On Thursday, December 5th, 2019, 8pm, the Interpretations Series continues it 31st season with composers Elizabeth Brown and Frances White with the Momenta Quartet (momentaquartet.com). Held at Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY, tickets are $20 for adults / $15 for students & seniors, and available on Roulette.org and Interpretations.info.

The Momenta Quartet joins forces with composers Elizabeth Brown and Frances White in a multimedia evening fusing Western contemporary music with Japanese aesthetics, literary references, and a video/sculpture installation by artist Lothar Osterburg.

This dynamic program features Momenta alongside baritone/narrator Thomas Buckner and Elizabeth Brown in her equal capacity as a master of the shakuhachi: a traditional Japanese flute. The concert includes two new works written specifically for this concert, with commission funds provided by The Sparkplug Foundation and a New Music USA Project Grant. 

The NY premiere of Brown’s Dialect for solo shakuhachi, which uses repeating, morphing phrases to trace the evolution of a unique language. Then the world premiere of Babel continues the linguistic theme in a positive spin of the myth, celebrating NYC as a living organism, using multilingual pages and recordings of Emma Lazarus’ verse from the Statue of Liberty. Unlike the traditional story, nothing here is destroyed; instead, it is cumulative, with its architectural history visible, its constant influx of immigrants the source of its life and beauty. And White’s The book of evening for quartet and shakuhachi (also a world premiere) is drawn from the Mark Strand poem Moon, with the musical arrangement evoking “the moon between the clouds.” Strand’s moon creates a path to “those places where what you had wished for happens.” The music reflects that, evoking a longing for that place, vanishing as the book of evening closes.

Dedicated to the Momenta Quartet, Brown’s Just Visible in the Distance draws its title, inspiration, and form from W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn. The piece, inspired by Sebald’s continuous narrative arc, consists of intuitively-assembled small movements, each flowing into the next. Then White’s And so the heavens turned, for quartet and narrator, contemplates the mystery of storytelling itself.  A collaboration with writer James Pritchett and inspired by the 11th-century Persian epic Shahnameh, the text is read before the music and during its closing, evoking at times the anguish and passion of the epic’s mythic lovers, at others a questioning stillness.

Interpretations continues its tradition of playing host to composers, interpreters, and improvisers — artists of both local and international scale, with myriads of approaches to music.

On the heels of last year’s acclaimed 30th anniversary, the Interpretations Series is dedicated to nurturing the relationship of innovative composers with the growing community of new music virtuoso performers. “When we started, this was a real need, especially for the more experimental new music,” says Founder and Artistic Director Thomas Buckner. “Now we are experiencing a blossoming of new music groups and solo performers, which makes the series necessary in a new way. There are so many exceptional composers and performers who need a great place to perform.”

Other upcoming Series lineups:

※ THURSDAY APRIL 9, 2020: THOMAS BUCKNER
Baritone Thomas Buckner presents his 31st annual concert of newly commissioned pieces with works by Earl Howard, JD Parran, Buckner himself — including Gold/Crack, a Mutable Music commissioned work by Pauline Kim-Harris, and performed with String Noise (Kim-Harris and Conrad Harris). The evening also includes performers Soo Yeon Lyuh (haegeum, a two-stringed Korean bowed instrument); Andrew Drury (percussion); Earl Howard (synthesizer and saxophone); JD Parran (reeds).

※ THURSDAY MAY 7, 2020: MÉLANIE GENIN | ENSEMBLE L’ART POUR L’ART
Mélanie Genin performs new music for harp by Christian Dachez, Michael Greba, Saad Haddad, Pauline Kim Harris, Mantovani, and Ricardo Romaneiro. / Ensemble L’Art Pour L’Art perform works by Matthias Kawl, Stephan Streich, Killian Schwoon and others.  With Matthias Kawl (percussion); Astrid Smelik (flute). Michael Shorder (guitar); plus special guest Thomas Buckner (baritone voice).

For audio and video, and background on composers Brown and White, click here.
For more general information, please visit interpretations.info

On Saturday, November 2nd, 2019, at 8 pm, the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra will present a concert under the direction of guest conductor Jens Georg Bachmann with Canadian violinist Emmanuel Vukovich as soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major. The program will be performed at the Staller Center for the Performing Arts Main Stage, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook, NY. Tickets are $20 for general admission, $10 for seniors and students, and available on www.stallercenter.com and in person at the box-office.

