Violinist Yevgeny Kutik Signs With Epstein Fox Performances

Photo by Corey Hayes available in high resolution at: https://www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/yevgeny-kutik

Violinist Yevgeny Kutik Signs With Epstein Fox Performances

“polished dexterity and genteel, old-world charm”
– WQXR

www.yevgenykutik.com | www.efperformances.com

Violinist Yevgeny Kutik, known for his “assured and full-bodied playing” (The Washington Post), has signed with Epstein Fox Performances for North American and general management.

Michael Fox, partner and co-founder of Epstein Fox Performances, says, “Yevgeny Kutik has been telling a beautiful story his entire career about the strength and brilliance of the human spirit — his recordings and performances get straight to the heart of his life and what makes his approach to the rep that we all know and love so compelling. In 2024-2025, Kutik will be touring a recital program consisting of Mendelssohn, Bloch and Prokofiev along with performing a wide range of concerto repertoire that will include Shostakovich and the concerto by Joseph Schwantner that he recently premiered with Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.”

With a “dark-hued tone and razor-sharp technique” (The New York Times), violinist Yevgeny Kutik has captivated audiences worldwide with an old-world sound that communicates a modern intellect. Praised for his technical precision and virtuosity, he is also lauded for his poetic and imaginative interpretations of standard works as well as rarely heard and newly composed repertoire.

A native of Minsk, Belarus, Kutik began violin studies with his mother, Alla Zernitskaya, and immigrated to the US with his family at the age of five. An advocate for the Jewish Federations of North America, the organization that assisted his family in coming to the US, he regularly speaks and performs across the country to promote the assistance of refugees from around the world. Kutik is also ​​Artistic Director and co-founder of The Birch Festival –– a festival built around connecting and integrating leading musicians with the Berkshire community, while highlighting the unique and original stories of those who make up the Berkshires.

Kutik’s 2014 album, Music from the Suitcase: A Collection of Russian Miniatures (Marquis Classics), features music he found in his family’s suitcase after immigrating to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1990, and debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard Classical chart. The album garnered critical acclaim and was featured on NPR's All Things Considered and in The New York Times. The album is currently being developed into an immersive stage and performance production for the 2024-2025 season.

Kutik’s additional releases on Marquis include his most recent album, The Death of Juliet and Other Tales (2021), which highlights Russia’s rich history of folklore and folktales portrayed in the music of Prokofiev. The album connects Prokofiev’s Solo Sonata for Violin, Sonata No. 2, and “Parting Scene and Death of Juliet” (arr. Borisovsky) to five Russian folk melodies in new arrangements by Kutik, Michael Gandolfi, and Kati Agócs, commissioned specifically for the album. In 2019, he released Meditations on Family, for which he commissioned eight composers to translate a personal family photo into a short musical miniature for violin and various ensemble, envisioning the project as a living archive of new works inspired by memories, home, and belonging. Strings Magazine featured Kutik as its cover story for the March/April issue, reporting, “True to Kutik’s vision, each miniature is a window into the composer’s emotional life.” Featured composers include Joseph Schwantner, Andreia Pinto Correia, Gity Razaz, Timo Andres, Chris Cerrone, Kinan Azmeh, Gregory Vajda, and Paola Prestini. Kutik’s 2016 album, Words Fail uses Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words as a starting point to expand upon the idea that music surpasses traditional language in its expressive capabilities. His 2012 debut album, Sounds of Defiance, features the music of Achron, Pärt, Schnittke, and Shostakovich, focusing on music written during the darkest periods of the lives of these composers.  

In 2021, Kutik made his debut with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra led by Leonard Slatkin, performing the world premiere of Joseph Schwantner’s Violin Concerto, written specifically for Kutik. This is based on Schwantner’s earlier The Poet’s Hour – Soliloquy for Violin, which Kutik recorded on episode six of Gerard Schwarz’s All-Star Orchestra, a made-for-television classical music concert series released on DVD by Naxos and broadcast nationally on PBS. Kutik gave the world premiere of Cântico, a work for solo violin by Andreia Pinto Correia, at the Tanglewood Music Festival in August 2022. The work was co-commissioned for Kutik by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Throughout the United States, Kutik has performed with orchestras including the Rochester and Dayton Philharmonics, Tallahassee, New Haven, Asheville, Wyoming, and La Crosse symphony orchestras, as well as Florida’s SYMPHONIA, New York City’s Riverside Symphony and Park Avenue Chamber Symphony, and the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston. Abroad, he has appeared as guest soloist with Germany’s Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock and WDR Rundfunk Orchestra Köln, Montenegro’s Montenegrin Symphony Orchestra, Japan’s Tokyo Vivaldi Ensemble, and the Cape Town Philharmonic in South Africa. He has appeared in recital as a part of the Dame Myra Hess Concerts Chicago, Peoples' Symphony Concerts, Merkin Hall Tuesday Matinee Series, and National Sawdust in New York City, the Embassy Series and The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and at the Lobkowicz Collections Prague presented by Prince William Lobkowicz. Festival performances have included the Tanglewood Music Festival, Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, Pennsylvania’s Gretna Music, Germany’s Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele, and the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.

Passionate about his heritage and its influence on his artistry, Kutik is an advocate for the Jewish Federations of North America, the organization that assisted his family in coming to the United States, and regularly speaks and performs across the United States to both raise awareness and promote the assistance of refugees from around the world. He was a featured performer for the 2012 March of the Living observances, where he played for audiences at the Krakow Opera House and for over 10,000 people at Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

Yevgeny Kutik began violin studies with his mother, Alla Zernitskaya, and went on to study with Zinaida Gilels, Shirley Givens, Roman Totenberg, and Donald Weilerstein. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s degree from the New England Conservatory and currently resides in Boston. In 2006, he was awarded the Salon de Virtuosi Grant as well as the Tanglewood Music Center Jules Reiner Violin Prize. Kutik’s violin was crafted in Italy in 1915 by Stefano Scarampella.

For more information, please visit www.yevgenykutik.com.

About Epstein Fox Performances: Epstein Fox Performances (EFP) is a performing arts agency specializing in classical, jazz & roots artists. The newly minted Classical division is led by EFP partner and co-founder Michael Fox and Agent & Manager Brooke Scholl. The classical roster consists of many of the most dynamic ensembles & artists reshaping chamber, symphony and opera: Terence Blanchard, Turtle Island Quartet, Joseph Conyers, Harlem Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, PUBLIQuartet, and many others. The agency prides itself in its focus of supporting artistic innovation that moves the field forward and deepens the connection between the audience and the performers.

Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt Perform at the Kennedy Center Presented by Washington Performing Arts

Photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco available in high resolution at: www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/simone-dinnerstein

Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt Perform at the Kennedy Center Presented by Washington Performing Arts

Performing Music by
J.S. Bach, Brahms, Glass, Schubert, and Beethoven

Monday, October 30, 2023 at 7:30pm
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater
2700 F Street Northwest | Washington, DC

Tickets and information:
www.washingtonperformingarts.org/seasontickets/2023-24-season/simone-dinnerstein-awadagin-pratt/

“an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity”
– The Washington Post

Simone Dinnerstein: www.simonedinnerstein.com

Washington DC – GRAMMY-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The New York Times as “colorful and idiosyncratic,” along with esteemed pianist Awadagin Pratt, will be presented in concert by Washington Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (2700 F Street Northwest, Washington, DC). The concert will take place on Monday, October 30, 2023 at 7:30pm.

American pianist Simone Dinnerstein has a distinctive musical voice. She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”

For this performance, Dinnerstein and Pratt will collaborate on a program featuring several piano works written for four hands. Beyond their mutual passion for and prestige with the piano, Dinnerstein and Pratt share a connection through Washington Performing Arts, as both have taken part in its cherished Hayes Piano Series. The performance series was launched in 1966 in honor of Washington Performing Arts founder Patrick Hayes and wife, pianist and pedagogue Evelyn Swarthout Hayes. Dinnerstein and Pratt will perform J.S. Bach's O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 1085 as transcribed by György Kurtag; Schubert’s bright and dynamic Fantasie in F minor, Op. 28; and Beethoven’s stately Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 “Pastoral” –– as arranged by Selmar Bagge –– together at a single piano. The performance will also feature solo performances of Ballades Nos. 1 and 2, Op. 10 by Brahms and Philip Glass’s Etude No. 6.

Of the uniqueness built into a four hand concert program and performing alongside Awadagin Pratt, Dinnerstein says:

“There is an intimacy to the four-hand repertoire that makes a concert hall feel like a living room. This repertoire was meant to be played at home. Historically, symphonies were arranged for four-hands as a way of becoming familiar to music lovers long before the days of recording, and when live orchestral performances were few and far between. Orchestral transcriptions require so much imagination, and also reveal elements of the counterpoint that may be different than what one’s impressions are from hearing the fully orchestrated version. I’m anticipating that this concert will have a friendly and more informal feel to it as a result of this quality in the music itself.

I have admired Awadagin’s musicianship for many years and remember the first time that we read four-hand music together, backstage before a fabulous recital that he gave in Fairfield, CT. In the past few years, Awadagin has joined me in performances of Bach’s keyboard concertos for two, three, and four pianos with my ensemble, Baroklyn at the Miller Theater at Columbia University. It is always a thrill to collaborate with him, and I am greatly looking forward to our first four-hand recital together at the Kennedy Center!”

More About Simone Dinnerstein: Simone Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seoul Arts Center and Sydney Opera House. She has made thirteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard charts.

In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2. She premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera. Dinnerstein has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs. The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative. www.simonedinnerstein.com

About Awadigan Pratt: Among his generation of concert artists, pianist Awadagin Pratt is acclaimed for his musical insight and intensely involving performances in recital and with symphony orchestras.

Born in Pittsburgh, Awadagin Pratt began studying piano at the age of six. Three years later, having moved to Normal, Illinois with his family, he also began studying violin. At the age of 16 he entered the University of Illinois where he studied piano, violin, and conducting. He subsequently enrolled at the Peabody Conservatory of Music where he became the first student in the school’s history to receive diplomas in three performance areas – piano, violin and conducting. In recognition of this achievement and for his work in the field of classical music, Mr. Pratt received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Johns Hopkins as well as an honorary doctorate from Illinois Wesleyan University after delivering the commencement address in 2012.

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” and esteemed pianist Awadagin Pratt, are presented in concert by Washington Performing Arts. Dinnerstein and Pratt will perform a program featuring several selections written for piano with four hands, as well as solo selections. The concert will include music by J.S. Bach/György Kurtág, Brahms, Glass, Schubert, and Beethoven/Selmar Bagge.

Short description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity” (The Washington Post) and pianist Awadagin Pratt, are presented by Washington Performing Arts, performing selections by J.S. Bach/György Kurtág, Brahms, Glass, Schubert, and Beethoven/Selmar Bagge.

Concert details:

Who: Pianists Simone Dinnerstein and Awadagin Pratt
Presented by Washington Performing Arts
What: Music by J.S. Bach/György Kurtág, Brahms, Glass, Schubert, and Beethoven/Selmar Bagge
When: Monday, October 30, 2023 at 7:30pm
Where: Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, 2700 F Street Northwest, Washington, DC
Tickets and information: www.washingtonperformingarts.org/seasontickets/2023-24-season/simone-dinnerstein-awadagin-pratt/

Divine Discourse - Organist Victoria Sirota and Composer Robert Sirota Presented by St. John’s Episcopal Church on November 12th

Photo by Ryuhei Shindo available in high resolution at: www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/robert-sirota

Divine Discourse

Victoria Sirota, Organist & Robert Sirota, Composer
Presented by St. John’s Episcopal Church

Sunday, November 12, 2023 at 3pm
St. John's Episcopal Church | 225 French St. | Bangor, ME
Suggested Free Will Offering of $10.00

www.stjohnsbangor.org

“a compelling musical voice of our time”
– The American Organist

www.robertsirota.com

Bangor, ME – On Sunday, November 12, 2023 at 3pm, organist Victoria R. Sirota and composer Robert Sirota will present Divine Discourse, a concert at St. John’s Episcopal Church (225 French St.) featuring the music of J.S. Bach, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Robert Sirota.

Victoria Sirota says, “Bob and I have been each other’s primary muse since before we were married over 50 years ago. Over those years he has written more than a dozen works for organ. This one hour recital, which we are calling Divine Discourse, includes music by two composers who have had a strong influence on our musical and spiritual lives: J.S. Bach and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, as well as three Sirota works: Letters Abroad (1982), Celestial Wind (1987), and his most recent organ composition, Prayer (2020).”

Sharing a long history intertwined with family, faith, and music, Robert and Victoria will join together for the concert’s collaborative highlight, Letters Abroad for Piano and Organ –– a nine-movement work written by Robert Sirota in 1982. Around this extensive work, Victoria Sirota will perform J.S. Bach’s Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 686, which references a Lutheran hymn of 1524 written by Martin Luther as a paraphrase of the Biblical Psalm 130; Fanny Mendelssohn’s Präludium für Orgel F-Dur, one of the last pieces Mendelssohn wrote before her marriage to Wilhelm Hensel; Robert Sirota’s 2020 composition Prayer for organ; and his 1987 work Celestial Wind –– a work also inspired by Biblical scripture which Victoria premiered in 1987.

The central piece of the program, Letters Abroad, is imbued with feelings Robert Sirota experienced during the summer of 1980 when Victoria traveled abroad to pursue research on Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel while he remained in Massachusetts with their young son, Jonah. The work reflects a collection of musical “postcards” Sirota composed in order to, as he says, “ease the pain of separation” from Victoria. Not only does the piece contain a climax that’s intended as an homage to Fanny Mendelssohn but when the Sirotas collaborated on the recording, Robert and Victoria needed to be physically separated by a distance of 100 feet to successfully capture each individual part. Robert Sirota explains that this divide embodies the central metaphor of the work: “The organ and the piano speak to each other over time and space, and create a sense of separation, and ultimately of being reunited.” In this way, both Letters Abroad and Divine Discourse as a whole reflect the kind of personal and artistic intuition for which Robert Sirota is known.

Over five decades, composer Robert Sirota has developed a distinctive voice, clearly discernible in all of his work – whether symphonic, choral, stage, or chamber music. Writing in the Portland Press Herald, Allan Kozinn asserts: “Sirota’s musical language is personal and undogmatic, in the sense that instead of aligning himself with any of the competing contemporary styles, he follows his own internal musical compass.

More about Robert Sirota: Robert Sirota’s works have been performed by orchestras across the US and Europe; ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, Sequitur, yMusic, Chameleon Arts, and Dinosaur Annex; Concerts on the Slope; the Chiara, American, Ethel, Elmyr, Blair and Telegraph String Quartets; the Peabody, Concord, and Webster Trios; and at festivals including Tanglewood, Aspen, Yellow Barn, and Cooperstown; Bowdoin Gamper and Bowdoin International Music Festival; and Mizzou International Composers Festival. Recent commissions include Jeffrey Kahane and the Sarasota Music Festival, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Palladium Musicum, American Guild of Organists, the American String Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, the Naumburg Foundation, and yMusic, Thomas Pellaton, Carol Wincenc, Linda Chesis, Trinity Episcopal Church (Indianapolis), and Sierra Chamber Society, as well as arrangements for Paul Simon.

Since 2021, Sirota has presented Muzzy Ridge Concerts, an annual series featuring performances by world-class musicians, in his home studio in Searsmont, Maine. Robert Sirota has received grants from the Guggenheim and Watson Foundations, NEA, Meet the Composer, and the American Music Center. His music is recorded on Legacy Recordings, National Sawdust Tracks, and the Capstone, Albany, New Voice, Gasparo and Crystal labels, and is published by Muzzy Ridge Music, Schott, Music Associates of New York, MorningStar, Theodore Presser, and To the Fore. For complete information, visit www.robertsirota.com.

About Victoria R. Sirota: Victoria Sirota, organist, Episcopal priest and author, holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Boston University and Harvard Divinity School. She has studied organ with Andre Marchal in Paris and Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam and has performed organ recitals in the United States, France and Germany. The Rev. Dr. Sirota has taught at Boston University, Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music, and The Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University. Former National Chaplain for the American Guild of Organists and The Association of Anglican Musicians, she is the author of articles, reviews and texts for hymns, cantatas and song cycles. Her book Preaching to the Choir: Claiming the Role of Sacred Musician is available from Church Publishing, and, in addition to recordings on Northeastern and Gasparo labels, her recording of organ works by Robert Sirota Celestial Wind is available from Albany Records.

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Searsmont, ME composer Robert Sirota, whose music is described by The Portland Press Herald as “personal and undogmatic,” and organist Victoria R. Sirota, are presented in concert by St. John’s Episcopal Church. The Sirotas will perform a program titled Divine Discourse, which features Robert Sirota on piano and Victoria Sirota on organ, playing the music of J.S. Bach, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Robert Sirota.

Short description: Composer Robert Sirota, whose music is described as “personal and undogmatic,” (Portland Press Herald), and organist Victoria R. Sirota are presented by St. John’s Episcopal Church, performing music by J.S. Bach, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Robert Sirota.

Concert details:
Who: Organist Victoria Sirota and Composer Robert Sirota Presented by St. John’s Episcopal Church
What: Music by J.S. Bach, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Robert Sirota
When: Sunday, November 12, 2023 at 3pm
Where: ​​St. John's Episcopal Church, 225 French St., Bangor, ME
Information (Suggested free will offering $10): www.stjohnsbangor.org

Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2023-2024 Season Includes Performances in Over 16 Countries

Photo by Anna Maggý available in high resolution at www.annathorvalds.com/photos

Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2023-2024 Season Includes Landmark Performances by Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Continued Premieres of ARCHORA, Performances in at Least 16 Countries

“Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s natural instrument is the symphony orchestra, but in her hands it is reborn as a natural organism.”
– The Guardian

Double Concert by Iceland Symphony Orchestra in Reykjavik
 Led by Chief Conductor Eva Ollikainen

October 5 at Harpa Concert Hall: AIŌN
October 6 at Hallgrímskirkja: METACOSMOS, ARCHORA, Heyr þú oss himnum á, Ad Genua
Information: https://en.sinfonia.is/concerts-tickets/archora-1

Upcoming highlights include ARCHORA performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester, on October 14; French premiere by the Orchestre de Paris on January 24 and 25; Swiss premiere by Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne on February 7 and 8; Danish premiere by Aarhus Symphony Orchestra on February 29; and US East Coast premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 18-20

Anna’s major new installation piece METAXIS will be premiered by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at Harpa on June 1, 2024, as part of the opening celebration of the Reykjavík Arts Festival

Plus performances at the Southbank Centre, King’s Place, Beijing Music Festival, and by orchestras including the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Tampere Philharmonic, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and more

Schedule: www.annathorvalds.com/performances 

Latest Album Available Now on Sono Luminus: ARCHORA / AIŌN
Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Eva Ollikainen
Press downloads available upon request.

Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (The New York Times) and “riveting” (The Times) sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Her music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material – it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, in particular structural ones, like proportion and flow. “Thorvaldsdottir is incapable of writing music that doesn’t immediately transfix an open-eared listener,” reports The New York Times.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2023-2024 season (September 2023 to June 2024) includes performances of her music across at least sixteen countries, including Iceland, England, Ireland, China, the United States, Canada, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Slovenia. Her current schedule is available on her website and will be updated with additional performances throughout the year.

Up next, Anna’s concert season includes milestone performances on October 5 and 6, 2023 in Reykjavik by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, where Anna is Composer-in-Residence. On October 5, the ISO performs her symphony-scale AIŌN at Harpa Concert Hall, and on October 6, the orchestra presents a portrait concert of her work at Hallgrímskirkja that includes METACOSMOS, ARCHORA, Heyr þú oss himnum á, and Ad Genua, with the Choir of Hallgrímskirkja conducted by Steinar Logi Helgason, and soloist Bryndís Guðjónsdóttir. Both concerts will be led by ISO Chief Conductor Eva Ollikainen.

A major highlight of this season is continued premiere performances of Anna’s latest major orchestral work ARCHORA, from 2022. Of the world premiere, The Guardian reported, “Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is about mass and density, how different planes of sounds collide and combine, and how intricately detailed textures evolve over time. Those qualities make the orchestra the obvious medium for her work, and it has largely been through her sequence of strikingly effective orchestral scores that the Iceland-born composer has become recognised as one of the most distinctive voices in European music today." ARCHORA was commissioned by the BBC Proms and co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and Klangspuren Schwaz, and was premiered in August 2022 at the BBC Proms by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Ollikainen in a concert selected as among The Guardian’s Classical Highlights of 2022.

This season, the Swedish premiere of ARCHORA took place on September 21 and 22, performed by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eva Ollikainen. Upcoming performances include the Manchester premiere by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Ollikainen on October 14; the French premiere of the piece by the Orchestre de Paris, a co-commissioner of the work, led by Klaus Mäkelä on January 24 and 25, 2024; the Swiss premiere by the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne conducted by Ollikainen on February 7 and 8; the Danish premiere by the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra led by Ollikainen on February 29; and the US East Coast premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Andris Nelsons from April 18-20, 2024. 

These performances follow the May 2023 release on Sono Luminus of the ISO’s recording of ARCHORA and AIŌN, conducted by Ollikainen. In April 2023, Sono Luminus also released her major orchestral work CATAMORPHOSIS as part of the album Atmospheriques, conducted by Daníel Bjarnason. With these recordings, all of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s orchestral music is now available on Sono Luminus. The label’s previous releases include METACOSMOS in 2019; AERIALITY, originally released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2014 and re-released in a remastered version on Sono Luminus in 2022; and Dreaming, originally released on a portrait album by Innova Recordings in 2011 and re-released on Sono Luminus in 2020.

This season also brings the world premiere of Anna’s major new installation piece METAXIS by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra on June 1, 2024 at Harpa, part of the opening celebration of the 2024 Reykjavík Arts Festival and of the festival's collaboration with Harpa and the ISO. Anna describes METAXIS as, “an installation for deconstructed orchestra and space.” Audiences will have the unique opportunity to explore the music from different perspectives, as they wander through Harpa’s iconic foyer and feel how their experience of the music changes with every step. The musicians and the electronics will be spread out over the different levels of the building, blending together in myriad ways and creating a unique sound world with innumerable textures. The piece is half an hour in length and will be conducted by Eva Ollikainen.

In addition to the BBC Philharmonic’s performance of ARCHORA mentioned above, highlights of the season in England, where Anna is now based, include the Aurora Orchestra performing Anna’s string octet Illumine on October 8 at Saffron Hall in Saffron Walden and on October 11 at the Southbank Centre in London. Commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Anna writes in her note for the piece that it is, “based on the notion of dawn and the relationship between light and darkness.” Aurora Orchestra will also perform Anna’s chamber piece In the Light of Air on November 25 at King’s Place in London. On April 27, 2024 the City of Birmingham Orchestra will perform Dreaming in a concert conducted by Gergely Madaras at Symphony Hall in Birmingham. Gramophone describes Dreaming as, “an imposing monolith that emerges from silence and recedes back into it, speaking of natural desolation, severe beauty and precarious tectonics in between.”

Anna’s music will also be performed throughout the United States and Canada during the season. In Boston, in addition to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s East Coast premiere of ARCHORA mentioned above, Claire Chase and ensemble will perform Ubique, commissioned by and premiered at Carnegie Hall in May 2023, at Harvard University on October 18. The chamber orchestra A Far Cry will perform Illumine on February 17 and 18, 2024. On March 10, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Spectra at Jordan Hall. In New York, Blackbox Ensemble will perform Anna’s chamber piece Ró at the Noguchi Museum on November 8. On April 8, AXIOM ensemble will perform Hrím for chamber orchestra led by Jeffrey Millarsky at The Juilliard School. On the West Coast, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra conducted by Daniel Stewart will perform METACOSMOS on November 19. METACOSMOS was premiered by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2018 and in Europe by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert in January 2019. The Boston Globe reported, “There is possibly no other composer working today who is so adept at channeling the massive forces of nature, and given a full orchestral sound palette to play with, [Thorvaldsdottir] goes wild. Writing lines that ride the knife edge of order and chaos and giving poetic but direct suggestions to the musicians, she immerses listeners in eerie, irresistible landscapes of sound.” Other performances of Anna’s music will take place across the country in cities including Nashville, TN; Flagstaff, AZ; Boulder, CO; Austin, TX; Juneau, AK, and more. In Canada, CATAMORPHOSIS was performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Otto Tausk, on September 15 and 16, 2023. Additional performances of Anna's work will take place in Montreal.

In addition to the Orchestre de Paris’s and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne’s premieres of ARCHORA mentioned above, European performances include in Germany the Kammerakademie Potsdam Modern Ensemble performing Illumine on October 25, 2023; the Beethoven Orchester Bonn conducted by Dirk Kaftan performing Anna’s major orchestral work CATAMORPHOSIS on October 27; the Philharmonisches Orchester Heidelberg conducted by Cornelius Meister performing METACOSMOS on April 4 and 5, 2024; the Frankfurt Radio Symphony performing METACOSMOS conducted by Alain Altinoglu at Alter Oper in Frankfurt on June 13 and 14; and Aeriality performed by the Pfalzphilharmonie Kaiserslautern conducted by Daniele Squeo on June 16 and 17, 2024. In Switzerland, Aeriality will be performed on January 25, 2024 by Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen, conducted by Modestas Pitrenas. The Danish String Quartet continues touring Anna’s most recent string quartet Rituals, described by The New York Times as an, “entrancing series of permutations in which a set of musical gestures are rearranged like matter,” with performances at the Musikgebouw in Amsterdam on September 16, 2023; at National Concert Hall in Dublin, Ireland on September 28; and at Flagey’s Studio 4 in Brussels on October 13. Additional performances of Anna’s music will take place in Vienna, Austria and Ljubljana, Slovenia.

This autumn in China, Illumine will be performed by the Mahler Foundation Festival Orchestra conducted by John Warner at the Beijing Music Festival on October 13, 2023.

In the Nordic countries, in addition to the Swedish and Danish premieres of ARCHORA and the premiere of METAXIS in Iceland mentioned above, in Denmark on November 15, 2023 the Danish Sinfonietta performs Illumine in Randers. In Sweden, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali performs CATAMORPHOSIS on March 13 and 14, 2024. The Hehku Ensemble performs For it will never return for tenor and harp on May 18 in Gothenburg Concert Hall. On May 30, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra performs METACOSMOS conducted by Fabien Gabel at Malmö Live Concert Hall. In Finland this spring, CATAMORPHOSIS will be performed on April 26 by the Tampere Philharmonic conducted by Matthew Hall and on May 31 by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon in Helsinki. CATAMORPHOSIS, premiered in 2021, was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Of the piece The Times reported, “[Thorvaldsdottir] has carved her own corner in contemporary music by creating symphonic works of sustained brilliance and considerable power from the steady collision, growth and mutation of precisely imagined sounds and textures.”

For more information about Anna Thorvaldsdottir: www.annathorvalds.com/bio

Donato Cabrera Guest Conducts the Houston Symphony in Fiesta Sinfónica on October 13, 2023

Photo by Kristen Loken available in high resolution at www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/donato-cabrera

Donato Cabrera Guest Conducts the Houston Symphony in Fiesta Sinfónica on October 13, 2023

Friday, October 13, 2023
Jones Hall for the Performing Arts | 615 Louisiana Street | Houston, TX
Free, Reservations Required: www.houstonsymphony.org/tickets/concerts/fiesta-sinfonica

“He's a passionate, heart-on-the-sleeve conductor, with eclectic musical tastes and a wealth of experience.”
– The Mercury News

www.houstonsymphony.org • www.donatocabrera.com 

Houston, TX – Mexican-American conductor Donato Cabrera will guest conduct the Houston Symphony on Friday October 13, 2023 at 7:30pm at Jones Hall for the Performing Arts (615 Louisiana Street). Cabrera joins the Houston Symphony for its annual Fiesta Sinfónica, a free performance that dates back to 1992, celebrating the musical contributions of Latin American and Hispanic composers. The program for this special performance includes Márquez’s Conga del Fuego Nuevo, Rosas’ Sobre las Olas (Over the Waves), Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Contreras’ MeChicano (Texas premiere), the third movement from Orbón’s Tres versiones, and Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story. Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez is the soloist for Rhapsody in Blue, which will celebrate its centennial anniversary in 2024.

Cabrera says of this vibrant program and having Gabriela Martinez take part in the performance:

“With iconic works by Arturo Marquez and Juventino Rosas, as well as the Texas premiere of Juan Pablo Contreras’s MeChicano, this concert celebrates the music of Latin America composers. But we’ll also be performing Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which sheds light on the enormous influence Latin American music has had on native born composers like Leonard Bernstein. Latin American soloists have always had an important presence on concert stages throughout the world and what better vehicle to showcase the talents of Venezuelan pianist, Gabriela Martinez, than George Gershwin’s timeless classic, Rhapsody in Blue?”

Fiesta Sinfónica features the Texas premiere of Juan Pablo Contreras’ inspiring MeChicano, which Cabrera performed with the California Symphony and gave the world premiere of with the Las Vegas Philharmonic, two co-commissioners of the piece through New Music USA’s Amplifying Voices Program. Contreras became the youngest Mexican classical composer nominated for a Latin Grammy Award in 2019. MeChicano, the first work he wrote after becoming a U.S. citizen, celebrates the Mexican-American communities that have flourished across the nation. The Arizona Daily Star hailed MeChicano as, “A sonic cross-culture kaleidoscope that borrowed equally from Mexican music styles – toe-tapping cumbias, flashes of mariachi, and Tejana polka – and quintessential American – jazz and rock.”

Donato Cabrera is the Artistic and Music Director of the California Symphony and the Music Director of the Las Vegas Philharmonic. He served as the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and the Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009-2016. Cabrera is one of only a handful of conductors in history who has conducted performances with the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and the San Francisco Ballet. He is dedicated to adventurous programming, a leading advocate for living composers and digital innovation, and is keenly focused on outreach, engagement, and programming that reflects the communities he is serving. Cabrera co-founded the New York-based American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), which is dedicated to the outstanding performance of masterworks from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Cabrera has made debuts with the Chicago, London, National, and New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco, Philharmonic Orchestra of the Staatstheater Cottbus, Orquesta Filarmónica de Boca del Río, Orquesta Sinfónica Concepción, Hartford Symphony, Greensboro Symphony, Nevada Ballet Theatre, New West Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony, Monterey Symphony, and the Reno Philharmonic. In his Carnegie Hall debut, Cabrera led the world premiere of Mark Grey’s Ătash Sorushan with soprano Jessica Rivera.  

Deeply committed to diversity and education through the arts, Cabrera evaluates the scope, breadth, and content of the California Symphony’s music education programs, including its nationally recognized Sound Minds program and adult-education oriented Fresh Look: The Symphony Exposed weekly summer lecture series. As Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrera worked closely with its then Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, and frequently conducted the orchestra in a variety of concerts, including all of the education and family concerts, reaching over 70,000 children throughout the Bay Area every year. 

Cabrera is equally at home in the world of opera, frequently conducting productions in the United States and abroad. He was the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Opera from 2005-2008 and has also been an assistant conductor for productions at the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Ravinia Festival, Festival di Spoleto, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Music Academy of the West. Since 2008, he has frequently conducted productions in Concepción, Chile. In 2021 he made his debut with Opera San José and in spring 2023, Cabrera appeared with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music conducting Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul.

Awards and fellowships include a Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship at the Salzburg Festival and conducting the Nashville Symphony in the League of American Orchestra’s prestigious Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview. Cabrera was recognized by the Consulate-General of Mexico in San Francisco for his contributions to promoting and developing the presence of the Mexican community in the Bay Area. 

About Gabriela Martinez: Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez has a reputation for the lyricism of her playing, her compelling interpretations, and her elegant stage presence. Her playing has been described as, “magical… a remarkable pianist, with a cool determination, a tone full of glowing color and a seemingly effortless technique” (Los Angeles Times) and, “compelling …versatile, daring and insightful” (The New York Times). Martinez made her orchestral debut at age six, and has performed with over 100 orchestras since including the San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, Grand Rapids, New Jersey, Tucson, Pacific and Fort Worth symphonies, Buffalo Philharmonic; Germany’s Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, Nurnberger Philharmoniker; Canada’s Victoria Symphony Orchestra; the Costa Rica National Symphony, and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra in Venezuela. She has performed with Gustavo Dudamel, James Gaffigan, James Conlon, JoAnn Falleta, Michael Francis, Marcelo Lehninger and Guillermo Figueroa, among many others.

Martinez is passionate about new music, and has commissioned and premiered works by many composers including Mason Bates, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Paola Prestini, Jessica Meyer, and Dan Visconti. Her debut album, Amplified Soul, was released on the Delos label, and was recognized with a GRAMMY Award for Producer of the Year David Frost.

About the Houston Symphony Orchestra: Under Music Director Juraj Vacua, the Houston Symphony continues its second century as one of America's leading orchestras with a full complement of concert, community, education, touring, and recording activities. One of the oldest performing arts organizations in Texas, the Symphony held its inaugural performance at The Majestic Theater in downtown Houston on June 21, 1913. Today, with an operating budget of $37.8 million, the full-time ensemble of professional musicians presents more than 130 concerts annually, making it the largest performing arts organization in Houston. Traditionally, musicians of the orchestra and the Symphony's two Community-Embedded Musicians also offer over 1,000 community-based performances each year at various schools, community centers, hospitals, and churches reaching more than 200,000 people in Greater Houston annually.

After suspending concert activities in March 2020, the Symphony successfully completed a full 2020-21 season with in-person audiences and weekly livestreams of each performance, making it one of the only orchestras in the world to do so, while the Symphony's Education and Community Engagement team continued to fulfill its mission through creative and virtual means throughout the COVID pandemic. The Houston Symphony remains committed to livestreaming all of its 2023-24 season to a broad audience in over forty-five countries and all fifty states, one of few American orchestras dedicated to transmitting live performances to a size-able audience outside its home city through this technology.

The Grammy Award-winning Houston Symphony has recorded under various prestigious labels, including Koch International Classics, Naxos, RCA Red Seal, Telare, Virgin Classics, and, most recently, Dutch recording label Pentatone. In 2017, the Houston Symphony was awarded an ECHO Klassik award for the live recording of Alban Berg's Wozzeck under the direction of former Music Director Hans Graf. The orchestra earned its first Grammy nomination and Grammy Award at the 60 annual ceremony for the same recording in the Best Opera Recording category. The Symphony's most recent recordings include a Pentatone release in January 2022 of its world premiere performances of Jimmy Lopez Bellido's Aurora and Ad Astra, and a Naxos release in July 2023 of its world premiere performance of Jennifer Higdon's Duo Duel.

San Francisco Girls Chorus Announces 2023-2024 Season

Photo by Tim Hamlin available in high resolution at www.sfgirlschorus.org/press-room.

San Francisco Girls Chorus Announces 2023-2024 Season
Celebrating 45 Years of Empowering Young Women Through Music

Valérie Sainte-Agathe, Artistic Director

November 4 & 5, 2023 – This Is What It Means
SFGC Premier Ensemble Opening Concerts Centering Music by California Women
Co-Presented with Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Part of the California Festival
Music by Sarah Gibson (World Premiere), Reena Esmail, Nicolás Lell Benavides, Caroline Shaw, Gabriela Lena Frank, Lisa Bielawa, and Ursula Kwong-Brown

December 11, 2023 – SFGC Winter Concert: Folk Songs of the World with Latin Grammy-Nominee Accordionist Sam Reider at Davies Symphony Hall

March 9 & 10, 2024 – SFGC Premier Ensemble in Vivaldi’s Juditha Triumphans at Z Space
Music Direction by Valérie Sainte-Agathe & Stage Direction by Céline Ricci

May 2024 – Chorus School Spring Concert at Scottish Rite Masonic Center
Featuring World Premiere by SFGC Composer-in-Residence Sahba Aminikia

May 19, 2024 – SFGC Premier Ensemble with Percussionist & Composer Haruka Fujii at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music

San Francisco Girls Chorus: www.sfgirlschorus.org
Press Room: www.sfgirlschorus.org/press-room

San Francisco, CA – The San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC), led by Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe, announces its 2023-2024 season, which celebrates 45 years of empowering young women through music. Since 1978, SFGC has provided girls and young women the unique opportunity not only to perform at the highest artistic caliber, but also to develop self-confidence, leadership skills, and an awareness of the role of the arts in civic engagement.

