In conjunction with its Project W initiative which makes bold steps for gender equity in classical music, Chicago Sinfonietta announces performances of Hear Me Roar at Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville, IL (March 11, 2018, 3pm); and at Symphony Center, Chicago (March 12, 2018, 7:30pm).

This performance is the fourth of five Main Stage programs throughout the Sinfonietta’s 30th Anniversary Season. Maestro Mei-Ann Chen, who is Music Director of Chicago Sinfonietta, will conduct. Chicago Sinfonietta is Chicago’s professional orchestra dedicated to modeling and promoting diversity, inclusion, and both racial and cultural equity in the arts.

This timely and topical program includes new works Dance Card by recent Grammy winner Jennifer Higdon, as well as #MeToo by Reena Esmail, both commissioned as part of Sinfonietta’s Project W initiative. Featured instrumentalists include Carol Dylan, violin; Karen Nelson, violin; Marlea Simpson, viola; and Ann Griffin, cello. Hear Me Roar falls right after International Women’s Day (March 8) and within Women’s History Month (March).

The Program includes:
*Dances in the Canebrakes by Florence B. Price
*Dance Card by Jennifer Higdon (Chicago Premiere)
*#MeToo by Reena Esmail (World Premiere)
*Symphony in F sharp minor, Op. 41 by Dora Pejačević (Chicago Premiere)

The concert will be performed at Wentz Concert Hall, North Central College, 171 E. Chicago Ave, Naperville, IL on Sunday, March 11 at 3pm; and at Symphony Center, 220 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL on Monday, March 12 at 7:30pm.

Tickets range from $20-$99 for concerts at Symphony Center and $49-$62 for concerts at North Central College with special $10 pricing available for students at both concerts. Tickets can be purchased by calling Chicago Sinfonietta at 312-284- 1554 or online at chicagosinfonietta.org. Hear Me Roar is sponsored in part by Skadden, ITW, and Fifth Third Bank, in partnership with YWCA Metropolitan Chicago. Chicago Sinfonietta Season Sponsors include Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aon, and Southwest Airlines.

Ticket holders are invited pre-show and during intermission to experience activities with Girls Rock! Chicago and YWCA. These activities are presented as part of BRIDGE – Chicago Sinfonietta’s audience engagement thematic concert programming established to break social, racial, and economic barriers within the symphonic experience.

Leading Women Executives, an experiential program for high-potential women who are prepared to advance from senior management roles to executive leadership positions, is sponsoring a private event for their alumnae prior to the concert, with Motorola Solutions as co-host. The pre-concert event includes a networking reception & panel discussion with a panel of female conductors, composers and musicians.

“Hear Me Roar takes Chicago Sinfonietta into uncharted repertoire with two major new commissions among three Chicago Premieres” says Music Director Chen. She continues: “the entire program is comprised of incredible works created by women composers – both past and present. While Jennifer Higdon and Reena Esmail represent the new generation of composers who are making symphonic history with every piece they compose, Florence Price and Dora Pejačević wrote music that has literally become the hidden gem of the orchestral repertoire as very few music lovers know their music well. With less than 2% of the symphonic repertoire annually performed by American professional orchestras being works written by women, the Chicago Sinfonietta has hit the national radar championing for one of the most underrepresented minorities in the classical music world – the women who expressed their life experiences through the musical voices of symphony orchestras.”

For more information, please visit chicagosinfonietta.org

Musica Pacifica, one of America’s premier baroque ensembles, seeks a Booking Agent.

This part-time position starts at 15-20 hours per week; Although Musica Pacifica is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, candidates could work remotely from other areas of the country.

Note: if more hours are desired, another organization, also in need of a booking agent, could potentially double these hours.

Responsibilities:
·      Regularly and consistently contact presenters by phone and email to secure concert engagements.
·      Maintain and grow/develop database of prospective presenters active in booking live performances of classical music.
·      Prepare copy for bi-monthly or monthly newsletter emailed to presenters and mailing list; distribute to list.
·      Potentially negotiate fees and arrangements with presenters when group is engaged.
·      Create simple sales sheets with graphics.
·      Possibly other PR duties to be discussed.

Qualifications:
·      Sales ability, including making cold calls, tracking contacts, timely follow-up, and closing deals.
·      A familiarity with classical music is required, and familiarity with early music preferred.
·      Experience in this field is desirable, but resourcefulness, discipline and the ability to work independently are even more important.
·      Competence with email, a direct mail platform (such as MailChimp), word processing, preparing marketing pieces, and database management.
·      Basic to intermediate graphic design skills.

Compensation: an hourly fee plus commission on any engagements booked.

Please submit resume, cover letter and hourly salary requirements to Peter McDowell Arts Consulting, [email protected]

New York-based composer Gerald Cohen, known for his moving and vibrant chamber music, opera, choral and liturgical music, announces the exciting and important upcoming world premiere performances of his opera Steal a Pencil for Me, based on the true love story of Holocaust survivors Jaap and Ina Polak.

