| 
|
Friday,
February 27, 2004 at 7:30pm
Zankel Hall
Orchestra
Underground
Steven
Sloane, conductor
Andrew
Armstrong, piano
LISA
BIELAWA: The Right Weather (World Premiere, Commissioned
by The Helen F. Whitaker Fund)
MICHAEL GORDON, composer
BILL MORRISON, filmaker
LAURIE OLINDER, visual artist
BOB McGRATH, director
Gotham
(World Premiere, ACO Commission)
In
Collaboration with Ridge Theater
and Hypnotic Pictures
Tickets are
$20 & $30. Call CarnegieCharge:
212-247-7800
American
Composers Orchestra
Launches “Orchestra Underground” debut concert at Zankel
Hall February 27
Two world premieres
commissioned by ACO — Lisa Bielawa’s The Right Weather
and Michael Gordon’s Gotham — take advantage of
new hall’s unique facilities
Orchestra Underground, conducted by music director
Steven Sloane on Friday, February 27, 2004 at 7:30pm, marks American
Composers Orchestra’s (ACO) debut at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall.
This unconventional, multimedia event is a milestone for ACO, the first
concert in an ongoing, ambitious new initiative that will take full
advantage of Zankel’s state-of-the-art facilities. Two world premieres
have been commissioned especially for this event by important and distinctive
young composers: The Right Weather for chamber orchestra and
piano by Lisa Bielawa, with pianist Andrew Armstrong; and Gotham,
a multimedia collaborative work being created by Michael Gordon with
Ridge Theater artists, filmmaker Bill Morrison, visual artist Laurie
Olinder, and director Bob McGrath.
“Orchestra Underground is the first
concert in a new initiative that will challenge conventional notions
about symphonic music and the concert experience itself. Our goal is
to develop new repertoire and provide a fertile working ground for artists
who have not traditionally had access to the orchestral ensemble. Embracing
multidisciplinary and collaborative work, novel instrumental and spatial
orientations of musicians, new technologies and multimedia, Orchestra
Underground is magnificently representative of our new initiative,”
says ACO artistic director Robert Beaser. “Orchestra Underground
is an opportunity to introduce literature which is desperately needed
on the American orchestra scene. ACO was established over 25 years ago,
and there are now a lot of pieces of around 15-20 minutes in length
written for large orchestra. And American orchestras all over the country
are performing American music much more now than before. But where there
is a real hole in the repertoire is in works written for small orchestra
and chamber ensemble. And this is what we’re hoping the Orchestra
Underground series will do: explore new ways of defining the way
orchestras present contemporary music," adds music director Steven
Sloane.
The
Right Weather, by Lisa Bielawa, will be an amalgam of four separate
but interrelated pieces for piano solo and chamber orchestra, that “splinters
the orchestra into various mongrel forms, borne out of the spatial energy
of the Zankel Hall” according to Bielawa. The piece is based on
four verbs—“Roam,” “Wait,” “Beckon”
and “Start”—excerpted from the following passage in
Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin:
I roam above the sea,
I wait for the right weather,
I beckon to the sails of ships.
Under the cope of storms, with waves disputing,
On the free crossway of the sea
When shall I start on my free course?
Each verb serves as the title for one of the sections of The Right
Weather, in what the composer calls a ritual of “spatially
and temporally varied use of orchestral/instrumental forces.”
Roam is a chamber orchestration of a piece that was completed
by Bielawa at the Copland House in 2001. Selected for ACO’s 2002
new music readings for emerging composers, it opens with the solo pianist
playing only a few isolated chords. Wait is for piano and drone,
a drone that seems to come from the walls of the hall itself, as players
place themselves around the outside of the hall. Beckon is
scored for layered chamber ensembles, groupings of instruments mapped
to the plan of Zankel Hall, each playing without a conductor and cueing
off of one another. Start is a fully integrated piece for solo
piano and orchestra, in the spirit of the one-movement piano concerto.
“I
am fascinated with the expressive power of ‘non-integratedness’
in concert settings,” says the composer. “Our attention
as listeners, so often saturated and over-stimulated in our daily lives,
is made more acute through the laying-bare of different sound elements.
