Atlanta's "11 Alive" features Defiant Requiem and Hours of Freedom

On December 5, 2019 at 7:00 pm The Defiant Requiem Foundation performs Hours of Freedom: The Story of the Terezín Composer. Hours of Freedom is a concert-drama that showcases music by fifteen composers imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp (Terezín) during World War II. The performance is at the Ahavath Achim Synagogue (600 Peachtree Battle Ave NW, Atlanta). Admission is free; reservations are required by November 30 at this link. This performance is the featured 2019 Fran Eizenstat and Eizenstat Family Memorial Lecture.

Thanks to Candace Schilling of Ahavath Achim Synagogue for her work in securing this interview.

Red Pillows in Conversation with Roland Colton

At the beginning of Forever Gentleman, struggling architect and pianist, Nathan Sinclair, encounters the glamourous and beautiful heiress, Jocelyn Charlesworth. What draws Nathan to Jocelyn, and how does she respond to him when they first meet?

Although he has no expectation of an introduction, Nathan is intrigued enough to see if Ms. Charlesworth’s beauty is as extraordinary as the Sunday Times portrays it. Despite his protestations, the mistress of the estate insists on introducing Nathan to Jocelyn.  Once he observes her beauty firsthand, an intoxication of senses sweeps over him—never before has he seen a woman of such unimaginable beauty. Jocelyn’s reaction to Nathan is one of boredom, having endured countless stares from past star-struck suitors. She toys with him, looking for any opportunity to end the interview. Once she believes him to be a common servant, she rebukes him publicly, appalled that a servant would have the audacity to seek her acquaintance.

Nathan also meets the simple and plain social worker, Regina Lancaster. What’s special about Regina, and why does Nathan feel such a deep connection to her?

Though her outward appearance is ordinary, Nathan initially feels a strong attraction to Regina’s eyes and senses a kindred spirit.  Her dark brown eyes convey a journey through unspeakable tragedy, resulting in a deep appreciation for life and depth of character. Nathan is also attracted to Regina’s modesty, simplicity and inner beauty, qualities he admired in his mother. Once he learns of Regina’s selfless service to London orphans, he wonders if any man could possibly be worthy of her.

Music plays an important role in the story and in Nathan’s life. How do the musical elements in the novel tie together the themes in Forever Gentleman?

Nathan’s life has been steeped in music since his operatic mother gave birth to him. His pianistic bravado opens the door of London Society, and he becomes comfortable in a world far different than his humble abode. The music in Forever Gentleman accompanies the story as a soundtrack does a movie, enhancing both drama and mood. Women are attracted to Nathan’s musical genius, fostering love and romance in the story.

The Victorian Era was a time of contradictory wealth and poverty, along with great change, in England. What drew you to write a story set in this time period in history?

I’ve always been intrigued by a world where great beauty and brilliance could exist in the midst of poverty and misery.  While writing the story, I imagined what it would have been like to have lived in both worlds, as does Nathan in the story.  Also interesting is the sanitation miracle that occurred in the 1860’s, pulling London literally out of the squalor and stench of rotting pipes and sewer overflow into a world free of cholera and other dread diseases. And I wanted the timing of my story to coincide with the advent of the modern piano and creation of some of my favorite compositions.

How would you describe your writing process? And can you tell us about some of the research you did when you were writing Forever Gentleman?

My writing recipe involves equal amounts of struggle and ease. Sometimes the words flow in abundance; other times, I labor over every word in a sentence. I try not to let my writing get in the way of the story, and my goal was to have the reader lose himself or herself in Victorian London.  Many hundreds of hours were spent in research in my attempt to evoke the sights, sounds and smells of that bygone time. I strove for authenticity in events and venues, including authentic references to concerts, plays, performers and other events depicted in the book. I wanted to capture the times as they were, which is no small task when we live in a world far removed from that melancholy era.

Are you working on another novel? If so, what can you tell us about it?

Yes, I’m writing a new novel that highlights another passion of mine—my love for the sport of baseball. The book begins in 1911, highlighting the exploits of the wonder of the baseball world, Ty Cobb. Using newspaper reports from the time, the reader experiences some of the most incredible sports feats ever accomplished, usually thanks to the genius and skill of Mr. Cobb. After the opening chapters, a hit-and-run accident victim is discovered in modern times (with a face damaged beyond recognition), who purports to be Ty Cobb, mysteriously transported into the future. As the plot continues, this mystery man eventually shows exceptional baseball talent and ultimately plays a brand of baseball unlike anything in modern times, turning the sports world on its head. Is it possible that this baseball ace is truly Ty Cobb, or is it some imposter who has taken upon his attributes?  Only time will tell.

5 Stars for Roland Colton's "Forever Gentleman"

Heather Osborne
***** (5/5 Stars)
July 2, 2016

Forever Gentleman by Roland Colton is a historical fiction novel chronicling the fortunes, and misfortunes, of Nathan Sinclair. Nathan is a talented architect, and sometimes musician, living in London in the 1860s. Yet, all is not well for young Mr. Sinclair. He faces a debt thanks to a client who has been unable to pay, leaving him at the mercy of a loan broker. Still, Nathan does not despair, though he desperately seeks to pay off his debt. Then, while giving an impromptu concert at the home of a wealthy aristocrat, Nathan runs into a startlingly beautiful woman. Little does he know, his encounter with Jocelyn Charlesworth will change his life drastically, and force Nathan to choose between true love and the fulfillment of all his wildest dreams. All the while, outside forces and unexpected encounters threaten the life of our main character. Will he manage to come out of it on the side of honor, or greed?

It has been some time since I found myself swept away in a piece of historical fiction. Mr. Colton brings his readers directly into the world of the wealthy and the poor, delineating the distinctions with great dexterity. I loved that the main story was told from Nathan’s perspective, as I could really get into his head. Still, the ending surprised me and deviated from what I usually expect in historical novels of this type. I wasn’t sure if I liked Nathan at times, as he seemed to seek fame more than honor, but this gave him a flaw. I appreciated that he wasn’t perfect, and it made me empathize with his plight. Forever Gentleman by Roland Colton is not a novel to rush, but each page is to be savored as he paints a delicate picture of Nathan’s life, while still keeping the plot balanced. Easily one of the best books I have read so far this year.

