Pianist Jenny Q. Chai is a versatile artist. Her repertoire includes works by contemporary Europeans such as Phillipe Manoury and Marco Stroppa (her dissertation topic), and she recently recorded an excellent portrait CD on Naxos of music by Nils Vigeland. She also performs standard repertoire, such as Robert Schumann and Claude Debussy. On January 10, in a program entitled Where is Chopin? (subtitled “Steampunk Piano 2”), Chai creates a juxtaposition of Carnaval by Schumann with brand new pieces that feature artificial intelligence, performing the music of Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, a Stanford University-based composer who uses the AI program Antescofo. It supplies
Read morePhoto: THOMAS GRØNDAHL This Thursday, the Danish Piano Trio will make their US recital debut at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. The group – Katrine Gislinge, piano, Toke Møldrup, cello, and Lars Bjørnkjær, violin – will present piano trios by Niels Gade and Felix Mendelssohn (one of my personal favorite chamber works, the swoon-worthy Piano Trio in D minor). The group will also present the premiere of Bent Søresen’s Abgesänge. Pianist Steven Beck guests, joining Møldrup in the world premiere of Geoffrey Gordon’s Fathoms (Cello Sonata). The group’s DaCapo recording Danish Romantic Piano Trios is out now. CONCERT DETAILS
Read moreOn Tuesday, December 8, 2015 the first Green Umbrella Series concert of the season featured three Los Angeles-based string quartets: Calder Quartet, Formalist Quartet and the Lyris Quartet. Disney Hall was mostly full for the event, evidence of the strong following contemporary music has attracted by this concert series over the years. The music for the evening spanned works by John Cage and Christian Wolff to two world premieres and LA Philharmonic commissions from John Luther Adams and Tristan Perich. First up was the Formalist Quartet performing Music for Marcel Duchamp by John Cage. Originally written for prepared piano, this
Read moreOn Saturday, November 21, 2015 People Inside Electronics presented the contemporary vocal chamber ensemble Accordant Commons in a concert at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena. A Saturday night crowd of new music enthusiasts gathered to hear an evening of vocal music combined with electronics. The first piece presented, “those remaining words in nuance”, by Chen-Hui Jen featured soprano Stephanie Aston who began with a soft sustained pitch, accompanied by electronics fed through speakers on the stage. More pure tones and vocalizing followed and this gave a vivid sense of multiple voices – Ms. Aston sang along in harmony and this
Read moreIt’s that time of the year again, my composer friends! …When Marvin Rosen, WPRB’s champion of contemporary composers (far and wide, high and low, in or out, he likes you all!) is preparing his yearly “VIVA 21st CENTURY” 25-hour radio marathon, playing works from — well, you! Send along you recording by the December 5th deadline and you too can be a part of the big show. Full details below: CALL FOR NEW MUSIC RECORDINGS To be presented during the 11th Live Marathon (10th devoted to 21st century music) curated and hosted by Marvin Rosen, host of the award-winning program,
Read moreOn October 30, 2015 WasteLAnd presented Study for Eurydice, a concert at Art Share LA in downtown Los Angeles. A nice Friday night crowd filled the restored industrial performance space for an evening of new music. The first piece, Relay/Replay by Yiheng Yvonne Wu, featured Rachel Beetz on flute. A computer played recorded flute sounds through speakers mounted above the performance area. Relay/Replay began with a brief high-pitched tone from one of the speakers, answered in kind by the flute. A short silence followed and the sequence repeated. A pattern of call and answer continued and the electronic part gradually
Read moreOn Thursday, October 22nd at the new downtown New York venue the Sheen Center, an acoustically generous and attractive performance space, we heard the second of three concerts presenting selections from Anthony de Mare’s ambitious commissioning project Liasons: Reimaginings of Sondheim from the Piano. De Mare has recorded the 36 commissioned pieces for ECM Records, which has released a generously annotated 3 CD set of them. De Mare is an ideal advocate for this music. His touch at the piano is at turns muscular, dexterous, and tender, well able to encompass the many demeanors the commissioned composers adopted
Read moreThis past Saturday night, Kobacker Hall, on the campus of Bowling Green State University, came alive with the sounds of Jennifer Higdon’s compositions for wind ensemble and orchestra. The culminating performance of Bowling Green’s annual New Music festival, Saturday’s concert marked a rare opportunity to hear a program of large ensemble music focused on the works of a single living composer, and both Higdon, and her compositional craft, were aglow in the spotlight. As the featured guest composer of this, the 36th annual new music festival at BGSU, Higdon shared herself, and her music, with students are audiences in numerous
Read moreDean Rosenthal is an east-coast composer, lecturer, and current co-editor of the wonderful online The Open Space contemporary music magazine. About a year ago, his friend Richard Skidmore suggested that Dean take his 2012 piece Stones/Water/Time/Breath and make a “pocketcard” from it. As the piece is verbal notation and so open to performers of all stripes, it seemed a nice thing to share with others as a kind of hand out. The card shows interpreters how to perform the piece at the water with stones, in a group or on their own. Dean applied for a local grant and with the
Read moreLast night marked the launch of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams’ weeklong residency at the University of Michigan. Adams’ time in Ann Arbor, which will include performances as well as lectures on environmental advocacy, began with an evening of his chamber music at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The museum’s apse has been site of may memorable concerts over the years, but none may have taken advantage of this setting as well as yesterday’s program of Adams’ resonant and ravishing compositions. In one of the handful of interstitial interviews between Adams and University of Michigan Musicology Professor
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