Timo Andres's "Early to Rise" at NY Phil's CONTACT! Series

by Jordan Rae Borg on Nov. 17, 2014, 3:51 p.m.

On November 17, SubCulture presents a concert of new music curated and hosted by composer John Adams, featuring the New York premiere of Timo Andres's Early to Rise. The piece was commissioned by the Library of Congress for the Attacca Quartet and received its premiere in 2013 in Washington, D.C.

Timo writes that the ten-minute, four-movement string quartet is “the most recent in a series of Schumann-inspired pieces I’ve written; this time, the seed is a five-note accompanimental figure from his late piano cycle Gesänge der Frühe (Morning Songs). At first, Early to Rise uses this figure in a canon, gently cycling through harmonies while its rhythms rub against each other in expanding and contracting patterns.… In the final section, momentum builds in the opposite direction with a simple downward-drifting chorale, picking up speed until it reaches a frenetic conclusion.”

The concert is a co-presentation of the New York Philharmonic and 92nd Street Y and also includes works by Daníel Bjarnason, Ingram Marshall, and Missy Mazzoli.

Check out an excerpt of Early to Rise below.

Mivos Quartet Performs Mincek and Franzson

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 25, 2013, 11:47 a.m.

November has been a great month for new CD releases-- just in time for holiday gifts. (Who wouldn't want a new CD of new music?) In addition to the debut album by The Living Earth Show, which we previously wrote about, Carrier Records has released "Reappearances" by the Mivos Quartet performing works by Alex Mincek, Davið Brynjar Franzson, Wolfgang Rihm and Felipe Lara. 

On this new album, Mivos, whose consistently masterful performance of contemporary repertoire has brought them to the forefront of the new music scene, perform Mincek's String Quartet No. 3 ("lift - tilt - filter - split"), as well as Franzson's On Repetition and Reappearances, both available from PSNY. Mincek's quartet can also be heard performed by the Wet Ink Ensemble from a 2011 album, also on Carrier. Check out a video of Mivos performing Franzson's work in October 2013:

Mivos may be one of the busier string quartets in New York right now, having also recently released a full-length album of works by Patrick Higgins, but they still find time to perform live; they will play an album release concert on December 19th at the DiMenna Center in New York, also featuring a new work by Scott Wollschleger. 

Hannah Lash's "Total Internal Reflection" Now Available

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 12, 2013, 8:56 p.m.

New from PSNY: Hannah Lash's string quartet, Total Internal Reflection. Co-commissioned by the Great Lakes Chamber Festival and the Aspen Music Festival for the Jupiter Quartet, this work highlights Lash's unique musical language, using a metaphor borrowed from physics to describe the composer's intertextual encounter with the past. In physics, "total internal reflection" occurs when light is reflected back onto itself, failing to penetrate the border into another medium's boundary. Like this phenomenon, Lash views her composition as a kind of light source, reflecting back upon itself through the dense medium of the string quartet repertoire. Though Lash avoids direct quotation, her work approaches the history of the musical form with her own language.

Listen to the work here: