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

Insider Interview with Pianist Vasco Dantas

On Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 2 p.m. Portuguese pianist Vasco Dantas makes his Carnegie Hall debut performing music by Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Portuguese impressionist Luis de Freitas-Branco. In this Insider Interview, Vasco Dantas talks about his role as a cultural ambassador for Portugal, his early aspirations as a pianist, and more.

What first drew you to the piano? Tell us about some of your first memories about it.

The piano came into my life at the age of 4 by a mere coincidence. No one in my family is or was a professional musician, although my father always enjoyed music and arts (he had been a theatre actor before deciding to do engineering) and my mom has always painted as a hobby.

When I was 4 years of age, my father was singing in a choir and I would go with him to the rehearsals on Saturday mornings. The conductor of this choir, José Manuel Pinheiro, noticed that during the rehearsal break I would play at the keyboard. He realized I was imitating some of the melodies the choir had been singing just before. He sat down with me started playing a few musical games with me. He quickly realized that I had perfect pitch and subsequently suggested to my parents that there should be no question that I should begin studying the piano. That was it, the next school year I started learning this instrument which is now a major part of my life.

How did you choose the repertoire for this program? Tell us about the connections between the pieces.

I wanted to choose a program that I love and, at the same time, one I would be comfortable playing. Therefore I immediately chose “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky, which is one of my favorite works for piano which, curiously, I first learned about when I played the Ravel orchestration of the piece, on the violin with the Portuguese Youth Orchestra. I first recorded this piece in 2015 at the London Royal College of Music on my first solo CD called “Promenade” and I believe this is a fantastic piece to have in any piano recital.

For the first half of the program, I chose a special combination of 10 Prelúdios by Freitas Branco together with 5 Preludes by Debussy. This has been a recent project from me, combining these two similar composers, contemporaries of each other, resulting in carefully chosen sequence of 15 preludes performed with no significant interruption, giving it all a wonderful new combination and fresh vision. During the first half program, besides choosing wonderful music, I also wanted to bring new sounds and something different from my country, Portugal, a ‘premiere’ at Carnegie Hall.

Tell us more about the Portuguese composer Luis de Freitas Branco – he is not familiar to most music lovers here. How would you describe his style, and where does he stand in the history of music amongst his more famous contemporaries?

Luís de Freitas Branco is probably the most important Portuguese composer and pianist from the first half of the 20th century. Branco was from Lisbon but had the opportunity to study abroad in Central Europe and France where he had his first contact with modernism and impressionism, the prominent musical styles of the previous century. At that time the dominant musical paradigm in Portugal was still based on and inspired by the Romantic Musical Style from the 19th century. When Branco returned to his homeland he was the first composer to introduce Modernism into the Portuguese music. He, along with his older friend and composer Vianna da Motta, (pupil of Franz Liszt) also renewed the music curriculum at The Lisbon Music Conservatory, together).

Branco’s style is very much inspired by the French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, as well as the Belgian composer César Franck. These preludes, in particular, remind us of the French Impressionism from a uniquely different Portuguese perspective.

Branco has to his credit an abundance of high-quality repertoire, not only for solo piano, but also for Chamber Music. I believe his music ought to be played more often and studied more, both in Portugal and abroad.

You have won dozens of prizes in competitions, and now are making your Carnegie Hall debut. What are the next steps in your career?

First of all, it is for me an honor to perform in Carnegie Hall: such a mythical and hallowed venue where I have seen so many historic concert videos of fantastic musicians, particularly pianists.

I plan to continue developing my career, not only in Europe, but also in other parts of the world like USA and South America. One of the things about being a classical pianist is that there is almost an unlimited quantity of wonderful repertoire available. Therefore, I still have much repertoire I wish to perform, in solo and chamber recitals and with orchestras.

In the future, I would also like to combine my performance career with a pedagogic career, because I love teaching and I feel I learn so much by teaching others!

Apart from my performing career, I would like to continue to develop the cultural and musical scene in Portugal. I plan on expanding my chamber music festival “Algarve Music Series”, and creating other new musical projects in order to provide greater opportunities to the younger generation of musicians so as to foster classical music in Portugal, both broader in scope and in depth.

Your performances have taken you to many parts of the world. What experiences stand out to you in your travels?

My concert appearances have taken me to four different continents and many distinctive countries. I have had quite a few wonderful experiences while in contact with different people, cultures, food, and weather.

Once, on the first time I was in Russia for a concert with the orchestra, I had just met the musicians, and I realized they could not speak English well enough nor could I speak Russian very well. So before the rehearsal we were having a hard time communicating and sharing opinions with each other. I felt a little bit stressed imagining how hard those rehearsals and the concert were going to be. But something wonderful happened; once we started rehearsing everything started to make sense and we were able to communicate through music, musically demonstrating our artistic opinions on the piece we were playing. At that moment I understood that music truly is “the universal language”.