Cleveland Classical interview with andPlay

andPlay @ Kent State’s Vanguard New Music Series 

November 19, 2019 by Mike Telin

When the duo andPlay — Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola — were in Cleveland to perform on the Re:Sound Festival last summer, ClevelandClassical.com critic Jarrett Hoffman wrote that “Bennardo and Levinson played with obvious chemistry, genuinely at ease with one another in the kind of way that just makes an audience feel good.”

On Thursday, November 21, andPlay will return to Northeast Ohio for a performance on the Kent State Vanguard New Music Series. The 7:30 pm concert in Ludwig Recital Hall will include Leah Asher’s Letters to My Future Self (2018), Clara Iannotta’s Limun (2011), Anthony Vine’s Terrain (2019), Scott Wollschleger’s Violain (2017), and the premiere of a new work by Adam Roberts. The event is free.

I caught up with the duo by telephone and began our conversation by asking how their invitation to Kent came about.

Hannah Levinson: Adam Roberts teaches at Kent. We played a piece of his a few years ago, so that’s how we met him, and since then we’ve become friends. When he went to Kent he wanted to bring us there, so we commissioned this new piece from him. He introduced us to Noa Even, who runs the Re:Sound Festival. But it was a coincidence that we ended up going to the Festival, and it was very funny when we realized that it was the same Noa.

Mike Telin: Please say a few words about the piece.

Maya Bennardo: It’s a two-movement piece, and we previewed one the movements back in October.

HL: It was nice that we played something of his before because he was able to incorporate what he knows about us as players and people into the piece. It feels like all the motifs are being stretched. They are repeated and become more intricate, and the patterns are expanded in different ways. It creates a large and thick texture.

MB: There are interweaving patterns — like taking a fabric and pulling it so you can see through it a little bit. 

HL: With our commissions, it’s about finding people who will write something that sounds like more than just two string instruments, and Adam’s piece does that. It creates a multi-layered, complex, and powerful work.

MT: Congratulations on your new album playlist on New Focus Recordings. Will you be performing any works from that recording?

Read the rest of the interview at this link

New York Music Daily reviews Vasco Dantas at Carnegie Hall

Picturesque Brilliance and Rare Treasures at Vasco Dantas’ New York Debut

by delarue

“Feel free to create your own story for each of these preludes,” pianist Vasco Dantas encouraged the big crowd who’d come out for his New York debut at Carnegie Hall yesterday. Playing from memory for the better part of two hours, he gave them a panoramic view from five thousand feet. The music didn’t need titles or explanations: whatever was there, he brought out in stunning focus.

The most highly anticipated part of the program comprised a very rarely performed, pentatonically-spiced suite, Portuguese composer Luis de Freitas Branco’s 10 Preludios. Interspersing these World War I vintage pieces with five from Debussy’s 1910 Book 1 might well seem ludicrous on face value. But in a particularly sharp stroke of programming, Dantas had rearranged them so that, at least for those familiar with the French composer, there was never a question as to who was who.

And Branco’s music in many ways is more Debussy than Debussy himself: what a discovery! An Asian influence, often gamelanesque, sometimes mystical, was ubiquitous, as were close harmonies that sometimes reached an aching unresolve. Taking his time to let the narratives unfold, Dantas revealed a lullaby cached inside the ripples of Branco’s first prelude, followed by the vigorously waltzing, chiming incisiveness of the second.

The first of the Debussy works, The Sunken Cathedral, was also a revelation in that the pianist bookended its opulent languor and nebulous mysticism around a sternly rhythmic midsection: this was one striking edifice rising from the depths! Other delightful Debussy moments abounded, particularly the deviously blithe song within a song in What the West Wind Saw, and the momentary fish out of water amidst the sun-splattered ripples of Sails.

The rest of the Branco preludes glittered with minute detail. Spare, wintry impressionism moved aside for sharp-fanged, modally-tinged phantasmagoria and a slightly muted mockery of a march. The most dramatic interlude was in Branco’s Modern Ride of the Valkyries, its grim chromatics bordering on the macabre. The most technically challenging was the Preludio No. 5, Branco’s own relentlessly torrential counterpart to Debussy’s famous hailstorm shredding the vegetation.

Dantas brought equally telescopic brilliance to an old favorite of the Halloween repertoire, Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Yet not once did he go over the line into grand guignol: he left no doubt that this was a requiem. Who would have expected the carnivalesque creepiness of The Gnome to be dignified, and balanced, with just as much quasi-balletesque grace? The Old Castle may be a familiar horror theme, but Dantas’ insistently tolling low pedal notes left no doubt that this was in memory of a most original friend.

There were a few points where Dantas brought the menace to just short of redline – those were truly mad cows! – but otherwise, this was about poignancy and reflection. Dantas’ unwavering, perfectly articulated, otherworly chattering phrases in Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks were spine-tingling. The contrasts between the elegant Samuel Goldenberg and his lumbering namesake from the boondocks were striking yet sympathetic. Similarly, the grief in Dantas’ vast, desolate interpretation of The Catacombs was visceral, as was the unexpectedly distant horror of Baba Yaga. And he drew a straight line all the way back to Beethoven with the long crescendos and false endings after the whirling, evilly gleeful peasant dance in The Great Gate of Kiev.

After a series of standing ovations, he encored with his own gleaming, moodily Chopinesque arrangement of the Burnay Fado, from his home turf, complete with sparkly ornamentation mimicking a Portuguese twelve-string guitar. Let’s hope this individualistic rescuer of obscure and forgotten repertoire makes it back here soon.

ConcertoNet reviews Vasco Dantas Carnegie Hall Debut

Pictures at an 18th Century Salon

New York
Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
11/17/2019 -  
Luis de Freitas Branco: Ten Prelúdios
Claude Debussy: Préludes, Book I
Modeste Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
Vasco Dantas (Pianist)

“Rosalind: O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou
didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But
it cannot be sounded: my affection hath an unknown
bottom, like the bay of Portugal”
William Shakespeare, As You Like it

“Oh, Christ! it is a goodly sight to see
What Heaven hath done for this delicious land!
What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree!
What goodly prospects o’er the hills expand!!”
George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

When hearing that a Portuguese pianist was giving a recital this afternoon, my heart soared like Lord Byron’s poetry, printed above, on his first visit to Lisbon. Would Maria João Pires, my absolute favorite Chopin performer, be finally coming to New York?

