Classical

Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Sunday and Monday: Donald Hall at Works and Process

Works & Process celebrates Donald Hall this weekend. The 14th U.S. Poet Laureate will read and discuss his work.

New musical settings of Hall’s poetry by Drew Baker, George Lewis, David Del Tredici, Joshua Schmidt and Charles Wuorinen are performed for the first time. Performers include a host of New York’s finest: Mary Nessinger, Tom Meglioranza, Lauren Flanigan, Judith Bettina, James Goldsworthy, Moran Katze, Fred Sherry, Peter Kolkay, David Del Tredici, and Lois Martin.

Musical Premieres – settings of Donald Hall (Works & Process Commission)

DREW BAKER: THE SEA (mezzo-soprano & cello)

DAVID DEL TREDICI: THE POEM &THE MASTER (soprano & piano)

GEORGE LEWIS: THE PAINTED BED (tenor & viola)

JOSHUA SCHMIDT: ROUTINE (baritone & bass clarinet)

CHARLES WUORINEN: MOON CLOCK (baritone & bassoon)

Sun and Mon, May 10 and 11, 7:30 pm

The Peter B. Lewis Theater / Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street

Subway – 4, 5, 6 train to 86th Street / Bus – M1, M2, M3, or M4 bus on Madison or Fifth Avenue

$30 General / $25 Guggenheim Members / $10 Students (25 and under with valid student ID)

(212) 423-3587, M-F, 1–5 PM or visit www.worksandprocess.org

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

All living composers, all the time

Del Sol String Quartet

Or at least it sure seems that way, when you’re dealing with the Del Sol String Quartet. San Francisco’s longtime champions of new music have a drool-worthy concert on tap for this Friday, May 8th, entitled Mestizaje. Of the four contemporary quartets scheduled for the evening, three are new pieces written for Del Sol, and two are world premieres.  Drool away:

  • Tania León (b. 1943, Cuba): [String Quartet No. 1] (2009, world premiere)
  • Paul Yeon Lee (b. 1970, Korea): “Ari, Ari… ari” (2009, world premiere)
  • Philip Glass (b. 1937): String Quartet No. 5 (1991)
  • Linda Catlin Smith (b. 1957, USA): “Gondola” (String Quartet No. 4) (2007)

Composers Tania León and Paul Yeon Lee will be there in person to answer questions at the post-concert reception. You can also meet the Del Sol members – violinists Kate Stenberg and Rick Shinozaki, cellist Hannah D’Addario-Berry, and violist Charlton Lee (who’s known as “hunky Charlton” behind his back, and no, I won’t reveal my sources).

The concert begins at 8 p. m. in the Presidio of San Francisco’s Main Post Chapel, located on Fisher Loop near the Golden Gate Club. There’s free parking, and if you would rather not drive, you can take the Muni 29 Sunset bus. Tickets are $25.00 for adults, $20.00 for seniors, and $12.00 for students and kids, all sold at the door.

by Polly Moller
Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral, Orchestras, Performers

Review — S.E.M. Excitment at Tully

Music by Wolff, Sciarrino, Kotik, Carter, and Ligeti / Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Ostravská Banda, FLUX Quartet; Petr Kotik, Conductor /Alice Tully Hall, May 6, 2009

Conductor/composer Petr Kotik has been an impressive advocate for contemporary music in New York for forty years. Residing in the US since 1969, he has been running the S.E.M. ensemble since 1970: performing a wide range of repertoire, commissioning works and cultivating successive generations of young players into seasoned new music performers. S.E.M.’s orchestral unit has been active since ’92; Kotik’s also been running Ostravská Banda, an international chamber orchestra comprised of S.E.M. players and young European counterparts, since ’05. Both of these groups, as well as the FLUX string quartet, another youngish ensemble devoted to new music, were featured on Wednesday night’s Tully Hall performance: a program of brand new chamber music and three contemporary works that seem destined for the core repertory.

Christian Wolff’s Trio for Robert Ashley (commissioned for the concert) employed three of the FLUX members – violinist Tom Chiu, violist Max Mandel, and cellist Felix Fan – in a fragmentary multi-movement piece. Indeed, its juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated musical materials set the tone for an evening devoted to unorthodox formal presentation. Sustained notes were set against skittering, Webernian motifs. Single lines evaporated into pensive rests while vigorous tutti were all too ephemeral; evaporating into the silence from when they came.

In its US premiere, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Vento D’Ombra made quite an impression. Another work which employed silences as well as fragmentary gestures as signatures, it focused on tiny musical cells – mostly dyads and trichords – as well as a cornucopia of special effects. Wind and brass players breathed through mouthpieces without fingering notes, strings played scordatura and microtones. The whole was a meticulously shaded pointillist canvas of brief gestures, undulating slides, and pianissimo staccato dabs.

Kotik’s own String Quartet was cast in a lengthy single movement. Impeccably performed by FLUX, it was centered on an ambling, long-breathed melody played by the quartet in unison (later in octaves). Only gradually did this evolve into two-voice counterpoint, with a violin countermelody that took on greater urgency. Tutti passages ratcheted up the tension quotient still further, evocative of some of the brilliant polyphonic passages from Ligeti’s second quartet. The idée fixe unison passage returned at pivotal junctures, requiring precise coordination and tuning on the part of FLUX: both were readily supplied.