Which activities do you enjoy during your leisure time?

I love sports, when I am home I like to go surfing. It works as a kind of meditation time for me. I also like to run by the sea, play football with my friends and often I participate in chess tournaments, which I love too.

I like to be with my family and friends, hiking in Natural Parks or other beautiful places full of nature, and cooking nice meals.

What would you like people to know about Portugal?

Portugal has almost nine centuries of history and distinctive culture; it has both influenced and been influenced by its worldwide trade with other nations. However, during much of the 20th century, Portugal was ruled by a dictatorship that kept its borders closed to cultural and music influences from abroad.

Since the “Carnation Revolution” in 1974, the country has gradually changed; it is now a completely different place. It’s become a tourist destination, open to the arts and classical music, and the Portuguese musicians are among the best in Europe.

Violin Channel Interviews David Bird, whose music is featured on andPlay's Debut Album "Playlist"

On Friday, September 27, 2019, violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson, collectively known as the duo andPlay, release their debut CD playlist, on New Focus Recordings. The album features music by Ashkan Behzadi, Clara Iannotta, and David Bird. In this extended interview with The Violin Channel, David Bird discusses his piece “Apocrypha”, collaborating closely with andPlay, and more.

What was your idea or inspiration behind the work?

"Apocrypha" is loosely inspired by Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel "Solaris". Lem's book follows a team of scientists stationed on a distant planet covered by a vast and gelatinous ocean. In the novel, the ocean demonstrates a bizarre ability to manipulate the emotions and memories of the scientists. "Apocrypha", exploits a similar process, where the enveloping presence of the electronic sounds prompt different emotional states in the duo's performance. “Apocrypha” was written for andPlay (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo), and was developed in the summer of 2016 at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute. It’s also featured on the ensemble’s upcoming album ‘playlist' available on New Focus Recordings, September 27th.

How did this opportunity come to you?

I had worked with andPlay prior on a piece entitled "Bezier", it was a remarkable experience, as the ensemble was really willing to sit down and try things out as I was sketching the piece. I quickly appreciated how flexible and poignant they were in engaging with musical structures that were 'a bit weird' or uncommon, and doing so with a lot of poise and professionalism. So it was easy to hope for and anticipate a subsequent collaboration. Additionally the ensemble had been playing “Bezier” often, and being a composer with a background in electronic and electroacoustic music, I was eager to follow that with something that integrated my electronic music skill set with their unique sound world and performance capabilities.

What was your personal process for taking it from your head to the concert stage?

I think this was one of my longer composing periods, with this piece taking over a year to write. Because of this I was able to take a wider perspective on the piece and cut out extraneous sections where necessary. Even though it took a while to compose, the sound world of the piece always felt very alive and vibrant to me, I think this was in part because we had developed a lot of the sounds and sections together in residence at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute. And so in addition to being inspired by these sessions, I knew what would and wouldn’t work, and was able to work with a lot of high quality recordings made with the ensemble in these sessions.

What do you hope listeners will take away with them?

The novel "Solaris" depicts the way in which a planet is able to manipulate the emotions and memories of space travelers as they approach it, and I was interested in depicting the violin and viola as characters that slowly, and almost unknowingly, enter some kind of turbulent emotional orbit and then depart from it. And so in a broad sense, the piece charts a transformation of tone and perspective, with each section of the work descending into new layers and emotional depths, each with their own sound worlds and musical relationships. Ultimately I’d invite any perspective or listening of the piece, but would be glad if an audience experienced some kind of transformation for (or in) themselves.

Gramophone Reviews Victoria Bond's latest album "Instruments of Revelation"

BOND Instruments of Revelation

Gramophone Magazine | October 2019
By Guy Rickards

Victoria Bond (b1945) is a multifaceted composer and conductor (the first woman to hold a Doctorate in Conducting from the Juilliard School). Her catalogue ranges from chamber opera – her Clara was premiered this April during the Berlin Philharmonic Easter Festival to mark Clara Schumann’s bicentenary – to concertos, vocal, chamber and instrumental pieces, for instance the quintet for flute, clarinet and piano trio Instruments of Revelation (2010), which derives from three Tarot cards. Resonances of Stravinsky and Debussy rub shoulders before the triptych closes with ‘a touch of both comedy and chaos’.

There is more of both – and pathos – in Frescoes and Ash (2009), inspired by the paintings of Pompeii and, in the finale, the citizens’ appalling fate. Bond uses her ensemble (clarinet, piano, percussion and string quartet) sparingly in four of the seven movements; the central ‘The Sibyl Speaks’, for example, is a trio for two violins and viola. The whole is stylistically varied but always tonal, sometimes a little freely, as is the piano piece Binary (2005), which cunningly transmutes the digits 0 and 1 into variations on a samba!

Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming (2011) is a scena for tenor (sometimes speaking, sometimes singing) and piano, part of a varied series setting portions of Joyce’s Ulysses (Molly ManyBloom is available on Albany). Composed for Rufus Müller – who sings, narrates and declaims it with relish, nimbly accompanied by Jenny Lin – it is perhaps more of an acquired taste (like Joyce) but there is no denying the inventiveness of Bond’s setting. The performances throughout are well prepared and committed, from the virtuoso pianism of Olga Vinokur to the effortless ensemble of Chicago Pro Musica. An excellent disc and a benchmark for how contemporary music can be presented to a wider public.

Nov. 17: Pianist Vasco Dantas makes Carnegie debut

November 17: Portuguese virtuoso pianist Vasco Dantas makes Carnegie Hall debut

Solo recital includes works by Debussy, Mussorgsky, and rarely heard works by Portuguese composer Luís de Freitas Branco

On Sunday, November 17 at 2:00 pm, Vasco Dantas makes his New York debut at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Praised for “his master technical skills and great emotional power” by MDR Klassik, the pianist from Porto, Portugal is winner of over 50 international prizes and has performed concertos and recitals throughout Europe. Tickets are $35-$45, and are available at CarnegieHall.org | CarnegieCharge 212-247-7800 | Box Office at 57th and Seventh.

The program includes Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, Book I of Claude Debussy's Préludes, and Luís de Freitas Branco's 10 Prelúdios. Freitas Branco (1890-1955) was a preeminent figure in Portuguese music in the first half of the twentieth century. His “10 Prelúdios” are unquestionably influenced by works by Debussy, whom he met in Paris in the 1910s. "I am thrilled to share the music of Luís Freitas Branco with New York City! While not widely known outside of Portugal, he is one of the most significant voices in 20th century concert music in Portugal, and certainly has been an influence on my own artistry," says Mr. Dantas.

Award-winning Portuguese pianist Vasco Dantas, has been heralded for his “romantic and musical heart” by Aachener Zeitung. Mr. Dantas has won prizes in international competitions including "Grand Prix" at Valletta International Piano Competition (Malta, 2017), 1st Prize at Estoril Lisbon Music Competition (Lisbon, 2015), 1st Prize at Porto 'Santa Cecília' Piano Competition (Porto, 2011), Prize 'Richard Wagner Circle' (Germany, 2016), and "Special Prize" at Concours International de Piano Son Altesse Royale La Princesse Lalla Meryem (Morocco, 2016).

Highlights of Mr. Dantas’ 2019-20 season include performances with the Banda Sinfónica Portuguesa and Lisbon Gulbenkian Orchestra, solo recitals at Ciclo de Concertos do Palácio da Pena in Sintra, Portugal and Piano on the Rocks International Festival in Sedona, Arizona, and the release of a new solo CD, “Delikatessen" on the ARS Produktion label featuring songs by German and Portuguese composers.

CALENDAR LISTING

Sunday, November 17, 2:00pm

Pianist Vasco Dantas
Carnegie Hall recital debut

Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
57th Street and Seventh Avenue
New York, NY

Tickets: $35-$45 available at CarnegieHall.org | CarnegieCharge 212-247-7800 | Box Office at 57th and Seventh

Presented by the Anna-Maria Moggio Foundation

Program:
Luís de Freitas Branco: 10 Prelúdios
Claude Debussy: Préludes, Book I
Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition

Recordings by pianist Vasco Dantas

"Golden Liszt" - KNS Classical (A/043)
Works by Liszt including Grandes Études de Paganini and the Sonata in B minor.

"Promenade" - KNS Classical (A/036)
Works by Liszt including Tre Sonetti di Petrarca and Rhapsodie Espagnole, along with Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Insider Interview: andPlay Duo

On September 27, 2019, the pioneering violin and viola duo, andPlay release their debut album "playlist" on New Focus Recordings (FCR233). In this Insider Interview we spoke with Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson about how their duo began, how they developed their musical aesthetic, and more.

How did you meet, and what inspired you to form andPlay? 

andPlay met many moons ago when we were both undergrads at the Oberlin Conservatory. We were friends through Maya’s freshman roommate, and reconnected at the roommate’s wedding before Maya moved to NYC. Once Maya had made the move we ended up playing in a new music ensemble together. The ensemble asked if small groups of players would be interested in going to Fire Island to play chamber music concerts. Maya loves the beach and did not want to pass up the opportunity, so she called me [Hannah] and we decided to play violin/viola duos. We scoured the NYU music library and asked around to find some good music, and ended up putting together a very challenging and fun program of music by Stefano Gervasoni, August Reed Thomas, Brendan Faegre, and Christian Wolff that went over quite well with the beach-loving audiences! After that we decided that we wanted to play more together, so we booked a show and starting racking our brains for an ensemble name. andPlay was born, and the rest is history...

