Contemporary Music

Contemporary Music

John Luther Adams’ “Ten Thousand Birds” Performed by Alarm Will Sound under Alan Pierson at PS 21

Elena Siyanko, Executive Director of PS21, in her introductory comments preceding Alarm Will Sound's performance of John Luther Adams' Ten Thousand Birds, said that this event has been in the works for a year. Its purpose, conceived months before there was any hint in people's minds that the performance would occur under the restrictions imposed by the pandemic which continues without an end in sight, at least in the United States. The particular features of the new performance structure and the determination and resourcefulness of Ms. Siyanko and her staff have made PS21 a pioneer in offering live performances under safe conditions. The performance of Ten Thousand Birds was intended to showcase the new PS21 and its new semi-open performance space to the public. The beautiful grounds surrounding it are in integral part of its design and function in a way quite different from Tanglewood and SPAC, where lawns simply provide expanded seating for those who prefer to be out in the open.
Contemporary Music

Going Beyond the Impossible to the Musical: The JACK Quartet play the Complete String Quartets of Elliott Carter.

The string quartet literature is notable for throwing super-complex challenges at the players; after all, this is the most cohesive medium for ensemble playing, and quartets play together for years or decades and can polish their communication and coordination skills to the highest degree. For that reason, composers have striven their utmost to present path-breaking difficulties and daring quartets to conquer them. One sub-history of 20th/21st century music has been the interplay between quartet composers and the groups performing their music. The avatar of all of this is late Beethoven, whose Große Fuge pushed the boundaries of playability in its day, and whose late quartets were composed with the skills of the Schuppanzigh Quartet in mind. 

Contemporary Music

Come celebrate William Bolcom’s 80th birthday with an all-Bolcom program at Merkin Hall, Sunday, April 29, 2018 | 8:00pm

The illustrious American composer William Bolcom is about to celebrate his 80th birthday! In his honor there will be a full program of Mr. Bolcom’s chamber music, including the world premiere of his Dark Dreams that will Not Disappear, commissioned and performed by violist Jacob Adams and pianist Angela Drăghicescu for this occasion.
Contemporary Music

Eve Beglarian: Songs from A Book of Days at the Morgan

To call composer/performer Eve Beglarian inventive is to undercut her gifts and reach by a great deal. Winner of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in Music for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” her Book of Days, presented as an adjunct to the Morgan’s exhibit, Now and Forever: The Art of Medieval Time, on view until April 29, 2018, is her effort to make a piece of music for every day of the year. Twelve of her one hundred thirty-two finished pieces were on the program.
Berkshire Review

Inbal Segev talks to Michael Miller about Christopher Rouse’s Cello Concerto, Coming Up February 10 and 11th at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival

Last month I had the pleasure of chatting with Inbal Segev, a young cellist from Israel, who has been making a mark in contemporary music and the classics. She was discovered by Isaac Stern as a high school student in Israel, and he arranged for her to come the United States to study at Yale and Juilliard. On this occasion we talked about her upcoming performance of Christopher Rouse's cello concerto with the Albany Symphony under David Allan Miller and a very interesting—and successful—contemporary music festival sponsored by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Marin Alsop. It held its inaugural season just last summer.
Berkshire Review

Openings: Boston Musica Viva plays Boulez, Marteau sans maître, and Nelsons and the BSO present Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier

One hoped and expected there would be performances of Pierre Boulez pieces in Boston this season to honor this great musician who died last winter. The Berlin Philharmonic, hardly a local group, will play one piece on its visit here in November. I don’t see anything else on the horizon. So, many thanks to Boston Musica Viva, our fine contemporary music ensemble now in its 48th year, for opening its season with Boulez’s perhaps most significant work, Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master, 1954-57).
Contemporary Music

Mostly Mozart, Hold the Mozart: the International Contemporary Ensemble and Ellie Dehn perform Fujikura, Zorn, Lucier, and Messiaen at the Park Avenue Armory

ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) has become a fixture at what might once have been considered and unlikely event, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. In recent years it has devloped into a more eclectic sort of festival, grounded in the music of Mozart as always, but including baroque and classical music played on period instruments as well as contemporary music. Within a few weeks Mostly Mozart provides a condensation of our musical interests today. It is especially welcome to get some taste of the rich contemporary music life in the City, when it inevitably thins out for the summer, as composers, many of whom teach for a living, go off to the country or an arts center to compose, perhaps with a visit to the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood or some other opportunity to congregate with colleagues and hear each other's work.
Contemporary Music

Hotel Elefant: Light and Dark, at Roulette, September 23, 2013

The so-called "major" institutions in New York have not been entirely oblivious to the music that is being written now, for example Alan Gilbert's New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, although they seem to be flagging somewhat in the past season or two. It was demoralizing to see the superb Tully Scope Festival, which did an admirable job of surveying and balancing the most important trends in music as it is practised today, from Les Arts Florissants to Tyondai Braxton, vanish after one season. It has fallen to smaller, younger organizations to make the music of our own time and place heard. ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), now ten years old, is perhaps the most visible of these, and it is to the credit of both Lincoln Center and the young virtuosi of ICE that they maintain a presence a various Lincoln Center series, like Mostly Mozart and White Lights. (But I still wish they'd resurrect Tully Scope—perhaps with a more attractive name!) We can only count ourselves lucky that a symbiosis exists between the larger, older organizations and upstarts like ICE, and that they make the effort to bring their work to a larger audience, but it is clear where the leadership lies.
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