On the heels of its successful season opener, Trademark,Chicago Sinfoniettaannounces performances of Regresar / Revisit: A Día de los MuertosCelebration at Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville, IL (November 4, 2017, 8pm) and at Symphony Center, Chicago (November 6, 2017, 7:30pm). This performance is the second of five Main Stage programs throughout the Sinfonietta’s 30th Anniversary Season.
Maestro Hector Guzman will serve as Guest Conductor for this event. Other guests include NewMoon Chicago, Roosevelt University Conservatory Choirs, and Cuerdas Clásicas.
Regresar / Revisit‘s program features works by Mexican composers Revueltas, Cortes and Moncayo, as well as an entrancing and chilling performance of Mozart’s Requiem, performed with a 70-voice choir — and a Sinfonietta twist (of course).
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.
Chicago Sinfonietta, under the baton of Maestro Mei-Ann Chen, is Chicago’s professional orchestra dedicated to modeling and promoting diversity, inclusion, and both racial and cultural equity in the arts. The orchestra takes a leadership role in these areas with initiatives like Project Inclusion, a unique fellowship program serving emerging diverse musicians of color; and Project W, promoting gender equity in classical music.
The Program includes:
✻Astor Piazzolla: Libertango(arr. Eugenio Castillo)
✻Silvestre Revueltas: Redes
✻Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem
✻Edvard Grieg: Aase’s Death, Peer Gynt Suite No. 1
✻Gori Cortés: Marila
✻José Pablo Moncayo: Huapango
Ticket holders are invited pre-show and during intermission to celebrate this colorful Mexican holiday with activities including holiday-inspired crafts, a traditional altar, and more. 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.
Additionally, the West Suburban Friends of Chicago Sinfonietta will host their annual fundraiser “Día de los Muertos Celebration” before the concert on Saturday, November 4, 5:30pmat Wentz Concert Hall, Lower Level/Madden Theater. For information, please call 312.284.1559.
San Francisco’s Musica Pacifica combines world-class musicianship with a spirited and communicative performing style and brings exuberant vitality to the intimate chamber music of the Baroque. Since 1990, the ensemble has featured the talents of Judith Linsenberg, recorder and Elizabeth Blumenstock, baroque violin. Charles Sherman, harpsichord, joined the ensemble in 1997, and Josh Lee, viola da gamba, joined in 2012.
Now after 27 years, this season marks a “changing of the guard,” as Ms. Blumenstock has announced her retirement from the ensemble. Ever ready to celebrate, Musica Pacifica is gearing up to fête Ms. Blumenstock’s illustrious career with the ensemble and to welcome the widely acclaimed Ingrid Matthews as their new violinist.
Ingrid Matthews
Since winning first prize in the Irwin Bodky International Competition for Early Music in 1989, Ingrid Matthews has become well established as one of today’s leading baroque violinists. She served as Music Director of the Seattle Baroque Orchestra from 1994 until 2013, earning widespread respect among musicians and audiences alike. (For more information, please visit ingridmatthews.com)
Elizabeth Blumenstock is a long-time concertmaster, soloist, and leader with the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and American Bach Soloists, concertmaster of the International Handel Festival Orchestra in Göttingen, Germany, and is Artistic Director of the Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival. Her love of chamber music has involved her in several accomplished and interesting smaller ensembles including Musica Pacifica, Galax Quartet, Live Oak Baroque, Ensemble Mirable, and Voices of Music. An enthusiastic teacher, Ms. Blumenstock teaches for the Juilliard Historical Performance program, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the American Bach Soloists’ summer Festival and Academy, and the International Baroque Institute at Longy. Her discography includes some 100 CDs for such labels as harmonia mundi usa, Dorian/Sono Luminus, Koch, Naxos, Reference Recordings, and Virgin Veritas.
