Archived News and Events

The Cereal City Concert Band will be performing their Winter concert, Putting It Together on Sunday, February 23, 2020, at 3:00pm at the Pennfield Performing Arts Center, 8587 Pennfield Rd, Battle Creek, MIchigan. The concert will feature, among other works, Quod erat demonstrandum Fanfare for Wind Ensemble Op. 45 by ACA composer Andrew Ardizzoia. The title phrase refers to the Latin Which was to be proven - a phrase frequently found at the end of a mathematical proof or philosophical argument and refers to the composer's work technique for this and other recent pieces. This concert includes a special guest soloist, Ben Schmidt-Swartz who did his undergraduate studies in saxophone at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, and while there played with some of the worlds leading jazz musicians and performed at numerous jazz festivals throughout the country. Other works on the program include Mosaic by Stephen Paulus, Fanfare for a New Day by Joseph T. Spaniola, Variations on a Kitchen Sink by Don GIllis and more.

Lontano Records Limited (Lorelt) presents a new album release "Women's Voices" with music byElizabeth Maconchy,Nicola Lefanu, Hilary Tann, Eleanor Alberga,Barbara Jazwinski, and Cecilia McDowall. Performers includeJeremy Huw Williams (Baritone), Paula Fan (Piano, Harpsichord), Yunah Lee (soprano) Lauren Rustad Roth (violin), andTheodore Buchholz (cello). The Girl by the Ocean, by Barbara Jazwinski, features poetry ofMaria Jazwinski, and is performed by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams, who premiered the work in 2017.

Brian Schober will perform his own Toccatas and Fantasias for organ at St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University on Thursday, March 5th as part of the Sacred Music at Columbia series. Flautist Laura Falzon shares the concert program and willl perform Schober's Zephyrs for solo flute. Additional works for flute and organ will also be performed. Schober's music will also be performed as part of his solo concert at All Saints Episcopal Church Lenten Series in Leonia, NJ on Sunday, March 29 at 4 p.m.

Pianist, composer Max Lifchitz will perform Late Winter Music by NYCC Honorary Composer Raoul Pleskow on a concert presented by the North/South Consonance on Monday, February 10, 2020 at Marc A. Scorca Hall of the National Opera Center in New York City. The concert will begin at 8:00 PM and admission is free to the public.

Maestro Lifchitz will perform Bach's intriguing Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (BWV 903) as part of this recital with commentary featuring contrapuntally inspired chromatic works by Romantic and Contemporary composers.

The event is part of the 2020 Composers Now Festival taking place throughout New York City. It will be streamed live through the National Opera Center YouTube Channel

On Sunday afternoon at 3:00 on March 15, 2020 the American Guild of Organists, Cleveland Chapter, will present a concert of music by the noted Cleveland composer, H. LESLIE ADAMS at St. Peters Episcopal Church, 18001 Detroit Rd in Lakewood, OH. Included in the program will be works for organ, piano, trumpet, and voice. Artists include Nicole Keller, Tim Robson, Michael Miller, and Etienne Massacote. This concert is free and open to the public.

H. Leslie Adams (b. 1932, Cleveland, Ohio) composer of Nightsongs, and the music drama "Blake" has worked in all media, including symphony, ballet, chamber, choral, instrumental, vocal solo and keyboard. Adams' works have been performed by the Prague Radio Symphony, Iceland Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, and Indianapolis Symphony, and commissioned by The Cleveland Orchestra, Ohio Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland Chamber Symphony, among others. Adams' earned degrees are from Oberlin College (BME) Long Beach State University (MA) and Ohio State University (PhD). He is listed in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Who's Who in America, among others. He was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015.

Spotlight Series: Northern Iowa Symphony Orchestra Thursday, March 5, 2020 - 7:30 pm Under the direction of School of Music professor and conductor Rebecca Burkhardt, the Northern Iowa Symphony Orchestra presents the first Spotlight Series concert of the spring 2020 term, which will include la chanson du printemps . . . (1999) (the song of the spring . . . ) by Marilyn Shrude. For tickets, call (319) 273-4TIX or visit https://unitix.uni.edu/.

la chanson is an intimate and introspective work for string orchestra that uses the familiar Czech folk song, Kdoz jste bozi bo jovnici (Ye warriors of God), as its main thematic material. It also pays respect to the great work of Karel Husa, Music for Prague1968, which quotes the same melody.

Location: Great Hall
Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center
8201 Dakota St
Cedar Falls, IA 50614

Duo MemDi will perform in the Faculty Recital Series at Luther College in Decorah, IA, to include Mr. Adams's Sonata for Violin and Piano, and is confirmed for Wednesday, March 18, 2020 at at 7:30 pm.

Award-winning Duo MemDi was founded by violinist Igor Kalnin and pianist Rochelle Sennet in the summer of 2010, when they served on the faculty at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan. The objective of Duo MemDi is to perform music that embraces the diversity of world cultures. Particularly, they focus on commissioning and performing music of composers from underrepresented groups.These ideals inspired the name of the duo: Mem[ory] and Di[versity] = MemDi. All of the Duos live performances are from memory a rare feat in the world of chamber music.