Elliott Carter’s recent ‘second piano concerto,’ Dialogues, is a fascinating companion piece to the monolithic concerto from the 1960s. Written for a much smaller orchestra, it allows the soloist to take on an enlarged role. In a clever inverse of its larger precursor, the pianist often overwhelms the ensemble, cowing it with brilliant virtuosity. Daan Wandewalle was an excellent protagonist, supplying brilliant cadenzas, thunderous verticals, and an overarching sense of shaping and musicality. (more…)

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

ADORNO Ensemble takes on student work

ADORNO EnsembleWhen I was an undergrad at San Francisco State University in the late 1980s, we didn’t have a new music ensemble-in-residence. Like many music majors then and now, we relied on our fellow students to perform our pieces, and didn’t have a professional-level new music group serving as role models on campus.

All that has since changed, and the SFSU School of Music and Dance has the ADORNO Ensemble to take this challenge on. The group has spent the last few years impressing local audiences and getting cordial reviews, including this one from San Jose Mercury News music critic Richard Scheinin: “A crackerjack new music band that plays with conviction and vitality and blows the dust off classical music.” In 2007 they won an ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award, and launched an online composers’ workshop at www.scorexchange.org.

Clarinetist Jeffrey Anderle, violinist Graeme Jennings, cellist Gianna Abondolo, contrabassist Bill Everett, percussionist Loren Mach and Christopher Jones on piano will team up this Friday, May 8th, to realize that most un-dusty kind of classical music – student compositions. Five fortunate young artists will get what every emerging composer needs so badly: a professional performance of their work, plus a decent recording. Here’s the program:

  • Gamaliel Galindo: Among the Multitude for violin, clarinet and piano
  • Ryan Ike: Thermodynamica for percussion and contrabass
  • Natan Rodriguez: Piano Trio for violin, cello and piano
  • Allegra Mitchell: Hush, Hush Sweet Faire: A Set of Miniatures for clarinet, percussion and contrabass
  • Aaron Nudelman: Unforeseen Circumstances for clarinet, violin, cello and piano

The show starts at 7:30 p.m. in Knuth Hall in the Creative Arts Building on the San Francisco State University campus at 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco. General audiences get in for $10.00, students and seniors for $5.00.

by Polly Moller
Contemporary Classical, Housekeeping, Online

Many hands (and ears) make light work

Being an all-volunteer gig, Sequenza 21 has always relied on a cast of characters — almost all musicians themselves — that lend a hand as they can, but often end up caught in a whirl of other demands. And because based in NYC, there are times when it gets just a little too easy to report on all the events happening around the city, and get a little sidetracked about keeping tabs on so many wonderful musicians and concerts elsewhere in this country and beyond. So every once in a while the call goes out to some of the many good aquaintances we’ve made, asking if this or that person might like to have a go at sharing what’s up in their neck of the metaphorical woods, both geographically and stylistically. I’d like to take a second to introduce, and thank, some of the new contributors that you’ll spot around here in the coming weeks:

Hanging down here with me in Houston, TX, Elliot Cole.

Harrying the hoipoloi from Birmingham, England, Ed Lawes.

Hustling through the heaving masses of San Francisco and the Bay Area, Polly Moller.

And holding the fort in Kansas City, MO, Scott Unrein.

(And though he’s been around a few weeks already I’d be remiss to not give a quick shout to James Holt.)

They’ll be joining all our established crew you’ve grown accustomed to reading. These are just the first wave of new voices, as part of our constant effort keep you up to speed on living, breathing new music and musicians, no matter what & where. On with the party!

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Thanks for All the Fish

As stated in Oberlin College’s ‘Oberwiki’:

“…to enter you needed to take a sugar pill with a dot on it…and you rolled the dice, cause 1/3 of the dots were LSD…”

Yep, that’s our (currently) eldest composition teacher speaking of Oberlin’s glory days when he was but a wee lad out of grad school. Randy Coleman is many things, best summed up as “a real post-modern feminist old-time patriarch from Virginia.” He is most feared for his red pen marks on freshperson’s melody assignments and for the fabled “piece-per-day” routine with private students. His music contains much variety, with each new piece vastly different than what had come before. Also, as a result, he takes a long time in writing these pieces.

For the past 15-20 years, every course that Randy has taught has been called “Postmodernism.” He has taught at Oberlin since 1965, placing him as the conservatory professor with the second-longest post at Oberlin, second only to David Boe.