Alas, Ms. Pires was not on board. But her fellow Lusitanian, Vasco Dantas, was giving his New York premiere here, playing the music of a noted Portuguese musicologist and composer, one Luis de Freitas Branco. Mr. Freitas Branco was a tabula branco to me as was Mr. Dantas, but his youthful countenance was belied by an amazing two-page synopsis of his experience.

Experience which grew from a Portuguese childhood and studies in London, Paris and Germany to a remarkable number of concerts on virtually every continent. Add to this a program totally based on musical pictures, with ten preludes by an unknown Portuguese composer...

And the setting? The gorgeous baroque Weill Recital Hall, its crystal chandeliers and ivory-colored curlicued walls, were the settings of Portugal itself in its golden 17th Century apogee, the same architecture which can be seen in parts of Macao today.

(“Same”, so long as the barbarian Las Vegas casino-owners haven’t torn it down.)

Back to the music and Mr. Dantas. First, One could say that he played 30 different pieces in his two-hour recital. After the intermission, Mussorgsky’s Pictures. Before that, Mr. Dantas introduced the music of Freitas Branco, by alternating Debussy’s Book One Préludes with the Portuguese ten Prelúdios.

This was not a bad choice. True, Debussy, who lived from 1862-1918, was a generation above Freitas Branco, from 1890-1955. But the latter was a fairly conservative composer, and his “exotic” passages–whole tone melodies, faintly Asian melodies–had been Debussy trademarks long before that.

Mr. Dantas, with his slightly formal words and his swallowtail jacket, played both composers with limpid assurance. One doesn’t think of his fine technique, because he was always searching for the melodic undercurrent. Nothing was idiosyncratic in the Debussy, and preludes like The Engulfed Cathedral and Sails were taken with great assurance.

Mr. Freitas Branco has a few quirky titles (The Modern Ride of the Valkyries and Rapido, Grande Virtuosidade), but his works dovetailed on Debussy’s. A moderate Kind of Moderato was followed by an impetuous Animato. A sentimental Molto moderato was followed later by a Moto perpetuo etude.

They were all very pleasing, didn’t have an iota of traditional fado tears, and showed the mark of a craftsman, frequently inspired by hints of genius.

In a moment of his own programming genius, Mr. Dantas didn’t end with a bang, but with the delicious whispers of Debussy’s Minstrels.

One can never have enough of Pictures at an Exhibition, for those who can master its massive music. Mr. Dantas did this in style. I can’t say that I could form an image from each picture, but it was terrific music. Yes, I wanted to see more contrast between “rich Jew and poor Jew”, and the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks was heavier than the surrealistic title.

Yet that was Mr. Dantas’ choice, and he made good use of it. The final Great Gate of Kiev was played with all the power necessary, ending (prior to an encore of variations on a Portuguese song) with a triumphant set of flourishes.

By the way, the Great Gate of Kiev never existed. Like Mr. Trump’s Wall, it existed only in the mind. Painter Hartmann, composer Mussorgsky and pianist Dantas built it up to sheer power and monumental grandeur.

Harry Rolnick

New York Classical Review reviews Daedalus Quartet at Baruch PAC

Daedalus Quartet captures emotional depths of music by exiles

By Eric C. Simpson

It’s no secret that not all great performances happen in the biggest concert halls. This is especially true in the realm of chamber music, where a library or a small lecture hall is a more apposite setting than an auditorium built for thousands.

Just east of Madison Square Park, the Baruch Performing Arts Center hosts an impressive variety of musical programming in two small theaters underneath Baruch College’s main campus. On Tuesday evening, the talented Daedalus Quartet offered a program of works whose authors were all political exiles, forced by violence to leave their home countries.

As powerful as that idea is, it was the depth of the pieces themselves, rather than any thematic connection among them, that stood out in Tuesday’s concert. 

The evening began with the Third String Quartet of Viktor Ullmann. Ullmann, who was later killed at Auschwitz, wrote the quartet while a prisoner at Terezin, and the piece conveys deep emotions, even if they are not always obvious.

Open harmonies in the bars that begin the first movement feel bright but betray deep sadness, and Daedalus here brought a warm, full sound, breathing together from the start. The music proceeds with a waterfall-like flow, its apparent serenity interrupted by interludes of agitated arpeggios and nervous tremolos. In the scherzo, a waltz, at once playful and macabre, brings much harsher tonality and acid harmonies.

Long, slow, heavy breaths in the Largo are followed by a feeling of unease in the closing Rondo, where quiet tremolos create keen anticipation. Daedalus brilliantly captured the emotional ambiguity that makes the music at once so penetrating and uncomfortable.

Introducing his string quartet, Babel, Gabriel Bolaños explained that he had been born “in exile,” to use his phrase, his family having fled from Nicaragua to Colombia during the Sandinista Rebellion, just before his birth. Each of Babel’s five movements is a portrayal in music of particular features of languages to which Bolaños feels a personal connection. His musical language, though heavily gestural and reliant on extended technique, does feel expressive—though what exactly it expresses is a mystery. Overall, the piece is difficult to follow, even with program notes hinting at the ideas behind each movement.

“Spanish” presents little flashes of sound in short, disjointed phrases made up of glissandos, ricochets, and harmonics. In “English + Chinantecan,” the violins and the viola brush the strings while the cello traces a lonely melody. In “Nuxálk,” fierce pizzicato lines among the upper strings interlock in frantic conversation with each other while the cello scrapes a long, pitchless tone. The jumble of all these voices, each struggling to be heard in “Greenlandic,” gives way to a slow, chilly crawl towards resolution in “Vowel Harmony.”

The program’s second half consisted of the profound Piano Quintet by Mieczysław Weinberg, who fled Poland for the Soviet Union at the start of the Second World War. Joined by pianist Renana Gutman, Daedalus gave a gorgeous, rich reading of this emotionally complex piece.

After an abortive start when second violinist Matilda Kaul’s instrument slipped out of tune, Daedalus and Gutman began beautifully, with a warm pulse of strings supporting the piano’s haunting, discursive melody. There is a composed focus in the music of this first movement, conveying a sense that fraught emotions hide just below the surface. In spite of the hall’s dry acoustic, the musicians managed to achieve a full sound through rich dynamic definition.

The Allegretto brought just a hint of a springing dance step before ending in an astonishing hush, but a more exuberant romp came out in the boisterous waltz of the Presto, where there was a hint of comedy in the melodramatic melancholy of the dance. 