The program presents established masterpieces and music by living composers. The recital will feature the first performance in Decorah of Sonata for Violin and Piano by a prominent African American composer H. Leslie Adams. Other pieces on the program will include D minor Violin Sonata by Brahms, Valse-Scherzo by Tchaikovsky, and rarely performed Schumann's arrangement of Bach's G minor Solo Violin Sonata.

David Liptak's Sticks, Bones, and Dust will be premiered by Matt Sharrock of the Boston-based duo Transient Canvas in Las Vegas. Both Transient Canvas and David will be guests of the University of Nevada's Nextet concert on Monday, November 18th.

On Saturday, April 13, at 8 PM at Advent Lutheran Church in New York City (93rd and Broadway), The New York Virtuoso Singers will present the American premiere ofHymns from the Dark, by Louis Karchin, a recent choral piece commissioned for a celebration in Italy of the 500th anniversary of the Edicts of Luther (and premiered on the exact 500th anniversary of the Edicts, Oct. 31, 2017). The program also includes Thea Musgrave's Missa Brevis, as part of her 90th birthday celebration, and music by Guy Barash, Elizabeth Skola Davis, student composers, and more.

Inscape will present the world premiere of Robert Gibson's new work Night Eats Color for 10 players. The performance will take place at Linehan Hall on campus at the University of Maryland Baltimore County on April 7th as part of their regular season.

Composer's note: Night eats color was inspired by Chika Sagawas poem entitled Backside - as translated by Sawako Nakayasu.

The surreal imagery of Sagawas poem evoked for me rhythmic and harmonic patterns based in the language of jazz and rock, filtered through the lens of a chamber ensemble. My musical image of this poignant text is created from motion, transparency and color that evolve through patterns and sound colors created by the ensemble at large and in smaller groupings. These groups sometimes progress like people walking in a crowdall moving forward, but not always at the same tempo.
Night eats color was written for and is dedicated to Richard Scerbo and Inscape Chamber Orchestra.

Robert Gibson's double bass quartet, Soundings, will be performed this summer at the International Society of Bassists Convention at Indiana University. The convention hosts over 1000 bassists from all over the world. Gibson's piece has been favorably compared to Quartet for Doublebasses by Gunther Schuller. The ISB 2019 Convention will be held June 3-8, 2019 in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University.

A new album of seven recent solos and duos by Louis Karchin will be released on New Focus Recordings on March 22, 2019. The works are for violin, piano, and oboe in various combinations, several premiered in Venice; others in New York City at Barge Music and the Met-Breuer Gallery. From the liner notes: "Composer Louis Karchin imbues his music with characteristics that are in dialogue with other disciplines that inspire him -- a rich relationship with poetry, the visual arts,the natural world, and iconic places inform aspects of his writing, from the structural to the gestural level."

Dark Mountains/Distant Lights is a collection of Karchins solos and duos written between the years of 2004 and 2017, and performed on this recording with sensitivity by three frequent collaborators, violinist Miranda Cuckson, pianist Steven Beck, and oboist Jacqueline Leclair. The CD may be pre-ordered through Amazon.com and other outlets.

Percussionist Adam DiPersio will give the premiere performance of Andrew Ardizzoia's "A Certain Stunned Muteness" for solo vibraphone on Friday, April 12th, at 8 p.m., at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA. This meditative, six minute piece was written in memory of composer David Macbride, who passed away last year.

Pianist Gayle Blankenburg is joined by New Zealand violinist, pianist and composer Mark Menzies in a program of music by Richard Cameron-Wolfe (his 2016 duo Lilith), Debussy, Lou Harrison, and Menzies, to be held at the Bridges Hall of Music, Pomona College (150 E. Fourth St., Claremont, CA) on Sunday, April 28 at 3:00PM (free admission).

This program is a special pre-tour concert, for their tour this May to Christchurch, New Zealand, where Mark is on faculty at Canterbury University. The Pomona concert will be dedicated to the victims of the recent massacre in Christchurch.

Margaret Mills will play Brian Schober's Etude Constructive VIII and Manhattan Impromptu VII - at her upcoming concert at Third Street Music School Settlement. In addition to Schober and Coates, the program also includes works by Nicholas Scarim, and Clara and Robert Schumann. Friday night at the Third Street Music School Settlement, 235 East 11th St. in New York City.

Emma Lazarus's famous poem, "The New Colossus" serves as the inspiration for the Cheah Chan Duo's eleventh season opening concert - a program of songs about migration and immigration, a theme that is close to the hearts of Phillip Cheah(voice) and Trudy Chan (piano), who both have moved from Asia and havemade their homes in New York City. The concert includes Juliana Hall's "The New Colossus" (set to Lazarus's poem) along with music by Kamala Sankaram, H. Leslie Adams, andStephen Lias, and isanchored by selections from Alan Louis Smith's 1999 song cycle Vignettes: Ellis Islandwhich featurestexts from actual immigrants to the United Statesin the earlier part of 20th century.