Under the baton of Jens Georg Bachmann, who is Artistic Director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Cyprus, the SBSO will be performing an opulent program featuring Vukovich — critically acclaimed for his attention to “every detail of phrasing” (Calgary Herald) and for being “a true musician” (Yannick Nézet-Séguin).

Soviet-Russian-born American composer Lera Auerbach’s Post Silentium for Orchestra opens the evening. Originally commissioned in 2012 by Germany’s Staatskapelle Dresden, this one-movement work is written for strings, piccolo, English horn, contrabassoon, bass trombone, harp, piano, and various forms of percussion.

Composed in 1888, and translated into English as “Death and Transfiguration”, Richard Strauss’s tone poem Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24 depicts the death of an artist, with a four-part sonic storyline of childhood, manhood, attainment, and the shift from this plane to the afterlife.

Initially a failure at its premiere in 1806, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61 is a work of “radiant beauty” (Yehudi Menuhin). This monumental work defines a turning point in the evolution of the concerto form in which the soloist emerges from the orchestra as a free and independent individual voice.  

Works included:
Strauss Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24
Lera Auerbach Post Silentium for Orchestra
Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61

Critically acclaimed for his “attention to every detail of phrasing”, Canadian violinist Emmanuel Vukovich (www.emmanuelvukovich.ca) is emerging as an artist of musical integrity and artistic maturity. Grand-prize winner of the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition as first violinist of the former Lloyd Carr-Harris String Quartet, Emmanel has performed across North and South America, Europe, and Australia in performances with artists such Ida Haendal, Matt Haimowitz, Anton Kuerti, and Alex Klein. He is the founder and artistic director of The Parcival Project, an international chamber music collective which has toured Canada, the US, and South America, as well as artist director of Montreal’s Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur “Bach Odyssey” – a multi- year series centered around the solo violin Sonatas and Partitas of JS Bach. Emmanuel performs on a 1629 Nicolo Amati violin on generous loan from The Canada Council for the Arts Musical Instrument Bank.

 Upcoming highlights include the creation of two new works:

• Inspired by North Indian Classical Hindustani music, American composer Sheila Silver is writing a violin concerto expressly for Emmanuel. This concerto is intended to be premiered and recorded in 2021. 
• An original work for solo violin, African drums, and chamber orchestra, co-composed with award-winning composer John McDowell, Parzival & Fierefiz: A New Narrative of Race will make its world premiere at the University of Toronto in November 2020 in conjunction with the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Wagner’s Parsifal.

Emmanuel is currently a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Stony Brook University, working with Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet, Hagai Shaham, and Colin Carr. His final graduation recital will present selections from the solo violin Sonatas & Partitas of J S Bach and Parzival & Fierefiz: A New Narrative of Race.

Jens Georg Bachmann (www.jensgeorgbachmann.com) is the Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of Cyprus, since 2017. With his artistic leadership the CySO has significantly increased its popularity and reputation across the country. Being equally at home in operatic and symphonic repertoire, Bachmann has conducted, the Boston, Florida and Princeton symphony orchestras, the Berlin and Hamburg symphony orchestras, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the ERT Radio and Thessaloniki Symphony Orchestras of Greece, the Radio Orchestras of Germany (NDR) as well as at The Metropolitan Opera New York, Royal Swedish Opera, Komische Oper Berlin, Staatsoper Berlin and the state operas of Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Düsseldorf.

Mr. Bachmann had been Associate Conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and Principal Conductor of the Texas Chamber Orchestra as well as Music Director of the Crested Butte Music Festival in Colorado. He has collaborated with some of the world’s finest musicians such as Pinchas Zukerman, Daniel Hope, Yefim Bronfman, Cyprien Katsaris and singers Renée Fleming, Marcello Giordani and Jonas Kaufmann. In addition, Bachmann has been teaching in the USA and Germany academically at the Manhattan School of Music, New York University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the Lübeck Hochschule. He also collaborates regularly with the Cyprus Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Being thoroughly trained through mentorships with Christoph von Dohnányi and James Levine for several years, Bachmann is an avid proponent of contemporary music and has worked with many active composers of our time including Elliott Carter, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sofia Gubaidulina as well as annually since 2017 with members of the Center of Cypriot Composers.

Jens Georg Bachmann was born in Berlin, Germany, and studied conducting and violin at the Hochschule für Musik „Hanns Eisler“ Berlin and The Juilliard School New York.

Bachmann has recorded for the DaCapo and Naxos labels.

For more about Emmanuel Vukovich, please visit his website.
To purchase tickets for this event, visit the Staller Center’s order page.