The most substantial movement of the five is the Largo, which unfolds in a deliberate but arresting development of ominously resonating chords. In it we hear the most emotional intensity and complexity of the quintet, as it passes through a number of musical ideas in succession. Out of the initial gloom emerges a wandering violin cadenza, in which Min-Young Kim channeled a folk spirit. Suddenly there appears a bright E-major chord in the piano that glides into an airy reverie in which longing, contentment, and sadness all mix together.

After the many subtle emotions of the Largo, it was a shock to hear the aggressive, gritty start of the Allegro agitato, which moves into something like an Irish reel. Daedalus and Gutman gave exuberant, heart-racing performance of the finale to finish off an impressive evening of challenging music.

Baruch Performing Arts Center’s next chamber event is 7:30 p.m. November 20, when the Alexander String Quartet performs works by Shostakovich, Mozart, and Mendelssohn. baruch.cuny.edu

Take Effect Reviews andPlay "playlist"

ANDPLAY

Playlist

New Focus, 2019

8/10

Listen to Playlist

andPlay is the duo of violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson, and on Playlist the pair deliver the work of David Bird, Clara Iannotta and Ashkhan Behzadi with precision, mystery and a whole lot of varied sounds.

“Crescita Plastica” starts the listen with almost sci-fi sounding strings, as dramatic tension is met with adventurous ideas and cautious manipulation, and “Bezier” follows with a similar approach where a cinematic quality invades the unpredictable setting that’s playful, textured and sometimes vulnerable.

The back half of the listen offers “Limun”, which, at over 7 minutes, is the shortest tune but no less impactful with acrobatic swells of sharp violin, and “Apocrypha” ends the listen haunting and with electronics, as the balance between digital and organic unfolds with ingenuity.

Though this is their debut as andPlay, Bennardo and Levinson have both been involved in many other outfits. Together, however, their dynamic sensibilities and keen sense of song craft collide with an inimitable, extraordinary performance.

Travels well with: Hilary Hahn & Hauschka- Silfra; Joshua Bell- Voice Of The Violin

Blogcritics reviews Alon Goldstein at Baruch PAC

Concert Review: Pianist Alon Goldstein (NYC, 22 Oct. 2019)

Jon Sobel

Pianist Alon Goldstein performed an era-spanning program of animated piano music at the Baruch Performing Arts Center (BPAC) Oct. 22. Beginning with four selections from his large Scarlatti arsenal, he also offered thoughtful and frequently amusing commentary on the music. When a musician talks directly to the audience, it lightens the formal air that tends to hang over classical music, and that’s all to the good for listeners and artists alike.

Domenico Scarlatti’s astoundingly imaginative sonatas – there are 555 of them – can speak for themselves, of course. And I always appreciate hearing how different keyboardists interpret these works by a composer born in 1685, the same year as J.S. Bach.

Goldstein took a middle ground between the clockwork formalism some pianists apply to this music – perhaps in an effort to evoke the lesser dynamics of the harpsichord for which it was written – and the more romantic approach exemplified by Vladimir Horowitz.

Goldstein read K. 11 with pensive delicacy, carefully delineating each note while weaving a smooth imaginative tapestry out of the whole. Slightly excessive speed made K. 159 a little less satisfying, with overly distracting tempo breaks necessitated by quick changes in hand positions. But aside from that, his rubatos and tempo changes felt emotionally valid. Light, judicious use of the sustain pedal in K. 324 brought the harpsichord heritage to mind. The set closed with K. 120, whose over 100 hand crossings require almost superhuman dexterity and earned the pianist rousing applause.

Moving on to Beethoven, Goldstein first demonstrated the world of color differences produced by different keys, playing for a moment the opening bars of the “Moonlight” Sonata in C minor, instead of the unusual key of C sharp minor that the composer chose. The latter key gave it, in Goldstein’s words, “a color no one expected or heard before.”

He chose a relatively quick tempo for that famous opening movement. The effect, for me, was to suggest the music’s connection to the baroque lineage of J.S. Bach. I’d never thought about this before when hearing – or playing, as I did too often as a young piano student – this beloved and indeed over-played piece. It also brought to mind the songfulness of Mendelssohn and Schubert. I found it a really enlightening interpretation of a movement that’s often performed so slowly that it lands heavily on the soul.

The crisp syncopated rhythms of the second movement were equally effective. But the tempo got ahead of good intentions in the third movement’s piled-up arpeggios, which at times got muddy under the sustain pedal.

Stunning clarity returned in Janáček’s agonized Piano Sonata 1.X.190 “From the Street.” This protest piece from 1905 carries a painful sting, and Goldstein wielded it with force and precision. Moments of calm proved illusory amid the stormy first movement (“Foreboding”). The more solemn second (“Death”) only brought more pain in Goldstein’s insightful reading, though some relief as well after the first movement’s gut punch.

Wisely, he followed up with two Debussy Preludes. These carry their own unpredictable drama but in a dreamy style, full of airy colors and kaleidoscopic clusters.

The concert closed with impressive showpieces courtesy of Alberto Ginastera, the 20th-century Argentine composer whose work seems to be turning up on concert programs everywhere these days. Even the titles are fun: “Dance of the Old Herdsman” was racy and playfully intense, “Dance of the Delicate Maiden” softly romantic with delicate dissonances. Finally, assertive high spirits ruled in the tightly wound virtuosity of “Dance of the Arrogant Gaucho.”

For an encore, Goldstein gave us something perfect for a New York City audience: a piano transcription from Leonard Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety” Symphony, loaded with wild pianistic jazziness and played masterfully. Visit Alon Goldstein’s website for upcoming concerts and BPAC’s site for its busy season of cultural events.

World Music Report reviews andPlay "playlist"

andPlay: Playlist

By Raul da Gama

Ashkan Behzadi – Crescita Plastica; David Bird – Bezier; Apocrypha; Clara Iannotta – Limun

andPlay is Maya Bennardo: vn and Hannah Levinson: va

In a rather audacious complaint, pianist and contemporary composer Thomas Larcher once posited that to him, the piano’s natural sound was “of something  worn out, obsolete, at a dead-end” and said that this led to his desire to attempt to resuscitate it through a wholly new “sound” through his work need never apply to violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson performing as andPlay. The string duo has simply re-invented the sound of their instruments – played separately and in harmony with each other. They have, of course, had the benefit of being given a leg up by three brazen composers who have imagined what this “newly invented sound” would be like once music was created out of it.

