Two New Works by Timo Andres

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 18, 2015, 10:02 a.m.

It's hard to claim a real achievement in the month of November. For many, surviving the transition to colder weather, the pressures of the work week, and the onslaught of holiday advertising is enough. But PSNY composer Timo Andres is different: on top of his performing career, which saw him perform Christopher Cerrone's Sonata for Violin and Piano with Tim Fain at LPR earlier this month, he'll also see two new compositions premiered by the Takács Quartet and Jonathan Biss with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. 

Andres' new string quartet Strong Language premiered on November 15th at Shriver Hall. The Baltimore Sun praised Andres' piece for creating "fascinating little journeys" in a "clear, vivid, and commanding" performance by the Takács Quartet. On November 19th, the piece will be performed again at Carnegie Hall, which co-commissioned the work. With three movements lasting roughly 23 minutes, Strong Language is a concise exploration of three musical ideas, one per movement. Get a taste with an excerpt from Andres's earlier string quartet, Thrive on Routine:

As Andres describes, The Blind Banister, his new piano concerto for Jonathan Biss and the SPCO, is a kind of "fraternal twin" to Strong Language; the pieces were written back-to-back, and share a 3-movement structure. However, Andres' piano concerto sees him writing for much larger forces— including, for the first time, timpani. In the meantime (and if you can't make it to Saint Paul for the premiere), check out a sample of Andres's recent completion of the Mozart "Coronation" Concerto:

Soper, Lash, and Pintscher Performances on the East Coast

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 16, 2015, 11:06 a.m.

Brooklyn's National Sawdust has already become one of the most vital venues for new music in New York, adding to an already-vibrant cultural scene on the East Coast. The New York Philharmonic has recognized this by holding their 2015 CONTACT! Series in this new venue, and on November 16th, they give a performance of Kate Soper's Into That World Inverted, for horn and piano.

Inspired by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Into That World Inverted imagines the inside of instruments, "where left is always right,/where the shadows are really the body,/where we stay awake all night,/where the heavens are shallow as the sea[...]". Check out a recording of it below. 

 This performance comes on the heels of the world premiere of Hannah Lash's Two Movements for Violin and Piano and the US Premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Profiles of Light triptych, both given brave and empassioned debut performances on November 13 by the Ensemble InterContemporain at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. A Washington Post review of the performance sums it up:

A work of almost prayer-like gentleness opened the program. Hannah Lash’s lovely, understated “Two Movements for Violin and Piano” (a commission by the Library’s McKim Fund, in its premiere) used the simplest of means — a cantabile violin line over a spare and open piano accompaniment — to create a sense of wistful reflection, then hesitation, before finding release in the soaring second movement.

Sound Icon Performs Ken Ueno's "Zetsu"

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 11, 2015, 10:50 a.m.

Sound Icon, Boston's acclaimed contemporary music sinfonietta, gives the East Coast premiere of Ken Ueno's Zetsu on November 12th at Boston University's CFA Concert Hall, presented by Boston University's Center for New Music. The performance features violinist Gabriela Diaz, for whom Ueno originally wrote this "person-specific" piece, and who premiered the piece along with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in February 2015. Zetsu is inspired by the ceramics of Nishida Jun, whose works are in the collection of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Like Jun's ceramics, Zetsu attempts to analogize the creation of a protean form of music, which Ueno accomplishes by crafting both new ways of playing instruments and new instruments themselves, such as percussion idiophones using microtonal tunings specific to the harmonic spectrum of the piece, and the "Hookah Sax"—a saxophone augmented with a 7' length of plastic hookah tubing: 

Ueno writes that, formally, the piece "pushes and pulls gestures and textures to extremes: the slowly evolving shimmer in the solo violin of the opening gives way to discrete, rhythmically clarified polyphony for the ensemble. The soloist returns with an intricate part ranging widely in articulation and tessitura, microtonal contours lending an organic, improvised, very human intensity."