On Monday, we mentioned that the Miner’s Hymns, for which Jóhann Jóhannsson composed the score, was screening Downtown in NYC. Jóhannsson has a live appearance scheduled tonight on the United States’ opposite coast.
Joined by the Formalist Quartet, Jóhannsson will give a retrospective concert at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on February 8th. The composer was also featured last night on KCRW’s program Morning Becomes Eclectic (Listen here).
Event Details
Wednesday, February 8th – Los Angeles, CA
@ The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery – 8PM, $25
Jóhann Jóhannsson performs music spanning his entire career with the Formalist Quartet
Cellist Maya Beiser and pianist Pablo Ziegler appear at Le Poisson Rouge on Wednesday, February 1st at 7:30 (doors open at 6:30). They are performing Canyengue, the Soul of Tango, a program that features the works of Astor Piazzolla.
From 1978-’88, Ziegler was a member of Piazzolla’s band. His arrangements for cello and piano translate Piazzolla’s compositions, such as Libertango and Adíos Nonino, to a more intimate medium, but retain the genre’s vibrant spirit. The duo will also perform several pieces by Ziegler, and Beiser will take a solo turn, performing Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel.
Below, hear a stream from File Under ?’s Tumblr page of the duo playing Fuga Y Misterio, a somewhat lesser known piece by Piazzolla, arranged by Ziegler.
Le Poisson Rouge is located at 158 Bleecker Street (between Thompson and Sullivan), in the West Village, NYC. Tickets are $15, available through the club’s website, www.lepoissonrouge.com, or call 212/505-FISH (3474).
Out on 2/13 in the UK (and everywhere else on 3/6/12), “Jerk Driver” is the lead off single from Gabriel Prokofiev’sCello Multitracks, a CD that is his latest genre-bending release for the Nonclassical imprint. It features cellist Peter Gregson, a noteworthy genre bender in his own right, playing all nine cello parts, creating a swath of overdubbed strings that is then subjected to remixes by Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), musician/producer MaJiKer, and composer Marcas Lancaster. Check out a sample embedded below.
As Jerry Bowles points out on the homepage, Gregson and Prokofiev will be presenting the piece at Joe’s Pub in New York on 2/10. More US events are listed below: some of them include Prokofiev’s concert music; others, his work as a DJ!
The Israeli Chamber Project performs at Weill Hall on Wednesday, Feb. 1. In addition to warhorses of the chamber music repertoire by Brahms and Shostakovich, the group performs two Twentieth Century pieces that are less frequently heard on New York stages as well as one from the cusp of the millenium, Night Time (2000),a duo by Sebastian Currier.
Below is a video of the ensemble performing Matam Porat’s “Night Horses” at a 2008 concert in Tel Aviv: an evocative and unerringly paced work that they play superlatively.
The Israeli Chamber Project Carnegie Hall Debut
February 1, 2012 at 7:30 pm
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
Shostakovich Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello in C minor, Op. 8
Sebastian Currier Night Time for Harp and Violin
Martinů Chamber Music No. 1
Paul Ben Haim Three Songs Without Words (arranged for clarinet and harp)
Brahms Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano in A minor, Op. 114
Last weekend, mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen and violinist Joseph Kneer premiered a new version of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (2011) on the Federal Hill Parlor Series. They are going to perform the piece again on Saturday in York, Pennsylvania. Below is a YouTube video of the 1/25 performance (the first I’m aware of that features one of my compositions).
The Federal Hill Parlor Series:the enormity of small things
In her recital at Columbia University on Wednesday, organistGail Archer is premiering a new composition by Sequenza 21friend Hayes Biggs. His Three Hymn Tune Preludes use stirring material for their inspiration: He Leadeth Me! O Blessed Thought, Be Thou My Vision, and Eternal Father, Strong to Save.
The recital is the first of Archer’s ”An American Idyll” programs that occur throughout the city during 2012. Their focus is American repertoire, including many neglected and under-performed pieces. Now that’s an “Idyll” we can all vote for!
An American Idyll
All Concerts are FREE and first come, first serve.
Wednesday, January 25@ 7:30pm
Location: St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University.
117th St. & Amsterdam Ave.
Subway: take the 1 Train to Columbia University/Broadway (116th Street).
Program: Ascent (Joan Tower), He Leadeth me! O Blessed Tho’t!*, Be Thou My Vision, Eternal Father*, Strong
to Save* (Hayes Biggs), Wondrous Love (Samuel Barber), Praeludium super Pange Lingua (David Noon),
Featured Performers: Lydia Beasley, Soprano Megan Ihnen, Mezzo-Soprano Joe Kneer, Violin
Jordan Faye Contemporary Gallery
1401 Light St
Federal Hill
Baltimore, USA
Featured Composers:
Josh Bornfield
Doug Buchanan
Christian Carey Vaughan-Williams ‘Along the Field’ Gustav Holst ’4 Sacred Songs’ David Lang ‘I had no reason’
Tickets available online (recommended) and at the door: $20.00.
Please also take a moment to thank our contributing composers by making a donation to the Composers Fund while purchasing your tickets.