But creating dissonance and stringing up discordant notes into musically acceptable phrases on paper is no guarantee that such precocious imaginings would work in practice. Interpreting it successfully not one – it appears – but at least twice by this duo is the other – missing – piece. And so, positioning themselves in creative conflict with age-old protocols about how string instruments should be played, and dispensing with travelling a naturally well-worn road Miss Bennardo and Miss Levinson have chiseled their performances into something provocative and unique on this repertoire on Playlist.

Throwing out the dead and, in Mr Larcher’s words that which seems “worn out” and “obsolete” the duo ends up throwing overboard melodic, structural and harmonic hooks that have become expressively blunted by overuse and built music from what might – or might not – be left. In doing just so, the duo has enabled the brave new worlds of Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird and Clara Iannotta to come to life not in the musical traditions that we expect but with a new definition of beauty central to their new artistic credo.

With those composers, then, Miss Bennardo and Miss Levinson argue against the “beauty” of overly perfumed, audience-ingratiating beauty typical of commercial music and in favour of “authentic beauty”. This often evokes the German word Geräusch – meaning noise, but in a sense of natural noise such as perhaps the wind blowing through trees or representative of an icy dulled chill in the scenario of a narrative to shepherd these works without compromising their newly declared elementally “beautiful” sound-world.

Released – 2019
Label – New Focus Recordings (fcr 233)
Runtime – 48:04

BlogCritics reviews Momenta Festival

Concert Review: Momenta Quartet Plays Ligeti, Partch, and a Roberto Sierra World Premiere (Oct 16, 2019)

Jon Sobel

The Momenta String Quartet gave each of its members an evening to curate during this year’s edition of the ensemble’s Momenta Festival. Despite a heavy rainstorm, a sizable audience turned out for the “Night Dances” concert curated by first violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron. While her inspiration may have lain in the shadows, the energy was bright during a program of fascinating music by legendary 20th-century iconoclast Harry Partch, modernist icon György Ligeti, and others. Notable was the world premiere of an intense piece written for the Momenta Quartet by the eminent Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra – who can count Ligeti as one of his teachers.

It’s hard to imagine Sierra, who was in attendance, being anything but delighted by the debut of his “Cuarteto para Cuerdas (String Quartet) No. 3.” A thoughtful and virtuosic showpiece, with five flowing movements built around a single nine-note scale, it leaps off the page with tricky rhythms right from the start. A percussive and densely harmonic “Cantando” second movement opens the way for the intriguing fits and starts of the “Rapidísimo” third. The final movements boil together with untrackable (yet somehow playable) rhythms. Altogether it’s a brilliantly constructed contiguous whole that leaves the listener metaphorically breathless.

The musicians’ convincing reading made Sierra’s new baby a fitting counterweight to the big beast of the concert’s second half, Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, “Métamorphoses nocturnes.” This work demands a great variety of techniques and colors, which the musicians achieved with a warm humanism matching their technical mastery.

As the instruments traded off on the simple main theme in the final section, sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes in reverse, sometimes with slides, the theme’s wild variations and developments, which had formed the meat of the piece, came back to me in a satisfying recall (including a sort-of-cubist waltz). This youthful work may predate the full flowering of the composer’s personal language, but it fully deserves its place in the 20th-century canon, as the Momenta’s accomplished performance demonstrated.

Harry Partch was surely one of the last century’s most unusual musical spirits, defying most conventions and composing for instruments of his own invention. Gendron chose to open the concert with an arrangement for string quartet by Ben Johnston of Partch’s “Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales.” These folksy miniatures featured playful melodies with startling use of just intonation, evoking in a humble but effortless way the weirdness of the large 44-string resonating boxes called the Harmonic Canon II for which Partch originally wrote them.

The Ligeti and Partch on the program drew me to this concert, but I was pleased to hear music by Erwin Schulhoff as well. This Czech-German-Jewish composer who perished in the Holocaust is little heard today. I first encountered his music on the Jerusalem Quartet’s recent Yiddish Cabaret album (reviewed here), which included Schulhoff’s spirited “Five Pieces for String Quartet.” Gendron of the Momenta performed a piece I hadn’t heard before, Schulhoff’s 1927 “Sonata for Violin Solo.” Playing a modern violin that sounded both fulsome and intimate in the Americas Society‘s small concert hall, she regaled us with magnificent fiddling in this colorful, barnburning music.

As if the pieces described above didn’t offer enough variety, the night-inspired program also included Mario Lavista’s String Quartet No. 2 “Reflejos de la noche” (1984), comprised entirely (with the exception of some lighthearted squeaks) of harmonics. So of course it’s a quiet piece, but its suggestions of bird and insect sounds are punctuated by siren wails. The single movement develops into a kind of skewed pastoral, with a surprisingly wide variety of colors (given the restrictions of harmonics), and tugged in unexpected directions by blue notes.

The Momenta musicians played this innovative (if somewhat overlong) work with sensitivity and charm, as they did the entire program. Their festival wraps up Oct. 18 and 19 with concerts at the Tenri Cultural Institute. Visit the Momenta’s website for information on upcoming concerts, and the Americas Society website for its calendar of upcoming musical events.

Lucid Culture reviews Momenta Festival

Things Go Bump in the Night With the Momenta Quartet

It’s extremely rare that an artist or group make the front page here more than once in a single week. But today, because the Momenta Quartet play such stylistically diverse, consistently interesting music, they’ve earned that distinction – just like the Kronos Quartet have, on two separate occasions, since this blog went live in 2007. Some people are just a lot more interesting than others.

This year’s annual Momenta Festival is in full swing, with its usual moments of transcendence and blissful adrenaline. The Momenta Quartet’s violist Stephanie Griffin programmed night one; night two, violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron took charge. As she put it, the theme was “Lively things that happen at night.” She wasn’t kidding.

Maybe, to provide a little break for her bandmates – who also include violinist Alex Shiozaki and cellist Michael Haas – Gendron supplied a major portion of the adrenaline with an irresistible romp through Erwin Schulhoff’s rarely performed Sonata For Violin Solo. Throughout its eclectic shifts from evocations of Appalachian, Middle Eastern, Asian and rustic Romany music, she swayed and practically clogdanced at one point, and that vivacity was contagious.

