Thesis Composer's Concert
Friday, Feb. 24 at 7:30
120 Claremont Ave.
New York, NY 10027
Graduating composition students at Manhattan School of Music Yi Yiing Chen, James Sheppard, Pedro Ramos, Sophie Coran, Lu-Han Li, and Rex Isenberg present their thesis pieces.
Admission: free
Leap into Love
Friday, Feb. 24 at 8:00pm
Sunday, Feb. 26 at 6:00pm
144 W90th St.
New York, NY 10024
Opera Collective presents a late Valentine's Day/early Leap Year scenes program concerning the seasonally predictable theme of love. Excerpts will be of favorites such as La bohème, Lucia di Lammermoor, L’elisir d’amore, Der Fledermaus, West Side Story, and others. The singers are the familiar faces and talented chords in the local opera circuit such as Lisa Chavez, Robert Hughes, George Kasarjian, Kristen Lamb-Kasarjian, Victor Khodadad, Adrienne Patino-Dunn, Michelle Pretto, Zack Rabin, Patricia Vital, Carla Wesby, and Jorell Williams. Geoff Duce will be at the piano.
Admission: $10 suggested donation
In Context: Yehudi Wyner
Friday, Feb. 24 at 8:00pm
Fulton Ferry Landing
Brooklyn, New York 11021
Last season the impressive and ambitious Brooklyn Art Song Society under Michael Brofman featured composer Tom Cipullo. This year, when not on Charles Ives, their focus turns to Yehudi Wyner, who inherited his father’s command of Jewish-American identity and melded it with an often biting modernism, winning the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for his piano concerto, Chiavi in Mano. Mr. Weiner will join Michael Brofman and Michael Rose on piano, with Tema Watstien, violin, Mariel Roberts, cello, and singers Melissa Fogarty, Paul An, and Dominique Labelle, in his Psalms and Early Songs, Three Medieval Latin Lyrics, and The Second Madrigal. Also on the program are Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seven Poems by Alexander Blok.
Admission: $35, $30, $15
Missy Mazzoli: Song from the Uproar—The Lives & Deaths Of Isabelle Eberhardt
Friday–Saturday, Feb. 24–25 at 8pm
Thursday–Saturday, March 1–3 at 8pm
512 W 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
Missy Mazzoli, whose brooding, pulsating, and unpredictably polytonal works have made her a shining star of the Brooklyn scene typified by New Amsterdam Records, one of increasing national visibility, collaborates in this multimedia theater work with filmmaker Stephen Taylor, librettist Royce Vavrek, and stage director Gia Forakis. Song from the Uproar is inspired by the life and writings of early-20th Century explorer Isabelle Eberhardt. Steven Osgood will conduct the NOW Ensemble with full-voiced and intense mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer.
Admission: $15
Brandy String Trio Presents a Night of Chamber Music
Sunday, Feb. 26 at 7:30pm
9 Clinton Street
New York, NY 10002
The Brandy String Trio (Audrey Lo, Pedro Vizzarro Vallejos, and Eric Cooper) boasts effortlessly accurate intonation and a naturalistic sense of phrasing, and an immediate relationship with the music they play, whether traditional or contemporary. Returning to their monthly roost at Culturefix with pianist Emile Blondel, they offer a program heavy on transcriptions, featuring the string trio Dmitry Sitkovetsky arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia for Violin and Cello, in addition to Beethoven’s redoubtable "Archduke" piano trio.
Admission: free
KLEINE MUSIK: Music of Heinrich Schütz and Ivan Moody
Monday, Feb. 27 at 7:30pm
Broadway United Church of Christ
2504 Broadway
New York, NY 10025
Anonymous 4 founding member Johanna Maria Rose, joined by soprano Karol Steadman, Deborah Booth, flute and recorders, Tricia van Oers, recorders, Jason Priset, theorbo, and Patrica Ann Neely, viola da gamba, present a program of selections from Gabrieli and Monteverdi student Heinrich Schütz’s early Baroque masterpiece, his Kleine Geistliche Konzerte, side by side with the U.S. premiere of contemporary British composer Ivan Moody’s recent settings of those same texts. Mr. Moody, a Greek Orthodox priest, possesses similar musical and theological influences as his compatriot, John Tavener, and here sets off a contrast in approaches to spirituality, from the present and dramatic to the distant and contemplative.
Admission: free
Composers Now Presents the CUNY Composers' Alliance
Monday, Feb. 27 at 8:00
Elebash Hall
365 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10016
Young, ambitious, and talented describes the members of the Composers’ Alliance, the cooperative society of the composition students and the CUNY Graduate Center. Technically proficient in their craft, they combine strong traditional foundations with the intellectual curiosity to explore new sounds and means of expression. Their contribution to the month-long Composers Now Festival will feature works by André Brégégère, David Bridges, Jonathan Katz, Jessica Rudman, Harry Stafylakis, and Jaeseong You. A brief panel discussion about the role of the composer in society will begin the program.
Admission: free
Lunatics at Large explores Saariaho & Influences
Thursday, March 1 at 7:30
31 East 28th Street
New York, NY 10016
Kaija Saariaho is among the most prominent living composers. Her music combines graceful gestural sweep, luminous, gossamer textures, a complex though spare harmonic language, and a breathtaking emotional scope, which often has at its heart a quiet sense of longing. This ingenious program places her music among some of her aesthetic influences, Claude Debussy, Leoš Janáček, and Luigi Dallapiccola, all performed by a chamber ensemble devoted to the continuum of art music stretching from the early 20th Century to the present day, and critically noted for its renditions thereof.
Admission: $20 suggested donation
C4 Presents: A Loss for Words
Thursday, March 1 at 8:00
Church of St. Luke in the Fields
487 Hudson St.
New York, NY 10014
Saturday, March 3 at 8:00
43A W13th St.
New York, NY 10011
C4, the explosive choral composers’ collective, offers an intriguing program of largely wordless music, hosted by Toby Twining, whose own ensemble and compositions have long been exploring extended choral techniques, including overtone singing, microtones, and abstract, near endless melismas. The pieces programmed will be Four2 by John Cage, The Blue of Distance by Zibuokle Martinaityte, Without Words by Huang Ruo, Hee oo oom ha by Toby Twining, Prelude, Choral and Fugue by Thomas Stumpf, and Pseudo Yoik by Jaako Mӓntyjärvi, plus works by C4 members Timothy Brown, David Harris, Karen Siegel, and Martha Sullivan.
Admission: $15
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