A leader in the Bay Area and national music scenes, SFGC produces award-winning concerts, recordings and tours; empowers young women in music and other fields; and sets the international standard for the highest level of performance and education. SFGC has been recognized through numerous honors including five GRAMMY Awards, four ASCAP/Chorus America Awards for Adventurous Programming, and in 2002, becoming the first youth chorus to receive Chorus America's prestigious Margaret Hillis Achievement Award for Choral Excellence. Each year, hundreds of singers of diverse backgrounds from 45 Bay Area cities ranging in age from age four to eighteen participate in SFGC’s programs. The organization consists of a six-level Chorus School training program and the Premier Ensemble, a professional-level chorus of treble voices.

Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe says, “What distinguishes SFGC from other youth choirs is the creativity, the innovation, the fact that we are giving our singers the opportunity to show their best in every single situation. All of these traits are on display in this 45th Anniversary Season, as we celebrate the legacy of the San Francisco Girls Chorus by looking towards the future. Not only are we bringing overlooked masterpieces to the 21st century, we are performing cutting edge new works, including commissions written uniquely for us.”

Under the direction of Valérie Sainte-Agathe, SFGC has achieved an incomparable sound that underscores the unique clarity and force of impeccably trained treble voices fused with expressiveness and drama. As a result, the SFGC vibrantly performs 1,000 years of choral masterworks from plainchant to the most challenging and nuanced contemporary works, many created expressly for them, in programs that are as intelligently designed as they are enjoyable and revelatory to experience. The SFGC 2023-2024 season is no exception.

SFGC launches the season with This Is What It Means, two concerts featuring its Premier Ensemble co-presented and performed with Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) as part of the statewide California Festival on November 4, 2023 at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley and November 5, 2023 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The concert program centers the voices of Californian women composers, interweaving instrumental and vocal works by Pauline Oliveros (Tree/Peace), Gabriela Lena Frank (Picaflor Esmeralda from Two Mountain Songs and Canto para California), Reena Esmail (Love of Thousands, SFGC commission 2019), Gabriella Smith (Carrot Revolution), Lisa Bielawa (Opening: Forest from Vireo), and Ursula Kwong-Brown (I See You, I Hear You, I Believe You) with the music of Nicolás Lell Benavides (A Bird Came Down the Walk), Caroline Shaw (Dolce Cantavi), and Hildegard von Bingen (O Virtus Sapientiae). SFGC and LCCE join forces in the world premiere performances of a new work by Los Angeles-based composer Sarah Gibson titled This is what it means, co-commissioned by the two ensembles for the occasion. Gibson's music has been described as "expansive" by the Los Angeles Times, and has been performed by the BBC and Los Angeles Philharmonics, Atlanta, Seattle, and New Jersey Symphonies, and more. Her compositions reflect her deep interest in the creative process across various artistic mediums, especially from the female perspective.

On December 11, 2023, SFGC presents its highly anticipated annual concert at Davies Symphony Hall, SFGC Winter Concert: Folk Songs of the World, bringing together hundreds of singers from the Premier Ensemble, the entire Chorus School, as well as SFGC alumnae. This year’s concert is inspired by folk music traditions from around the world and features acclaimed accordionist and 2023 Latin Grammy nominee Sam Reider as guest artist, combining traditional favorites (including Silent Night), new works, and hidden gems from the holiday choral repertoire. The San Francisco-based Sam Reider has performed, recorded, and collaborated with a range of artists including Jon Batiste, Jorge Glem, Sierra Hull, Laurie Lewis, and Paquito d’Rivera. From his genre-bending acoustic ensemble The Human Hands to his duo collaboration with Grammy-nominated Venezuelan artist Jorge Glem, his unique compositional voice and melodicism runs throughout his eclectic projects.

On March 9 and 10, 2024, SFGC presents its Premier Ensemble in Vivaldi’s Juditha Triumphans at Z Space, with music direction by Valérie Sainte-Agathe and stage direction by Céline Ricci. This remarkable oratorio from 1716 was written for an all-female ensemble, with all characters both male and female interpreted by women of the Ospedale della Pietà, a girl’s orphanage in Venice where Vivaldi was music director. It is the only oratorio by Vivaldi to have survived.

In May 2024, the Chorus School will showcase singers from Levels 1 through IV at its annual Chorus School Spring Concert at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center, coming together to celebrate their accomplishments from the year individually and as a school. The concert will culminate in a world premiere by 2023-2024 SFGC Composer-in-Residence Sahba Aminikia written specifically for the occasion. Aminikia believes music to be an immersive and transcendent, yet visceral, human experience, and is highly influenced by the poetry of Hafiz, Rumi, and Saadi, as well as traditional, classical and jazz music. The Iranian-born American composer trained under Iranian pianists Nikan Milani and Safa Shahidi, and his first classical teacher, Mehran Rouhani. He later relocated to Russia, where he studied at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory. He received his B.M. and M.M. from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The San Francisco Chronicle has described him as, “an artist singularly equipped to provide a soundtrack to these unsettling times.”

SFGC’s Premier Ensemble’s 2023-2024 season concludes with a collaboration with renowned percussionist and composer Haruka Fujii on May 19, 2024 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The concert of new music will include a commissioned work by Fujii, one of the most prominent solo percussionists and marimbists of her generation. Fujii has won international acclaim for her interpretations of contemporary music, having performed numerous premieres of works from luminary composers, and appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the San Francisco Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and more. Since 2010, she has performed as an artist of the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble, joining a group of international musicians founded by Yo-Yo Ma, and serves as one of the artistic leadership team alongside with the artistic director Rhiannon Giddens. Her interest in percussion was influenced by her mother, noted marimbist Mutsuko Fujii. She studied music at the Tokyo National University, the Juilliard School, and the Mannes College of Music. Fujii previously collaborated with SFGC on the world premiere of the choral opera Tomorrow’s Memories: A Little Manila Diary by Matthew Welch.

In addition, SFGC ensembles will perform throughout the Bay Area in collaboration this season with other organizations and artists including the East Bay Philharmonic, Sunset Music & Arts, Lisa Mezzacappa, and the Amateur Music Network.

Tickets for the San Francisco Girls Chorus’s 2023-2024 season will be available beginning on October 2, 2023 at www.sfgirlschorus.org.

San Francisco Girls Chorus Season Highlights

This Is What It Means
SFGC Premier Ensemble Opening Concerts Centering Music by California Women
Co-Presented with Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
Part of the California Festival

November 4, 2023 at 7:30pm
First Presbyterian Church, 2407 Dana St, Berkeley, CA

November 5, 2023, at 4pm
San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak St, San Francisco, CA

SFGC Winter Concert: Folk Songs
with Latin Grammy-Nominee Accordionist Sam Reider

December 11, 2023 at 7pm
Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco, CA

SFGC Premier Ensemble in Vivaldi’s Juditha Triumphans
Music direction by Valérie Sainte-Agathe & stage direction by Celine Ricci

March 9, 2024 at 7:30pm & March 10, 2024 at 2pm
Z Space, 450 Florida St, San Francisco, CA

Chorus School Spring Concert
Featuring a World Premiere by SFGC Composer-in-Residence Sahba Aminikia

May 2024
Scottish Rite Masonic Center, 2850 19th Ave, San Francisco, CA

SFGC Premier Ensemble with Percussionist & Composer Haruka Fujii

May 19, 2024 at 3pm
San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak St, San Francisco, CA

Tickets & information: www.sfgirlschorus.org

The San Francisco Girls Chorus receives support from Grants for the Arts, The Kimball Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Sequoia Trust, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., The Sam Mazza Foundation, The Bernard Osher Foundation, and The Morris Stulsaft Foundation.

More About The San Francisco Girls Chorus And Chorus School:

Established in 1978, the mission of the San Francisco Girls Chorus is to create outstanding performances featuring the unique and compelling sound of young women’s voices through an exemplary program committed to education and visionary leadership in the development of this art form.

Commissions of new works from the leading composers of our time, collaborations with renowned guest artists, and partnerships with other Bay Area and national arts organizations provide the young women of SFGC with matchless performance experiences among powerful adult role models. In addition to its annual engagements with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Symphony, recent and current/upcoming artistic partnerships include the San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Film Festival, Opera Parallèle, Kronos Quartet, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, New Century Chamber Orchestra, TEDxSanFrancisco, and Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky. SFGC has also traveled to the East Coast on a number of occasions in recent years for debut concert engagements, including for the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL FESTIVAL at Lincoln Center in collaboration with The Knights orchestra, for SHIFT: A Festival of American Orchestras in April 2017 with The Knights at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, and at Carnegie Hall in February 2018 with the Philip Glass Ensemble, for a sold-out performance that was broadcast around the world by Medici TV.

SFGC's commitment to artistic excellence has been recognized through many awards and honors, including five GRAMMY Awards; four ASCAP/Chorus America Awards for Adventurous Programming; and, in 2002, becoming the first youth chorus to receive Chorus America's prestigious Margaret Hillis Achievement Award for Choral Excellence.

SFGC was founded in 1978 by Elizabeth Appling, who served as Artistic Director until her retirement in 1992. Other Artistic Directors during SFGC's illustrious 40-year history include Sharon J. Paul (1992 - 2000), Magen Solomon (2000-2001, interim), Susan McMane (2001-2012), Brandon Brack (2012-2013, interim), and Lisa Bielawa (2013-2018).

SFGC owns and operates the Kanbar Performing Arts Center, which has become a hub for small to mid-size arts organizations in the Bay Area. In addition to SFGC’s own rehearsal and performance programs, the Kanbar Center provides long-term leased office space to such organizations as American Bach Soloists, Opera Parallèle, Jewish LearningWorks, and the Chinese-American International School, as well as rehearsal space for groups including New Century Chamber Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Merola summer opera program, and the San Francisco Boys Chorus.

About Valérie Sainte-Agathe, SFGC Artistic Director:

Valérie Sainte-Agathe has prepared and conducted the San Francisco Girls Chorus since 2013, including performances with renowned ensembles throughout the United States and beyond. Through transformative choral music training, education, and performance, Ms. Sainte-Agathe empowers young women and champions the music of today throughout the choral world.

Prior to her time with SFGC, Ms. Sainte-Agathe served as Music Director for the Young Singers program of the Montpellier National Symphony and Opera in France from 1998-2011, and participated in eight recordings with the Montpellier National Orchestra and The Radio France Festival.

In the 2022-2023 season, Ms. Sainte-Agathe celebrated a decade of leadership with the San Francisco Girls Chorus. During her tenure, she has welcomed artistic collaborations with many celebrated guest artists including Chanticleer, Santa Fe Opera, soprano Shawnette Sulker, composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra, GRAMMY-nominated composer Ayanna Woods, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the King’s Singers, Roomful of Teeth, Bobby McFerrin. She premiered SFGC’s first self-produced and commissioned opera, Tomorrow’s Memories: A Little Manila Diary at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in June 2023. Her first recording as SFGC’s Music Director, Final Answer, was released on Orange Mountain Music in February 2018, and her second recording, My Outstretched Hand, was released in July 2019. Ms. Sainte Agathe has toured with SFGC’s Premier Ensemble locally and internationally, and will travel with the ensemble to South Africa in July 2024.

Ms. Sainte-Agathe’s artistry stretches beyond the San Francisco Girls Chorus, including joining Philharmonia Baroque as its new Chorale Director in 2022, and a feature in the 2022 book Music Mavens: 15 Women of Note published by the Chicago Review Press. Ms. Sainte-Agathe joined forces with GRAMMY Award-winning Kronos Quartet during its 2021-2022 season to conduct the world premiere of At War With Ourselves - 400 Years of You by Michael Abels and continues to perform this work throughout the U.S. on tour with the ensemble.

Ms. Sainte Agathe’s performance highlights include her Carnegie Hall and Barbican Center debuts with the Philip Glass Ensemble, conducting with Michael Riesman in Glass’s Music with Changing Parts; conducting SFGC for the New York Philharmonic Biennial Festival at Lincoln Center; and collaborating with The Knights for the SHIFT Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. She also served as Choirmaster with Taylor Mac, recipient of MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grant," for the "Holiday Sauce" production at the Curran Theater in December 2018.

Invoke Presented by Panoramic Voices in Two Performances

Photo by Marshall Tidrick. Available in hi-resolution at: www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/invoke

Invoke Presented by Panoramic Voices in Two Performances

Featuring World Premieres of
Steven Sérpa's Terra sagrada, Terra solitária and
Uma and Wari by Adrienne Inglis

Plus arrangements of Invoke Originals with Panoramic Voices

Thursday, October 19, 2023 at 7:30pm
Central Machine Works | 4824 E Cesar Chavez St | Austin, TX

Saturday, October 21, 2023 at 7pm
Jester King Brewery, Kitchen, Farm and Event Hall
13187 Fitzhugh Road | Austin, TX

More information: www.panoramicvoices.org

“The special thing about Invoke is…how its lively spirit and playfulness are essential to the way they approach every piece of music.”
– Austin Chronicle

www.InvokeSound.com

Austin TX – Austin’s own multi-instrumental quartet Invoke (Nick Montopoli, violin/banjo/vocals; Zach Matteson, violin/vocals; Karl Mitze, viola/mandolin/vocals; Geoff Manyin, cello/vocals) –– a group the Austin Chronicle says “infuse[s] their performances with such a down-home joyfulness” –– will be presented by Panoramic Voices –– a 130-person inclusive choir known for spanning all genres from classical, country, rock, hip hop, and beyond –– in two performances on October 21 at Jester King Brewery, Kitchen, Farm and Event Hall (13187 Fitzhugh Road) and October 19 at Central Machine Works (4824 E Cesar Chavez St.). The performance on October 19 was added to accommodate high demand, and will feature only a small selection from the full program on October 21.

The setlist for October 19 will feature a performance of the title track from Invoke’s forthcoming Sono Luminus album, Evolve & Travel, as performed by the quartet, as well as several traditional folk songs specially arranged by Karl Mitze and Panoramic Voices Managing Artistic Director Juli Orlandini, collaboratively performed by Invoke and Panoramic Voices. On October 21, Invoke will perform works from Evolve & Travel, in addition to arrangements of their music with Panoramic Voices. The performance will also feature the world premieres of Uma and Wari by Adrienne Inglis, as well as Terra sagrada, Terra solitária by Steven Sérpa –– all commissioned by Panoramic Voices specifically for this performance.

Driven by a passion for storytelling, Invoke’s performances feature original works composed by and for the group, which form a unique contemporary repertoire inspired by many different musical styles –– from minimalism, to jazz, to American fiddle tunes, and bluegrass.

Violinist Zach Matteson says of this unique collaboration and performing on different instruments for Serpa and Inglis’s works:

"We're really excited to bring back some of the repertoire from Invoke's past for including our arrangement of Sweet Willie (found on our debut album Souls in the Mud) where we highlight a Smithsonian archive recording of my great-grandfather, Maurice Matteson singing a ballad he "bagged" in the hills of North Carolina. Our original arrangement only contained muted strings to enhance the eerie qualities of the tune, but now we can explore a wider array of textures with this amazing choir. I'm also excited that we'll be bringing back a tune we arranged during our Pandemic Streaming days, Green Green Rocky Road.

Another aspect of this collaboration that will be really special is the addition of two world premiers by composers Steven Sérpa and Adrienne Inglis. We are very honored to be exploring Steven Sérpa's roots as a part of the incredibly wide ranging array of Portuguese folk music heard in Terra sagrada, Terra solitária. And I personally am really excited for my debut on Sikus (Bolivian pan pipes) and Karl Mitze’s debut on Charango, a traditional Andean stringed instrument for Adrienne's work, Uma.”

Adrienne Inglis says of Uma: “[Uma] for [Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass] and string quartet with optional charango and sikus, is written as a dance in the style of a Bolivian huayño. The text in the indigenous language of Aymara comes from the poem “Uma,” written by Chilean poet Pedro Humire Loredo. In the high Andean plateau called the altiplano or puna, the scarcity of water calls on the local people to share the precious and essential resource. Humire’s poetry reassures us that there is enough uma (water) for all. The popular indigenous huayño dance predates the Spanish conquest. This choral setting celebrates cooperation and sharing of water with embellished instrumental sections and optional panpipes (sikus or zampoñas) played in hocket (trenzado) and charango. Occasional shouts (gritos) may add to the excitement.”

Of Wari, the text for which also uses the indigenous language of Aymara and comes from Pedro Humire Loredo’s poem “Uma,” Inglis says: “Wari means vicuña, a native wild camelid species considered to be the ancestor of the domesticated alpaca. The harsh life of the Andes takes its toll on vicuña young, leaving behind grieving vicuña mothers. The Aymara people suffer similar losses and also cry for their lost loved ones. This yaraví lament includes expressive cadenza sections for both violin and cello, traditional key and rhythm, and a choral setting of Humire’s poignant poetry.”

With Terra sagrada, Terra solitária, composer Steven Sérpa connects with the music of his long-lost Portuguese heritage. This suite uses folk songs from southern Portugal and incorporates the local style of communal folk singing “Cante Alentejo.” Terra sagrada marks out emotions experienced by many immigrant families: the desire to see the world or find a better life for their families, the heartache for loved ones left behind and nostalgia for the villages they grew up in, and a sacred esteem for the lands that gave them life.

Director Juli Orlandini says of the collaborative project:

“Invoke’s passion for their craft is absolutely infectious; beyond the musicality they bring to their performances, the sheer joy in doing so is tangible from the moment they step on stage. As the leader of a community choir, my job is to provide experiences that will enrich my singers’ lives; I am beyond grateful for the once-in-a-lifetime performance opportunity Invoke has afforded over 130 singers, some of whom are singing with a choir for the first time in their lives!”

More about Invoke: Described as “...not anything but everything: Classical, Folk, Bluegrass, Americana and a sound yet to be termed seamlessly merged into a perfect one” (David Srebnik, SiriusXM Classical Producer), Invoke strives to successfully dodge even the most valiant attempts at genre classification. Invoke was selected to be the Young Professional String Quartet in Residence at the University of Texas at Austin from 2016-2018. Their awards include first prizes in the Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition in New York, NY, received First Prize at the M-Prize International Chamber Arts competition in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and received First Prize in the Coltman Competition in Austin, Texas.