The high point of the night was one of the group’s innumerable world premieres, Roberto Sierra‘s sublimely shapeshifting, relentlessly bustling Cuarteto Para Cuerdas No. 3. Flurrying, almost frantic interludes juxtaposed with brief, uneasily still moments and all sorts of similarly bracing challenges for the group: slithery harmonics, microtonal haze spiced with fleeting poltergeist accents, finally a wry series of oscillations from Haas and a savagely insistent coda. Distant references to boleros, and a less distant resemblance to restless, late 50s Charles Mingus urban noir drove a relentless tension forward through a rollercoaster of sudden dynamic changes. There were cameras all over the room: somebody please put this up on youtube where it will blow people’s minds!

There was even more on Gendron’s bill, too. The hypnotic horizontality and subtle development of playful minimalist riffs of Mario Lavista’s String Quartet No. 2 were no less difficult to play for their gauzy microtonality and almost total reliance on harmonics. Harry Partch’s Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales have a colorful history: originally written for the composer’s own 88-string twin-box invention, the Harmonic Canon II, the Momentas played the string quartet arrangement by the great microtonal composer Ben Johnston, a Partch protege. Part quasi Balkan dance, part proto horror film score, the group made the diptych’s knotty syncopation seem effortless.

They closed with Gyorgy Ligeti’s String Quartet No.1, subtitled “Metamorphoses Nocturnes.” The ensemble left no doubt that this heavily Bartokian 1953 piece was all about war, and its terror and lingering aftershock (Ligeti survived a Nazi death camp where two of his family were murdered). The similarities with Shostakovich’s harrowing String Quartet No. 8 – which it predated by six years – were crushingly vivid. If anything, Ligeti’s quartet is tonally even harsher. In the same vein as the Sierra premiere, these dozen movements required daunting extended technique. Which in this case meant shrieking intensity, frantic evasion of the gestapo, (musical and otherwise) and deadpan command of withering sarcasm and parodies of martial themes. All that, and a crushing, ever-present sense of absence.

The 2019 Momenta Festival winds up tonight, Oct 19 at 7 PM at the Tenri Institute, 43A W 13th St., with a playful program assembled by Shiozaki, including works by Mozart, toy pianist Phyllis Chen (who joins the ensemble), glass harmonica wizard Stefano Gervasoni and an excerpt from Griffin’s delightfully adult-friendly children’s suite, The Lost String Quartet. Admission is free but you should rsvp if you’re going.

anearful reviews andPlay "playlist"

andPlay - playlist There’s so much overlap in NYC’s fecund new music scene that it took me a minute to connect the Hannah Levinson I was watching play Catherine Lamb with Talea Ensemble at Tenri Cultural Center last month with this album, which I already had on repeat at the time. But, yes, this is the same violist, here paired with violinist Maya Bennardo, whom I also know as a member of Hotel Elefant. Though they founded andPlay about seven years ago and have commissioned many works, this is their debut album. The five world-premiere recordings make a perfect statement of the versatility and even power of this combination of instruments.

Ashkan Behzadi’s Crescita Plastica (2015) opens the album with dramatic swoops and glides, guttural stops and eerie harmonics in a bold statement of purpose. Bezier (2013), the first of two works by David Bird, turns the viola and violin into glitchy simulacra of electronic instruments, with bird-like tones intruding playfully before the real fireworks start. It’s a tour de force and quite a calling card for this composer, who was new to me. Clara Iannota’s Limun (2011) is next, adding a harmonica to the sound world, which provides a drone over which Levinson and Bennardo alternately duel and join forces. Bird’s Apocrypha (2017) further expands things with electronics and brings the album to a stunning close. He is a composer I hope to hear more from soon. Bennardo and Levinson have made such a strong case for this instrumentation that I hardly thought about it, just reveling in all the fantastic sounds, expertly captured by New Focus. I hope andPlay is prepared to be overwhelmed next time they put out a call for scores!

New York Music Daily reviews opening night at the 2019 Momenta Festival

Transcendent Rarities and World Premieres to Open The 2019 Momenta Festival

by delarue

A few months ago at a panel discussion at a major cultural institution, a nice mature lady in the crowd asked a famous podcaster – such that a podcaster in the 21st century serious-music demimonde can be famous, anyway – what new composers she should be listening to. Given a prime opportunity to bigup her favorites, the podcaster completely dropped the ball. She hedged. But if she’d thought about the question, she could have said, with complete objectivity, “Just go see the Momenta Quartet. They have impeccable taste, and pretty much everything they do is a world premiere.”

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the annual Momenta Festival, and the fifteenth for the quartet themselves. There was some turnover in the early years, but the current lineup of violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Alex Shiozaki, violist Stephanie Griffin and cellist Michael Haas has solidified into one of the world’s major forces in new music. Opening night of the 2019 Momenta Festival was characteristically enlightening and often genuinely transcendent.

Each of the quartet’s members takes a turn programming one of the festival’s four nights; Griffin, the only remaining member from the original trio that quickly grew into a fearsome foursome, took charge of the opening festivities. Each festival has a theme: this year’s is a retrospective, some of the ensemble’s greatest hits.

In a nod to their trio origins, Shiozaki, Griffin and Haas opened with Mario Davidovsky’s 1982 String Trio. Its central dynamic contrasted sharp, short figures with lingering ambience, the three musicians digging into its incessant, sometimes striking, sometimes subtle changes in timbre and attack.

The night’s piece de resistance was Julian Carrillo’s phantasmagorical, microtonal 1959 String Quartet No. 10, a piece the Momentas basically rescued from oblivion. Alternate tunings, whispery harmonics and a strange symmetric logic pervaded the music’s slowly glissandoing rises and falls, sometimes with a wry, almost parodic sensibility. But at other times it was rivetingly haunting, lowlit with echo effects, elegaic washes underpinned by belltone cello and a raptly hushed final movement with resonant, ambered, mournfully austere close harmonies.

In typical Momenta fashion, they played a world premiere, Alvin Singleton‘s Hallelujah Anyhow. Intriguing variations on slowly rising wave-motion phrases gave way to stricken, shivering pedal notes from individual voices in contrast with hazy sustain, then the waves returned, artfully transformed. Haas’ otherworldly, tremoloing cello shortly before the coy, sudden pizzicato ending was one of the concert’s high points.

