Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Spring Has Sprung for Music

We present Shakespeare songs to celebrate the quadricentennial of the bard's birth, as well as a portrait of eccentric Canadian composer Claude Vivier, and we celebrate Brazilian composer Felipe Lara with a portrait concert.

Québecois composer Claude Vivier remains one of the most enigmatic and little-performed composers of his generation. He studied with Stockhausen before traveling east to Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand, where he became immersed in the rhythms and traditional culture. New York City-based ensemble mise-en presents a portrait of the Canadian enigma, including several of his chamber works from the 1970s and 1980s.

Vivier's Pour guitare (1975) performed by Nolan Krell We round out our series of early music events this season with a bit of Shakespeare: Canadian soprano Suzie LeBlanc joins harpsichordist Alexander Weimann for "<a href="http://www.as-coa.org/events/suzie-leblanc-alexander-weimann-you-it" target="_blank">As You Like It</a>," early arias set to Shakespearean texts, in late April. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="280" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vJPWcX8gTcs" width="500" class="youtube-player"/> Suzie LeBlanc performs Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga from Rinaldo. Puerto Rico's premier choral organization, <a href="http://www.as-coa.org/events/concert-orfe%C3%B3n-san-juan-bautista" target="_blank">Orfeón San Juan Bautista</a> (OSJB), has offered more than a hundred concerts which regularly include premieres of works by contemporary Puerto Rican composers since its founding in 2001. The 42-member, mixed-voice ensemble had the chance to perform at Santa María de la Encarnación Metropolitan Cathedral, the oldest church in the Western Hemisphere, and in late April OSJB returns to New York to perform at Hispanic Society of America. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="280" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ij8Vc06hSGw" width="500" class="youtube-player"/> OSJB performs Edwin Fissinger's In paradisum. <a href="http://www.as-coa.org/events/felipe-lara-meditations-and-calligraphy" target="_blank">Brazilian composer Felipe Lara</a> is currently in residence at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and his electroacoustic compositions span over a decade. Musicians from International Contemporary Ensemble and JACK Quartet, along with violist Elizabeth Weisser, will perform a selection of Lara's solo and ensemble works at Americas Society. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/141319078" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500">

Rebekah Heller performs Metafagote at Abrons Arts Center, New York.

New York New Music Ensemble returns to Americas Society for a program of new music from the hemisphere, including Diego Tedesco (Argentina), Javier Álvarez (Mexico), and Chilean composers Juan Manuel Quintero Saavedra, Pablo Galaz, and Miguel Chuaqui. Brazilian percussionist Eduardo Leandro will conduct.

NYNME performs Morton Feldman at Tenri Cultural Institute, 2014.

Music of Americas returns to Dixon Place in collaboration with Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón and SuperUber for the U.S. premiere of multimedia monodrama Inteligencia Artificial, which juxtaposes man's temporality with the simultaneous universes of memory, data processing, and the enduring legacy of artificial intelligence, effectively establishing a distance between between the organic and artificial.

Excerpt from world premiere production at CETC (June 2014) Image credits, clockwise from top left: ensemble mise-en; Hugo Glendinning for Rolex, Orfeón San Juan Bautista, and Claude Vivier.

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Spring Has Sprung for Music

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