Invoke has shared the stage with some of the most acclaimed chamber groups in the country, including the Westerlies, Miró and Ensō Quartets, and the U.S. Army Field Band. Additional performance highlights include Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Lincoln Center, the Phillips Collection, and the Green Music Center. Invoke has also appeared with musicians from various genres, including composer-performer Clarice Assad, chamber rock group San Fermin, indie group Never Shout Never, and DC beatboxer/rapper/spoons virtuoso Christylez Bacon.

Invoke’s discography includes their debut album, Souls in the Mud (2015); Furious Creek (2018); and Fantastic Planet (2021). The group’s recording credits appear on bassist/composer Ethan Foote’s solo album Fields Burning, singer/songwriter Marian McLaughlin’s Spirit House, jazz/soul singer Rochelle Rice’s EP Wonder, and many more. Invoke has also worked extensively with composer Graham Reynolds and his non-profit organization, Golden Hornet, recording volumes IV-VI of String Quartet Smackdown, Marfa: A Country & Western Big Band Suite, and the 2019 film, Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

Invoke is strongly committed to championing diverse American voices through commissioning and highlighting new music. Invoke’s ongoing commissioning project, entitled American Postcards, asks composers to pick a time and place in American history and tell its story through the group’s unique artistry.

For more information, visit www.invokesound.com.

About Panoramic Voices: Directed by Juli Orlandini, Panoramic Voices is an adventurous choral collective that thrives on a “music without borders” approach to music making. Singers from all walks of life are accepted—no auditions, no participation fees—making the group a truly inclusive community. With collaborations spanning all genres from classical, country, rock, hip hop, and beyond, PV has worked with a dizzying array of artists such as Mobley, Roky Erickson, Carson McHone, Calliope Musicals, Zeale, and Grammy Award-winners Roomful of Teeth. The commissioning of new works has also been an important part of Panoramic Voice’s mission, resulting in the premiere of compositions by Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw, Wilco’s Glenn Kotche, Austin luminary Graham Reynolds, and many more.

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Austin-based, multi-instrumental quartet Invoke – a group known for storytelling through music, which the Capital Gazette describes as “versatile and musically adventurous” – is presented by Panoramic Voices for a hometown performance. The concert features the world premieres of Terra sagrada, Terra solitária by Steven Sérpa and Uma by Adrienne Inglis. Invoke will perform several of their original works, in addition to collaborating with the choral ensemble Panoramic Voices to perform special arrangements of Invoke’s original music.

Short description: Invoke brings a “lively spirit and playfulness” (Austin Chronicle) to Panoramic Voices, performing original music and arrangements for Panoramic Voices, plus the world premieres of Terra sagrada, Terra solitária by Steven Sérpa and Uma by Adrienne Inglis.

Primary Concert details:
Who: Invoke
Presented by Panoramic Voices
What: Original Music by Invoke Plus Arrangements with Panoramic Voices and the World Premieres of Steven Sérpa’s Terra solitária andAdrienne Inglis’s Uma.
When: Saturday, October 21, 2023 at 7pm
Where: Jester King Brewery, Kitchen, Farm & Event Hall, 13187 Fitzhugh Road, Austin, TX
Tickets and information: www.panoramicvoices.org/

Secondary Concert details:
Who: Invoke
Presented by Panoramic Voices
What: Excerpts from “Folk Yeah!” - Original Music by Invoke Plus Arrangements with Panoramic Voices
When: Thursday, October 19, 2023 at 7:30pm
Where: Central Machine Works, 4824 E Cesar Chavez St, Austin, TX
Tickets and information: www.panoramicvoices.org/

Violinist Yevgeny Kutik is Guest Soloist with Traverse Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Maestro Kevin Rhodes

Photo by Corey Hayes available in high resolution at: https://www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/yevgeny-kutik

Violinist Yevgeny Kutik is Guest Soloist
with Traverse Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Maestro Kevin Rhodes

Featuring Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61

Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 3pm
Corson Auditorium | 4000 M-137 | Interlochen, MI

Tickets and Information:
http://traversesymphony.org/concert/beethoven/

“polished dexterity and genteel, old-world charm”
– WQXR

www.yevgenykutik.com

Traverse City, MI — On Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 3pm, violinist Yevgeny Kutik, known for his “dark-hued tone and razor-sharp technique,” (The New York Times) will be presented in concert as the featured soloist with the Traverse Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Kevin Rhodes. The performance will take place in Corson Auditorium (4000 M-137).

A longtime collaborator of the Traverse Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Kevin Rhodes, Kutik reunites once again with Rhodes and the TSO after a 2022 performance in the TSO’s Maestro Series. For this concert, Kutik and the TSO will perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61 as part of a program that also includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36. In this performance of Beethoven’s sole violin concerto, audiences can enjoy Kutik’s refined solo artistry alongside a musical conversation fostered with the TSO. The work embraces a more collaborative approach to the concerto form that connects the soloist and orchestra through a melodic dialogue.

Of this next collaboration with Maestro Kevin Rhodes and the TSO, Kutik says:

“I am so delighted to return back to Traverse to perform with Kevin Rhodes and the TSO. The Beethoven Violin Concerto is a stunning piece, without a doubt one of the most important violin concertos ever written. One of the greatest joys in music making is when a piece is a true collaboration between instruments, and this piece is a great example of this. Often, it can feel like a gathering of friends, together on stage, making music for the purpose of something much larger than themselves.”

About Yevgeny Kutik: With a “dark-hued tone and razor-sharp technique” (The New York Times), violinist Yevgeny Kutik has captivated audiences worldwide with an old-world sound that communicates a modern intellect. Praised for his technical precision and virtuosity, he is also lauded for his poetic and imaginative interpretations of both standard works and newly composed repertoire. Kutik is also ​​Artistic Director and co-founder of The Birch Festival.

A native of Minsk, Belarus, Kutik began violin studies with his mother, Alla Zernitskaya, and immigrated to the US with his family at the age of five. An advocate for the Jewish Federations of North America, the organization that assisted his family in coming to the US, he regularly speaks and performs across the country to promote the assistance of refugees from around the world. Kutik’s discography, all on Marquis Classics, includes The Death of Juliet and Other Tales (2021), Meditations on Family (Marquis Classics 2019), Words Fail (2016), Music from the Suitcase (2014), and Sounds of Defiance (2012). Music from the Suitcase is being developed into an immersive stage and performance production for the 2024-2025 season.

Yevgeny Kutik was a featured soloist in Joseph Schwantner’s The Poet’s Hour – Soliloquy for Violin on episode six of Gerard Schwarz’s All-Star Orchestra, a made-for-television classical music concert series released on DVD by Naxos and broadcast nationally on PBS. In 2021, Kutik made his debut with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra led by Leonard Slatkin, performing the world premiere of Schwantner’s Violin Concerto, an expansion of The Poet’s Hour, written specifically for Kutik. Kutik gave the world premiere of Cântico, a work for solo violin by Andreia Pinto Correia, at the Tanglewood Music Festival in August 2022. The work was co-commissioned for Kutik by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 2019, he made his debuts at the Kennedy Center, presented by Washington Performing Arts, and at the Ravinia Festival. Kutik made his major orchestral debut in 2003 with Keith Lockhart and The Boston Pops as the First Prize recipient of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Young Artists Competition. In 2006, he was awarded the Salon de Virtuosi Grant as well as the Tanglewood Music Center Jules Reiner Violin Prize.

Kutik holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s degree from the New England Conservatory and currently resides in Boston. Kutik’s violin was crafted in Italy in 1915 by Stefano Scarampella.

For more information, please visit www.yevgenykutik.com.

About Traverse Symphony Orchestra: The Traverse Symphony Orchestra (TSO), founded in 1952 by community leader Elnora Milliken as The Northwestern Michigan Symphony Orchestra, has grown from a small group of volunteer musicians to a paid professional orchestra of 60 contracted members, with a commitment to presenting the finest in musical entertainment and quality educational programs.

Tickets for this performance are $25.50, $38.50, $45.50, and $61.50 and available now at www.traversesymphony.org/concerts-tickets

For more information about the 2023-23 Season concerts including the complete lineup of guest artists and repertoire, please visit our website at www.TraverseSymphony.org or call our Box Office 231-947-7120, 10-3pm Monday-Friday.

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Violinist Yevgeny Kutik, described by The New York Times as having a “dark-hued tone and razor-sharp technique,” is presented as the featured soloist with the Traverse Symphony Orchestra on Saturday, October 22, 2023 at 3pm. Together with the Symphony, Kutik will perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, under the direction of Maestro Kevin Rhodes.

Short description: Violinist Yevgeny Kutik, known for his “dark-hued tone and razor-sharp technique,” (The New York Times), is presented by the Traverse Symphony Orchestra on October 22, 2023 as the featured soloist in a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major led by Maestro Kevin Rhodes.

Concert details:

Who: Yevgeny Kutik
Presented by Traverse Symphony Orchestra
What: Music by Ludwig van Beethoven
When: Saturday, October 22, 2023 at 3pm.
Where: Corson Auditorium, 4000 M-137, Interlochen, MI
Tickets and information: www.traversesymphony.org/concert/beethoven/

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein is Guest Soloist with Alabama Symphony Orchestra on October 12th

Photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco available in high resolution at: www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/simone-dinnerstein

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein is Guest Soloist
with Alabama Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Music Director Carlos Izcaray

Featuring Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major

First of Three Performances as part of the Gogue Center’s 2023–24 Orchestra
and Chamber Music Series

Thursday, October 12, 2023 at 7pm
Woltosz Theatre at Gogue Performing Arts Center
910 South College Street | Auburn, AL

Tickets and information:
https://www.goguecenter.auburn.edu/simone-dinnerstein-and-the-alabama-symphony-orchestra/

“lean, knowing, and unpretentious elegance”
– The New Yorker

Simone Dinnerstein: www.simonedinnerstein.com

Auburn, AL – GRAMMY-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein will be the featured guest soloist with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra on Thursday, October 12, 2023, for a performance in the Woltosz Theatre at the Gogue Performing Arts Center (910 South College Street). Dinnerstein, who is heralded for her distinctive musical voice and commitment to sharing classical music with everyone, will perform Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major as part of a concert program which also features Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro Overture and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92. The performance will be conducted by Music Director Carlos Izcaray. This will be the first of three appearances by Dinnerstein as part of the Gogue Center’s 2023–24 Orchestra and Chamber Music Series.

The Washington Post has called Simone Dinnerstein “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”

While Dinnerstein has come to be recognized and celebrated for her appreciation of music by J.S. Bach, she has also brought bold and expressive artistry to the work of Brahms in performances for over 10 years. Brahms’ second piano concerto is a new addition to her repertoire. She says, “Brahms’s second piano concerto has long been my favorite, but I never felt ready to play it. Something about turning fifty felt like it was about time I faced this challenge, and I have spent the past few months delving deep into the forest of this remarkable work.”

As part of the Gogue Center’s Orchestra and Chamber Music Series for 2023-2024, Dinnerstein will be presented in two additional performances in 2024. On January 26, 2024, Dinnerstein will perform The Eye Is the First Circle, the first project Dinnerstein conceived, created, and directed. The performance will be done in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett. Then on April 5, 2024, Dinnerstein will lead her ensemble, Baroklyn, in a program of all Bach repertoire in the final presentation of the Gogue Center’s Orchestra and Chamber Music Series.

Of collaborating with conductor Carlos Izcaray and giving three performances with the Gogue Center, Dinnerstein says:

“I feel honored to be presented by the Gogue Center in three performances this season. My last performance before the pandemic was at the beautiful concert hall of the Gogue Center and I am very excited to return to this wonderful venue with their abundance of fine pianos! I am also looking forward to collaborating with the distinguished conductor, Carlos Izcaray. I have found that conductors that regularly work with stellar youth orchestras have a particular vibrancy and freshness to their approach. As the conductor of the American Youth Symphony, I am eager to see how this element of Maestro Izcaray’s musicianship will add to our collaboration with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.”

Simone Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Seoul Arts Center and the Sydney Opera House.

She has made thirteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard classical charts, with repertoire ranging from Couperin to Glass. From 2020 to 2022, she released a trilogy of albums recorded at her home in Brooklyn during the pandemic. A Character of Quiet (Orange Mountain Music, 2020), featuring the music of Philip Glass and Schubert, was described by NPR as, “music that speaks to a sense of the world slowing down,” and by The New Yorker as, “a reminder that quiet can contain multitudes.” Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic (Supertrain Records, 2021), surpassed two million streams on Apple Music and was nominated for a 2021 GRAMMY Award in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. The final installment in the trilogy, Undersong, was released in January 2022 on Orange Mountain Music.

In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2. She premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera. Dinnerstein has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs. The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.

For more information, please visit www.simonedinnerstein.com.

About the Alabama Symphony Orchestra: The formation of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra (ASO) began with the first performance by a group of volunteer musicians in 1921. That group would evolve from a volunteer ensemble to the state’s only full-time professional orchestra. Today, the ASO is continuing to make music and provide vital services to the residents of the state, serving nearly 100,000 individuals a year through concert series, youth programs, and educational and community engagement efforts to fulfill its mission to change lives through music. The Alabama Symphony Orchestra has entertained and enriched audiences for almost a century, playing a variety of classical and popular music and hosting performances by some of the finest guest artists in the world. Performing 100 concerts annually, the 53 talented musicians of the ASO bring to life some of the world’s most treasured musical masterpieces and introduce listeners to exciting new works and composers.

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Simone Dinnerstein, described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” is presented as the featured guest soloist with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in a performance led by Music Director Carlos Izcaray, of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-Flat Major. The evening’s program will also include performances of The Marriage of Figaro Overture by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92. This is the first of three scheduled appearances by Dinnerstein for the Gogue Center’s 2023–24 Orchestra and Chamber Music Series.

Short description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, an artist of “lean, knowing, and unpretentious elegance” (The New Yorker), is presented in a performance with the the Alabama Symphony Orchestra led by Music Director Carlos Izcaray, as the featured soloist in Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-Flat Major.

Concert details:
Who: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein
Presented by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Music Director Carlos Izcaray
What: Music by Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven
When: Thursday, October 12, 2023 at 7pm
Where: Woltosz Theatre at Gogue Performing Arts Center, 910 South College Street, Auburn, AL
Tickets and information: www.goguecenter.auburn.edu/simone-dinnerstein-and-the-alabama-symphony-orchestra/

ECM New Series Releases Thomas Larcher's The Living Mountain

ECM New Series Releases

Thomas Larcher: The Living Mountain

Sarah Aristidou, soprano; Alisa Weilerstein, violoncello; Aaron Pilsan, piano; Luka Juhart, accordion; Andrè Schuen, baritone; Daniel Heide, piano

Münchner Kammerorchester
Clemens Schuldt, conductor

ECM New Series 2723
CD 0289 485 8784 1

Release Date: October 6, 2023
Press downloads available upon request. 

Austrian composer Thomas Larcher’s new album features premiere recordings of three strongly contrasting works. The Living Mountain, composed 2019-20, draws inspiration from Scottish poet and nature writer Nan Shepherd’s book of the same name. Having grown up in Tyrol and familiar with mountain landscapes, Larcher was taken by Shepherd’s unique approach to the topic in her memoir, and “how completely different it is from all the other literature touching upon this subject. There’s a particularly palpable connection between her introspection and the nature that surrounds her, the microscopic details that are elaborated in that context. Being able to identify with her writing as much as I did, reading the book turned into my own introspective journey and immediately sparked the musical connotations that I elaborate in my piece”.

In the piece, motifs are bound to thunderous percussive crescendos and insistent note repetitions that frame the powerful and evocative vocal performance of Sarah Aristidou. Besides the relation to Nan Shepherd’s text, Larcher’s piece also draws from a series of photographs by Dutch photographer Awoiska van der Molen – landscape pictures taken in the mountains of Tyrol that were first published alongside the premiere of Larcher’s piece in 2022. Van der Molen and the composer felt a deep affinity with each other’s work from the start – work “characterized by the slowness of analogue composing and photography as well as constraint through erasing and concealing of content.”

The act of concealment, of leaving things unsaid, is the keyword of Larcher’s setting of German author W.G. Sebald’s Unerzählt (composed 2019-20). A song cycle performed by baritone Andrè Schuen and pianist Daniel Heide, Unerzählt is composed of thirteen sparsely designed miniatures that underscore Schuen’s expressive range. Unerzählt presents its miniatures in a very pure and concentrated way, with their enigmatic appeal leaving much freedom for interpretation.

On Ouroboros, an instrumental work in three movements for violoncello and orchestra, cellist Alisa Weilerstein draws compelling lines against the backdrop of the Munich Chamber Orchestra’s cluster harmonies and the pointillist accompaniment of pianist Aaron Pilsan. The second movement, Allegro infuriato, true to its tempo indication, is a storm of sonic fury.

*

Described by Alex Ross in The New Yorker as “an unpredictable, freethinking composer, who has set aside the modernist strictures that have long governed Central European music”, Thomas Larcher, was born in Innsbruck in 1963, and studied composition and piano in Vienna. His ECM recordings include Naunz (2001), Ixxu (2006) and Madhares (2011).

Andrè Schuen grew up in South Tyrol, where he played cello before studying singing at the University Mozarteum Salzburg. He is today one of the most sought-after baritones, performing in opera houses across the world, such as the Bavarian State Opera, the Vienna State Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden and others. More recently, Schuen “made big waves”, to quote the Swiss daily Neue Züricher Zeitung, at the Salzburger Festspiele 2023 for his part as Count Almaviva in Mozart’s La Nozze Di Figaro.

The French-Cypriot soprano Sarah Aristidou is an award-winning interpreter of both contemporary music and core opera repertoire. In 2022/23, Aristidou she made her debut at Semperoper Dresden under Omer Meir Wellber as Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In the same year she also made her debut at the Bavarian State Opera.

American violoncellist Alisa Weilerstein’s commitment to new music has been recognized with a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”. She has worked extensively with composers Osvaldo Golijov, Lera Auerbach and Joseph Hallman, among others.

The Münchner Kammerorchester’s association with ECM began in 2000. Since then the orchestra has recorded music of Mansurian, Hartmann, Bach, Webern, Scelsi, Hosokawa, Isang Yun, Barry Guy and more. In 2011 they also contributed to Larcher’s Madhares album.

