Recent press about the YSM community
In the Financial Times, Harry Eyres praised a concert he'd heard this past summer at the Yale Summer School of Music/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival: "Two of my musical highlights this year were dark, rich confrontations with mortality as interpreted by artists bringing all their life-experience to bear on music of almost unbearable poignancy."
One of these highlights was the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, "played at the Music Shed in Norfolk, Connecticut, by an inspired David Shifrin and the Tokyo String Quartet. This last performance was made especially poignant by the Tokyo String Quartet’s announcement that this would be their last season, and by a conversation I’d had a couple of days before with viola-player Kazuhide Isomura, in which he poured out memories of 40 years of the quartet’s history." Click here to read the full article.
Harvard Magazine featured faculty composer Hannah Lash ’12AD in a recent article that began: "There is nothing casual about the music of composer Hannah Lash." "I’m drawn to highly, highly pigmented emotions," the magazine quotes her as saying. "Things have to be the most fully realized they can possibly be." Read the full article here.
The Boston Globe recently highlighted the work of violinist Adrian Anantawan ’08MM, who teaches in an El Sistema-inspired program at the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Brighton, MA. "Anantawan's story fascinated Rebecca Levi, the El Sistema program director. But she hired him not because of his disability, but because of his ability. 'We have here an entire elementary school filled with classroom teachers who already know how to do the management piece,' she says. 'The ingredient we were missing was that excellent artistry.'"
Click here for the full article and a video on Anantawan's work at the school.
The music blog Superconductor listed De Profundis, last April's Yale in New York concert featuring music for low instruments, as one of the top events of 2012. Writer Paul Pelkonen singled out faculty bassist Donald Palma for his performance of "Valentine" by former faculty composer Jacob Druckman. "Jacob Druckmann's Valentine had bass soloist Donald Palma playing his bull fiddle with hands, a timpani stick, and of course, the bow. Whispered, muttered performance instructions were part of the work, as Mr. Palma slapped, whacked, stroked, rubbed the strings, adding expressive sounds by hitting the belly of his instrument and occasionally playing on the bridge and tailpiece."
