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Sparr Concerto for Jazz Guitar premieres in Arkansas

March 25, 2016 by Bill

The Arkansas Symphony will give the premiere performances of D.J. Sparr’s new Concerto for Jazz Guitar on April 9 and 10, with Ted Ludwig as soloist. Writing for guitar often stymies composers, but Sparr is unique in that he himself is an excellent guitarist who has premiered many new works, including Michael Daugherty’s Gee’s Bend.

The Arkansas Symphony Youth Orchestra will perform Sparr’s The WOW! Signal in May, rounding out this celebration of Sparr’s music in Arkansas.

D. J. Sparr: Playing Well with Others from NewMusicBox on Vimeo.

Paterson/Campbell’s THE WHOLE TRUTH

March 17, 2016 by Bill

The Whole Truth, a new one-act opera by composer Robert Paterson and librettist Mark Campbell, was premiered in January as part of the exciting wave of new operas that overwhelmed New York City. A sold-out success that garnered uniform praise, it was paired with Stewart Copeland’s one-act opera, The Cask of Amontillado.

The Whole Truth is a short comic opera for three singers—soprano, mezzo-soprano and baritone—that uses very limited production elements in its storytelling and has been written to be performed in intimate to medium-sized venues. In the opera, a young married woman named Megan (a role shared by the soprano and mezzo-soprano) carries on an affair with a fellow dentist and a dalliance with young carpenter that lead her to momentarily confront the web of lies she has created to other…and to herself. Using a single bed positioned vertically onstage and a couple of chairs, the settings include a psychiatrist’s office, Megan’s dental office, the bed of her lover, the dining table and the bed she shares with her husband, and another psychiatrist’s office. The Man (played by the baritone) employs six cardboard cutouts to help represent the roles he plays: Psychiatrist 1, The Lover, The Husband, The Carpenter and Psychiatrist 2.

Duration: 27′
Instrumentation: piano/vocal version—three singers (soprano, mezzo-soprano, baritone) and piano. Chamber version (10 instrumentalists): flute, oboe, bassoon, percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass.
Libretto by Mark Campbell • Based on the short story of the same name by Stephen McCauley
Commissioned by UrbanArias, Robert Wood, Executive and Artistic Director
Premiere of Chamber Version: American Modern Ensemble, Tyson Deaton, conductor, Walker Lewis, director, Dixon Place, New York, NY, January 16, 17, 18 and 19, 2016.
Premiere of Piano/Vocal Version: UrbanArias, Robert Wood, conductor, Atlas Performing Arts Center, Washington, DC, February 21, 27 and 28, 2015.

Watch the video here:

David Bruce’s NOTHING premieres at Glyndebourne

February 5, 2016 by Bill

If someone you knew declared that life had no meaning, how would you convince them it does?

That’s the question a group of teenagers ask themselves in Nothing, a compelling new youth opera that premieres at Glyndebourne this February.

They decide that each of the group must give up an object that means something to them. This starts with toys and clothes, but things quickly escalate as the classmates go to ever more extreme lengths to try to persuade their friend there are things worth caring about.

In Nothing members of Glyndebourne Youth Opera aged 14-19 perform alongside professional singers. It is the latest in a line of pioneering youth operas that have premiered on the main stage at Glyndebourne.

The opera has been adapted from Danish author Janne Teller’s award-winning novel by composer David Bruce and librettist Glyn Maxwell. Their popular adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Firework Maker’s Daughter wowed audiences in the UK and New York.

Read the Independent review here.

Classical Music previews the piece.

Kahane THE FICTION ISSUE

February 4, 2016 by Bill

The Fiction Issue, a collaboration with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, is Gabriel Kahane’s first album of chamber music, comprising three pieces written between 2011 and 2015. The title work, featuring Shara Worden, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall, and premiered in 2012. It was revised in 2014. Bradbury Studies (2014-2015), for quartet alone, is a deconstruction of the song “Bradbury (304 Broadway)” from The Ambassador, and is dedicated to Brooklyn Rider. Finally, Come On All You Ghosts (2011), on poems by Matthew Zapruder, closes the set.