A solo pianist appears but plays only momentarily, when the orchestra
is not playing. When he begins to play, the orchestra vacates the stage,
only to re-enter later, unseen, on a single note. Then the orchestra
appears in small groups through numerous doors around the hall, behind
which they have been playing the drone, and play only in self-contained
utterances, which call to each other around the audience while the pianist
is silent. At last we see the forces together onstage, and our experience
of integrated sound is like a deliverance.”
Winner
of ACO’s 2002 Helen F. Whitaker Commission,
Lisa Bielawa is a recent recipient of the Aaron Copland Award for emerging
composers. Her string quartet was recently premiered by the Chamber
Music Society of Lincoln Center. As a co-founder and producer of the
inventive Music at the Anthology, Ms. Bielawa has established herself
as a provocative musical creator with a strong dramatic sense.
Andrew
Armstrong, piano
 Pianist
Andrew Armstrong is the soloist in The Right Weather. He received the
1993 Van Cliburn Competition’s, Jury Discretionary Award. The
youngest pianist entered in the competition, The New York Times wrote
that Armstrong was “…the most talented player in the competition…
he’s a real musician. We’ll hear more from him,” while
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram called him simply, “Fabulous! Fabulous!”
In 1996, Armstrong was named a Gilmore Young Artist. He has performed
at Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center.
Michael
Gordon: Gotham
Michael Gordon is well known to downtown music fans
as one of the co-founders of Bang on a Can. Gordon’s music combines
the intensity and power of rock music with formal composition, and has
been performed by artists such as the Kronos Quartet and Ensemble Modern
at venues from BAM to Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, Royal Albert
Hall, and festivals from Edinburgh to St. Petersburg. His special interest
in adding dimensionality to the concert experience has led to frequent
collaborations with artists in other media.
In commissioning Gotham, a 35-minute multimedia
portrait of New York City, ACO reunites Gordon with cutting-edge filmmaker
Bill Morrison, visual artist Laurie Olinder, and director Bob McGrath
of New York’s Ridge Theater. This same team created Decasia,
a music/film/projection experience that has received rave reviews from
Europe to the Sundance Film Festival.
Gotham will incorporate a film that will be
projected throughout the entire length of the piece. Musicians will
be positioned to be visible to the audience through the projections,
at times seeming to inhabit the world of the film and slides.
Gotham has been inspired by its creators’
affinity for their hometown of New York—a personal portrait of
a place as it has come to be known by these artists. It is a piece that
finds beauty in the seemingly dirty and mundane details of the city,
rather than relying on the knee-jerk reactions its more visible landmarks
have come to inspire. Gotham seeks to reclaim New York for
those who live and work here, seeing it as a constantly changing source
of inspiration and hope.
Archival material will be used to show other personal
visions of New York throughout the history of the recorded image. Rather
than iconic stock shots, these images will tend toward the small observations
of those who have been similarly inspired in the past. Imagery will
also reflect the intimate knowledge of the town we live in. Although
this world is clearly New York City, it also speaks to any number of
urban dwellers in the 21st century. Gotham becomes the physical
world through which we navigate.
About Ridge Theater
Ridge Theater has been presenting new theater works
since 1987. Born out of the cabaret and performance spaces in Lower
Manhattan, Ridge Theater has developed into one of New York's premier
creators of experimental theater and opera. The New York Times
featured the company in a 1998 article stating: "Ridge Theater
is an avant-garde company with an unbuttoned charm who made a name in
experimental theater for staging multimedia spectacles with tidy, Swiss-watch
precision." Ridge Theater's productions are often large-scale visual
and aural works that seek to expand theatrical boundaries. Their productions
often utilize diverse elements such as film and slide projections, musical
scores, and defined ensemble movement. Ridge Theater has, since its
inception, sought to work with innovative collaborators from a variety
of related fields who endeavor to invigorate the live theatrical experience.
Among Ridge Theater’s recent productions is Jennie
Richee, which received 2001 OBIE Awards for Direction and Collaborative
Design. The Chicago Tribune called that production “Technically
impressive, with its intricate film and slide projections...staged with
a fine feeling for theatrical space by director Bob McGrath...he has
conjured up a dreamlike world, in which the actors seem to float.”