How did you come up with your name, and how does it describe the aesthetics (or any other aspect) of your ensemble?   How would you describe andPlay’s style? 

andPlay was born out of another freelance gig that Maya was part of in her early days in NYC. In this piece a group of 12 performers each had their own tape part with headphones that would tell the performers when to play. Maya would wait and wait until a firm voice would quickly say “and PLAY”. We spent a great deal of time making lists and contemplating different ensemble names, and one evening at my [Hannah’s] apartment while hosting a monthly cake night we workshopped some names around to the group. There were a few contenders, but andPlay was the one that everyone kept coming back to. 

We liked the connotations of the name and how succinct it was. There is something playful and mischievous about it that keeps you on your toes. This curiosity and light-hearted nature is something that we always strive to bring to our collaborations and performances. Even when performing very “serious” music, we try to remember that we are “playing,” both in the sense that we are literally playing our instruments, and that we are enjoying making something together!

How did your interest in music by contemporary composers develop?  How has your taste in various compositional styles changed over the years?

Like I mentioned before, we both went to the Oberlin Conservatory where the Contemporary Music Ensemble and new music in general was woven into the fabric of the community in the same way that Bach and Brahms are. Our professors encouraged us to explore music outside of the traditional repertoire and we both fell in love with the collaborative quality of performing music that was being written in our time and by people that we could actually have a conversation with. 

Over the years our tastes have broadened and we experiment with and discover new styles of music. We have been performing a lot more music by the Wandelweiser collective in the past three years, and have become quite enamored with exploring the intimacy of two voices playing static or sparse music. We have also commissioned music in Just Intonation and have committed to delving into this musical world and learning as much as we can. 

Your upcoming debut album, playlist, features world premiere recordings of works that you commissioned. What do you look for in selecting composers to write works for the duo? 

When we commission new works we are looking for composers that are writing music that speaks to us and who we can imagine writing something genuinely unique for our instrumentation. So much of the early repertoire for violin/viola duo was written as if it were almost two different hands on a piano - someone has the melody, someone accompanies them, and vice versa! We are really interested in composers who push past that and treat the ensemble as one giant instrument, figuring out creative ways to compose for two similar instruments.  Some of our commissions stem from long-term collaborations with composers and their music, whether with andPlay, or through other ensemble or solo pieces. Those types of relationships are really special to us because it means that we develop a musical language together that we have fully immersed ourselves in over the years, like the two pieces by David Bird featured on this album, which were written four years apart. 

What other projects are keeping each of you busy, both with the duo and elsewhere? 

We are constantly dreaming and have a long list of projects that we want to bring to life in the coming years with andPlay. So much of our creative energy is thrown into the duo, and our differing yet complementary personalities keep us both grounded/idealistic enough to pinpoint the projects that we know will be both fulfilling, exciting, and possible for the ensemble. This season we are looking forward to new commissions, a collaborative project with some LA-based musicians, the second season of our audience engagement series,  and performances throughout the United States. Stay tuned for some larger projects on the horizon in the next few years! We can both also be found performing with other ensembles in NYC and around the world; we are definitely keeping busy!

October 15-19: Momenta Festival V

In celebration of its 15th Anniversary, Momenta Quartet presents: Momenta Festival V - October 15, 16, 18 & 19

Four concerts each curated by a different quartet member

Admission is free for all Momenta Festival concerts Reservations strongly encouraged for events at Americas Society October 15 & October 16

"[the Momenta Festival] has become one of the most amazingly eclectic, never mind herculean feats attempted by any chamber ensemble in this city..." - New York Music Daily

October 15-19, 2019: Momenta Quartet presents the Momenta Festival at Americas Society and Tenri Cultural Institute. The fifth edition of the Festival features five premieres (four world premieres and one NYC premiere). Admission to all concerts is free. The festival features four diverse chamber music programs each curated by a different member of the quartet. With programs that blend the old and new, the "intriguing programming" (The New York Times) and "striking originality" (I Care If You Listen) of the Momenta Festival have been acclaimed by critics and fans alike.

The 2019 festival opens at Americas Society on October 15 with a retrospective on 15 years of the Momenta Quartet, featuring guest conductor David Bloom, vocalist Brad Walker and curated by violist Stephanie Griffin. The performance includes the world premiere of Alvin Singleton's Chamber Music America commission as well as the late Mario Davidovsky's String Trio. The music continues on October 16 with the program “Night Dances” curated by violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron and featuring works by Roberto Sierra and Gyorgy Ligeti. The festival moves downtown to the Tenri Cultural Institute for the final two concerts. On October 18, cellist Michael Haas’ program “American Voices” features a world premiere by Christopher Stark and a New York premiere by Alyssa Weinberg. The festival concludes on October 19 with the program “Toy Stories” curated by violinist Alex Shiozaki. Momenta is joined by toy pianist Phyllis Chen in a program inspired by the recent birth of Shiozaki’s first child. The evening ends with a performance of Mozart's String Quartet K. 387, a consonent conclusion to a wildly diverse quartet of programs.

"We founded this festival in 2015 as an artistic outlet for each of our individual musical interests," says Momenta violist Stephanie Griffin. "I continue to be surprised to discover new pieces and composers that my Momenta colleagues introduce me to through this festival."

Admission to all concerts is free. Reservations strongly encouraged for events at Americas Society October 15 & October 16

Momenta Quartet's 2019 Momenta Festival

Fifteen Years of Momenta: A Retrospective - curated by Stephanie Griffin

Tuesday, October 15 at 7:00 pm

Americas Society

680 Park Ave., NYC

Free admission

Momenta Festival V opens with a celebration of Momenta’s 15th anniversary with selected milestones from their unique and eclectic personal repertoire along with world premieres by Matthew Greenbaum (conducted by David Bloom) and the Chamber Music America commission of Alvin Singleton. The Momenta Quartet is joined by bass-baritone Brad Walker.

Program:

Mario Davidovsky: String Trio

Julian Carrillo: String Quartet no. 10

Alvin Singleton: Hallelujah Anyhow CMA Commission WORLD PREMIERE

Matthew Greenbaum: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry for baritone and string quartet WORLD PREMIERE, text by Walt Whitman

Guest artists: baritone Brad Walker and conductor David Bloom

Night Dances - curated by Emilie-Anne Gendron

Wednesday, October 16 at 7:00 pm

Americas Society

680 Park Ave., NYC

Free admission

"Dreamy and hallucinatory works inspired by or evocative of night music- contrasts of darkness and light, mysterious atmospheres and manipulations of time, extremes of character and emotion." This is how violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron describes her program which features the world premiere of Roberto Sierra's String Quartet no.3 - written for and dedicated to Momenta. Also on the program is Ligeti's raucous and colorful String Quartet no.1, music by Harry Partch arranged by the late Ben Johnston, and more.

Program:

Roberto Sierra: String Quartet no. 3 WORLD PREMIERE

Gyorgy Ligeti: String Quartet no. 1 “Metamorphoses nocturnes"

Mario Lavista: String Quartet no. 2 "Reflejos de la noche"

Harry Partch (arr. Ben Johnston): Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales

Erwin Schulhoff: Sonata for solo violin

American Voices - curated by Michael Haas

Friday, October 18 at 7:00 pm

Tenri Cultural Institute

43a W.13th St., NYC

Free admission

Featuring the world premiere of Christopher Stark's Seasonal Music, the New York premiere of Alyssa Weinberg's Still Life for clarinet and string quartet, as well as music by Manena Contreras and Jason Kao Hwang - American Voices highlights music all written in the past 15 years.

Program:

Manena Contreras: Instantes

Alyssa Weinberg: Still Life for clarinet and string quartet NYC PREMIERE

Jason Kao Hwang: If We Live in Forgetfulness, We Die in a Dream

Christopher Stark: Seasonal Music WORLD PREMIERE

Guest artist: clarinetist Eric Umble

Toy Stories - curated by Alex Shiozaki

Saturday, October 19 at 7:00 pm

Tenri Cultural Institute

43a W.13th St., NYC

Free admission

“Toy Stories is inspired by a recent, life-changing event that I experienced on May 2, 2019: the birth of my son. While I have long been interested in the unconventional sounds of toy instruments, this year’s festival seemed like the right time for a 'toy program'." - Alex Shiozaki. For the final concert of the 2019 festival, the Momenta Quartet is joined by toy pianist Phyllis Chen.

Program:

Stephanie Griffin: "Happy Car Ride" from The Lost String Quartet

Stefano Gervasoni: Adagio ghiacciato da Mozart, KV 356 for toy piano and violin

Phyllis Chen: The Matter Within for deconstructing toy piano, toy piano tines, and string quartet

Mozart: String Quartet No. 14 in G major, K387

Guest artist: toy pianist Phyllis Chen

Momenta: the plural of momentum - four individuals in motion towards a common goal. This is the idea behind the Momenta Quartet, whose eclectic vision encompasses contemporary music of all aesthetic backgrounds alongside great music from the recent and distant past. The New York City-based quartet has premiered over 150 works, collaborated with over 200 living composers and was praised by The New York Times for its "diligence, curiosity and excellence." In the words of The New Yorker's Alex Ross, "few American players assume Haydn's idiom with such ease."