Works to be performed:
H. Leslie Adams: "Creole Girl" from Nightsongs
Vernon Duke: "Autumn in New York"
Juliana Hall: "The New Colossus"
Stephen Lias: Songs of a Sourdough
Kamala Sankaram: "The Last Blast of Anthony the Trumpeter"
Alan Louis Smith: Vignettes: Ellis Island (selections)

Church of St. Luke in the Fields
487 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
8:00pm

For over ten seasons, Cheah Chan Duo has garnered acclaim for its electrifying concerts of uniquely curated thematic art song programs. Lauded by Time Out New York for its restlessly inquisitive performances, the Duo has become a mainstay of the New York musical scene with performances at The National Opera Center, The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Tenri Cultural Institute, Cornelia Street Caf, North of History, Church of St. Luke in the Fields, St. Bartholomew's Church,and Symphony Space.

Three recent electroacoustic works by Robert Scott Thompson: Nullius in Verba (2018), published by American Composers Alliance and featured on their new double-CD Currents, Breathing of Trees (2017) and A Wheel in the Pure Syntax of Steel (2018) were selected by international jury for the DIFFRAZIONI FESTIVAL 2019, Florence, Italy, 26th-31st March.

Diffrazioni - Florence Multimedia Festival in Florence, Italy is a project dedicated to contemporary art, to explore boundaries between technology and poetic expression, where new tools, new scenarios meet with deep inner emotions. The project bases its strength on a system of synergies between institutions of higher artistic education, public administrations, young artists, cultural associations and non-profit organizations.

All events are free.

The Astra Choir with soloists, conducted by music director, John McCaughey

5 pm, Sunday 8 December
GOOD SHEPHERD CHAPEL, ABBOTSFORD CONVENT
St Heliers Street, Abbotsford, VIC (a suburb of Melbourne, Australia)

Unsettled choir scores
A terrain of spoken and sung music 19302019

Including works by: Ernst Toch, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, John J. Becker, Arnold Schoenberg, Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Milton Babbitt, Penelope Alexander, Eve Duncan, John Arthur Grant, Jena Capes, and Callum Mintzis.

The concert initiates the Astra Choirs third CD-production of first-recordings with the venerable New York label New World Records. From Ernst Tochs recently rediscovered speech-choruses of 1930, which transferred choral phonetics into a pioneering form of electronic manipulation, the program extends to the visionary harmony of Charles Ives's friend and contemporary, John J. Becker. From the succeeding generation, the unknown early choral creations of Kenneth Gaburo mark the start of his path to "compositional linguistics", which placed him among the foremost explorers of electronic and vocal composition.

Four works are premiered in this concert from a wide generational span in Australian music. These include a remarkable first hearing of three madrigals from 1955 by the Australian-American Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Previously unknown and unperformed, the manuscript of these deft and original settings of early Wallace Stevens poems was found in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and made available by Melbourne scholar Dr Suzanne Robinson, author of a new biographical study of the composer, from the University of Illinois Press.

Astra was formed in 1951 as an orchestra of women musicians under the direction of Asta Flack, a violinist and conductor who had migrated to Australia from Lithuania. In 1958, George Logie-Smith became Musical Director, extending the orchestra to include male members and a larger wind section and founding the Astra Choir. Over a period of 20 years, he developed links with Australian composers as well as giving performance of choral and chamber orchestral repertoire rarely heard at that time (for example the Bach Passions, Stravinsky's Les Noces, works of Bartok, Britten, Penderecki.)

Since John McCaughey became Musical Director in 1978 (continuing to the present), the Astra Choir has provided the principal focus of concerts, joined by many of Australia's leading contemporary instrumental performers as guests.

The CITG Concert Series will host the Cobalt Quartet with works by the Long Island Composers Alliance. They will perform exciting worksfor saxophone quartet by local composers Allen Brings, Richard Brooks, Larry Dresner, Jay Anthony Gach, Joe Landi, Sunny Knable, and Edward Smaldone. Suggested donation is $20. All proceeds go to the churchs music fund.

The Cobalt Quartet comprises four of the finest saxophonists from the New York metropolitan area Raymond Kelly, Anthony Izzo; Ryan Mantell, and Josh Lang and is particularly interested in presenting modern pieces by living composers alongside the very best classics of the repertoire as well as lesser-known contemporary works, both original and transcribed. Since it's founding in the summer of 2017, the ensemble has presented highly varied and exciting programs including a recent concert of all new music as part of a series with AWCANYC and Concrete Timbre. Upcoming performances include collaborations with the MSO, Andrew Koss, and LICA. www.cobaltquartet.com

New Yorks most accomplished chamber musicians present a winter afternoon of flute music by such 20th and 21st-century musical luminaries as (clockwise in the photo) Miriam Gideon, Ernest Bloch, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein. Curated by music historian Nancy Toff, the concert will be introduced by Dr. Tina Fruhauf of Columbia University. The concert takes place at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. Founded in 1920, The New York Flute Club is the oldest orchestral instrument club organization in the United States. "Eclogue" (1990) for flute and piano by Miriam Gideon will be featured on this program. Ticket Info: $20 general; $15 seniors; $10 CJH/Partner members, students at flutemusic.bpt.me or 800-838-3006.