From January 25-30, 2018, Opera Colorado will produce the world premiere of Steal a Pencil for Me, with music by composer Cohen and libretto by Deborah Brevoort. The opera is a love story, full of hope, set during the the dark times of WWII concentration camps. It is based on the book of the same title by Jaap and Ina Polak, whom the composer knew for more than 25 years, and who had the chance to see the opera in its workshop phase in 2013. This unusual and dramatic plot features a love “quadrangle” revolving around the story of the dissolution of Jaap’s first marriage to the difficult Manja, his romance with Ina, and Ina’s ill-fated relationship with her youthful sweetheart Rudi. Opera Colorado Music Director and conductor Ari Pelto and stage director Omer Ben Seadia will lead a cast featuring soprano Inna Dukach, baritone Gideon Dabi, and mezzo Adriana Zabala.

Conductor Ari Pelto says, “Gerald Cohen’s music is compelling, sophisticated and approachable for the listener…There is a tight, natural connection between text and music, writing the music so as to make Deborah Brevoort’s text very clear.” He continues, “The story is compelling partly because there is no heroism. The three lead characters wrestle with the challenges, complications and emotions of life, love and partnership. At the same time, they are faced with surviving the horrors of the Holocaust.”

The opera will be performed at the Elaine Wolf Theatre at the Mizel Arts and Culture Center at the JCC, 350 S. Dahlia Street, Denver, CO. Tickets start at $20 and are available at www.operacolorado.org/steal-a-pencil-for-me/.

For more about composer Gerald Cohen, please visit geraldcohenmusic.com

American composer and pianist Sam Post, whose work spans classical, jazz and chamber music, announces performances of his newly orchestrated work Sketches of Kazakhstan: a Chamber Symphony in a larger program called “CONNECTIONS” at the San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox series, under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas, on December 8 and 9, 2017 at 9 pm.

SoundBox is an experimental performance space inside Davies Symphony Hall, 300 Franklin Street, San Francisco, CA. Information on tickets and on the works performed during each concert is available at www.sfsoundbox.com. The doors open at 8pm for each event, with the performance beginning at 9pm. Tickets to the December 8 and 9 SoundBox performances are available at 10 a.m., Monday, November 20. General admission is $45. To become a supporter of SoundBox, patrons may purchase Producer-level tickets at $350. For more information about the benefits of becoming a Producer, please go to www.sfsoundbox.com/producer

Mr. Post was originally connected to the San Francisco Symphony by Yo-Yo Ma after Sam played one of his pieces for Mr. Ma, and then performing together with Mr. Ma and Renée Fleming at the Kennedy Center Arts Summit 2016. The original San Francisco Symphony commission, premiered in February 2017, was for a string quartet based on the themes of the late Kazakh dombra player Karshyga Akhmedyarov. His daughter, Raushan Akhmedyarova, is a violinist in the symphony and played first violin in the quartet. Each of the five movements is loosely based on one or more musical themes from one of his pieces. This mini-orchestrated (28 players) version receives its world premiere with these performances.

Watch this video of Raushan Akhmedyarova talking about her background and about this new work:

And watch this video of Sam Post playing original work, “Dizzy Days” – the title track from his newest album:

To learn more about Sam Post and his music, please visit samueljpost.com
And for more about the SoundBox series, visit sfsoundbox.com

New York-based composer Gerald Cohen, known for his moving and vibrant chamber music, opera, choral and liturgical music, announces an exciting and important upcoming world premiere: Voyagers, to be performed with astronomical projections at New York’s esteemed Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History on November 28th, is a new quintet inspired by the Voyager space mission.

Voyagers, a composition for clarinet and string quartet, is a tribute to the two Voyager spacecraft on the 40th anniversary of their launch, and of the music sent to accompany them on their journey out of the solar system. The piece, a linking of music, science and visual art, was commissioned by and written for the Cassatt Quartet and clarinetist Vasko Dukovski. Accompanying astronomical visualizations will be created by Carter Emmart, director of Astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History.

The work will be performed at the Museum’s Hayden Planetarium Space Theater in New York City on November 28, 2017 at 7pm. Tickets range from $12-$15, and are available for purchase online.

Cohen says “When the Cassatt Quartet asked me to write a piece based on the theme of ‘voyages’ for a planned concert, I recalled that the two Voyager spacecraft—launched in the late 1970s, explorers of the outer planets, and now journeying beyond the edge of our solar system—were each launched with a ‘Golden Record’, the brainchild of Carl Sagan, containing recordings of selections of Earth’s music, along with photos and sounds of human life. This was sent as a message, to any extra-terrestrial civilization that might find the record, to convey the essence of human life on Earth.”

This 25-minute piece focuses on several of the pieces that were part of the Golden Record, and weaves them together in a composition that celebrates humanity’s quest to explore the universe, and the power of music to express the rich emotional and cultural world of human beings. The creators of the Golden Record chose a very idiosyncratic selection of pieces from around the world, and Cohen has in turn chosen several of these pieces—a Renaissance dance, an Indian Raga and a late Beethoven quartet—as the main source material for his composition about music and exploration.

Best-selling author, documentary filmmaker and producer of the Voyager Golden Record, Timothy Ferris, will be giving a brief contextual talk at the top of the program. Ferris has been called Called “the best popular science writer in the English language” by The Christian Science Monitor and “the best science writer of his generation” by The Washington Post.

For more about composer Gerald Cohen, please visit geraldcohenmusic.com