Watch a 2012 highlight from Elizabeth Blumenstock‘s tenure with Musica Pacifica:
MUSICA PACIFICA SEASON HIGHLIGHTS CALENDAR:
• Elizabeth Blumenstock’s final concert with Musica Pacifica will take place on Saturday, December 16th, 2017 on the Barefoot Chamber Concert series at the Hillside Swedenborgian Church, 1422 Navellier Street, El Cerrito, California, where the group will also have a champagne send-off for Ms. Blumenstock and a welcome for Ms. Matthews. This is the public’s last chance to experience live and in person the brilliant musical chemistry between Ms. Blumenstock and Ms. Linsenberg.
• February 16, 2018: A la mode, A le monde – a potpourri of Medieval, Renaissance, traditional, and world music—performed on a panoply of bowed, blown, plucked and hit instruments. On the Barefoot series with Judith Linsenberg, Shira Kammen, Peter Maund, and Katherine Heater. Hillside Swedenborgian Church, 1422 Navellier Street, El Cerrito, California
Pianist Inna Faliks, who has performed throughout the United States, Europe and Asia, at such venues as Weill Hall in New York City, and The National Performing Arts Center in Beijing, has just released a new Double CD of music –Polonaise-Fantaisie: The Story of a Pianist– on Delos Records.
The thirteen works on this recording span 289 years in their dates of composition, and run the gamut from Bach and Mozart to Gershwin and Elliott Carter. The musical tracks appearing on the CD are interspersed with writings by the pianist chronicling her upbringing in Odessa, Ukraine; her musical and romantic awakenings; and her subsequent immigration to the US as a Jewish refugee.
The unique story of an immigrant, narrated on this recording by actress Rebecca Mozo, is a timely topic that needs to be heard in the current turbulent political climate.
The thirteen musical tracks featured are unified by their brevity. Representing a huge variety of styles, they are carefully curated to be emotionally and texturally illustrative of events unfolding in the life experience of the protagonist, pianist Inna Faliks.
Works are:
✻Rodion Shchedrin: Basso Ostinato
✻J.S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue in G-sharp Minor, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1
✻Jan Freidlin: Ballade in Black and White* – *composed for Inna Faliks in 2011
✻W.A. Mozart: Fantasia in D Minor, K 397
✻Chopin-Liszt: The Maiden’s Wish
✻Paganini-Liszt: La Campanella
✻Frédéric Chopin: Polonaise-fantaisie, Op. 61
✻George Gershwin: Prelude 1 in B-flat Major
✻Gershwin: Prelude 2 in C-sharp Minor
✻Gershwin: Prelude 3 in E-flat Minor
✻Elliott Carter: Retrouvailles
✻P. I. Tchaikovsky: Nocturne in C-sharp Minor
✻Harrison Birtwistle: Oockooing Bird and “Living with Music…”
More about Inna Faliks
The “adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most exciting, committed, communicative and poetic artists of her generation. Click here for a biography.
On August 31, 2017, 6 PM, Inna Faliks will be performing “Four-Hand Mahler” – an arrangement of Mahler’s 6th Symphony – with fellow pianist Daniel Schlosberg at Ravinia Festival. This will be her debut performance at Ravinia. 200 Ravinia Park Rd, Highland Park, IL 60035. Tickets are $10, and can be purchased here.
Piano concert focusing on global warming and its effects on the Earth’s oceans.
On Sunday, November 6th, 2016 at 7:00 pm, Shanghai/Paris-based pianist Jenny Q Chai will be performing Acqua Alta (High Water) at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, New York, NY. Seated tickets are $20 advance, $25 day of show. Standing tickets are $15 advance, $20 day of show, and are available for purchase at lpr.com or in person at the box office.
Jenny Q Chai‘s Acqua Alta (High Water) is a program which focuses on global warming and its effects on the Earth’s oceans. The music on this program showcases the piano’s full range of expression, from exquisite nuance to bold gesture, as well as a wide range of musical understandings of water dating from both before and after the emergence of global climate change.