After forty-three years of showing impractical, starry-eyed composition students how it’s really done, Randy Coleman is moving on. A fine appreciation is here; On Friday May 8th at 8pm, The Contemporary Music Ensemble there is giving an all-Coleman farewell concert bash, featuring Bellagio (2007-09), a concerto for piano and large ensemble with Ran Duan, piano; Apparitions (2003) for string ensemble and piano, Tom Fosnocht, piano with videodance by Nusha Martynuk and Carter McAdams;  Soundprint III (1973),  in memoriam Ezra Pound for dancer and percussion, Nusha Martynuk, dancer; The Great Lalula (1988) for voice and chamber ensemble, Molly Netter, voice, with dance choreographed by Nusha Martynuk and performed by Cleveland GroundWorks Dance Company. It’s at Hall Auditorium, Room ID_1 @ 67 North Main Street, Oberlin, OH, and absolutely free.  If you’re close come on by; this composer gave in a big way, and it seems only fair to give back.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

New Music Bake Sale

Two weeks ago at the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights, 25 different organizations in New York’s new music scene assembled for a the first annual New Music Bake Sale; an event that was a cross between a music festival and a the vendor fair at a conference.  I mean that second part in only the best possible sense–in fact the sense of community created by the setup was the best part of the whole event.  Each of the ten ensembles that performed, and fifteen other groups, all had tables lining the main room and the entry area, where they gave out promotional materials, sold baked goods and CDs, collected names for mailing lists, and in some cases bought names for mailing lists with the enticement of baked goods in exchange.  The modestly sized space was packed throughout the evening, and the participants and audience members were like a who’s-who of the 20-and 30-something music scene.  (Our old friend Ian Moss was even there.)  Everyone milled around, listening to the music and hanging out, and it felt more like a genuine community event than anything I’ve been to in New York except for Bang On A Can.

The performances by So Percussion, itsnotyouitsme, Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick, Lukas Ligeti, Newspeak, ACME, JACK Quartet, Dither, Loadbang, and Ensemble de Sade were all excellent (okay, I missed a couple of them, but I have no reason to suspect that the ones I missed were any less good than the ones I saw).  Highlights included David T. Little’s “Sweet Light Crude,” performed by Newspeak, an epic guitar quartet rockout by Lainie Fefferman, performed by Dither, the brilliantly simultaneously creepy and funny “The Exaltation of Grace Budd” by Matt Marks, performed by Ensemble de Sade (“You clap when we tell you to clap”), and So Percussion’s pieces which featured audience participation, conceptual an performance art elements, and a fascinating blurring of the boundaries of what was part of the piece and what wasn’t.

Organized by Newspeak and Ensemble de Sade, this was the first of what should become an annual event.  It’s hard to know for certain where it will go from here, but the concept is brilliant, the execution was spot-on, and we may well have witnessed the birth of a critical New York institution.

by Galen H. Brown
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Vienna’s Ensemble On_Line visits NYC on Monday

THE AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM NEW YORK CONCERTS

ENSEMBLE ON_LINE

MONDAY MAY 4, 7:30 PM
Austrian Cultural Forum NY, 11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022

Also touring to Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, this program is curated by Karlheinz Essl and Reinhard Fuchs, in cooperation with Soundfield and the Slought Foundation.

PROGRAM

Gene Coleman | Subaugusta (2009) for bassflute, bassclarinet, violin, cello and piano
Karlheinz Essl | Sequitur II (2008/09) for bass clarinet and live-electronics
Simeon Pironkoff | Spiel(t)räume (2006) for piano solo
Gerard Grisey | Talea (1985/86) for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano
Leah Muir | i frammenti di desiderio, act four (2009) for clarinet and cello
Beat Furrer | Presto (1997) for flute and piano
Marcel Reuter | Interludio (2007) for clarinet, cello and piano
Gerald Resch | Gesten (2002) for violin and cello

ensemble on_line

Sylvie Lacroix (flute)
Theresia Schmidinger (clarinet)
Johannes Dickbauer (violin)
Martin John Smith (cello)
Mathilde Hoursiangou (piano)
Karlheinz Essl (live-electronics)

RESERVATIONS
Free Admission. Reservations necessary. Call (212) 319 5300 ext. 222 or e-mail reservations@acfny.org

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, New Amsterdam, New York

All Your Fridays Are Belong To Us!

Almost everyone in and around the New Amsterdam Records scene has been written up by us. Many are good and long-time visitors, contributors and pals of S21. But screw that; the real reason we follow this crew is that they’re an awesome bunch of composers and performers, with a fresh, open and energetic approach to this whole art-music thingy-ma-jingy. They’re proving it again this May, with… Aww, just let the poster tell you:

Makes a nice prelude to the BOAC “oldsters” Marathon, dontcha think?

by Steve Layton
Birthdays, Contemporary Classical, Online, Publications

I Would Have Gotten You a Card

To paraphrase a comment I spotted once on Myspace, “We would have got you a card or something but we spent all of our money on booze, speed, and hookers”…  So let’s just do with this shout-out to NewMusicBox, the American Music Center, the whole unsung crew and of course the one-and-only Frank J. Oteri, for seeing this most vital and consistently important modern classical site through its first decade.

Before appearing May 1st, 1999 there had never, ever been such a resource for living composers, performers and their music-hungry audience. Ten years on, there’s still no equal. It’s our island and oasis; though we might visit a host of other wonderful and worthwhile sites, we must visit NewMusicBox. Perfectly perfect? No. Plenty important? Yes!  Here’s to the next ten, Frank.

by Steve Layton