Metropolis Ensemble is pleased to offer a free download of Sports et Divertissements, recorded live at The Times Center in New York City on April 10, 2008. Erik Satie's twenty-one brilliant thumbnail sketches are presented in a delightful arrangement for chamber orchestra by David Bruce, and featuring our resident funny-man Mike Daisey.

Download Sports et Divertissements
(right-click to download the mp3, ctrl-click on a mac)

David and Mike had the opportunity to sit down and discuss Satie's work ahead of last month's concert. The conversation – ranging from challenges of composing and updating this work, to the serious (and not so serious) business of comedy – is available in the video archive. Be sure to also watch the Tennis excerpt and see conductor Andrew Cyr serve up a surprise finale.

And because there should never be lack of razor-sharp wit, Mike Daisey invites you to his latest performance: How Theater Failed America, running through June 22 at the Barrow Street Theatre. Dark, honest and hilarious, Daisey seeks answers to essential and dangerous questions about the art we're making, the legacy we leave to the future, and who it is we believe we're speaking to. An exclusive discount is available for Metropolis Ensemble members and fans!

Sports et Divertissements is commissioned for chamber orchestra by Metropolis Ensemble. Special thanks to audio engineer Ryan Streber, videographer Tim Bakland, and video editor Dan Hayek.

Labels: davidbruce, ensemblenews, eriksatie, loop, mikedaisey

Metropolis Ensemble and composer Ryan Francis are delighted to offer the complete live recording of Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra during its world premiere performance at The Times Center in New York City on April 10, 2008. You can download it here, absolutely free.

Ryan Francis: Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra:

• Movement 1
• Movement 2
• Movement 3
• Movement 4

(right-click to download the mp3s, ctrl-click on a mac)

You can also watch the entire Concerto, featuring pianist Anna Polonsky and the Metropolis Ensemble led by Artistic Director/Conductor Andrew Cyr on the Media Page, along with an extensive archive of performances and behind-the-scenes footage. Watch now...

Looking for more of Ryan Francis? Check out his MySpace, and get ready for this summer's world premiere of The Rite: Remixed. Ricardo Romaneiro joins forces with Ryan Francis and Leo Leite to re-conceptualize the most revolutionary work of the 20th Century, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, through the lens of the latest sounds and technology from electronica! Three opportunities to experience the revolution (July 16-18)! Complete details...

Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra is co-commission from the Metropolis Ensemble and the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation. Metropolis Ensemble's Wet Ink and Youth Works programs are generously funded by the van Otterloo Foundation. Special thanks to audio engineer Ryan Streber, videographer Tim Bakland, and photographer Vern Kousky.

Labels: education, ensemblenews, loop, ryanfrancis, therite

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan talks about his new piano concerto, the featured work in Metropolis Ensemble's upcoming concert Loop.

Composed concurrently to his Piano Etudes, Ryan Francis's Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra brings together two creative directions that he has been pursuing in his music. One is a post-minimalistic style driven by rhythmic relationships within a simple, diatonic harmonic scheme, exemplified by Remix for violin and piano. Straights of Anian represents the other, post-spectralist style, evoked through coloristic texture and less concerned with metric rhythm. In the Concerto, the solo piano and chamber ensemble engage in an intimate and dynamic dialogue, as in Luciano Berio's Points on the Curve to Find.



Music credits: Luciano Berio, Concerto II (Echoing Curves), Andre Lucchesini piano, Luciano Berio, London Symphony Orchestra; Red Seal; B000003GAZ. Ryan Francis, Remix, Wayne Lee violin, Daniel Spiegel piano. Ryan Francis, Straights of Anian, Pacific Orchestra. Ryan Francis, Digital Sustain for Piano, (MIDI rendering). Special thanks to Ania Dabrowski.

Labels: composerseries, loop, ryanfrancis

Metropolis Ensemble and Artistic Director/Conductor Andrew Cyr are delighted to announce two new concerts for 2008:

LOOP
Thursday, April 10, 2008 (8pm)
The Times Center (620 8th Avenue at 41st Street)
Tickets: $20 online / $25 at the door
Buy tickets now...