After a fond slideshow including shots of seemingly all of the violinists who filtered through the group in their early years, conductor David Bloom and baritone Nathaniel Sullivan joined them for another world premiere commission, Matthew Greenbaum’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a setting of Walt Whitman poetry. The program notes mentioned that the text has special resonance for the composer, considering that he grew up close to where the old ferry left Manhattan and now resides across the river near the Brooklyn landing. Brain drain out of Manhattan much?

It took awhile to gel. At first, the music didn’t seem to have much connection to the text, and the quartet and the vocals seemed to be in alternate rhythmic universes – until about the time Sullivan got to the part cautioning that it is not “You alone who know what it is to be evil.” At that point, the acerbic, steady exchange of voices latched onto a tritone or two and some grimly familiar, macabre riffage, which fell away for longer, rainy-day sustained lines.

The Momenta Festival continues tonight, Oct 16 at 7 PM at the Americas Society, 680 Park Ave at 70th St. with works by Harry Partch, Mario Lavista, Roberto Sierra, Gyorgy Ligeti and Erwin Schulhoff programmed by Gendron. How much does this fantastic group charge for tickets? Fifty bucks? A hundred? Nope. Admission is free but a rsvp is very highly advisable.

Amsterdam News features Alvin Singleton premiere at Momenta Festival

Prolific composer Alvin Singleton talks upcoming work, ‘Black culture’ as ‘American culture’

NADINE MATTHEWS

Alvin Singleton was a kid with access in the midtwentieth century close-knit Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of his childhood. “Where I grew up,” he explains in an interview with Amsterdam News, “there were a lot of jazz musicians. I had friends in their families so I used to go to their rehearsals.” That informal exposure became the foundation for what became Alvin Singleton’s international career as an award-winning musical composer.

He studied music composition at New York University and Yale University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Rome. After returning to the U.S., after living in Europe for almost 15 years, he was Composer-in-Residence with the Atlanta Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Ritz Chamber Players and Spelman College. Singleton still spends much of his time in Atlanta.

Momenta Quartet will premiere Singleton’s Chamber Music America-commissioned piece “Hallelujah Anyhow” at Americas Society in New York City on Oct. 15. It will be part of the fifth annual Momenta Festival, a series of four concerts with diverse programs curated by the members of Momenta Quartet. Admission is free, but reservations are strongly recommended.

Singleton’s parents also played a significant role in his decision to become a musician. “They made me learn an instrument and I chose piano. Eventually, I learned to play jazz.” Singleton’s experience with jazz led to an interest in composing music. He enrolled in the New York College of Music (now part of NYU) where he began studying music composition. “I didn’t really categorize myself. I had begun listening to classical pieces and I knew there were a lot of Black composers.” Singleton joined the Society of Black Composers, which further fueled his fascination.

Singleton demurs when described as a composer of classical music. “I know that I write music. I’m a composer. So, categorization always gets us in trouble because it defines us very narrowly.”

When asked to describe “Hallelujah Anyhow,” he is characteristically reluctant to do so. “When people ask me about the titles for my pieces, I always say titles are for identification, not explanation. To know the music, you have to listen to it.”

The process of composing “Hallelujah Anyhow” was unexpectedly interrupted by a health scare. Singleton shares, “This piece took quite a long time,” he says, “because I had to have heart bypass surgery last year. It came out of nowhere because I didn’t have a heart attack or anything, I just had a blockage.”

He will, however, share his thoughts on some of his works that are relatively special to him. He has admitted that his “After Fallen Crumbs” was dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. due to King’s focus on helping

the poor.

The prolific Singleton will also share that he is particularly proud of “Shadows,” which he wrote for orchestra. “When I go back and examine it I see ideas that I was using that I didn’t realize at the moment. When I go over early music, I see ideas that aren’t fully developed because I was still developing. The more I write, the more I mature. In fact, I’m still developing even at this age.”

Perhaps because of his special connection to “Shadows,” Singleton has ventured to describe it in a past interview as, “An idea based upon different-sized spinning tops, each having its own little melody, and they intersect and shadow one another as the work develops.”

The general acknowledgment that Black American culture is an integral part of U.S. culture itself is something Singleton is excited about. In part borne out by recent developments such as the announcement by The Met that it will present Terence Blanchard’s opera based on New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s memoirs “Fire Shut Up In My Bones,” the first time in the storied institution’s history that it will present an opera by a Black composer. The libretto is by writer and filmmaker Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”). “I think it’s about time, first of all,” Singleton says. “Secondly, it’s about the music. There are plenty of Black composers writing really good music but they don’t get the opportunity to be invited to be composers. Slowly but surely Black culture is being recognized as true American culture. I can’t imagine this country without Black people.”

NYC-ARTS previews Dan Siegler's “Concrète Jungle”

“Concrète Jungle” is a work of sound art performed live by composer Dan Siegler and special guests. The piece is inspired by and takes its title from musique concrète, an electroacoustic genre in which ready made sounds are employed in place of instrumentation. Featuring hundreds of intricately edited New York voices, “Concrète Jungle” highlights borough-specific accents, linguistic filler and word repetitions to form assembled sentences and musical grooves. Siegler has pointilistically sequenced these recordings, creating a work that contains both pre-arranged and improvisational components. Layered under the dialogue, Siegler transforms harsh urban street noise, filtering it through digital delay, reverb and echo effects, rendering it meditative and ambient.

Connected to his father’s loss of language from dementia, Siegler attempts to create order out of verbal chaos, removing words from their original context and intended meaning and reassembling surprisingly comedic, often poignant invented dialogue between people who have never met. A native New Yorker, Siegler grew up in Greenwich Village at a time when artists and middle-class families could afford to live there.”Concrète Jungle”contrasts that era’s debates with today’s public discourse, illustrating the value of meaningful conversation around challenging subjects across generations. The piece engages the audience in what composer Pauline Oliveros called “deep listening.”

The world premiere performance includes collaborative performers, including dancer Pam Tanowitz, vocalist Christina Campanella and violinist Tomoko Omura, improvising onstage with the electronic sounds manipulated by Siegler in real time.

Image courtesy of Dan Siegler.

