World-renowned soprano and leading new music muse Dawn Upshaw, and Meet the Composer Foundation have invited Metropolis Ensemble to perform the newly arranged Three Pieces from Piosenki by composer David Bruce at a gala dinner held in Upshaw's honor at the Manhattan Penthouse in New York City on May 28, 2008. The annual event organized by Meet the Composer honors a prominent American artist. The benefit committee includes Esa-Pekka Salonen, James Levine, Robert Spano, Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, among others.

Upshaw was involved in the original Carnegie Hall commission of Piosenki, and has recently been championing Bruce's music, commissioning an opera from him for her students on the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard College, NY and scheduling performances of Piosenki herself in the fall. Other pieces selected for the event are by John Harbison and Tania Leon, both of whom will be in attendance.

More details about the gala...

Listen and learn about Piosenki...

Labels: davidbruce, dawnupshaw, ensemblenews

Metropolis Ensemble commissioned a new arrangement for chamber orchestra of Erik Satie's Sports et Divertissements from London-based composer David Bruce for our spring concert Loop.

Sports et Divertissements was originally written for piano and narrator in 1914 as a multi-media project of sorts. Satie provided piano music to drawings made by Charles Martin, a French illustrator from the Beaux Arts and Art Deco traditions. First published and performed in the early 1920s, Satie's twenty brilliant thumbnails sketches illuminate Martin's drawings with whimsical verbal and musical images of outdoor sports and amusements.

David Bruce offers his thoughts on creating a chamber orchestra arrangement:

Satie's Sports et Divertissements presents itself in such a deliberately humble, almost self-depricating manner that it's easy to overlook the quality of Satie's inventiveness. Indeed, I think I only really appreciated the true depth and subtlety of Satie's art once I began the process or orchestration.

From the instruments available, I tried to pick an orchestral palette which resonated with the subject matter of the individual pieces, (ranging as it does from circus clowns to and octopus in its cave) and in doing felt a sense of polishing up a tiny gem to reveal an extraordinary richness and strangeness. The tiniest of fragments which might whizz past in the piano piece and which might seem unremarkable, suddenly jumped into life... its true significance seeming stronger than ever.

Most notable were a wealth of connections with Satie's Parisian contemporaries, particularly Debussy and Stravinsky... connections which had only been marginally apparent to me in listening to the piano version. What we now think of as a Stravinskian orchestral sound is particularly evident in the pieces that evoke the circus or the comedia del'arte characters - the combination of 'earthy' circus music sounds with the particular kinds of harmony and repetitive patterns Satie uses bring out the Stravinsky connection especially strongly - and makes one reconsider the extent of the influence Satie exerted on the great Russian composer.

More about Erik Satie...

Labels: composerseries, davidbruce, eriksatie, loop