The program also includes sound and video installations based on global warming data curated by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories scientist Dr. Ian Fenty. The effect of global warming on water has been Fenty’s field of specialization for years. In addition, some pieces on the program are paired with the digital paintings of artist Relja Penezic, all of which are related to water. A narrative unfolds over the course of the performance, at first showing the tranquility of water and of humanity living harmoniously with it, then gradually showing a breakdown of that harmony in an increasingly industrialized world, and a troubling of the delicate balance that oceanic life requires.
Works to be performed during the “Acqua Alta (High Water)” program include:
Victoria Jordanova, Loveling
Marco Stroppa, Tangata Manu from Miniature Estrose, Book I
Claude Debussy, La cathédrale engloutie
Theodore Wiprud, Face of the Deep*
Orlando Gibbons, Allemande (Italian Ground)
Franz Liszt, La lugubre gondola
Milica Paranosic, Bubble (in trouble)
György Kurtág, Shadow-play
Marco Stroppa, Ninnananna from Miniature Estrose, Book I
György Ligeti, Musica Ricercata Nos. 1 and 7
Cole Ingraham, Entropy (3 parts)*
*commissioned for this program
“I am lucky to know so many of the best living and 20th century composers in person or in a very personal way” – Jenny Q Chai
An artist of singular vision, pianist Jenny Q Chai is widely renowned for her ability to illuminate musical connections throughout the centuries. With razor-sharp intention, Chai integrates her prodigy’s training with personal fascinations in the latest in live electronics, artificial intelligence, and environmental research, creating layered multimedia programs and events which explore and unite elements of science, nature, and art. Also of note, Ms. Chai designs all her performance gowns and some jewelry, in order to present a more united performance aesthetic, akin to the idea of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Ms. Chai has performed across the globe, headlining the most impressive venues from Carnegie Hall in New York City to the National Performing Arts Center in Beijing, China.
“Jenny Q Chai, who has studied with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, is following the more eclectic path…” The New York Times.
About Dr. Ian Fenty
Dr. Ian Fenty received his Ph.D. in Climate Physics and Chemistry from MIT where he studied how the year-to-year variability of the oceans affects the formation and extent of Arctic sea ice. He joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow to research the connection between a warming ocean and the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and sea level rise. As part of this research, Dr. Fenty collaborates with JPL oceanographers, glaciologists, and other scientists to reconstruct the circulation of Earth’s high-latitude oceans over the past two decades using a combination of numerical climate models and satellite and field observations.
About Relja Penezic
Relja Penezic is a painter, video artist, printmaker, photographer, and a filmmaker. His work is a multimedia blend that combines technology and painting, performance and video, art and craft. Penezic exhibits his work internationally and his short films are regularly shown at film festivals throughout the world. Relja Penezic is a cofounder of ARTaVIVA, company/curatorial project dedicated to promotion of audio/video art as a permanent installation medium. From 2007 his work is regularly shown on Souvenirs from Earth, the first Cable TV station broadcasting a 24/7 program of Film and Video art. In addition to an international career as an artist he served as a Creative Director for ID8, Los Angeles based branding agency, an Art Director and a Designer for Jump Ship Studios, San Francisco, and a Designer/Visual Effects Artist for Fleet Street Pictures of San Francisco. Relja Penezic was also a Master Printmaker for John Nichols Printmakers of New York specializing in silk-screen and lithography limited editions. He was a lecturer at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Princeton University School of Architecture, Haverford College, and Bowling Green State University.
MI PALPITA IL COR: BAROQUE PASSIONS
Musica Pacifica’s new recording featuring Soprano Dominique Labelle
Released today on Navona Records
American-based Early Music ensemble Musica Pacifica, in collaboration with French-Canadian soprano Dominique Labelle, is set to release a new CD of music – MI PALPITA IL COR: BAROQUE PASSIONS – on theNavona Label, today, October 14th, 2016.
Produced by GRAMMY-nominated producer David v.R. Bowles, the recording will be released in both physical and digital formats, and will be available for purchase at major online retailers such as Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, and many more.