MusicWeb International Review: Mozart Piano Concertos

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, K453 (1784) [30:01]
Piano Concerto No.24 in C minor, K491 (1786) [29:04]
Orli Shaham (piano)
St Louis Symphony Orchestra/David Robertson
rec. 2017/18, Powell Hall, St Louis, Missouri
CANARY CLASSICS CC18 [59:10]

Coupling two such theatrical concertos as these, and ones that sport theme and variations in their finales, makes good sense. It also marks the first commercial recording in 16 years for the St Louis Symphony under David Robertson, then nearing the end of his 13-year stint as music director. Who better to accompany, then, than his wife, Orli Shaham playing on a New York Steinway.

Clearly there was perceptive microphone placements in Powell Hall, as the balances are finely judged, and things emerge naturally and not spotlit. In the Concerto in G the opening orchestral introduction is genially characterised and there is a chamber-like colloquium between soloist and wind principals. The violins sound divided too, and the consequent performance marries elegance, precision in voicings and secure ensemble. Similarly, there’s a touching intimacy in the slow movement and Shaham’s cadenza here has a quality of veiled melancholy. Cannily judged, the variations in the finale are both engaging and full of bubbling wit.

The companion concerto in C minor is the moodier and more introspective work but it too receives a buoyant and winning reading. The horns make their presence felt and the St Louis strings sound lithe but full toned and mercifully free of period desiccation. To enliven the first movement Shaham plays the Saint-Saëns cadenza with fiery intensity and commanding bravura – Robert Casadesus did the same in his old recording with Szell. The slow movement is fluency itself, in a clarity-conscious landscape, and the finale reprises the virtues, of line, definition and characterisation, that imbued the G major work.

Working hand in glove ensures a particularly simpatico reading of this brace of concertos. The booklet is a symposium between Shaham, Robertson and writer and academic Elaine Sisman that goes into some interesting musical detail about the works and is well worth reading. And as for this disc – it’s well worth hearing.

Jonathan Woolf

OperaWire previews Victoria Bond's "Clara"

Victoria Bond’s ‘Clara’ Comes To NYC This November

ByDavid Salazar

The German Forum is set to showcase Victoria Bond and Barbara Zinn Krieger’s “Clara” in New York.

The new opera will be presented at Symphony Space in New York City on Nov. 8 with another showcase set for Nov. 10 at the Church of the Messiah in Rhinebeck.

The opera will feature Christine Reber as Clara Schumann with Jonathan Estabrooks as Robert Schumann. Heejae Kim will take on the role of Johannes Brahms while Robert Osborn will portray Friedrich Wieck. The performance will also showcase a piano trio comprised of violinist Sumina Studer, cellist Thilo Thomas Krigar, and pianist Babette Hierholzer.

The opera had its premiere at the Berlin Philharmonic Festival in Baden- Baden earlier this year in celebration of Schumann’s birth.

“Bond’s opera emphasizes Clara’s inner life and the conflicts of a woman struggling to balance the demands of those who depend on her against her rising consciousness of her own needs,” stated the review from Classical Voice America.

Lucid Culture reviews andPlay CD release party

New Music Duo andPlay and Cello Rocker Meaghan Burke Put on a Serious Party at the Edge of Chinatown

How do violin/viola duo andPlay manage to create such otherworldly, quietly phantasmagorical textures? Beyond their adventurous choice of repertoire, they use weird alternate tunings. Folk and rock guitarists have been doing that since forever, but unorthodox tunings are a relatively new phenomenon in the chamber music world. At the release party for their new album Playlist at the Metropolis Ensemble‘s second-floor digs at 1 Rivington St. last night, violist Hannah Levinson and violinist Maya Bennardo – with some help from their Rhythm Method buds Meaghan Burke and Leah Asher, on harmonica and melodica, respectively – evoked a ghost world that was as playful and bracing as it was envelopingly sepulchral. Anybody who might mistakenly believe that all 21st century serious concert music is stuffy or wilfully abstruse needs to check out the programming here.

The party was in full effect before the music started. A sold-out crowd pregamed with bourbon punch and grapefruit shots. As the performance began, Levinson sent a big bucket of fresh saltwater taffy around the audience, seated in the round. The charismatic Burke opened with a brief solo set of characteristically biting, entertainingly lyrical cello-rock songs. Calmly and methodically, she shifted between catchy, emphatic basslines, tersely slashing riffs, starry pizzicato and hypnotic, loopy minimalism. The highlights included Hysteria, a witheringly funny commentary on medieval (and much more recent) patriarchal attempts to control womens’ sexual lives, along with a wry, guardedly optimistic, brand-new number contemplating the hope tbat today’s kids will retain the ability to see with fresh eyes.

Dressed in coyly embroidered, matching bespoke denim jumpsuits, andPlay wasted no time introducing the album’s persistently uneasy, close harmonies  with a piece that’s not on it, Adam Roberts‘ new Diptych. Contrasting nebulous ambience with tricky polyrhythmic counterpoint, the duo rode its dynamic shfits confidently through exchanges of incisive pizzicato with muted austerity, to a particularly tasty, acerbic, tantalizingly brief coda.

Clara Ionatta’s partita Limun, Levinson explained, was inspired by the Italian concept of lemon as a panacea. Playful sparring between the duo subtly morphed into slowly drifting tectonic sheets, finally reaching a warmer, more consonant sense of closure that was knocked off its axis by a sudden, cold ending.

The laptop loops of composer David Bird‘s live remix of his epic Apochrypha threatened to completely subsume the strings, but that quasar pulse happily receded to the background. It’s the album’s most distinctly microtonal track, Bennardo and Levinson quietly reveling in both its sharp, short, flickeringly agitated riffs and misty stillness.

The next concert at the space at 1 Rivington is on Oct 11 at 7:30 PM with composer Molly Herron and the Argus Quartet celebrating the release of their new album “with music and poetry that explore history and transformation.” Cover is $20/$10 stud.

Momenta Festival featured in The New Yorker

Any good string-quartet performance demonstrates the capacity for four individuals to meld their distinct personalities into a group identity and sound. The Momenta Festival serves notice that the reverse is also true, as each member of this excellent quartet—the violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Alex Shiozaki, the violist Stephanie Griffin, and the cellist Michael Haas—programs a free concert. Taken together, they provide a kaleidoscopic view of the group’s inner urges. The first two programs, curated by Griffin and Gendron, respectively, present a fascinating mix of works, including world premières by Alvin Singleton, Matthew Greenbaum, and Roberto Sierra; the next set follows on Oct. 18-19, at Tenri Cultural Institute.

—Steve Smith