Momenta has appeared at such prestigious venues as the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery, Rubin Museum, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Washington University in St. Louis, Ostrava Days in the Czech Republic, and at the internationally renowned Cervantino Festival in Mexico. Momenta has recorded for Centaur Records, Furious Artisans, PARMA, New World Records, and Albany Records; and has been broadcast on WQXR, Q2 Music, Austria's Oe1, and Vermont Public Radio.

Insider Interview: composer Dan Siegler

On October 17 and 18, 2019, composer Dan Siegler and guest artists perform the world premiere of Concrète Jungle at The Invisible Dog (51 Bergen St.) in Brooklyn. In this Insider Interview we spoke to Mr. Siegler about the origins of Concrète Jungle, his early inspirations as a composer, and more.

How did Concrète Jungle come into being? 

The work evolved slowly. It was something I would do for fun in between assignments for hire. I became fascinated by New York voices and sounds, and more conscious of the city I’ve spent my whole life in. I would wander the streets recording noise, interview people with strong accents, find archival clips on YouTube. After a few years it had developed into…something. I wasn’t sure what yet. 

How/where did you find and gather all of the different voices you use in the piece? How did you determine which bits to use?

The piece is entirely instinctual, with the imperative that every sound come from New York or a New Yorker. As I collected the voices, I began to notice that themes were emerging; dialogue about gentrification, art making, industry, feminism. Do you remember that game “Concentration”? It was kind of like that. I’d turn over one square and try to find the other square that matched the same subject matter. It was like some gigantic puzzle, but the answers were more abstract than literal. I became interested in creating dialogue through editing, between people who had never met. 

You recently gave a workshop performance of excerpts of this work. Tell me about the audience reaction. What do you hope the audiences at the Invisible Dog performances will come away with?

In the Summer of 2018, I finally showed the piece to the public when David Lang and Suzanne Bocanegra graciously opened their little theater to me. If I didn’t get this thing out of my head I was going to go crazy. What I was looking for was what they call “proof of concept” on Shark Tank. In other words, does the thing work? Does it hold an audience’s attention. It’s a “deep listening” experience and requires focus. To my complete shock at the Q & A after, there was so much response that we had to cut it off at a certain point. The conversation with the audience on that night was one of the most validating experiences of my life and helped me recommit to the project and go deeper. I hope that the audience for Invisible Dog will feel the intention of the piece which is about connection and how hard it is and how important it is, between people and across generations. We have sound, lighting, and production design now so the whole piece has taken a bold step further. 

What roles do the guest performers – be it dancer, instrumentalist, or vocalist - serve in relation to what you are doing on stage? Do you provide printed music, parameters or suggestions to them? 

The guest performers are all talented artists I know or have worked with and I’ve been lucky to have surrounded myself with a lot of special people. That they would contribute their time and talent to this is really an honor. All the direction really comes from curation. I would only ask people I knew would be comfortable improvising in this sort of environment. I think of the guests as representing those chance encounters that you have, like at the deli or on the street, that affirm humanity and make the city feel like a special place. They serve as a reminder to not live too far inside your own head, that others around you can contribute to a shift in collective energy if you’re open to it. 

And….what ARE you doing on stage during the performance? 

What I’m doing is live mixing. So I’m taking the text and the sounds and using f/x to manipulate them, so that every performance contains improvisatory elements, both from the guest soloists and myself. I can decide to emphasize a particular part or bring something down. I can fly a sound around the room or make it sound tinny, like it’s coming from an old transistor radio. 

What led you to a career as a composer?

I studied classical piano until I got to high school and then I ditched it for rock music. I had bands and played all the great clubs that are now closed, CBGB’s etc. All the while, I was contributing music to friends’ theater productions and modern dance performances. I was setting up my recording studio and finding that was my happy place. I love tinkering with sounds and structures and I can take a maddeningly long time to finish. But I get there eventually. So essentially, not becoming a rock star led to my career as a composer, which it turns out, I was a lot better suited for. 

How would you describe your composition style, and what other composers do you draw inspiration from? 

I start with sounds, as opposed to notes. The notes come later after I’ve established the baseline concept. The concept comes from the sounds. Over the past few years my work has evolved and has become more mobile. I record from wherever I am and that inevitably becomes part of the composition. Hildegard Westerkamp has been a huge influence as of course has Pierre Schaeffer, an early pioneer of musique concrète, from which Concrète Jungle gets its name. I try to mess with people’s conception of rhythm. We’re such a beat-driven society. I love beats as much as the next person, but I want to find rhythm in different ways. Even arpeggios make me impatient. We all rely on these devices to create propulsion and I try to find that motion in other ways. I use words rhythmically, voices as instruments, not as singers or storytellers. Then I usually add vintage synthesizers and minimal orchestration for strings, horns or woodwinds.  

Dan Siegler's Concrète Jungle: a twist on New York voices

October 17 & 18: Dan Siegler's Concrète Jungle

A conversation between New York past and New York present, about New York’s future

"The recorded music, by Dan Siegler...used varied sounds—rushing water, staticky buzzes—to complement the piano, strings, and brass, and was frequently haunting." - Andrew Boynton, The New Yorker

On October 17 & 18, Bessie-award winning composer of experimental music, Dan Siegler and guest artists perform the world premiere of Concrète Jungle at The Invisible Dog (51 Bergen St.) in Brooklyn. Admission is free ($15 suggested donation) and reservations are available at this link.

Siegler's new electro-acoustic work features hundreds of intricately edited New York voices and highlights borough-specific accents, linguistic filler and word repetitions to form assembled sentences and musical grooves. Layered under the dialogue, Siegler transforms harsh urban street noise by filtering it through digital delay, reverb and echo effects, rendering it meditative and ambient.

The world premiere performance features guest instrumentalists, vocalists and dancers including Pam Tanowitz (dance), Netta Yerushalmy (dance), Christina Campanella (voice), Pauline Kim Harris (violin), Tomoko Omura (violin), and Greg Chudzik (double bass). The collaborative artists perform, individually, improvised solos that compliment and contrast with the ambient noise created by Siegler.

Concrète Jungle is inspired by and takes its title from musique concrète, an electronic genre pioneered in the 1940’s in which readymade sounds are employed in place of instrumentation.

Dan Siegler began recording the source material, clips of conversations and other utterances by New Yorkers, in 2013, shortly after his father was diagnosed with dementia. “I didn't realize it at the time,” said Siegler, “but by creating this piece, I was attempting to make order out of the chaos of my dialogues with him, which contained some of the most comical and emotional exchanges we'd ever had." After Siegler's father died, Dan discovered some of his black and white street photographs, including images of a Times Square flea circus, Chinatown parades, and East Village tenements. Projections of this artwork are incorporated into the performance.

“The New York City I remember is long gone,” says Siegler. “But when I'm live-mixing these dialogues and sounds, I'm establishing some measure of control, if only for one night, and placing sounds, voices, attitudes, expressions that may be considered antique, into a contemporary context.”

CALENDAR LISTING

October 17 and 18, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Concrète Jungle

by Dan Siegler

with guest performers Pam Tanowitz, dance, Christina Campanella, voice, Pauline Kim Harris, violin Tomoko Omura, violin, Greg Chudzik, bass and more

The Invisible Dog

51 Bergen St.

Brooklyn, NY

Free admission

($15 suggested donation) RSVP at this link

Dan Siegler is a Bessie Award-winning composer and sound artist. His music has been described as "luxuriously mercurial" by Artforum, and “eerie, churchly and jazzy…” by The Village Voice. Strongly influenced by musique concrète, his work incorporates references to jazz, blues and folk via a mix of analog synthesizers, orchestration for strings, horns and woodwinds, glitch sound material and field recordings.

Siegler has worked extensively with choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Their collaborations have been performed at venues including Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center Out of Doors and The Joyce Theater. He has composed music for choreographer Yanira Castro and the violin duo, String Noise, among others. DanSieglerMusic.com

andPlay duo: new release of world premieres on New Focus Recordings

Debut album by andPlay features world premiere recordings commissioned by the duo

Violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson perform works by David Bird, Clara Iannotta and Ashkhan Behzadi

“playlist” on New Focus Recordings is released on September 27, 2019

When violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson decided to form the duo andPlay in 2012, their mission was to expand the repertoire for their instrumentation. By any measure, this New York-based duo has already succeeded. andPlay has commissioned and premiered nearly three dozen works to date, in addition to performing other rarely heard 21st century works, in venues from New York City to Stockholm.

All four of the works on andPlay’s debut album, “playlist” (New Focus Recordings, FCR233, release date September 27, 2019) are world premiere studio recordings. The duo commissioned three of these: Crescita Plastica by Ashkan Behzadi, and two pieces by David Bird: Bezier and Apocrypha. The fourth work, Clara Iannotta's Limun, was previously released as a live recording, and is heard here for the first time in a studio performance.