Tickets can be purchased/donations can be made here.
Even if you are not able to make it to this performance, please consider making a donation to the Composers Fund so that the Parlor Series may continue to bring new and important contemporary works to our guests.
Program note for piece by Christian Carey:
I enjoy working with unconventional combinations. I’ve composed a number of pieces in recent years for solo voice and solo string player. The W.B. Yeats poem “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” was one of the readings that my wife and I selected for our wedding ceremony. For our first anniversary, I created this setting for vocalist and string instrument. The inscription on the score’s title page reads:
To my wife Kay Mitchell on the occasion of our first Wedding Anniversary (They say the appropriate gift is paper; I took the liberty of adding notes.)
Critical Models: Chamber Works of Mohammed Fairouz Katie Reimer, piano; Claire Cutting, oboe; James Orleans, double bass; Jonathan Engle, flute; Maarten Stragier, classical guitar; Vasko Dukovski, clarinet; Rayoung Ahn, violin; Michael Couper, alto saxophone; Thomas Fleming, bassoon; Lydian String Quartet
Dorian Sono Luminus CD
Composer Mohammed Fairouz is one of a number of twenty-something contemporary classical composers who revel in the postmillennial polyglot atmosphere, where frequent shifts of stylistic demeanor are worn as badges of courage rather than markers of indecision. But writing convincingly in one style is challenging enough: chops-wise, a composer has to be loaded for bear in order to bring off the many signatures polystylists seek to incorporate.
Critical Models, a portrait CD featuring Fairouz’s chamber music, reflects a composer with a fertile mind and considerable technical acumen. An omnivore, if a somewhat conservative one, Fairouz tends to favor neoclassical models: Stravinsky and Hindemith are frequent touchstones. One can hear their spectres in “Litany,” a bucolic piece for double bass and wind quartet. There’s also more than a whisper of Schoenberg in the angular passages of “Lamentation” for string quartet, a work played on the CD with particular ardor by the Lydian Quartet.
Perhaps via osmosis from his own studies at Curtis and New England Conservatory, Fairouz is fond of emulating the Postwar American conservatory set – Persichetti, Mennin, and Schuman – in their explorations of pandiatonism, mixed meters, and dissonant counterpoint. One particularly hears these referents in his Six Piano Miniatures, idiomatic works that, apart from the poignant final movement, “Addio,” seem slighter than others on the disc, with the possible exception of the serviceable but often plodding Airs for solo guitar.
The title work is more formidable. A duo for alto saxophone and violin, it adroitly surveys each of the aforementioned stylistic categories singly in separate movements. Also included is a movement entitled “Catchword” that cannily references Nonwestern music. In each of these stylistic portraits, Fairouz seamlessly adopts a different compositional persona. While his versatility is admirable, one still awaits a thorough synthesis of these various demeanors into a durably individual voice.
On Thursday 1/19 at 8 PM, Fairouz presents “Resistance: Chamber and Vocal Music of Mohammed Fairouz” at Weill Recital Hall. Performers include Imani Winds, the Transatlantic Ensemble, soprano Mellissa Hughes, and clarinetist David Krakauer.
On Monday, January 16 at Carnegie Hall,Distinguished Concerts International New York brings together over three hundred musicians to give the world premiere of The Peacemakersby Karl Jenkins. The composer will conduct this work for choir, orchestra, and instrumental soloists. It is the first world premiere of one of his large-scale works to take place in New York.
TICKETS: www.carnegiehall.org or 212-247-7800 or in person at the Carnegie Hall Box Office.
The recording of The Peacemakers just came out this past Tuesday on EMI Classics. It features the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra and three choirs: the City of Birmingham Youth Choir, Rundfunkchor Berlin, and the 1000-strong Really Big Chorus.
EMI is offering a free download of a track from the album here.
The label’s also been kind enough to offer us several copies of the limited edition version of The Peacemakers for a CD giveaway. Interested parties should email me here.
I’ll use a Cageian (random) method to determine the “winners.” The contest is open until Monday, 1/16 at midnight.
Although I only taught at Manhattan School of Music for a year, one of the great joys and privileges of that experience was meeting and working with composer, vocalist, copyist, and teacher Hayes Biggs. This past Fall, Hayes helped us to organize the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert, going through stacks and stacks of scores as an adjudicator and, as a composer, contributing one of his own: the beautiful last movement of his string quartet O Sapentia/Steal Away.
After twenty years on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music, Hayes is finally getting a solo show there: a composition recital that features the world premiere of his song cycle Psalms, Hymns & Spiritual Songs(2011), performed by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Christopher Oldfather. Attendees will also get to hear Hayes’s string quartet in its entirety, performed by the Avalon Quartet: the group that not only commissioned and premiered it, but also recorded Steal Away/O Sapentia for the Albany imprint. Event details are below. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll make the trip uptown to hear Hayes’s music: it is very special work.
Event Details
Sunday January 15, 2012 at 7:30 PM
William R. and Irene D. Miller Recital Hall,
Manhattan School of Music,
120 Claremont Avenue (entrance on 122nd and Broadway), New York, NY
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