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Posts tagged 'brass quintet'

New Works by Kate Soper and Mario Diaz de Leon at the LA Phil


(photo: Kate Soper: © The New Yorker; Mario Diaz de Leon: © Katrin Albert)

The Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series has become a vital part of America's New Music landscape, commissioning and featuring composers and performers from around the country. On Saturday, October 1, Green Umbrella presents a "composers-as-performers" concert, featuring World Premieres of new works by PSNY Composers Kate Soper and Mario Diaz de Leon, along with PSNY composer Timo Andres performing a new work written for him by Ingram Marshall.

Soper will perform her new work, The Ultimate Poem is Abstractwritten for soprano and ensemble—alongside the LA Phil's New Music Group, conducted by John Adams. This work questions the relationship between voice, text, music, and abstraction, setting texts by Soper, Wallace Stevens, and many other contemporary writers in a work that points toward vocal experience over vocal description. To get in the spirit, check out a performance of Soper's Cipher with the composer joining recent PSNY Greenroom artist violinist Josh Modney:

Diaz de Leon's new work, Lightmass, for brass ensemble and electronics, is a three-movement work that turns these two concepts—light and mass—into a descriptive and narrative musical dialectic. The three movements are inspired by urban spaces and architecture; in Diaz de Leon's words, "outward manifestations of inner experience, a living building as a divine body." Listen to a performance of de Leon's Trembling Time II by the Talea Ensemble:

Ann Cleare's "Mire |...| Veins" at the Festival of New Trumpet Music



New York's FONT - the Festival of New Trumpet Music - has been pushing the boundaries of brass music since 2003, and this year is no exception. In an abundantly-programmed concert on September 23rd at The New School, Michael Gurfield (principal trumpet for Signal Ensemble and Alarm Will Sound and co-founder of Deviant Septet) has chosen works by contemporary American composers Matt Marks, John Altieri, and Liza Lim, as well as Europeans Vinko Globokar and Mauricio Kagel. But we're most interested in his choice to present a work by a composer not so easily categorized— mire|...|veins, by Irish composer Ann Cleare


(audio: excerpt from mire|...|veins)

Commissioned and premiered in 2013 by Ensemble Apparat in Berlin, this work deconstructs the brass ensemble into three separate groupings that, in Cleare's words, "unknowingly amount to a ball of raucously unfolding moments." The French Horn, in a grouping of its own, "posseses an all-seeing, transmitting and connective capability" between the other players. The horn gradually unveils an extraordinary hybrid sound (mixing the instrumental tone with a whistle placed at the roof of the mouth), which infiltrates the ensemble.

    
(pages from mire|...|veins

Brooklyn Brass Quintet performs mire|...|veins as part of FONT at The New School on September 23. Cleare will also see a performance of her ensemble work Dorchadas in Ireland on September 20th, with Alan Pierson leading the Crash Ensemble as a part of "Composing the Island: Love and Death", a concert series presented by RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. 


(audio: excerpt from Dorchadas)

Anthony Cheung's "Twin Spaces, Intertwined" Premieres in Chicago

The University of Chicago has long been held as the paragon of "the life of the mind." Established as a graduate research university in 1890, it has graduated classes of students every three months in quarterly convocation ceremonies; these ceremonies have taken place in the 1,800-seat-capacity Rockefeller Chapel since its construction in the 1920s. On December 11th, the newest class of graduates will mark the completion of their degrees by hearing the world premeire of Anthony Cheung's Twin Spaces, Intertwined — a new work for spatialized chamber ensemble, written specifically for the gothic cathedral space.

Performed by members of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago under the baton of Michael Lewanski, Twin Spaces, Intertwined consists of separate wind and brass quintets spread out throughout the interior space of the chapel, along with two percussionists above the altar. Cheung writes: 

The idea is to fill the chapel with echoes and refrains, with the sensation of calls and responses, especially in the horns. […] The tone of the piece, while in many ways celebratory because of this specific occasion and reflected in quite jubilant passages at its climaxes, is also one of contemplation, reflection, and mystery.
 

 Check out a few excerpts from Cheung's recent work for ensemble, Time's Vestiges:

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