The Living Mountain and Ouroboros were recorded in June 2021 and Unerzählt in May 2022. The album was produced by Manfred Eicher.

CD booklet include photographs from Awoiska van der Molen’s ‘The Living Mountain’ series and liner notes by Friedrike Gösweiner.

Kellen Gray and Royal Scottish National Orchestra Release African American Voices II on October 13th

Announcing African American Voices II

Conducted by Kellen Gray | Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Featuring the First Commercial Recordings of Landmark Orchestral Pieces Composed by Margaret Bonds, Ulysses Kay, and Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson

Release Date: October 13, 2023 (Digital) & October 20, 2023 (CD)
Linn Records

CDs and press downloads available upon request.

 www.kellengray.com | www.rsno.org.uk | www.linnrecords.com

American-born, Scotland-based conductor Kellen Gray has reunited with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) in this second installment of African American Voices, featuring the first commercial recordings of three landmark orchestral pieces. African American Voices II includes Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations (1964), Ulysses Kay’s Concerto for Orchestra (1948), and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Worship: A Concert Overture (2001) and will be released worldwide on Linn Records on October 13, 2023 (digital) and October 20, 2023 (CD). The album follows Gray’s 2022 recording with the RSNO, African American Voices I, which was praised for its “finesse and sensitivity” in a five-star review by Diapason, and includes William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1934), William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1 (1930), and George Walker’s Lyric for Strings (1946/1990).

Kellen Gray was the Assistant Conductor at the RSNO from 2021 to 2023. The Scotsman gave his Royal Scottish National Orchestra subscription debut four stars. Of the same performance, Vox Carnyx: Scotland’s Voice for Classical Music and Opera reported, “he unfolded the smooth, mellifluous contours with patience and understanding.” His recent and upcoming engagements include the Philharmonia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera, Chineke! Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and many more.

Gray has earned a reputation as a versatile and imaginative artist through his diverse array of traditional and experimental programming, thrilling performances, and provocative multimedia concert experience curation. He currently serves as Associate Conductor of the Charleston Symphony, where, as a champion for African-diasporic composers, he founded and curates the Symphony’s Project Aurora, a programming and performance initiative aiming to illustrate the richness of African-American arts and culture as equally important to its European equivalent. He is also Assistant Editor and Conductor Liaison for the African Diaspora Music Project.

Kellen Gray is a native of South Carolina and credits the many folk music styles of the southeastern United States as his earliest and most impactful musical influences. He learned folk music by rote, in church and in his local community, including from the Gullah people – direct descendants of West Africans enslaved in the United States in the Lowcountry and Sea Island regions, who have preserved many of their musical traditions. Though most known for his mastery of the works that feature American folk idioms, his performances of other folk-based composers such as Béla Bartók, Manuel de Falla, and Ralph Vaughan Williams root from the same passionate pursuit of authenticity.

This musical background has informed Gray’s approach to the music on African American Voices I and II. “I think the music of our earliest years leaves a lasting impression on all of us,” he says. “Some of my first memories are clapping and singing in Sunday morning choirs, on the school yard, or in the grass of the backyard. Whether it was spirituals, juba, or rags, the most important element was that the music was performed with the utmost expression and aimed to make the listener truly feel something. In our rehearsals I sang the songs on which the Bonds and Perkinson are based with the syncopated Gullah rhythms we’d clap and stomp on Sundays mornings. It was most important to us to perform these pieces in a way that would feel authentic to those of us who have performed the source material all our lives.”

About the Music on the Album 

Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations was rediscovered in 2017 and is her only purely orchestral work not lost after her death. The piece chronicles the first decade of the Civil Rights Movement and was written after Bonds’ visit to Birmingham, Alabama on a concert tour with baritone Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires. The seven-movement piece is a programmatic theme and variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” It begins with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and culminates in the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four young girls, closing with a moving lament and benediction. Bonds dedicated the piece to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. She never heard it performed during her lifetime.

Watch the Album Trailer:

Bonds’ contemporary, the prolific composer Ulysses Kay, who was the first African-American composer to win the Prix de Rome, cultivated a neoclassical voice, as his Concerto for Orchestra exemplifies, very much in line with William Grant Still and his teacher Paul Hindemith. As musicologist Gayle Murchison explains in the album's liner notes, “Kay’s music is tonal, but it freely uses chromatic and dissonant harmony and counterpoint, as it suits the musical moment. Possessing a lyrical gift, Kay favors complex and rhythmic counterpoint, layering melodies to create complex textures. His orchestrations are lush, especially exploiting the woodwind instruments. Regarding form, Kay embraced clear forms, though not always limiting himself to the forms of previous eras.”

A versatile musician, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson comes a generation later. Murchison notes, “We hear both the enduring imprint of Perkinson’s involvement in the Black church in Worship: A Concert Overture and the way in which he weaves multiple stylistic elements. In this one work, we can hear a blend of Baroque counterpoint, elements of the blues, spirituals, and Black folk music, complex rhythmic interplay, Romanticism, and lyricism in his treatment of the traditional Christian doxology ,the hymn ‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.’ Perkinson merges the sacred hymn and the secular concert overture as he centers Black spirituality.”

All three pieces on African American Voices II were included as part of the Minnesota Orchestra’s 2021 Listening Project, in partnership with the African Diaspora Music Project. They have not previously been recorded for commercial release.

About the Royal Scottish National Orchestra:

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is one of Europe’s leading symphony orchestras. Formed in 1891 as the Scottish Orchestra, the company became the Scottish National Orchestra in 1950, and was awarded Royal Patronage in 1977. Many renowned conductors have contributed to its success, including Sir John Barbirolli, Walter Susskind, Sir Alexander Gibson, Neeme Järvi, Walter Weller, Alexander Lazarev and Stéphane Denève.

The Orchestra’s artistic team is led by Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård, who was appointed RSNO Music Director in 2018. The RSNO is supported by the Scottish Government and is one of the Scottish National Performing Companies. The Orchestra performs across Scotland, including concerts in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth and Inverness and appears regularly at the Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC Proms. The RSNO has made recent tours to the USA, China and Europe.

The RSNO has a worldwide reputation for the quality of its recordings, receiving a 2020 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Chopin’s Piano Concertos (soloist: Benjamin Grosvenor), conducted by Elim Chan, two Diapason d’or awards (Denève/Roussel 2007; Denève/Debussy 2012) and eight Grammy Award nominations. Over 200 releases are available, including Thomas Søndergård conducting Strauss (Ein Heldenleben, Der Rosenkavalier Suite) and Prokofiev (Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5), the complete symphonies of Sibelius (Gibson), Prokofiev (Järvi), Bruckner (Tintner) and Roussel (Denève), as well as albums championing the music of William Grant Still (Eisenberg), Xiaogang Ye (Serebrier) and Thomas Wilson (Macdonald).

Track List:

African American Voices II
Kellen Gray, Conductor | Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Linn Records CKD 731 - 1 CD
Release Date: October 13, 2023 (digital) & October 20, 2023 (CD)

Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) Montgomery Variations (1964)
1. Decision [1:41]
2. Prayer Meeting [4:45]
3. March [3:19]
4. Dawn in Dixie [2:41]
5. One Sunday in the South [2:45]
6. Lament [2:40]
7. Benediction [5:20]

Ulysses Kay (1917–1995) Concerto for Orchestra (1948)
8. Toccata: Allegro moderato [4:50]
9. Arioso: Adagio [6:11]
10. Passacaglia: Andante [7:08]

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932–2004)
11. Worship: A Concert Overture (2001) [6:25]

Total Time: 47:48
Recorded in Scotland’s Studio, Glasgow, UK, on February 15-16, 2023
Recording Producer: Philip Hobbs
Recording Engineer: Hedd Morfett-Jones
Post-Production: Matthew Swan
Label Manager: Timothée van der Stegen
Design: stoempstudio.com
Cover Image © Martin McCready, Upfront Photography
Recording session photo by James Montgomery for the RSNO.

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein Presented by Schubert+ Festival Unity Temple

Photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco available in high resolution at: www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/simone-dinnerstein

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein Presented by
Schubert+ Festival Unity Temple

Performing Music by Couperin, Schumann, Glass, and Satie
From her Album Undersong and A Character of Quiet

Saturday, October 14, 2023 at 7:30pm
Unity Temple | 875 Lake St. | Oak Park, IL

Tickets and information:
www.schubertfestivalunitytemple.org/program-and-tickets

“lean, knowing, and unpretentious elegance”
– The New Yorker

Simone Dinnerstein: www.simonedinnerstein.com

Oak Park, IL – GRAMMY-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The New York Times as “colorful and idiosyncratic,” will be presented in concert by the Schubert+ Festival on Saturday, October 14, 2023 at 7:30pm at Unity Temple (875 Lake St.), an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Dinnerstein is part of a two-concert event that also includes vocalist Meigui Zhang, who will perform separately at 4:30pm. A dinner break will be held at 6pm with a limited number of tickets available for an Austrian style meal offered at a separate cost of $50.00 per person.

American pianist Simone Dinnerstein has a distinctive musical voice. The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”

On October 14, Dinnerstein will perform selections from her 2022 Orange Mountain Music album Undersong –– the final installment in a trilogy of albums recorded at her home in Brooklyn during the pandemic between 2020 and 2022, which also included A Character of Quiet (Orange Mountain Music, 2020) and Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic (Supertrain Records, 2021). The latter surpassed two million streams on Apple Music and was nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. In addition to works from Undersong, Dinnerstein will also perform music from A Character of Quiet. Her concert program will include Robert Schumann’s Arabesque, in C Major, Op. 18; François Couperin­’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses and Tic-Toc-Choc; Philip Glass’s Mad Rush and Etude No. 2; and Franz Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat Major, D 960.

Dinnerstein explains of Undersong’s title: “Undersong is an archaic term for a song with a refrain, and to me it also suggests a hidden text. Glass, Schumann, Couperin and Satie all seem to be attempting to find what they want to say through repetition, as though their constant change and recycling will focus the ear and the mind. This time has been one of reflection and reconsidering for many of us, and this music speaks to the process of revisiting and searching for the meaning beneath the notes, of the undersong.”

Sequenza21 describes Dinnerstein’s approach to Couperin’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses as “sonorous [and] eschewing ornamentation in favor of unadorned, shapely melodies.” Meanwhile, the tempo of Couperin’s Tic-Toc-Choc is thought to mirror the rhythmic precision of a clock and the full title (Le Tic-Toc-Choc, ou Les Maillotins), references little hammers or mallets. The San Francisco Classical Voice says Dinnerstein’s performance of the piece makes it appear as if she “magically transform[s] the piano into a harpsichord.”

Dinnerstein explains that Schumann’s Arabesque, in C Major, Op. 18 is “a very beautiful, poetic piece of music but it ends with a separate type of epilogue that's something different from the piece and modern in a way. There's a rest before you play it and the rest serves as a bridge to Philip Glass’s Mad Rush. It's unclear to the listener whether it's Schumann or Glass. I really like that blurring of the composer's languages with each other."

With its distinctly repetitious compositional structure, Philip Glass’s Mad Rush, a piece originally composed for organ at New York City’s St. John the Divine, underscores the collectively seamless nature of this program’s repertoire. The New Criterion describes Dinnerstein’s performance of the piece as “transcendent – the picture of introspection interrupted by unexpected vision.” Of her interpretation of Glass’s Etude No. 2, Classics Today said Dinnerstein ”savor[s] every note without losing any sense of narrative,“

Reflecting upon her experience reconnecting with music during the pandemic lockdown, Dinnerstein explains how Glass’s etudes and Schubert’s B-flat Sonata stood out to her:

“Once I’d warmed up to the idea of playing again there was the question of what to record. The three Glass etudes and the Schubert B-flat Sonata immediately came to mind. Glass and Schubert are very different composers but they share some unexpected similarities. I love their pared down quality, their economy, their ability to change everything by changing just one note in a chord. Their asceticism suited the moment. But there is a sensual element in both, too, because the human voice is central to Glass and Schubert’s sound worlds. They both create a feeling of a solitary journey, a sense of time being trapped through repeated vision and revision as the music tries to work itself to a conclusion. This all spoke to the way I was feeling.”

More About Simone Dinnerstein: Simone Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seoul Arts Center and Sydney Opera House. She has made thirteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard charts.

In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2. She premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera. Dinnerstein has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs. The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative. www.simonedinnerstein.com

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The New York Times as “colorful and idiosyncratic,” is presented in concert by the Schubert+ Festival. Dinnerstein will perform several selections found on her 2022 album, Undersong, as well as her 2020 album, A Character of Quiet –– both released on Orange Mountain Music. The program will feature Robert Schumann’s Arabesque, in C Major, Op. 18; François Couperin­’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses and Tic-Toc-Choc; Philip Glass’s Mad Rush and Etude No. 2; and Franz Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat Major, D 960.

Short description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The New York Times as “colorful and idiosyncratic,” is presented in concert by the Schubert+ Festival, performing selections by François Couperin, Robert Schumann, Philip Glass, and Franz Schubert from her albums A Character of Quiet (2020) and Undersong (2022).

Concert details:
Who: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein
Presented by Schubert+ Festival Unity Temple
What: Music by François Couperin­, Robert Schumann, Philip Glass, and Franz Schubert
When: Saturday, October 14, 2023 at 7:30pm
Where: Unity Temple, 875 Lake St, Oak Park, IL 60301
Tickets and information: www.schubertfestivalunitytemple.org/program-and-tickets/

Emerald City Music Announces Season 08

L-R: Sybarite 5, Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand
Sybarite 5 photo credit: Shervin Lainez | CityBand photo credit: Liudmila Jeremies

Emerald City Music Announces Season 08

Fourteen Concerts from October 2023 through May 2024
in Seattle and Olympia

Violinist Kristin Lee, Artistic Director

Season Opening Weekend: Evolution of Improvisation

With Kristin Lee, Anthony Tidd, Steve Coleman, Miles Okazaki, Dafnis Prieto, Julio Elizalde

Friday, October 20, 2023 at 8pm | 415 Westlake | Seattle, WA
Saturday, October 21, 2023 at 7:30pm | The Minnaert Center for the Arts
2011 Mottman Rd. | Olympia, WA

Tickets & Information: www.emeraldcitymusic.org

Seattle & Olympia, WA – Continuing under the leadership of Artistic Director and violinist Kristin Lee, Emerald City Music (ECM) presents fourteen concerts during Season 08 between October 2023 and May 2024 at its two signature venues – in Seattle at 415 Westlake and in Olympia at The Minnaert Center for the Arts – as well as at Olympia’s Washington Center for the Performing Arts in November and Capitol Theater for a special performance in May. Emerald City Music is the Pacific Northwest home for eclectic, intimate, and vibrant classical chamber music experiences. Known for a casual environment combined with award winning artists, ECM has gained recognition since its founding in 2015. The Seattle Times says of ECM: "ECM isn’t falling back on the tried-and-true, under the assumption that a new listener is an unadventurous, easily frightened-off listener. Instead, they’re betting that the tried-and-true could be precisely one of the barriers to sparking interest that classical-music organizations need to overcome." The concept of the concert series as a platform where artists and audiences transform one another breathes life into every element of what ECM does – from the casual open-bar setting of its flagship Seattle concert experiences, to the bustling community that faithfully assembles in its concert halls in Olympia and beyond. At Emerald City Music concerts, the audience’s presence matters, transforming the artists, the community, and the future of classical music.

Emerald City Music’s focus during Season 08 is on connection – between performer and audience, between genres, and across time periods. “Our theme this season is ‘connection,” explains Kristin Lee. “My goal was to connect the dots of time, genre, art forms, and more – hence juxtaposing jazz and classical in our opening program, Gamelan and classical in our December concert, film with storytelling in our May concert, music mentor to mentee (Calidore Quartet and Abeo Quartet) in our March concert, and cultural exchange through a brand new, world premiere work in February. By creating programs that highlight these connections, we ultimately connect the people in the audience with those on the stage.”

From exploring the evolution of improvisation from baroque to jazz, to hosting major ensembles such as the New York Classical Players, the University of British Colubmia Balinese Gamelan Ensemble, two string quartets – the Calidore Quartet and the Abeo Quartet – and more, this season is packed full of opportunities to connect with music and with one another

Watch the Season 08 Introduction:

As in past seasons, all of ECM’s Mainstage performances will be recorded live and then made available on Emerald TV, ECM’s subscription-based streaming platform for performances and additional video content.

Emerald City Music’s Season 08 Mainstage Performances:

Evolution of Improvisation – October 20-21, 2023: Artistic Director and violinist Kristin Lee and bass player/producer Anthony Tidd (a collaborator of a myriad of artists, from Steve Coleman to Lady Gaga and The Black Eyed Peas) co-curate the newest program in ECM’s Evolution Series: Evolution of Improvisation, a comprehensive historical journey spanning 250 years through the art of improvisation, from the baroque to modern jazz. They collaborate with saxophonist Steve Coleman, guitarist Miles Okazaki, drummer Dafnis Prieto, and pianist Julio Elizalde for a performance blending the work of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach with Okazaki’s Improvisation For Solo Guitar, Prieto’s Improvisation For Solo Drums, and Coleman’s Spontaneous Composition Collective.

New York Classical Players with Dongmin Kim, conductor – November 10-11, 2023: The New York Classical Players and 2017 Cliburn Piano Competition gold medalist Yekwon Sunwoo make their West Coast debut collaborating on a program crafted with the richness of Romantic-era music by Tchaikovsky and Chopin, as well as living composer David Ludwig’s (b. 1957) Moto Perpetuo, For Solo Violin (2016).

Inspired by Gamelan – December 15-16, 2023: The Balinese Gamelan stands as one of the world’s most fascinating, hypnotic, and transporting experiences of music. In this concert-length evening, experience the Gamelan alongside the works of three 20th Century composers that found their influence in this music: Steve Reich, Claude Debussy, and Lou Harrison. This concert features performances by Kristin Lee, violin; Michael Stephen Brown, piano; Svet Stoyanov, percussion; and the University of British Colubmia Balinese Gamelan Ensemble, which will provide a 30 minute experience of the gamelan as the second half of the performance. It is supported in part by the American-Indonesian Cultural & Educational Foundation.