The World Premiere performance of Piano Concerto by Wet Ink Composer Resident Ryan Francis featuring pianist Anna Polonsky. Also on the program, three 20th Century masterpieces: Ravel's Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Salonen's Five Images from Sappho with soprano Kiera Duffy, and Satie's Sports et Divertissements, arranged by David Bruce. Wine reception during intermission.

Digital Sustain: Six Etudes for Piano by Ryan Francis
Saturday, March 8, 2008 (2pm)
Chelsea Art Museum (556 W 22nd Street)
Tickets: $20 online / at the door
Buy tickets now...

The World Premiere performance of ETUDES for Piano by Ryan Francis featuring pianists Vicky Chow, Michael Shinn, and Daniel Spiegel. Presented in tandem with etudes from Ligeti, Bolcom, Chopin, and Liszt. This special concert is a preview of Ryan Francis' spring concert premiere, Piano Concerto.

Labels: andrewcyr, digitalsustain, ensemblenews, loop, ryanfrancis

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan offers his thoughts on his new Piano Concerto, the featured work in Metropolis Ensemble's spring concert, Loop.

This concerto feels like an arrival point for me artistically that has been in the works for the past four years. I've been exploring a lot of seemingly (to me, at least) disparate musical concepts, but this concerto is the crucible in which I'm forging them all together. On the one hand, I've written a good deal of music that deals more with textural as opposed to 'metric' rhythms, and I also have a parallel string of pieces that are concerned with electronic influence on acoustic music, which are much more metrically complex, while retaining more harmonic clarity.

My interest in electronics has influenced the concerto on both an aural level and a process level. While the concerto's orchestration is often designed to create 'electronic' tambors, I also decided to forego my traditional paper-and-pencil-exclusively method of composing, in favor of working with MIDI maps.

This new method of working allowed me to explore and develop textures that I probably would have never discovered were I simply working with my hands on a keyboard, and this influenced the soloist's part in particular. I would write with grids, unconcerned with playability, and would then transcribe them into mensural notation and revise and revise until they were completely idiomatic. The result has been that the piano writing is often utterly different than my previous work, which was my goal.

Each of the movements were developed out of piano etudes that I have been writing for the past year, and the form of each movement reflects the same sort of obsessive quality of an etude, although I allowed myself to be a little more expansive as well; this is a concerto, after all!

• The first movement could almost be a chorale, were it not for the sharp syncopated disjunctive melodic contours that cut through the texture.


• The second movement is a sort of musical jacob's ladder; constantly rising musical gestures that are also continuously falling.


• The third movement is more about color than the others, and less rhythmically driving as well, although there is a gentle repeated note pulse that runs through much of the movement.


• The final movement is comprised of two basic layers: a light, distant textural one, and a foreground built on constantly evolving loops of material.

Labels: composerseries, loop, ryanfrancis

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

Metropolis Ensemble's Wet Ink Composer Resident, Ryan Francis, won a competitive commission from the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation for his Piano Concerto. The world premiere will be presented by the Metropolis Ensemble's spring concert, Loop, on April 10, 2008 with pianist Anna Polonsky and conductor Andrew Cyr. Here's the official announcement:

The American Composers Forum announces the results of the 2007 Jerome Composers Commissioning Program (JCCP). JCCP, now in its 28th year and one of only a few national commissioning programs, supports the production of new musical works by emerging composers. It seeks to boost a composer's career by offering composers an early commission and more experienced composers a chance to stretch their current boundaries. Composers apply with an ensemble or presenter and request support to underwrite the commissioning fee. Awards this year ranged from $3,000-8,000. A total of 17 projects were funded from a pool of $90,000.

Jerome Foundation was created by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill in 1964, and makes grants to support emerging artists across the performing and visual arts, particularly those based in Minnesota and New York.

American Composers Forum is an organization committed to supporting composers and developing new markets for their music. Through grants, commissions, and performance programs, the Forum provides resources for over 1,700 composers around the world.

Congratulations to Ryan for this exciting achievement!

Labels: ensemblenews, loop, ryanfrancis