New Music New Haven 11/19 features composer Jack Vees
Program includes Vees’s “Party Talk” and premieres by other Yale composers
The Yale School of Music presents a New Music New Haven concert featuring composer Jack Vees on Thursday, November 19 at 8 pm in Sprague Hall. The highlight of the concert will be Vees’s Party Talk, a piece written in 1996 for narrator and mixed ensemble of winds, brass, percussion, piano, organ, strings, and electric bass. The concert will also premiere music by student composers, including excerpts from Chris Cerrone’s opera Invisible Cities, Jordan Kuspa’s Piano Trio, Adrian Knight’s Work for Sixteen Strings, and Feinan Wang’s Pisces Monodrama–Chapter VII. Christopher Theofanidis is the artistic director of the New Music New Haven concert series. (more…)
New Music New Haven features composer Bernard Rands
New Music New Haven presents a concert featuring composer Bernard Rands on Thursday, October 8 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Hall. Rands, a professor at Harvard, is the winner of such accolades as the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award. The program will feature Rands’ virtuosic Concertino for solo oboe and mixed ensemble, and “now again” for mezzo-soprano and ensemble. Rands favors unconventional combinations of instruments: the ensemble for Concertino consists of flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet, and that for “now again” includes flute, clarinet, trumpet, percussion, harp, violin, viola, cello, and soprano and alto singers. The text of “now again” compiles fragments of poetry from Sappho.
The concert will also premiere new works by two Yale School of Music composers. Jordan Kuspa’s Lemonade Battery for chamber orchestra will open the evening’s program. Following it will be Polina Nazaykinskaya’s Real April for soprano, baritone, and ensemble, based on the poetry of Jordan Jacks and Laura Marris. (more…)
New Music New Haven: Yale Percussion Group performs David Lang
Concert also features diverse music by eight other Yale composers
David Lang, renowned as the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music, is the featured faculty composer in the next New Music New Haven concert on Thursday, April 30 at 8:00 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. The world-renowned Yale Percussion Group will perform music by Lang, who was appointed to the Yale School of Music faculty in the fall of 2008. Other works on the program cover a broad range of media and thematic content, from Timo Andres’s Fast Flows the River for MIDI keyboard and cello, to Richard Harrold’s Two Studies for Guitar Duo. Themes of water and ice are explored in Naftali Schindler’s Water Tropes for string quartet, sampler, and Tuvan throat singer, and in Ted Hearne’s THAW for percussion quartet, a piece that imagines the sensation of being immersed in a block of ice. (more…)
