viola

Canada, Cello, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Composers Now, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, New York, Orchestral, Premieres, viola, Violin, Women composers

Momenta Festival IX: Ives at 150 and a Quartet at 20

On Thursday evening in New York, Momenta Quartet’s October festival – now nine years running – closed with an assorted program, enthusiastically curated by violist/composer Stephanie Griffin. Griffin is the last founding member still actively performing with the group. Noting that this festival has ever featured the opportunity for each member to have curatorial carte blanche on one night only, Griffin nodded to the overall 2024 theme – Charles Ives at 150 – while admitting that “this is not a thematic program, but rather a joyous collection of pieces that I saw fit to celebrate the genius of Charles Ives

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by Adam Sherkin
BAM, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York, Opera, Strings, viola, Violin, Vocals

“Angel Island” by Huang Ruo at the Prototype Festival

The special sauce that has made Prototype, the annual opera/theater festival, a success for over a decade is a straightforward formula: socially relevant, edgy vocal works that are high on drama. Angel Island, a theatrical work with music by Huang Ruo, fits that description. The speck of land in the middle of San Francisco Bay known as Angel Island served as an immigration port in the first half of the 20th century . Hundreds of thousands of hopeful migrants from Asia were interrogated and detained, some of them for years, in the decades from 1910 to 1940. It’s not a

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by Gail Wein
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation, Microtonalism, Music Instruments, Seattle, viola

Garth Knox premiere at University of Washington’s Harry Partch Festival

This year’s Harry Partch Festival has kicked off at the University of Washington, where the original Partch instruments have been housed since 2014 under the capable direction of Charles Corey. On hand for the first evening concert on May 12, 2018 was composer-violist and Arditti Quartet alum Garth Knox who premiered his Crystal Paths, a concertino for viola d’amore and six Partch instruments. The work is basically a series of duets between Knox and, in succession, Partch’s Crychord, Bass Marimba, Surrogate Kithara, Chromelodeon and Harmonic Canon. An interesting twist is that once each duet has been underway for a minute or so, the

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by Michael Schell
Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Strings, viola, Violin

Ljova in Princeton

“Sorry About the Mess – Portraits in Music:” Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin and Friends Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University February 27, 2018 Sequenza21.com By Christian Carey PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY – Violist and composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin has been a guest artist this semester at Princeton University’s Atelier. The special courses in this program feature guest artists in interdisciplinary collaboration: student participants can “mirror” or “shadow” their work. Zhurbin’s course, “Grandma’s Russian Painting: Puppetry and Music,” also involves puppeteer Basil Twist. As part of his residency, on Tuesday, February 27th Zhurbin gave a composer/performer portrait concert. Held in The Forum,

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by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, viola, Violin

Andrew McIntosh in Recital at The Wild Beast

On Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at The Wild Beast on the Cal Arts campus, a faculty recital by Andrew McIntosh featured no fewer than six different violins and violas, five sections of the Rosary Sonatas with period Baroque tuning, four contemporary pieces, and two world premiers. A good-sized crowd turned out mid-week to experience a wide range of music employing tuning practices from the 16th to the 21st century. Embellie (1981) by Iannis Xenakis was first, a solo viola piece. Xenakis is quoted in the program notes: “I wrote this piece… trying to think only of the viola, with its

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by Paul Muller
Brooklyn, Composers, Concerts, viola, Violin

Karen Bentley Pollick at Firehouse Space, Brooklyn

Superstorm Sandy wreaked a fair amount of havoc on a lot of concert schedules, but things are starting to return to something resembling normal. One quick shout-out I’d like to pass along is a performance this coming Sunday, Nov. 11, by the really wonderful violinist/violist Karen Bentley Pollick. Usually found at home in the mountains of Colorado, Karen’s coming to Brooklyn to give a concert of lots of pretty recent music — including the premiere of former Brooklynite and S21 composer/webmaster Jeff Harrington’s Grand Tango for violin with video. Jeff’s been living in France for a couple years now, and it’s good

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by Steve Layton
CDs, Cello, Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York, viola

Tuesday at LPR: Garth Knox Celebrates Saltarello

Saltarello Garth Knox, viola & fiddle with Agnès Vesterman, cello & Sylvain Lemêtre, percussion ECM Records CD 2157 Dance music in multiple forms, from the saltarello, a Venetian dance dating back to the Fourteenth century, to  Breton and Celtic folk music, as well as transcriptions of medieval era compositions, Renaissance era consort music, and contemporary fare, are featured on Saltarello, violist Garth Knox’s latest ECM CD.  Among the early music slections, Particularly impressive is a Vivaldi concerto, performed in a duo arrangement for viola d’amore and cello. Its interpreters, Knox and Agnès Vesterman, take this continuo less opportunity to accentuate a

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by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Interviews, viola

Nadia Sirota: Interview

“I always describe the viola as something that is kind of the wrong size for its body. It sounds like a man singing very high or a woman singing very low. And there’s something about that in-between-ness that is very attractive to me and the challenge of overcoming the fact that, physics-wise, it’s actually proportioned incorrectly, in other words, for a viola to be the right size for the length of its strings to play very easily, it would be something like the size of a small cello…There’s something about reaching in and having to get around that imperfection that

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by Chris McGovern
Cello, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Music Events, New York, S21 Concert, viola

Guest post: Clarice Jensen and Nadia Sirota

Clarice: So, ahem, Nadia it was pretty remarkable when we switched from reading from the score to parts when we were working on Hayes’ piece (ed.: Steal Away by Hayes Biggs). It’s like the music took on a different meaning. Nadia: I know!! I find that stuff so incredible. Sometimes I forget that a massive portion of our jobs as musicians (especially of the new music persuasion) is essentially translating visual material into sound. We’re kind of like professional map-readers. Do you have any notational pet peeves? Clarice: Page turns of course… But other than that, just spacing in general.

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by Christian Carey