Critics’ Choice: New York. New Music.
Compiled and annotated by Brian Wise.
5 October 2011
Corpus Christi Church, 529 W. 121st St.
Robert Sirota’s Holy Women: Lives of the Women Saints in the Stained Glass Windows of St. Bede’s Chapel.
Aside from his day job as president of the Manhattan School of Music, composer Robert Sirota writes music for a variety of media, and often pieces with a sacred or spiritual themes. His latest is Holy Women, a cantata for nine singers and chamber ensemble, with a libretto by his wife, Victoria Sirota. Premiered last November at St. Bede’s Chapel in Greenwich, CT, the work tells the stories of the nine women saints – whose lives spanned 16 centuries — represented in St. Bede’s Chapel’s ornate stained Glass windows. The cantata attempts to be a conversation among these women, who include mystics, martyrs and mothers.
6 October 2011
Miller Theater at Columbia University.
Composer Portrait: Tobias Picker.
Tobias Picker is known particularly for his full-length operas (Emmeline, Thérèse Raquin, An American Tragedy) in which he writes gracefully and powerfully for voice. As such, Miller Theater’s Composer Portraits series focuses on arias from these and other operas yet that’s not all. The Brentano String Quartet, Sarah Rothenberg and Ensemble Signal present the New York premiere of his Piano Quintet: Live Oaks. Also on tap are a couple of very early works, Rhapsody (1978) and the piano concerto Keys to the City (1987). Pianist Ursula Oppens moderates an on-stage discussion with Picker.
14-22 October 2011
SONiC Festival.
Various Locations.
The SONiC Festival (Sounds of a New Century) brings nine days of 21st Century Music – all written by composers age 40 or under – to venues around New York. Produced in partnership with American Composers Orchestra, highlights include ICE at The Kitchen; Alarm Will Sound (performing works by Aphex Twin and Nico Muhly among others) at Roulette; Either/Or giving the U.S. premiere of a smear, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood; Rufus Wainwright’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers, performed by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City at Miller Theater; and Eighth Blackbird playing works by Timothy Andres, Bruno Mantovani, Caleb Burhans and others, also at Miller Theater.
13-15 October 2011
Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Symphony on the Dance Floor.
Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR).
Additional music by Lord Jamar and Cynthia Hopkins.
Daniel Bernard Roumain is well known for solo and ensemble pieces that mash up classical, rock, blues and hip-hop elements. But thanks to a three-work commission from BAM he has been thinking on a larger, more theatrical scale in the last few years. Symphony for the Dance Floor, the trilogy’s final installment, brings in rapper Lord Jamar (a founding member of Brand Nubian and actor on HBO’s Oz), the singer-songwriter and performance artist Cynthia Hopkins, videographer Jonathan Mannion, and choreographer by Millicent Johnnie. If DBR occasionally seems to struggle to bring shape and economy to his ambitious themes the process is well worth watching.
25-27 October 27 2011
Merkin Concert Hall
New York Festival of Song.
Gabriel Kahane’s In the Memory Palace.
Having toured earlier this year with cellist Alisa Weilerstein, the pop songwriter and composer Gabriel Kahane continues to emerge as a modern-day cross between Francis Poulenc and Burt Bacharach. His latest foray into modern art song is In the Memory Palace, a work described as a kind of personal travelogue up and down the East Coast. A number of young NYFOS artists are on tap for this program, including soprano Michelle Areyzaga; mezzo-soprano Rebecca Jo Loeb; tenor Paul Appleby; and baritone Andrew Garland. Steven Blier and Michael Barrett are the pianists. The program also includes music by Britten, Villa-Lobos, Granados and Frank Bridge.
Read about: New York. Not-So-New Music.
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