Oboe / Oboe – February 9-10, 2024: Superstar oboists Titus Underwood and James Austin Smith collaborate on a program that highlights their instrument’s versatility and presence throughout time, performing music from 18th century baroque works to a world-premiere by Ghanaian-American composer Fred Onovwerosouke, commissioned by ECM. Performers include Titus Underwood, oboe; James Austin Smith, oboe; Kristin Lee, violin; Ling Ling Huang, violin; Ayane Kozasa, viola; Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, cello; Rachel Calin, bass; and Oksana Ejokina, piano and harpsichord.

Quartet(s) in Spotlight: Calidore Quartet & Abeo Quartet – March 8-9, 2024: For this Quartet-in-Spotlight program, the Calidore Quartet and Abeo Quartet join together to perform a program that features the brilliance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet, alongside Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 11, Op. 122 performed by the Abeo Quartet and Mozart’s String Quartet No. 16, K. 428 performed by the Calidore Quartet.

Evening with Jinjoo Cho – April 19-20, 2024: Emerald City Music welcomes award-winning violinist Jinjoo Cho in a full-length multimedia concert for solo violin that will feature music from the 17th century, to J.S. Bach’s famed “Chaconne” from Partita No. 2 in D Minor, to Juri Seo’s 2022 work Toy Store For Violin And Fixed Media Electronics.

Mother – May 17-18, 2024: The finale program of Season 08 aligns the mediums of film and live music to explore the true diverse stories of Pacific Northwesterners expounding on the simple but profound question, “What is a mother?” The evening will feature the premiere of a new film by Carlin Ma presented alongside music by Anna Clyne, Antonín Dvorák, and more.

For Emerald City Music’s Complete Schedule and Concert Details, visit www.emeraldcitymusic.org/calendar.

Emerald City Music’s 2023-2024 concerts take place on Fridays at 8pm at 415 Westlake in Seattle, WA and on Saturdays at 7:30pm at The Minnaert Center for the Arts in Olympia (2011 Mottman Rd) Washington Center for the Performing Arts, or Capitol Theater in Olympia (206 5th Ave SE). Season tickets and tickets to individual concerts are now on sale at www.emeraldcitymusic.org.

About Kristin Lee, ECM Artistic Director:

Kristin Lee is a violinist of remarkable versatility and impeccable technique who enjoys a vibrant career as a soloist, chamber musician, educator, and artistic director. “Her technique is flawless, and she has a sense of melodic shaping that reflects an artistic maturity,” writes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Strad reports, “She seems entirely comfortable with stylistic diversity, which is one criterion that separates the run-of-the-mill instrumentalists from true artists.

As a soloist, Lee has appeared with leading orchestras including The Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Hawai’i Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Ural Philharmonic of Russia, Korean Broadcasting Symphony, Guiyang Symphony Orchestra of China, and Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional of Dominican Republic. She has performed on the world’s finest concert stages, including Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Kennedy Center, Kimmel Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ravinia Festival, the Louvre Museum, the Phillips Collection, and Korea’s Kumho Art Gallery. An accomplished chamber musician, Kristin Lee became a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center after winning The Bowers Program audition and completing the program's three-year residency. In addition to her prolific performance career, Lee is a devoted educator. She is on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as an Assistant Professor of Violin. Lee is also the founding artistic director of Emerald City Music (ECM), a chamber music series that presents authentically unique concert experiences and bridges the divide between the highest caliber classical music and the many diverse communities of the Puget Sound region of Washington State.

Kristin Lee’s honors include an Avery Fisher Career Grant, top prizes in the Walter W. Naumburg Competition and the Astral Artists National Auditions, and awards from the Trondheim Chamber Music Competition, Trio di Trieste Premio International Competition, the SYLFF Fellowship, Dorothy DeLay Scholarship, the Aspen Music Festival’s Violin Competition, the New Jersey Young Artists’ Competition, and the Salon de Virtuosi Scholarship Foundation. 

Born in Seoul, Lee moved to the United States and studied under prestigious teachers including Sonja Foster, Catherine Cho, Dorothy DeLay, Donald Weilerstein, and Itzhak Perlman. Lee holds a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School. Lee’s violin was crafted in Naples, Italy in 1759 by Gennaro Gagliano and is generously loaned to her by Paul & Linda Gridley. For more information, visit www.violinistkristinlee.com.

About ECM:

Emerald City Music (ECM) is the Pacific Northwest home for eclectic, intimate, and vibrant classical chamber music experiences. Deemed "the beacon for the casual-classical movement" (CityArts), ECM hosts world-renowned musicians in unique concert experiences. Founded in 2015, Emerald City Music produces and tours seven productions annually, with each tour visiting Seattle’s South Lake Union (415 Westlake, a chic contemporary venue with an open bar), Olympia’s Minnaert Center (a 495 seat modern concert hall), a once annual concert at the Bellingham Music Festival, and an annual concert in New York City.

ECM has gained recognition regionally and nationally as a major player in the chamber music scene. Artistic Director Kristin Lee –– a touring violinist awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant and a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center –– is regarded for her innovative programming that both honors the tradition of chamber music while expanding the genre’s boundary past common limits. Emerald City Music made a name for itself beginning in its second season with a national collaborative commission with Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams, and has continued to press the boundary of chamber music with accolades like a tour of Steve Reich’s iconic and rare Music for 18 Musicians, a pitch-black performance of Georg Haas’s “In the Dark” quartet, and the West Coast debut of the Danish folk group The Dreamers’ Circus.

ECM values real, authentic connection and holds the belief that music possesses the innate power to connect people, inclusive of varying backgrounds and perspectives. Over eight years, artists from every corner of the globe have visited Emerald City Music to prove just that: there exists a special connection between artist and listener that only music can facilitate.

Follow ECM on Social Media

Facebook: www.facebook.com/emeraldcitymusic
Twitter: www.twitter.com/emeraldctymusic
Instagram: www.instagram.com/emeraldcitymusic

The Jasper String Quartet Releases Insects and Machines - Vivian Fung's String Quartets - on Sono Luminus

The Jasper String Quartet Releases Insects and Machines on Sono Luminus

Premiere Commercial Recording of Vivian Fung’s String Quartets Nos. 1-4

Release Date: October 27, 2023
Available for Pre-Order Now 

CDs and press downloads, including album booklet, available upon request.

 The Jasper String Quartet Performs Vivian Fung’s Quartets in Concert

Monday, October 16, 2023 at 7pm
Presented by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas
680 Park Avenue| New York, NY

Tickets: www.as-coa.org/events/jasper-quartet-music-vivian-fung 

www.jasperquartet.com | www.vivianfung.ca | www.sonoluminus.com

On October 27, 2023, Sono Luminus will release Insects and Machines, the Jasper String Quartet’s new album featuring JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung’s String Quartets Nos. 1-4. This is the premiere commercial recording of Fung’s first four string quartets, composed over a span of 18 years from 2001 to 2019. Truly a collaborative effort, the portrait album was recorded by the Jasper String Quartet (violinists J Freivogel and Karen Kim, violist Andrew Gonzalez, and cellist Rachel Henderson Freivogel) with the composer in the studio, in October 2022. The album title is borrowed from the subtitle of Fung’s fourth quartet.

NPR calls Vivian Fung “one of today’s most eclectic composers” and The Philadelphia Inquirer praises her “stunningly original compositional voice.” A recipient of Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, the Jasper String Quartet has been hailed as “sonically delightful and expressively compelling,” (The Strad) and described by Gramophone as “flawless in ensemble and intonation, expressively assured and beautifully balanced.” The Quartet’s 2017 album Unbound was named by The New York Times as one of the 25 Best Classical Recordings of the year.

Vivian Fung has long been a friend and admired composer of the Jasper String Quartet. The Quartet first performed one of her works in 2019, and was immediately captivated by the visceral energy and impeccable craft of her writing.

The Jasper Quartet says, “Vivian’s String Quartets Nos. 1–4 reflect a remarkable journey of absorbing, integrating, and synthesizing a unique spectrum of influences into her compositional voice. Unwavering in all of the works is a fierce heart, instrumental fearlessness, and an amazing instinct for texture. We are incredibly grateful to have recorded these works with Vivian in the studio and for the growth we experienced in the process.”

The Jasper String Quartet and Vivian Fung will celebrate the release of Insects and Machines with a concert on Monday, October 16, 2023 at 7pm presented by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas in New York. In spring 2024 at the Kaufman Music Center, the Quartet will collaborate with tenor Nicholas Phan and pianist Myra Huang on the premiere of a new work by Fung addressing climate change, culminating in the world premiere performance on May 30, 2024.

About the Music on the Album 

The piece that became the third movement of Vivian Fung’s String Quartet No. 1, “Pizzicato,” was composed while Fung was in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2001, for a reading by the American String Quartet. Fung had been listening to and absorbing influences from the folk music of parts of Asia, including China and Indonesia, and incorporated them into this piece. She went on to compose the other three virtuosic movements of the piece over the next two years, with the Avalon String Quartet premiering the entire work in 2004. 

Watch the Jasper String Quartet in Vivian Fung’s String Quartet No. 1

Of her String Quartet No. 2, Fung states, “As a composer, I try to best represent in musical terms my own individual voice in each work that I write. Even though each composition addresses different artistic challenges, issues of my Asian identity underscore much of my work. Oftentimes, the source of inspiration for a work lies in Asian folk materials, as is the case in this String Quartet No. 2, which uses a Chinese folksong as the basis of the introduction, interlude, and postlude.” The piece, which comprises six shorter movements, each a study in a certain mood or affect, was premiered by the Shanghai Quartet at The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. in 2009.

Vivian Fung wrote her String Quartet No. 3 in 2013 for the Banff International String Quartet Competition. The piece revolves around a chant. Fung writes, “Evoking non-Western song, the chant is announced by the entire quartet, highly ornamented, powerful, and tuned to suggest the microtonal tendencies found in many non-Western scales. My recent reflections on faith and spirituality come to life in this quartet as a world of varied prayers, sometimes turbulent, sometimes passionate, sung to oneself or among a crowd.”

Fung’s String Quartet No. 4: Insects and Machines from 2019 was influenced by her time in Cambodia. She writes, “I was especially attuned to the persistent noises of buzzing insects that accompanied my walk through the thick jungle, and this cacophony gelled with my emotional reaction to the terrible genocide of the Khmer people. I give voice to this background babbling in this quartet, organizing the various moments as episodes that freely morph from one event into another. One can hear buzzing at the beginning that turns into a waltz, which in turn transforms into a motoric adventure of machine-like chuggings-along.”

About the Jasper String Quartet:

Jasper String Quartet by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

Celebrating its seventeenth anniversary in 2023, the Jasper String Quartet is recognized as one of the leading American string quartets on the performance stage today. The Quartet is the Professional Quartet-in-Residence at Temple University's Center for Gifted Young Musicians and is committed to celebrating the diverse array of compositional voices writing for string quartet on every program. Highlights of the 2023-24 season include residencies at Trinity University, Swarthmore College, and the Fine Arts Center of Greenville, SC. The Quartet is the Founder and Artistic Director of Jasper Chamber Concerts. 

The Jasper Quartet is passionate about connecting with audiences beyond the concert hall and has performed hundreds of outreach programs in schools and community centers. The Quartet received a Residency Partnership grant from Chamber Music America for the 2020-21 season and has received numerous Picasso Project grants from Public Citizens for Children and Youth to support its ongoing work with public schools in Philadelphia. The Fischoff National Chamber Music Association recognized the Quartet's "outstanding and imaginative programming for children and youth in the United States" with their 2016 Educator Award.

Formed at Oberlin Conservatory, the Jasper Quartet launched their professional career in 2006 while studying with James Dunham, Norman Fischer, and Kenneth Goldsmith as Rice University’s Graduate Quartet-in-Residence. In 2008, the Quartet continued its training with the Tokyo String Quartet as Yale University's Graduate Quartet-in-Residence. In 2008, the Jaspers swept through the competition circuit, winning the Grand Prize and the Audience Prize in the Plowman Chamber Music Competition, the Grand Prize at the Coleman Competition, First Prize at Chamber Music Yellow Springs, and the Silver Medal at the 2008 and 2009 Fischoff Chamber Music Competitions. They were also the first ensemble honored with Yale School of Music’s Horatio Parker Memorial Prize, an award established in 1945, and selected by the faculty for “best fulfilling… lofty musical ideals." In 2010, they joined the roster of Astral Artists after winning their national auditions. 

The Jasper String Quartet is named after Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. For more information, please visit www.jasperquartet.com. The Quartet is represented by Artist Manager Marianne LaCrosse of Suòno Artist Management.

About Vivian Fung:

Vivian Fung by Geneviève Caron

JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a unique talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. Upcoming performance highlights include the world premiere of her fifth String Quartet by Canada’s Lafayette String Quartet and a new piece for Houston’s ROCO; international performances of her critically-acclaimed elegy for the pandemic, Prayer; and the European premieres of A Child's Dream of Toys and Baroque Melting. Mary Elizabeth Bowden tours her Trumpet Concerto to Philharmonia Northwest, Waynesboro Symphony, San José Chamber Orchestra. Fung is the 2023 Composer-in-Residence at Alba Music Festival Composition Program in Italy.

Fung is currently at work on a new project with soprano Andrea Nunez and Royce Vavrek, percussion works for Network for New Music and Ensemble for These Times, a piano work for the “Ligeti Etudes meets 18 Composers” commissioning project, and a commission by Cape Cod Chamber Music Society. Elizabeth Bowden has recorded her Trumpet Concerto with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras for future release on Çedille Records.

Fung has a deep interest in exploring cultures through travel and research. As a composer whose trips often inspire her music, Fung has also explored diverse cultures in China, North Vietnam, Spain, and Indonesia. With a grant from the Canada Council, she and Royce Vavrek will travel to Cambodia in 2023 to continue research for a new opera based on her family’s experience surviving the Cambodian genocide.

In 2012, Naxos Canadian Classics released a recording of Fung’s Violin Concerto [No.1], commissioned by the Metropolis Ensemble, which earned Fung the 2013 JUNO Award for “Classical Composition of the Year.” Several of Fung’s other works have also been released commercially on the Telarc, Çedille, Innova, and Signpost labels.

Fung is a passionate mentor for young composers, is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre, and served on the board of the American Composers Forum. Born in Canada, Fung received her doctorate from The Juilliard School. She currently lives in California. Learn more at www.vivianfung.ca.

Track List:
Insects and Machines
The Jasper String Quartet | Vivian Fung, Composer
String Quartets Nos. 1-4

[1-4] String Quartet No. 1 (2004)
1. I. Animato [4:03]
2. II. Interludium [3:37]
3. III. Pizzicato [4:21]
4. IV. Moto Perpetuo – Presto Possible [4:28] 

[5-10] String Quartet No. 2 (2009)
5. I. Introduction [1:40]
6. II. Of the Wind [3:01]
7. III. Of Birds and Insects [3:29]
8. IV. Interlude – With Calmness: Klangfarbenmelodie [1:45]
9. V. Of Tribes and Villages [3:44]
10. VI. Postlude: Of Ghosts and Memories [2:51] 

11. String Quartet No. 3 (2013) [11:48]

12. String Quartet No. 4: Insects and Machines (2019) [11:27]

Total time: [56:22]

Producer: Dan Merceruio

Recording, Mixing, Mastering Engineer: Daniel Shores
Editing Engineer: Dan Merceruio
Recording Technician: Joshua Frey
Photography: Cover Front/Back - “Scenic Drive” © Julia Fosson
Encaustic Art, pp. 9/10 & digipak inside - Lisa-Marie Mazzucco; p.14 - Geneviève Caron; p. 17 - Joshua Frey
Graphic Design: Joshua Frey
Liner Notes: Vivian Fung
Executive Producer: Collin J. Rae

Recorded at Sono Luminus Studios, Boyce VA, October 2-5, 2022
Recorded in Pyramix with Merging Technologies Horus.
Mastered with Merging Technologies Hapi.
Recorded in DXD at 24 bit, 352.8kHz in Native 7.1.4
Mixed and mastered on Legacy Audio speakers. legacyaudio.com

Generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alice M. Ditson Fund.

Invoke Announces Evolve & Travel Album Debut with Sono Luminus

Invoke Announces Evolve & Travel
Album Debut with Sono Luminus

Worldwide Release: October 27, 2023
Pre-Order Available Now

Downloads and CDs available to press on request

“[Invoke’s music] sounds impeccable without losing its sense of lightness and joy — no small feat.”
– NPR Music

www.InvokeSound.com

Austin, TX – Multi-instrumental quartet Invoke (Nick Montopoli, violin/banjo/vocals; Zach Matteson, violin/vocals; Karl Mitze, viola/mandolin/vocals; Geoff Manyin, cello/vocals) announces Evolve & Travel, its newest album and debut with Sono Luminus which is set for worldwide release, digitally and CD on October 27, 2023. This new record marks the group’s tenth anniversary and features seven original works. Each song reflects Invoke’s growth as people, composers, and as friends with a rich history of shared creative experiences and personal memories.

Invoke’s journey from strangers to string quartet is an intriguing tale. All students at the University of Maryland, the last place Montopoli, Matteson, Mitze, and Manyin expected to bond over a deep appreciation for new American music was in the heart of Tuscany, Italy, busking for “spaghetti money” on the medieval streets of Siena while there for a summer music festival. That shared spark followed the four friends back to Maryland and from there, excitement, drive, and a desire to stand apart from their quartet competitors in a chamber music competition inspired the group to embrace multifaceted musicality. Learning to play and write music for instruments like the banjo and mandolin, Invoke took their creative scope –– both as composers and ever-curious storytellers –– beyond the bounds of classical convention.

Invoke instilled their versatility, compositional creativity, and artistic spirit into the seven original works on Evolve and Travel, while also highlighting the strengths of Mitze and Montopoli as songwriters and composers. The music lets the group completely abandon any semblance of the traditional “string quartet” formality and focus on what makes “Invoke” Invoke –– best friends who make the music they love to hear, weaving together threads of classical technique, folk improvisation, and musical camaraderie.

Evolve and Travel was born out of Invoke's experience of (and evolution during) the pandemic and of being back on the road, traveling again. After a strenuous touring schedule from 2018 to 2020, like all other musicians in spring 2020, the members of Invoke found themselves without an agenda.