Mi Palpita Il Cor features an array of instrumental and vocal compositions, exploring the rich repertoire of the mid- and late-Baroque period. Thematically focused on “passion,” the selections range from ‘anguish’ to ‘humor,’ displaying the exquisite musicianship of these early music superstars. Included on the disc are cantatas by Handel, Steffani, and Rameau, as well as a Paris Quartet by Telemann and a trio by Sammartini.
MUSICA PACIFICA
Called “some of the finest Baroque musicians in America” by American Record Guide, Musica Pacifica is host to virtuosic soloists Judith Linsenberg (recorder), Elizabeth Blumenstock (violin), Josh Lee (viola de gamba), John Lenti (theorbo; guitar), and Charles Sherman (harpsichord).
DOMINIQUE LABELLE
Featured vocalist Dominique Labelle, noted for her “lustrous and urgent voice” (San Francisco Classical Voice), brings vibrancy to this work. Having previously collaborated in live settings, Musica Pacifica is pleased to team up again with Labelle in this studio recording.
Works included are:
✻Agostino Steffani (1654-1728) Guardati O Core (Cantata)
✻Giuseppe Sammartini (1695-1750) Sonata in B minor, Op. 1, No. 6 (London, 1736)
✻George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) Mi Palpita il Cor (Cantata)
✻Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) Quatuor Nr. 3 in G major – “Nouveaux Quatuors” (1738)
✻Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) Orphée (Cantata)
Total Running Time: 76 minutes
About Dominique Labelle
Dominique Labelle is renowned for her vast repertoire of Baroque to New Music, performing internationally in New York, Budapest, Las Palmas, and her home of Montréal. Her passionate commitment to music-making has led to close and enduring collaborations with a number of the world’s most respected conductors and composers, such as Iván Fischer, Nicholas McGegan, Jos van Veldhoven, Jean-Marie Zeitouni, and the Pulitzer Prize winning composer Yehudi Wyner. She also treasures her long association with the late Robert Shaw.
Among her numerous recordings of opera and concert repertoire is Monsigny’s Le Déserteur with Opera Lafayette and Ryan Brown (Naxos). She can also be heard on recordings on the Virgin Veritas, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, RCA Victor Red Seal, Koss, Denon, New World, Carus and Muisica Omnia labels. Her recording of Handel’s Arminio (Virgin Classics) won the 2002 Handel Prize.
Trained at McGill and Boston Universities, Dominique is Professor of Voice at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. She has also taught master classes at Harvard University, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts.
About Musica Pacifica
Musica Pacifica has, since its founding in 1990, become widely recognized as one of America’s premier baroque ensembles. Lauded for both the dazzling virtuosity and the warm expressiveness of its performances, they have been described by the press as being “among the best in the world” (Alte Musik Aktuell). At home in the San Francisco Bay area, the artists perform with Philharmonia Baroque and American Bach Soloists, and appear with many other prominent early music ensembles nationally and abroad. The Washington Post noted: “the effect was transporting––a small miracle of precision and musical electricity.”
They have performed on some of the most prestigious concert series in the U.S., including the Boston and Berkeley Early Music Festivals, Music Before 1800 and the Frick Collection (NY), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Cleveland Art Museum, Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC), Pittsburgh Renaissance and Baroque, Seattle Early Music Guild, Early Music Society of the Islands (Victoria, BC) and Houston Early Music Society, among many others.
Musica Pacifica’s previous eight CD releases on the Virgin Classics, Dorian and Solimar labels have won national and international awards, including the highest ratings in several CD magazines and being chosen as “CD of the Month” by the early music journal Alte Musik Aktuell (Regensburg). Their recordings have been praised by the likes of Audiophile Edition, Chamber Music America, and prestigious British journal Gramophone.
On radio, they have been featured on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today”, WFIU’s nationally syndicated “Harmonia”, New York’s WQXR, and on Minnesota Public Radio. Online, Musica Pacifica can be heard on radio stations 1.fm, Last.fm, Celtic Radio, and Recorder-radio.com, as well as on Pandora, iTunes and Magnatune; and seen on youtube.com/MusicaPacificaSF.
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