Bob McGrath, director
Bob McGrath is the winner of three OBIE awards: Direction,
Jennie Richee (2001), Best New American Work, The Carbon
Copy Building (2000), and an award for Sustained Achievement. He
has directed all of Ridge Theater’s productions. Mr. McGrath was
awarded a fellowship from The Foundation for Contemporary Performance
Arts, and has taught at NYU and the Eugene O’Neil Theater Center.
He has directed at venues including the American Repertory Theater,
The Kitchen, Lincoln Center, La MaMa, ETC., MASS MoCA, The Kampfnagle
(Hamburg, Germany), and The Carignano (Turin, Italy). He has worked
with writers and composers such as Mac Wellman, Ben Katchor, Susan Sontag,
Robert Coover, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Bang on a Can, and Cynthia Hopkins.
As an actor and writer, Mr. McGrath has collaborated on the Scott Saunders
films The Headhunter’s Sister (Winner, Independent Spirit
Awards, 1998) and The Lost Words.
Laurie Olinder,
visual designer
Laurie
Olinder has created visual designs for Ridge Theater productions since
1987, including slide design, sets, backdrops, costumes, and props.
Most recently, she designed slides for Decasia, an environmental
symphony with projections for the 55-piece Basel Sinfonetti in November
2001. She will also be the visual designer for the upcoming Anatomy
Theater, a collaboration with Ridge Theater, David Lang, and Mark
Dion. She has recently been involved in design work for FEVA (Federation
of East Village Artists) dedicated to the future of The East Village
Art Community. Ms. Olinder graduated from the Boston Museum School of
Fine Arts and attended Cooper Union. She is a recipient of a 2001 NYFA
Fellowship, a 2001 OBIE Award for Collaborative Design for Jennie
Richee, a MacDowell Fellowship, and in 1998 received an Eliot Norton
Award for Outstanding Design in Theater for her work at The American
Repertory Theater (Cambridge, MA) with fellow designer Fred Tietz.
Bill Morrison, filmmaker
Award-winning
filmmaker Bill Morrison has contributed films to thirteen Ridge Theater
productions since 1990, and has been recognized with Bessie (1993) and
OBIE (2001) awards along the way. Five of these films are in the permanent
collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Among them is his first full-length
work, Decasia, which premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival,
and on the Sundance Channel throughout January 2003. (For more information,
visit www.decasia.com.) Morrison was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
for filmmaking in 2000, and received grants from Creative Capital and
NYFA in 2001.
Steven
Sloane, music director & conductor
Steven
Sloane is one of the most adventurous and innovative conductors to have
emerged in recent years. Through his work with orchestras, festivals,
choruses, and opera companies across Europe and in America, Mr. Sloane
has won acclaim for his compelling programming, theatrical flair, and
impressive technique. His passion for unusual repertoire, interest in
eclectic juxtapositions of music of divergent eras and styles, commitment
to contemporary works, and willingness to challenge convention have
established Mr. Sloane as a bold champion of the future of concert music.
[find out more...]
Ticket Info
Tickets
for Orchestra Underground are $20 and $30. Tickets may be purchased
through CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800, by visiting Carnegie Hall’s
website at www.carnegiehall.org,
or at the Carnegie Hall box office, 57th Street at 7th Ave.
About ACO
Founded
in 1977, American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world
dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation, and promulgation
of music by American composers. [find
out more...]
Major
support of American Composers Orchestra is from Alliance Capital Management
L.P., Amphion Foundation, ASCAP, The Bagby Foundation for the Musical
Arts, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Bodman Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation,
BMI Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Citigroup Foundation,
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Edward T. Cone Foundation, Consolidated
Edison, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable
Trust, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Fidelity Foundation, Ann and
Gordon Getty Foundation, The Estate of Francis Goelet, Horace W. Goldsmith
Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, The Hauser Foundation, Henfield
Foundation, Victor Herbert Foundation, Geoffrey Hughes Foundation, Christian
Humann Foundation, Jephson Educational Trust, The Jerome Foundation,
Helen Sperry Lea Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, Meet the Composer,
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JPMorganChase, National Academy of Recording
Arts & Sciences Foundation, The New York Times Co. Foundation, Josephine
Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fan
Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Virgil Thomson Foundation,
Oakleigh L. Thorne Foundation, and The Helen F. Whitaker Fund. ACO programs
are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency,
and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. |