Purchase the recording her e.

Read Nate Chinen’s review in the New York Times here.

Sheet music for The Fiction Issue is available here.

Sheet music for Come On All You Ghosts is available here.

Kaminsky/Campbell/Reed to write Georgia O’Keefe Opera

January 4, 2016 by Bill

San Francisco’s Opera Parallele (OP) has announced its first main stage opera commission, the creation of a new opera by American composer Laura Kaminsky inspired by the life of Georgia O’Keeffe at the time she left New York to embark on her iconic and influential experiences in New Mexico. The company has been awarded a prestigious Repertoire Development Grant from Opera America in the amount of $35,000 to support the work’s initial stages of creation and workshopping, and is set for an April 2019 premiere. The opera will feature a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed, with a film by Reed as part of the production. The production team will be led by Opera Parallele Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel, will be conducted by OP Artistic Director and founder Nicole Paiement and will feature a cast of ten, details will be announced. The production is being undertaken by Opera Parallele in consortium with American Opera Projects and Cornish College of the Arts, and all three co-commissioners will present performances and other activities to be announced.

About The Opera

Today It Rains is set in May 1929, when Georgia O’Keeffe takes a train from New York to Santa Fe with her friend Rebecca Strand, propelling herself away from her tumultuous relationship with Alfred Stieglitz and his circle in search of a more fulfilled life as an artist. The libretto will segue seamlessly between O’Keeffe and Strand, charging forward through the American landscape, and O’Keeffe looking back on her love for Stieglitz. The opera will culminate in a moving finale as O’Keeffe arrives in Santa Fe to begin her new life. The opera’s title comes from one of O’Keeffe’s letters.

About The Composer

Laura Kaminsky is an award-winning, internationally recognized composer of opera, orchestra, chamber, vocal and choral music who is known to Bay Area audiences most recently for the Festival Opera production of As One, an opera about gender identity . As One (co-librettists Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed), premiered in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to unanimously positive reviews, and was mounted in 2015 by Festival Opera in Oakland. Subsequently, the As One team has since been commissioned by Houston Grand Opera for a new work, Some Light Emerges, that will premiere in 2017, and by San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle for Today It Rains. Other upcoming commissions include a Piano Quintet for Ursula Oppens and the Cassatt String Quartet and a new work for Flute and Piano for the University of Minnesota/Duluth.

Kaminsky has received grants, awards and fellowships from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Opera America, Chamber Music America, BAM/The Kennedy Center De Vos Institute, Aaron Copland Fund, Virgil Thomson Foundation, Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music, American Music Center, USArtists International, CEC ArtsLink International Partnerships, Likhachev-Russkiy Mir Foundation Cultural Fellowship, Kenan Institute for the Arts, Artist Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, Bronx Arts Council, Arts Westchester, North Carolina Arts Council, Seattle Arts Commission, and Meet the Composer. She has received six ASCAP-Chamber Music America Awards for Adventuresome Programming, a citation from the Office of the President of the Borough of Manhattan, the 2015 Polish Gold Cross of Merit, a decoration awarded by the President of Poland for exemplary public service or humanitarian work, as well as the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2010 Chopin Award. She has been a fellow at the Hermitage Artist Retreat Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Centrum Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Millay Colony for the Arts, and, in 2016, the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.

Currently composer-in-residence at American Opera Projects, Kaminsky is a member of the faculty in the School of the Arts/Conservatory of Music at Purchase College/SUNY, where she served as dean from 2004-2008; she was also Artistic Director of Symphony Space in New York City until 2014. Previously she was chair of the music department at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Artistic Director of the European Mozart Academy in Poland, and visiting faculty at the National Academy of Music in Ghana. In New York she held the positions of Director of Music and Theatre Programs at The New School, Artistic Director of Town Hall, and Associate Director of Humanities at the 92nd Street Y.

