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This week: concerts in New York (April 1 – April 7, 2013)

coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe (Workshop V) | American Composers Orchestra

coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe is the first and only professional research and development lab to support the creation of cutting-edge new American orchestral music through no-holds-barred experimentation, encouraging composers to do anything but play it safe.The composers participating in coLABoratory this season are Du Yun, Troy Herion, Raymond J. Lustig, Judith Sainte Croix, and Dan Visconti, selected from a national search for their willingness to experiment and stretch their own musical sensibilities, and their ability to test the limits of the orchestra. This season, coLABoratory will include a unique incubation process of workshops, public readings, collaborative feedback, and laboratory performances of music, open to the public, taking place from November 2012 through April 2013. Each composer’s work is developed with the orchestra over the course of the season in a process that includes ACO’s Music Director George Manahan, ACO’s artistic leadership Robert Beaser and Derek Bermel, mentor composer Morton Subotnick, plus ACO advisors and members of the orchestra.
Tuesday, April 2 at 2 PM
FREE
The DiMenna Center, 450 W 37th St., New York, NY
..:: Website

Premiere of Violin Sonata No. 2 | Robert Sirota

Robert Sirota – Photo by Brian Hatton

Violinist Laurie Carney and pianist David Friend will give the world premiere of Robert Sirota’s Violin Sonata No. 2. Sirota wrote the sonata for Carney, a founding member of the American String Quartet (ASQ), and dedicated it to their mothers who both passed away recently. The concert will also include Brahms’ Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in A Major; Messiaen’s Theme and Variations; and Faure’s Piano Quartet in C Minor with violist Daniel Avshalomov (also of the ASQ) and cellist William Grubb (Carney’s husband).
Tuesday, April 2 at 7:30 PM
FREE
Manhattan School of Music’s Greenfield Hall, 120 Claremont Ave., New York, NY
..:: Website
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Another #ChicagoNewMusicPlethora

Chicago is a hot burning bonfire of contemporary music, bursting with talented composers, expert players/ensembles, and a growing, appreciative audience. Some weeks there are more performances than it is physically possible to attend, a phenomenon we have hash-tagged #ChicagoNewMusicPlethora. We faced the latest of these dilemmas on the weekend of March 8-10, 2013 when we attended concerts by Third Coast Percussion, Fifth House Ensemble, and Spektral Quartet. Three outstanding concerts in three days . . . and we had to skip at least four others in the process.

Third Coast Percussion Ensemble with guest pianists Timo Andres and David Kaplan (photo credit: Larry Dunn)

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Under the influence: Deviant Septet commissions Sleeping Giant

Igor Stravinsky once said that “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” In Histories, a new piece by Brooklyn-based composer collective Sleeping Giant and commissioned by the Deviant Septet ensemble, they do just that, stealing from the bad boy of music himself in what becomes a revisionist and exhilarating look at history, artistic influence, remix culture, and the process of creation.

On May 24, Deviant Septet and Sleeping Giant joined to present Histories at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room. Deviant Septet is an ensemble of musicians that came together to fulfill Stravinsky’s unique vision of instruments needed for his L’histoire du Soldat ensemble. L’histoire du soldat, or The Soldier’s Tale, was a theatrical work based on a Russian folk tale composed by Stravinsky and initially performed in 1918. Scored for a septet of double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet or trumpet, trombone and percussion, Stravinsky had imagined that this combination of instruments would grow in influence and scope. Deviant Septet’s mission is to not only realize Stravinsky’s unfulfilled dream, but to extend his vision, commissioning avant-garde and unique works to add a spark of the unusual to modern chamber music. Sleeping Giant consists of six emerging composers (all Yale School of Music Graduates: Timo Andres, Ted Hearne, Jacob Cooper, Christopher Cerrone, Andrew Norman, and Robert Honstein) who, similarly to Deviant Septet, are unafraid to shake things up a bit in the contemporary classical world, and are drawn to one another based upon mutual respect of their unique compositional voices.

Deviant Septet

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Switchboard Music Festival 2012 at Brava Theater

Sunday April first (no joke!) was the fifth annual Switchboard Music Festival. One of several new music festivals/marathon concerts in San Francisco, Switchboard features eight hours of mostly modern music. I had been really looking forward to hearing the first set with Danny Holt (piano and percussion at the same time), but due to the ever-present “my muni bus didn’t show up when nextbus said it would” problem in San Francisco, I did not arrive at the Brava Theater until his set was nearly over. This year is the second year in a row Switchboard has been held at the Brava Theater, which is located in the middle of the Mission District. It’s a wonderful place to hold a marathon concert, because between sets the audience can literally walk half a block out the door and find several options for good Mexican food. If by chance you didn’t like Mexican food, the festival had hired a food truck, which was parked nearby selling Indian food (the samosas were amazing!).

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Sequenza21 brings ACME at Joe’s Pub

Very few classical music blogs are as popular as Sequenza21, and many blogs in that position would just stick to what they routinely do. Well, Jerry Bowles and his team don’t and with the funds they are able to raise through advertising, grants and donations, they produce occasional concerts such as the one that was presented at Joe’s Pub this Tuesday night (with the generous support of Manhattan New Music Project). The concert featured music by 9 composers performed by ACME (American Contemporary Music Ensemble), itself led by artistic director and cellist Clarice Jensen.

Nancy Kleaver, Executive Director of MNMP

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SONiC Festival – eighth blackbird at Miller Theatre

What a treat for the second night of SONiC Festival to get to see eighth blackbird at the Miller Theatre (@ Columbia University). I had been looking for this moment since the last time I saw them (especially after missing them at the Armory)… I was also curious to see the ensemble perform with their new member, violinist extraordinaire Yvonne Lam (a Curtis/Juilliard graduate): eighth blackbird is quite a unique ensemble on the contemporary scene and possibly a hard one to join. Saturday night’s program was called Fractured Jams after the eponymous piece by Dan Visconti, a title that suited perfectly this evening of music that broke down the ensemble on several instances.

The concert opened with Two Sides for sextet by Swedish composer Fabian Svensson. This antagonistic piece split the sextet in two trios facing each other: high pitched vs. low pitched. A game of question an answer quickly settled and since the material was pretty much the same in both camps (highly triadic) the piece moved to a rhetoric plane: a power struggle, with delightful frictions and dynamic contrasts. Somehow the two parts couldn’t reach an agreement and the performers left the stage one by one, leaving the stubborn piccolo arguing with the piano that eventually also gave up. One couldn’t help but notice how this piece echoed with the political context in the city or the country, from #OccupyWallStreet to countless GOP debates. [Read more →]