Violinist Zach Matteson summarizes the experience: "The unexpected bright side of the pandemic lockdown was an excess of time and a newfound drive to be creating music that connected with people in a virtual space on a regular basis. We dug deep to create new work at a faster pace than ever before and Evolve and Travel is a direct result of that. A lot of the new tunes have individual inspirations, but certainly you can say they express an aspect of what we were interested in during our time in lockdown –– from books that we were reading and other periods of history that we were looking back on, to a need for hope and optimism in the face of great doubt. Coming together amid our tenth year together as a group, Evolve & Travel is a culmination of lessons we have learned along the way. From the straight-ahead sound of the string quartet to a blend of voice, mandolin, banjo, and strings, this album showcases the entire scope of our growth as musicians, composers, and collaborators."

Hailed by The Capital Gazette as writing music that is “versatile and musically adventurous, [and] way more than classical,” and according to the Austin Chronicle, “bust[ing] through genres in…spicy performances,” Invoke embraces exploration and kinship through music that is far reaching both in its technical ambition and social and cultural curiosity.

Evolve & Travel joins Invoke’s discography which began with Souls in the Mud (2015), featuring original works composed by Invoke and works by composer Danny Clay; Furious Creek (2018), featuring original compositions and arrangements; and Fantastic Planet (2021), an original soundtrack composed by the group inspired by the 1973 French animated feature.

Evolve and Travel | Invoke | Sono Luminus | Release Date: October 27, 2023 (Digital, CDs, Worldwide)

[1] Burlywood 4:42
[2] Prohibition Song 5:55
[3] Alchemy 4:33
[4] Doorway 4:13
[5] Evolve and Travel 6:42
[6] Syl 4:51
[7] Dustbowl 3:01

[Total Time: 33:57]

Geoff Manyin, cello/vocals
Zach Matteson, violin/vocals
Karl Mitze, viola/mandolin/vocals
Nick Montopoli, violin/banjo/vocals

Composer: Burlywood, Prohibition Song, Evolve and Travel, and Syl - Karl Mitze
Composer: Alchemy, Doorway, Dustbowl - Nick Montopoli

Editing Engineer: Nick Montopoli
Recording Engineer: Charlie Kramsky
Recorded at 12th St. Studios on July 25th and 26th, 2022 & Spectra Studios on December 16th, 2022
Mixing/Mastering Engineer: Daniel Shores
Executive Producer: Collin J. Rae and Sono Luminus
Management & PR: Jensen Artists
Photography: Marshall Tidrick
Graphic Design: Joshua Frey

About Invoke: Described as “...not classical but not, not classical…beautiful, adventurous, American and immediately engaging” (David Srebnik, former SiriusXM Classical Producer), Invoke (Nick Montopoli, violin/banjo/vocals; Zach Matteson, violin/vocals; Karl Mitze, viola/mandolin/vocals; Geoff Manyin, cello/vocals) strives to successfully dodge even the most valiant attempts at genre classification. The multi-instrumental quartet encompasses traditions from across America, including bluegrass, Appalachian fiddle tunes, jazz, and minimalism. Fueled by their passion for storytelling, Invoke weaves all of these styles together to form a unique contemporary repertoire, featuring original works composed by and for the group.

Invoke was selected to be the Young Professional String Quartet in Residence at the University of Texas at Austin from 2016-2018. The group also participated in the Emerging String Quartet Program at Stanford, and was selected as an Artist in Residence at Strathmore, the Emerging Young Artist Quartet at Interlochen, and the Fellowship String Quartet at Wintergreen Performing Arts. In 2018, Invoke was named a winner of the Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition in New York, NY, received First Prize at the M-Prize International Chamber Arts competition in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and received First Prize in the Coltman Competition in Austin, Texas.

Invoke has shared the stage with some of the most acclaimed chamber groups in the country, including the Westerlies, Miró and Ensō Quartets, and the U.S. Army Field Band. Additional performance highlights include Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Green Music Center, a concerto appearance with the Brevard Sinfonia, a residency at the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Institute, and performances on the NextNOW Festival at University of Maryland and Festival Amadeus in Montana. Invoke has also appeared with musicians from various genres, including chamber rock group San Fermin, indie group Never Shout Never, and DC beatboxer/rapper/spoons virtuoso Christylez Bacon.

Invoke is strongly committed to championing diverse American voices through commissioning and highlighting new music. Invoke’s ongoing commissioning project, entitled American Postcards, asks composers to pick a time and place in American history and tell its story through the group’s unique artistry. They have commissioned eight new works since 2017, including the latest addition to the initiative, The Lessons of History, by Jonathan Bingham, which premiered in summer 2021.

In addition to American Postcards, Invoke has performed and recorded numerous world premieres, including works by Joseph C. Phillips Jr., Armando Bayolo, and Geoff Sheil. The group’s recording credits appear on bassist/composer Ethan Foote’s solo album Fields Burning, singer/songwriter Marian McLaughlin’s Spirit House, jazz/soul singer Rochelle Rice’s EP Wonder, and many more.

For more information, visit www.invokesound.com.

Sono Luminus releases Sonic Alchemy featuring music by Mozart, Arvo Pärt, and Pēteris Vasks

Sono Luminus Releases New Album Sonic Alchemy

Featuring Violinist YuEun Kim, Pianist Mina Gajić, and Cellist Coleman Itzkoff
Music by W.A. Mozart, Pēteris Vasks, and Arvo Pärt

Release Date: October 13, 2023

Pre-Order Available Now

CDs or press downloads, including album booklet, available upon request. 

www.sonoluminus.com

On October 13, 2023, Sono Luminus will release Sonic Alchemy, a new album from a formidable trio –  violinist YuEun Kim, pianist Mina Gajić, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff – featuring music by W.A. Mozart, Pēteris Vasks, and Arvo Pärt. Sonic Alchemy explores music by composers offering a new perspective on how we perceive time. All three artists on the album have recorded for Sono Luminus before, as part of the label’s Boulder Bach Festival album released last year. In addition, pianist Mina Gajić's Sono Luminus album with violinist Zachary Carrettin, Boundless, was released in 2020 and made the Top 10 on The Billboard Classical Chart. Her album Confluence: Balkan Dances & Tango Nuevo was also released in 2022 on Sono Luminus.

Sonic Alchemy weaves together music spanning several centuries – from 1782 to 2013 – connected by a common quality of creating ephemeral moments that seem removed from time, encouraging deep, meditative listening.

“Sonic Alchemy is inspired by the transformation and fluidity of life, represented by the seasons in nature, and in humankind in the way people connect through religion and spirituality,” Mina Gajić says. “In that way we can look towards Mozart–Adagio and see how it ‘converts’ to a trio while remaining true to itself at the same time. Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel is as mirrored reflections in water, movement and stillness appearing simultaneously. Vasks’ Castillo Interior echoes the same thoughts but this time they seem to refer to something internal, very personal. In this respect I was glad to collaborate with colleagues who – like myself – walk the line between historical and modern instruments, crossing into practices and repertoires of the 21st century.”

Vasks’ White Scenery from 1980 is part of his larger work, The Seasons for piano. The piece is notated in a non-traditional way, with simple dots placed on the page to indicate how many seconds each note should last. Icelandic composer Páll Ragnar Pálsson, who has contributed the album’s liner notes, writes, “Although Vasks is referring to the snowy landscape, perhaps of his beautiful homeland Latvia, it is also tempting to see White Scenery as a blank page, tabula rasa, a space for us to just be, rid of time and meaning.” The other piece by Vasks on the album, Castillo Interior for violin and piano from 2013, conjures images of the ancient Baltic landscape, and was written in remembrance of the great mystic St. Teresa of Avila.

Sonic Alchemy includes three pieces by iconic Estonian composer Arvo Pärt: Fratres from 1977, Spiegel im Spiegel from 1978, and Mozart-Adagio (after Sonata K. 280) from 1992. Pálsson writes in the liner notes, “His compositional method, which has been written about extensively, is based on a fixed relation between two voices. One is the melody and the other his distinct version of countervoice consisting only of one of the three notes that make up the fundamental triad. But for music that is so mathematically constructed, how can it sound so spiritual and pure? Pärt himself has compared his method to how we perceive the subjective and objective worlds. One represents our thoughts and feelings, doings, and mistakes, the other the unchangeable, the things in life that we cannot control like God, death, and love. It is perhaps in this space between those worlds where the fundaments of our existence lie, and time stands still.”

The album is anchored by two of W.A. Mozart’s Fantasias for solo piano – the D minor, K. 397 from 1782 and the C minor, K. 475 from 1785. Pálsson writes, “Despite the roughly 200 years that separate Mozart from Vasks and Pärt, there are elements that connect them. Similarly to Pärt and Vasks who needed to find a way to deal with the oppressive rule of the Soviet Union, Mozart also made a well-known declaration of independence. He left the archbishop in Salzburg and the financial security that followed and embarked on a path of what we would call freelance composing today. All of them needed to get away from an authority that demanded something much more primitive than they were willing to provide. Their youthful playfulness, sheer joy of creating and giving combined with clarity and depth of thought was stronger than the cage around them.”

About the Artists:

Award-winning South Korean violinist YuEun Gemma Kim concertizes internationally as soloist and chamber music collaborator in a wide variety of repertoire on modern and baroque period instruments. She moved to the United States in 2013 to attend University of Southern California, where she studied with Midori Goto. In 2022 YuEun was named Artist-in-Residence with Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra and Concertmaster of The Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s, Los Angeles. Recent performances include collaborations with American Bach Soloists, Boulder Bach Festival, Voices of Music, and Blue Hill Bach. She was a top prize winner at Boulder International Chamber Music Competition Art of Duo, a semi-finalist at the Qingdao International Violin Competition in China and at the Michael Hill International Violin Competition in New Zealand, and recently received the Jeffrey Thomas Award from American Bach Soloists.

YuEun is a core member of the self-conducted chamber orchestra Delirium Musicum. During the pandemic, Delirium Musicum created MusiKaravan, which took YuEun and Artistic Director Etienne Gara on the road in a vintage Volkswagen bus to perform socially distanced concerts for farm workers, winemakers, random passersby, and even the occasional ostrich. MusiKaravan won the Audience Choice Award of the San Francisco Classical Voice for “Best Streaming Series.” She can be heard on Delirium Musicum’s recent debut album, Seasons.

YuEun is also a founding member of “Yu & I,” a duo with guitarist Ines Thomé. Together, they won the Beverly Hills National Auditions, and recently recorded their debut album, A Journey with Yu & I, featuring folk-inspired music from around the world. As concerto soloist, YuEun has performed with symphony orchestras across North America and Asia. Embracing audiences worldwide during the pandemic, her Chopin Nocturne video on YouTube has been viewed more than 14 million times thus far.

Mina Gajić has garnered an international reputation for insightful and dynamic performances of a vast and ever-evolving repertoire including many new works by living composers, concertos and recitals performed on historic Romantic Era pianos, and collaborations on harpsichord and fortepiano. She started her education and music career in Yugoslavia and subsequently performed as concerto soloist and recitalist in Italy, France, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Montenegro, China, Bolivia, and across the United States. As duo partner with violinist Zachary Carrettin, she has appeared on four continents, focusing on a diverse repertoire spanning the centuries and various styles—on historic period pianos in addition to modern concert instruments, and including new works composed for the duo.

Notable performances have included critically-acclaimed period instrument renditions of works by Chopin, Brahms, Britten, Ives, Berg, Antheil, and Bartók. Her doctoral dissertation and subsequent research on the work of Yugoslav composer Josip Slavenski connect Balkan folkloric traditions and approaches to twentieth century music between the two World Wars. Her performances of Brahms and Schumann (Érard piano, 1895) can be heard on the audio book Escapement, by award-winning author Kristen Wolf. Additionally, Gajić and Carrettin’s recording of Schubert sonatas on historical instruments (Érard piano, 1835), Boundless, was released in 2020 and made the Top 10 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart the following month. Her recording Confluence: Balkan Dances & Tango Nuevo was released in 2022 on the Sono Luminus label. She performs as harpsichord concerto soloist on the 2023 Boulder Bach Festival album, also on Sono Luminus.

Gajić holds degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Gajić is the founder and Artistic Director of Boulder International Chamber Music Competition—Art of Duo. Former faculty at Sam Houston State University, in 2019 she became Artistic and Executive Director of Boulder Bach Festival.

Cellist and performer Coleman Itzkoff stands at the intersection of baroque/classical/new music, contemporary dance, and experimental theater. Whether premiering works by living composers and performing baroque music on historical instruments in the same concert, delivering enigmatic monologues in a piece of avant-garde dance theater (as well as dancing in said piece), composing, arranging, and recording music for the Amazon film Le Bal des Folles, or simply playing a piece of solo Bach for hospital patients in the time of COVID, Coleman continues to push the boundaries of what it means to be a musician of the 21st century, bringing his diverse range of interests and shape-shifting presence to every room and stage he occupies.

Hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for his “flawless technique and keen musicality,” Coleman has performed in the great halls and festivals of America and abroad. As a soloist, he has had the privilege of being the featured soloist with many great orchestras, including recent appearances with the Houston, San Diego, and Cincinnati Symphonies. As a recitalist, he is allowed to express his eclectic taste and inventive programming, and is constantly experimenting with the form and format of a solo concert, playing with unique lighting, unconventional spaces, and often with an accompaniment of dance or text.

Collaboration is the heart of Coleman’s art making. To that end, he is a dedicated member of several ensembles, including the early music ensembles Ruckus and Twelfth Night, and is a founding member of AMOC, the American Modern Opera Company. Coleman holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Rice University, a Master of Music degree from University of Southern California, and an Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School.

Track List:
Sonic Alchemy
Violinist YuEun Kim, Pianist Mina Gajić, and Cellist Coleman Itzkoff

1. Balta Ainava (White Scenery) by Pēteris Vasks (b. 1946) [8:27]

2. Fratres by Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) [11:38]

3. Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 by W. A. Mozart (1756-1791) [6:00]

4. Mozart-Adagio (after Sonata K. 280) by Arvo Pärt [6:33]

5. Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 by W. A. Mozart [12:13]

6. Castillo Interior (Interior Castle) by Pēteris Vasks [13:07]

7. Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt [10:24]

Total Time:  [68:27]

Producer: Erica Brenner
Recording, Mixing, Mastering Engineer: Daniel Shores Editing Engineer: Erica Brenner
Recording Technician: Joshua Frey
Piano Technician: John Veitch
Photography: Cary Jobe
Graphic Design: Joshua Frey
Liner Notes: Páll Ragnar Pálsson
Executive Producer: Collin J. Rae

Recorded at Sono Luminus Studios, Boyce VA
August 30 - September 2, 2022

Recorded in Pyramix with Merging Technologies Horus. Mastered with Merging Technologies Hapi.
Recorded in DXD at 24 bit, 352.8kHz in Native 7.1.4 Mixed and mastered on Legacy Audio speakers. legacyaudio.com

Newport Classical Presents Two Free Community Concerts

L-R: Sybarite 5, Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand
Sybarite 5 photo credit: Shervin Lainez | CityBand photo credit: Liudmila Jeremies

Newport Classical Announces Fall Community Concerts

Free, Casual, and Welcoming to All
Presented by BankNewport

Sybarite5
Sunday, September 10, 2023 at 2:30pm
Great Friends Meeting House | 21 Farewell Street | Newport, RI

Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand
Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 2:30pm
Newport Craft Brewing | 293 JT Connell Highway | Newport, RI

Newport, RI – Continuing its commitment to ongoing year-round programming, Newport Classical presents two fall Community Concerts featuring Sybarite5 on Sunday, September 10, 2023 at 2:30pm at Miantonomi Memorial Park (120 Hillside Ave) and Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand on Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 2:30pm at Newport Craft Brewing (293 JT Connell Highway). Audiences can look forward to casual, engaging, and welcoming concerts right in their own Newport neighborhoods. The performances are free and advanced registration is requested but not required.

On September 10, Sybarite5, described as “hyper-accurate yet fiercely vivacious” by I Care If You Listen, presents its signature cocktail of post-genre musical goodness expressed through the virtuosity of five accomplished string musicians – violinists Sami Merdinian and Suliman Tekalli; violist Caeli Smith; cellist Laura Andrade; and double bassist Louis Levitt. This exciting quintet is constantly evolving, defying categorization, and has been keeping audiences on their toes for ten years. Diversity is a strength and Sybarite5 is known for bridging genre gaps to bring unexpected musical combinations together, creating unique, dynamic, and intoxicating concert experiences. Expect works from John Coltrane, Radiohead, Xavier Foley, Komitas, The Punch Brothers, Pedro Giraudo, Marc Mellits, Jessica Meyer, Kenji Bunch, Shawn Conley, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Astor Piazzolla, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and more.

On October 8, Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand comes to Newport Craft Brewing for an afternoon of music, food trucks, and beverages. The Kinan Azmeh CityBand (Kinan Azmeh, clarinet; Kyle Sanna, guitar; Josh Myers, bass; and Shane Shanahan, drums) immediately gained recognition for their virtuosic and high energy performance, receiving praise from critics and audiences alike. With this New York ensemble, clarinetist Azmeh strives to reach a balance between classical music, jazz, and the music of his homeland, Syria. Azmeh’s expressive clarinet meets Kyle Sanna’s rustic guitar, soaring at times over the dynamic and volatile backdrop of Shane Shanahan’s percussion and Josh Myers’ double bass. Each band member has come from varied backgrounds to add their personal flair to this ensemble, resulting in a thoroughly exciting and rewarding listening experience.

“BankNewport is proud to support Newport Classical as presenting sponsor for the Community Concert Series again this season," said Jack Murphy, President and CEO, BankNewport. “Throughout our more than 200 year history, we have been committed to arts and culture within our local communities. Newport Classical's efforts to ensure that music is accessible to all perfectly aligns with our ‘All In’ mission.”