Torke THREE MANHATTAN BRIDGES with the Albany Symphony

December 19, 2015 by Bill

Michael Torke’s new piano concerto, Three Manhattan Bridges, will be premiered by the Albany Symphony on December 19, with Joyce Yang as soloist. Torke performed as soloist in his first piano concerto in 1994, which was also premiered by the Albany Symphony with David Alan Miller as conductor.

Torke talks about the association with Albany: “I am thrilled to have a long association with a great orchestra like the Albany Symphony. They bring a depth of understanding to their performances of my music, and David Alan Miller is a commanding, and at the same time, sensitive interpreter.”

Albany Records will be releasing a recording of Three Manhattan Bridges (Joyce Yang, Soloist and the Albany Symphony) along with Winter’s Tale, Torke’s new cello concerto that he wrote for Julie Albers and which The Albany Symphony premiered last season.

For an interview with Torke and Miller, click here.

Bruce’s THE FIREWORK MAKER’S DAUGHTER at Royal Opera House

November 9, 2015 by Bill

David Bruce’s The Firework Maker’s Daughter returns to the Royal Opera House in December for a run of 27 performances at the Lindbury Studio. The work premiered in 2013 and was nominated for both an Olivier Award and a British Composers Award. The Daily Telegraph’s Michael White called it “the most utterly endearing, joyous and delightful show I’ve seen in ages” and Opera Now called it “an intoxicating brew….The show is the operatic equivalent of a page-turner, ideally paced for an all-ages audience”

One of a select group of operas that have been performed on Broadway, The Firework Maker’s Daughter shares that honor with Menotti’s operas (4 of which ran on Broadway).

For more information, please click here.

Momenta Quartet premieres Sparr AVALOCH

November 1, 2015 by Bill

D.J. Sparr’s new string quartet, Avaloch, was given it’s premiere by the Momenta Quartet at the Tenri Cultural Institue.

New York Classical Review’s George Grelia reported:

“Avaloch set the aesthetic tone for the entire concert, the unique sound of American homespun experimentation, free of ideology and full of curiosity. The piece revolves around an agitated, yearning tune, and the music has a rough-hewn quality, like shape-note singing, particularly in the counterpoint. There is also pre-recorded music that played asynchronously from smart phones held inside ceramic pots by each musician.

Avaloch has a fulfilling sense of waywardness, disregarding obvious formal considerations and searching for a shape organic to itself. That quality, and Momenta’s weighty, lyrical playing gave it a social quality that is fundamental to the Ivesian conception of music making.”

Read the full review here.

Brantley commissioned to write a Cello Concerto

October 14, 2015 by Bill

Paul Brantley has been commissioned by Maestro Kenneth Kiesler and the Grammy Award winning University of Michigan Symphony to compose The Royal Revolver, a concertino for solo cello and 15 instruments.

Eric Jacobsen, cellist and conductor of The Knights, will be the cello soloist. This will be premiered in the 2017-2018 season in Ann Arbor. Details TBA.

Brantley writes: “As a composer/cellist, this cello concertino is a piece I’ve literally been thinking about writing since I was about sixteen. And so with Maestro Kiesler’s invitation, the time feels ripe to finally bring it to fruition. The Royal Revolver borrows its name from Finnegans Wake – one of Joyce’s many catch phrases such as “Here Comes Everybody” and “The Here We Are Again Gaities” – all of which evoke our mutually, psychically interdependent selves in that extraordinary dreamscape he created. I’m trying to emulate a fragment of this world by the solo cello constantly interfacing with and morphing into the other instruments of the ensemble, all in my best neo-baroque/psychedelic fashion. But on a pretty modest scale: with just a chamber ensemble of 15 instruments, in three movements, and all about 15 minutes in duration.”

If you would like to learn a little more about this Finnegans Wake inspired piece, and possibly even contribute to the consortium-styled commission, please see our Fractured Atlas project page.

Fung at the Vancouver Biennale

October 2, 2015 by Bill

Vivan Fung’s new Biennale Snapshots was premiered at the Vancouver Biennale on the Vancouver Symphony’s opening concert. Inspired by artwork in the outdoor exhibition, the piece was a vivid reminder of Fung’s fresh and engaging orchestra composition.