This collection of composers represents diverse cultural backgrounds and styles. Iranian-American Ashkan Behzadi’s Crescita Plastica(2015) “begins like a mad virtuoso falling off a cliff, as though all the wild expressiveness of music over the last 400 years were suddenly unleashed,” writes Meghan Burke in the liner notes. The work is a dense struggle between opposing musical elements — sustained lines with crescendi of varying lengths; violent interjections of double stops; furious microtonal passage work; and razor thin ponticello outbursts.

New York composer David Bird’s Bezier (2013)opens with a playful cataloging of timbres on the instruments, a vocabulary of scratches, cracks, pops, and breathy bow sounds in childlike exploration. Emerging from this texture are ethereal harmonic trills, briefly conjuring the fragile sound world of Sciarrino’s solo violin works, floating into a remarkable section of chirping sounds that could be mistaken for a field recording in a bird sanctuary. The second work by Bird on the album,Apocrypha (2017), incorporates electronics, producing a dialogue between the acoustic and digital sounds in which the acoustic sounds struggle to maintain their organic identity.

The sonic palette in Italian-born Clara Iannotta’sLimun (2011) explores shimmering harmonics, brilliant ponticello exclamations, and weightless glissandi, forming composite phrases that establish a tactile sensuality. The work requires the participation of two page turners who serve double-duty: they each play a high drone on a small harmonica.

Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson are true ambassadors for their instrumentation, pushing their collaborators to find new ways of writing for their instruments that sound like more than just a violin and a viola. This album goes beyond exploring the limits of instrumental technique and sound, engaging with aesthetic boundaries and possessing the ineffable, mysterious quality of communicating emotional truths far greater than the sum of their parts.

andPlay performs on October 4 at Metropolis in New York City; in Columbus, Ohio on November 20 and at Kent State University on November 21; details forthcoming. Contact ClassicalCommunications@gmail.com to request a physical or digital copy of this recording.

TRACKS

1. Ashkan Behzadi – Crescita Plastica (2015) - 14:30

2. David Bird – Bezier (2013) - 9:18

3. Clara Iannotta – Limun (2011) - 7:24

4. David Bird – Apocrypha (2017) - 16:47

Gapplegate Classical-Modern reviews "Instruments of Revelation"

A program of chamber music in first recordings is what we contemplate this morning, in other words New Tonal Music 2005-2011 by Victoria Bond (b. 1945), under the umbrella title Instruments of Revelation (Naxos 8.559864). The Chicago Pro Musica does the performance honors and they are quite convincing and well worth hearing in that role.

The music has a whimsical quality throughout, whether by means of mildly sarcastic quasi-march-gallops or a shade here and there of the burlesque. I was alerted to the attractions of this album as a huge James Joyce fan by the 20-minute "Leopold Bloom's Homecoming" (2011) based on a relevant Ulysses-oriented Joycian text sung by tenor Rufus Muller with piano accompaniment by Jenny Lin. It is broadly lyrical in a matter-of-fact way and convinces as viable vocal art without sounding as "radical" as the Joycean original, but that is OK. What I mean to say is that the music gives the words less of a stream-of-consciousness and more of a deliberation a la Britten with Henry James? No matter because it is nicely done and memorable.

The short piano solo work "Binary" (2005) is the more exploratory of the works here, with a convincing rhythmic punch that has a slightly "Jazzy" pedigree and clustering quasi-pentatonic-chromatic thrust that comes through nicely as played by Olga Vinokur. The music I read in the liners is based on a Brazilian Samba, which makes sense of it all once you know. The "Binary" of the title alludes to the composer's treatment of the digits zero and one, which the unaided ear may not at first catch but no matter as the music is compelling.

Backing up to the first works on the program we have the title piece. "Instruments of Revelation" (2010) which is for a large-ish chamber ensemble. The music has some somewhat Stravinskian whimsy a la L'Histoire du Soldat in an extension and a furtherance that goes beyond the original feeling and then segues into other realms. There is a pronounced descriptive exuberance at times that is captivating.

"Frescoes and Ash" (2009) has a rippling rhapsodic feel to it, a Carnival of the Animals sans animals flavor at times, descriptive and absorbing. The chamber ensemble sounds quite full thanks to Ms. Bond's artful scoring. There are times when I am slightly and favorably reminded of the hushed stillness of Vaughan Williams' "A Lark Descending," but then Ms. Bond moves forward into her own zone and the feeling goes to be replaced by another vista not without its own artful quality. Regardless there is poise and good humor throughout.

And as all is said and done with this program one feels refreshed and in the presence of a lively musical mind. This may not quite be a music of sturm und drang, but if you listen on its own terms there is music to like just fine, to draw a smile, to give is a puckish Midsummer Night's Dream without Puck himself or the Fairies. It is enchanted music nonetheless. Listen.