This concert is generously presented as part of the BankNewport Community Concerts Series, with additional support from the Newport County Fund at the Rhode Island Foundation, Rhode Island Foundation Community Grant and Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

Up next, Newport Classical’s Chamber Series opens on September 1 with musicians from Young Concert Artists on Tour, featuring today’s emerging star performers and arts leaders in music by Mendelssohn, Strauss, and more. On October 6, internationally renowned soloists and chamber musicians violinist Chad Hoopes and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott come together to create an exciting duo in a program anchored by Beethoven’s Sonata No. 9. Hoopes previously performed on the series in 2022, and McDermott has a long relationship with the organization – from 1990 to 1997, she was in residence as a Festival Artist. Violinist William Hagen, who performs on November 3 with pianist Orion Weiss, has been hailed as a “brilliant virtuoso…a standout” (The Dallas Morning News). On January 26, rising-star pianist Eric Lu, who has been described by The Guardian as “a veritable poet of the keyboard," will make his Newport Classical debut in a program featuring music by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bach, and Chopin. The Galvin Cello Quartet, which burst onto the scene after capturing the Silver Medal at the 2021 Fischoff Competition and the 2022 Victor Elmaleh Competition, will perform on February 23. Bassoonist Eleni Katz and pianist Evren Ozel take the stage on March 22 in a program celebrating the many facets of the bassoon, featuring music by Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Coleridge-Taylor, and more. On April 26, the award-winning Balourdet Quartet, which recently won the Grand Prize at the 2021 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, will present a program featuring Hadyn, Kurtág, and Schubert. Polish-American soprano Magdalena Kuźma, praised as a "standout" with "star quality" by Opera News, performs a program spanning from Chopin to Rachmaninoff to Rodgers and Hammerstein on May 17. On June 7, pianist Asiya Korepanova closes the Chamber Series with music by Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky, Beach, Chopin, and more.

For Newport Classical’s complete concert calendar, visit
www.newportclassical.org/concerts

About Newport Classical

Newport Classical is a premier performing arts organization that welcomes people of every age, culture, and background to intimate, immersive musical experiences. The organization presents world-renowned and up-and-coming artistic talents at stunning, storied venues across Newport – an internationally sought-after cultural and recreational destination.

Originally founded in 1969 as Rhode Island Arts Foundation at Newport, Inc. and previously known as Newport Music Festival (NMF), Newport Classical has a rich legacy of musical curiosity presenting the American debuts of over 130 international artists and rarely heard works and is most well-known for hosting three weeks of concerts in the summer in the historic mansions throughout Newport and Aquidneck Island. The organization has produced more than 2,000 concerts and hosted more than 1,000 musicians and singers. In 2021, the organization launched a new commissioning initiative – each year, Newport Classical will commission a new work by a Black, Indigenous, person of color, or woman composer as a commitment to the future of classical music.

Newport Classical is proud to be an essential pillar of New England’s cultural landscape, and to invest in the future of classical music as a diverse, relevant, and ever-evolving art form. Newport Classical’s four core programming initiatives – the iconic summer Music Festival taking place across Newport; the year-round Chamber Series at the organization’s home base Newport Classical Recital Hall at Emmanuel Church in downtown Newport; the free family-friendly Community Concerts held in green spaces around Aquidneck Island; and its newly expanded Music Education and Engagement Initiative program – illustrate the organization’s ongoing commitment to presenting “timeless music for today.”

Violinist Kristin Lee is Featured Soloist with Winston-Salem Symphony in Two Concerts on September 23rd and 24th.

Photo by Lauren Desberg available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/kristin-lee

Violinist Kristin Lee is Featured Soloist with
Winston-Salem Symphony in Two Concerts

Conducted by Music Director Michelle Merrill
Performing Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77

Friday, September 23, 2023 at 7:30pm
Saturday, September 24, 2023 at 3pm
Reynolds Auditorium | 301 N Hawthorne Rd. | Winston-Salem, NC

Tickets and more information:
www.wssymphony.org/event/merrill-conducts-bernstein-brahms/2023-09-23/

Kristin Lee: www.violinistkristinlee.com

Winston-Salem, NC – On Friday, September 23 at 7:30pm and Saturday, September 24, 2023 at 3pm violinist Kristin Lee will be the featured soloist with the Winston-Salem Symphony, conducted by newly appointed Music Director Michelle Merrill in her season debut at Reynolds Auditorium (301 N Hawthorne Rd.). Lee will perform Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77. The concert program will also include Dvořák’s Carnival Overture and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.

Kristin Lee’s accolades and sheer virtuosity as a violinist make any opportunity to witness her perform live an occasion worth much excitement. “Her technique is flawless, and she has a sense of melodic shaping that reflects an artistic maturity,” reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Lee has performed as soloist with leading orchestras around the world including The Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Nordic Chamber Orchestra of Sweden, Ural Philharmonic of Russia, Korean Broadcasting Symphony, Guiyang Symphony Orchestra of China, Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional of Dominican Republic, and many more.

In all of her performances and in the impressive array of roles she inhabits as a musician, Kristin Lee is dedicated to forging personal connections between audiences and classical music. She performs widely as a member of New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, including on tour in Italy, Croatia, Germany, Taiwan, and across the U.S. Always up for adventure, at the Moab Music Festival in Utah, Lee has performed in such unexpected places as rafting down the Colorado River, in a natural rock grotto, and in the magical landscape of the red rock canyons of the area. Lee founded Emerald City Music in Seattle, and as artistic director, presents eclectic, vibrant concert experiences in unusual venues, which leave both performers and audiences mutually transformed. The series was recently deemed "the beacon for the casual-classical movement" (CityArts). She is also committed to the future of classical music as a devoted mentor and educator for the next generation, serving on the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as an Assistant Professor of Violin, and teaching in residencies with the Singapore National Youth Orchestra, El Sistema Chamber Music Festival of Venezuela, and Music@Menlo’s Chamber Music Institute, among others.

Of her upcoming performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto with the Winston-Salem Symphony and her personal history of memories with the piece, Lee says:

“I am delighted to start my 23-24 season on a very high note with the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Winston Salem Symphony Orchestra. I am especially excited for this performance because I have the great privilege to join Michelle Merill on her debut as the new Music Director. I have vivid memories from when I first learned the Brahms Violin Concerto. I was so obsessed with this work that I spent many hours in the Listening Room at The Juilliard School, listening to recording after recording, and identifying the different interpretations from my musical heroes. Brahms's composition stands out from other violin concerti because even though it is one of the most technically demanding pieces in the violin repertoire, every single moment is to serve a musical purpose, not a virtuosic display. The emotional and musical complexity that Brahms captures through his writing is the reason why it remains as my favorite violin concerto to this day."

Born in Seoul, Kristin Lee moved to the United States and studied under prestigious teachers including Sonja Foster, Catherine Cho, Dorothy DeLay, and Itzhak Perlman. Her many honors include awards from the Trondheim Chamber Music Competition, Trio di Trieste Premio International Competition, the SYLFF Fellowship, Dorothy DeLay Scholarship, the Aspen Music Festival’s Violin Competition, the New Jersey Young Artists’ Competition, and the Salon de Virtuosi Scholarship Foundation. She is also the unprecedented First Prize winner of three concerto competitions at The Juilliard School, where she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Her violin was crafted in Italy in 1759 by Gennaro Gagliano and is generously loaned to her by Paul & Linda Gridley.

For more information, visit www.violinistkristinlee.com.

About Winston-Salem Symphony: Proud to be one of the Southeast’s most highly regarded regional orchestras, the Winston-Salem Symphony enters its 76th season, inspiring listeners of all ages throughout North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad with various concerts, education programs, and community engagement initiatives each year. www.wssymphony.org/

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Violinist Kristin Lee will be presented in two concerts on September 23 and 24, as the featured soloist with the Winston-Salem Symphony conducted by Music Director Michelle Merrill. A musician of impeccable skill whose performances The New York Classical Review describes as “vivid” and “fluid and expressive,” Lee will perform Johannes Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 as part of a program that also includes Antonin Dvořák’s Carnival Overture and Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.

Short description: Violinist Kristin Lee –– a musician of impeccable skill whose performances are described as “vivid” and “fluid and expressive” (The New York Classical Review) –– will be presented in two concerts as the featured soloist with the Winston-Salem Symphony, conducted by Music Director Michelle Merrill. Lee will perform Johannes Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77.

Concert details:
Who: Violinist Kristin Lee
Presented by the Winston-Salem Symphony
What: Music by Johannes Brahms, Antonin Dvořák, and Leonard Bernstein
When: Friday, September 23 at 7:30pm and Saturday September 24, 2023 at 3pm
Where: Reynolds Auditorium, 301 N Hawthorne Rd., Winston-Salem, NC 27104
Tickets and information: www.wssymphony.org/2324-2/

Pianist Sarah Cahill in an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert Performs Music from The Future is Female Album Trilogy on First Hand Records

Photo credit: Michael Zamora

Pianist Sarah Cahill in an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

WATCH NOW

Featuring Music from Sarah Cahill’s
The Future is Female Album Trilogy on First Hand Records

“Sarah Cahill plays a wide-ranging selection of music composed by women on the final volume of a series distinctive for its finesse and conviction.”
– Gramophone Magazine on The Future is Female

www.sarahcahill.com

Pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, recorded a NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert in July 2023, which premieres today. Cahill performed selections by composers highlighted on the three volumes of her album trilogy, The Future is Female –– the recorded counterparts to her ongoing curation project of the same name. The concert is available for viewing via NPR Music –– watch here.

The Future is Female is a three-volume series which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These albums encompass 30 compositions by women from around the globe and include many new commissioned works and world premiere recordings.

Listen to The Future is Female, Vols. 1-3 (First Hand Records):

Vol. 1: https://lnkfi.re/CahillFutureisFemaleVol1
Vol. 2: https://lnkfi.re/CahillFutureisFemaleVol2
Vol. 3: https://lnkfi.re/CahillFutureisFemaleVol3

“It was an incredible honor to perform in the iconic Tiny Desk series,” says Sarah Cahill. “I've admired the crew there for many years, and they were so welcoming. It was deeply meaningful to be in that legendary space where some of my favorite musicians have performed.”

NPR Music producer Tom Huizenga writes, “Pianist Sarah Cahill commands a near godlike status among fans of contemporary classical music. She's commissioned dozens of new works from today's top composers including John Adams, Julia Wolfe and Terry Riley. But when she sat down at the piano behind Bob Boilen's desk, she was focused not so much on new music but instead the plight of women composers. . . For this performance, she offers a sampler of The Future is Female, her multi-volume project that collects piano music by a staggeringly wide swath of women composers over a four-century span."

For her NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, Cahill performed Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová’s April Prelude No. 1; Ethiopian nun and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s Presentiment; Sarabande and Gigue from French Baroque era composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Suite No. 1; and "a candle burns time" from American composer Regina Harris Baiocchi’s Piano Poems, written for Cahill in 2020. (Presentiment is included courtesy of the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, a self-financing non-profit that funds music education for underserved children in the U.S and Ethiopia.)

Sarah Cahill began working on The Future is Female, which now encompasses more than 70 compositions, in 2018. “For decades I had been working with many living American composers, including Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, Eve Beglarian, Mary D. Watkins, Julia Wolfe, Ursula Mamlok, Meredith Monk, Annea Lockwood, and many more, but felt an urgent need to explore neglected composers from the past, and from around the globe,” she explains. “Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of color. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female, then, aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed and heard. Since recording these three albums in August 2021, I’ve performed extraordinary music by Louise Farrenc, Maria Szymanowska, Helen Hopekirk, Dora Pejačević and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Reena Esmail, Arlene Sierra, Viola Kinney, Marion Bauer, and many other composers who should rightfully be included in this series. The possibilities are, in fact, limitless.”

Cahill’s recent performances of The Future is Female include concerts presented by The Barbican, National Gallery of Art, Carolina Performing Arts, Carlsbad Music Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, University of Iowa, Bowling Green New Music Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, North Dakota Museum of Art, Mayville State University, the EXTENSITY Concert Series’ Women Now Festival in New York, and the Newport Classical Music Festival.

About Sarah Cahill: Sarah Cahill has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF). Her discography includes more than twenty albums on the First Hand Records, New Albion, CRI, New World, Tzadik, Albany, Innova, Cold Blue, Other Minds, Irritable Hedgehog, and Pinna labels. Her radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein Presented by the Wisconsin Union Theater Performs Music from her Album Undersong

Photo of Simone Dinnerstein by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco available in high resolution at: https://jensen-artists.squarespace.com/artists-profiles/simone-dinnerstein 

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein Presented by
the Wisconsin Union Theater

Performing Music by Couperin, Schumann, Glass, and Satie
From her Album Undersong

Thursday, September 28, 2023 at 7:30pm
Shannon Hall at Memorial Union | 800 Langdon St. | Madison, WI

Tickets and information:
www.union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/simone-dinnerstein-piano/

“an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity”
– The Washington Post

Simone Dinnerstein: www.simonedinnerstein.com

Madison, WI – Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” is presented by the Wisconsin Union Theater on August 28, 2023 at Shannon Hall at Memorial Union.

Dinnerstein, who is heralded for her distinctive musical voice and commitment to sharing classical music with everyone, will perform several selections found on her 2022 Orange Mountain Music album Undersong –– the final installment in a trilogy of albums recorded at her home in Brooklyn during the pandemic between 2020 and 2022, which also includes A Character of Quiet (Orange Mountain Music, 2020) and Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic (Supertrain Records, 2021). The latter surpassed two million streams on Apple Music and was nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. The concert program will include: Robert Schumann’s Arabesque, in C Major, Op. 18 and Kreisleriana, Op. 16; François Couperin­’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses and Tic-Toc-Choc; Philip Glass’s Mad Rush; and Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3.

Dinnerstein explains of Undersong’s title: “Undersong is an archaic term for a song with a refrain, and to me it also suggests a hidden text. Glass, Schumann, Couperin and Satie all seem to be attempting to find what they want to say through repetition, as though their constant change and recycling will focus the ear and the mind. This time has been one of reflection and reconsidering for many of us, and this music speaks to the process of revisiting and searching for the meaning beneath the notes, of the undersong.”

Reflecting on Schumann’s Arabesque, in C Major, Op. 18, Dinnerstein explains that it’s “a very beautiful, poetic piece of music but it ends with a separate type of epilogue that's something different from the piece and modern in a way. There's a rest before you play it and the rest serves as a bridge to Philip Glass’s Mad Rush. It's unclear to the listener whether it's Schumann or Glass. I really like that blurring of the composer's languages with each other."

Dinnerstein offers this connective observation between Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16 and Schumann’s, Arabesque “The Arabesque has some quick changes in mood and the most breathtaking coda at the end that completely takes it someplace else, written in Schumann’s music language but sounding absolutely contemporary. In comparison, Kreisleriana changes on a dime. Suddenly, you’ll be in a completely different headspace. I think that’s as much about Schumann himself, as about his love for Clara.”

Sequenza21 describes Dinnerstein’s approach to Couperin’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses as “sonorous [and] eschewing ornamentation in favor of unadorned, shapely melodies.” Meanwhile, the tempo of Couperin’s Tic-Toc-Choc is thought to mirror the rhythmic precision of a clock and the full title (Le Tic-Toc-Choc, ou Les Maillotins), references little hammers or mallets. The San Francisco Classical Voice says Dinnerstein’s performance of the piece makes it appear as if she “magically transform[s] the piano into a harpsichord.”

With its distinctly repetitious compositional structure, Philip Glass’s Mad Rush, a piece originally composed for organ at New York City’s St. John the Divine, underscores the collectively seamless nature of this program’s repertoire. The New Criterion describes Dinnerstein’s performance of the piece as “transcendent – the picture of introspection interrupted by unexpected vision.”

Of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3, Dinnerstein says, “Erik Satie published three Gymnopédie and three Gnossienne together, though he eventually wrote more Gnossienne, a fantastical term that he came up with. The markings in the score for Gnossienne No. 3 are bizarre: “Plan carefully”; “Provide yourself with clear sightedness”; “Alone for a moment”; “So as to get a hollow”; “Quite lost”; “Carry this further”; “Open your mind”. These are written right over the notes. The commentary is dada-esque.”

Patrons can visit union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/simone-dinnerstein-piano/, visit the Memorial Union Box Office or call (608) 265-2787 to purchase tickets to experience Dinnerstein’s artistry. Patrons can save on season events tickets by purchasing subscriptions available between June 1 and Sept. 28, including a Wisconsin Union Theater Classical Series subscription for a 20% discount or brand-new build-your-own subscription options of three to five events for 15% off or six or more events for a 20% discount.

About Simone Dinnerstein: American pianist Simone Dinnerstein has a distinctive musical voice. The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”

Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seoul Arts Center and Sydney Opera House. She has made thirteen albums, all of which topped the Billboard charts. During the pandemic she recorded three albums which form a trilogy: A Character of Quiet, An American Mosaic, and Undersong. An American Mosaic was nominated for a Grammy.

In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2. She premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera. Dinnerstein has also created her own ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs. The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative. www.simonedinnerstein.com

About the Wisconsin Union Theater: For more than 80 years, the Wisconsin Union Theater has served as a center for cultural activity in the heart of the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. The Theater hosts performances in multiple locations, including Memorial Union, and has an extensive history of remarkable performances. The Wisconsin Union Theater is committed to social justice and works to create an equitable, diverse, and inclusive place for all who engage with the Theater’s programming, events, and activities. The Wisconsin Union Theater is part of the Wisconsin Union, a membership organization that blends study and leisure to create unique out-of-classroom opportunities. Learn more: union.wisc.edu/wisconsin-union-theater.

For Calendar Editors:

Description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” is presented in concert by the Wisconsin Union Theater. Dinnerstein will perform several selections found on her 2022 Orange Mountain Music album, Undersong, including Robert Schumann’s Arabesque, in C Major, Op. 18 and Kreisleriana, Op. 16; François Couperin­’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses and Tic-Toc-Choc; Philip Glass’s Mad Rush; and Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3.

Short description: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein, described by The Washington Post as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity,” is presented in concert by the Wisconsin Union Theater performing selections by François Couperin, Robert Schumann, Philip Glass, and Erik Satie From her 2022 album Undersong.

Concert details:
Who: Pianist Simone Dinnerstein
Presented by the Wisconsin Union Theater
What: Music by François Couperin­, Robert Schumann, Philip Glass, and Erik Satie
When: Thursday, September 28, 2023 at 7:30pm
Where: Memorial Union, Shannon Hall, 800 Langdon St., Madison, WI, 53706
Tickets and information: www.union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/simone-dinnerstein-piano/