Jeremy Jordan
A member of the Young Steinway Artists roster and critically acclaimed, “a clear technical virtuoso”, “a rare talent”; “a true Wunderkind”, pianist and native Chicagoan Jeremy Jordan burst on the music scene.
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Taka Kigawa
Critically acclaimed pianist Taka Kigawa has earned outstanding international recognition as a recitalist, soloist, and chamber music artist since winning First Prize in the prestigious 1990 Japan Music Foundation Piano Competition.
Andrew Hsu
Andrew Hsu is a critically acclaimed pianist and award-winning composer. Writing music characterized as “an amorphous cloud of dissonance, slow and vibrating” (New York Times) and “deliciously atmospheric, pulseless.”
Mika Sasaki
Pianist Mika Sasaki is a sought-after soloist, chamber musician, and educator based in New York City. Since her concerto debut with the Sinfonia of Cambridge (U.K.) at age seven, she appeared twice with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.
The music of saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins is filled with empathy and conviction, bonding arcs of melody and lamentation to pluming gestures of space and breath. Listeners were introduced to this riveting sound with his acclaimed debut album Omega, which was named the #1 Jazz Album of 2020 by The New York Times. The album also introduced his remarkable quartet with Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums, a tight-knit unit that Wilkins features once again on his stunning sophomore album The 7th Hand.
Ruckus is a shapeshifting, collaborative baroque band with a visceral and playful approach to early music. The ensemble debuted in Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo in a production directed by Christopher Alden featuring Anthony Roth Costanzo, Ambur Braid and Davóne Tines at National Sawdust. The band’s playing earned widespread critical acclaim: “achingly delicate one moment, incisive and punchy the next” (New York Times); “superb” (Opera News).
Ruckus’s core is a continuo group, the baroque equivalent of a jazz rhythm section: guitars, keyboards, cello, bassoon and bass. Other members include soloists of the violin, flute and oboe. The ensemble aims to fuse the early-music movement’s questing, creative spirit with the grit, groove and jangle of American roots music, creating a unique sound of “rough-edged intensity” (New Yorker). Its members are assembled from among the most creative and virtuosic performers in North American early music, and is based in New York City.
2022 found Ruckus making many auspicious debuts, including as baroque band in residence at The Ojai Festival - their many performances garnered wide-spread acclaim: "the world’s only period-instrument rock band" (San Francisco Classical Voice)
Ruckus’ debut album, Fly the Coop, a collaboration with flutist Emi Ferguson, was Billboard’s #2 Classical album upon its release. Live performances of Fly the Coop in Cambridge, MA was described as “a fizzing, daring display of personality and imagination” (New York Times).
With Holy Manna, a program including arrangements of early American hymns from the shape-note tradition, Ruckus has begun a multi-project exploration of histories of American music. Other upcoming projects include a co-commission of a large-scale work by pioneering artist and NEA Jazz Master Roscoe Mitchell as part of a Bach / Bird Festival (with The Metropolis Ensemble and the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet), and a recital featuring Rachell Ellen Wong and Emi Ferguson.
Master saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell (born in Chicago in 1940) is one of the great innovators in creative music of the post-Coltrane, post-Ayler era. He has for over 40 years been a restless explorer of new forms, ideas and concepts. In 1967 he founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago (originally the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble). Its motto – “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future” – is vividly demonstrated on their ECM legacy, including the widely praised albums Nice Guys, Full Force, Urban Bushmen and Tribute To Lester. More recently Mitchell co-led the Transatlantic Art Ensemble with fellow saxophonist Evan Parker, which can be heard on Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3, and collaborated with Jack DeJohnette on Made In Chicago, celebrating the early days and continued relevance of the AACM.
Mitchell’s instrumental expertise extends through the full range of the saxophone and recorder families, as well as the flute, piccolo and clarinet. He has also been an innovator in percussion instrument design.
In 1997, fifteen years after the Art Ensemble of Chicago's The Third Decade, Mitchell returned to ECM with his Note Factory group, an ensemble brimming over with improvising soloists of the highest calibre. Mitchell described their first ECM outing, Nine To Get Ready, as “the coming together of a dream I had many years ago of putting together an ensemble of improvising musicians with an orchestral range".
The Note Factory dream continued with Far Side, as Mitchell continued to blur the demarcation between composition and improvisation.
In autumn 2015 ECM recorded Roscoe Mitchell’s concerts at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. An album is in preparation.
Adam Cuthbert
Adam Cuthbert (b. 1988) is a Detroit-based composer, mix engineer, and sound designer whose sometimes spare, sometimes brutal music has been described as an “eerie dreamscape” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) and “the lead-footed revving of double decker buses” (Acid Ted).
Their work fuses acoustic instruments with control voltage to create immersive sonic environments, drawing inspiration from the infinite palette of synthesized electronic sound, and the flow-state experience of open-world video games, garnering notice from The New York Times, NPR, Backstage Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle, which finds it “hard to resist the vigor and inventiveness of his writing.”
Nnux
Nnux is the solo project of Mexican composer, producer and keyboard player Ana López-Reyes, who is based in Mexico City. Her music is based on the digital processing of samples from voices, acoustic instruments, everyday sounds, electronic beats and synthesizers. Influenced by experimental music, electronic music and pop, Nnux creates music that aims to be emotional and vulnerable while still being experimental and imaginative.
Impromptuo
Combining training in European classical music with influences from free jazz and electroacoustic music, Impromptuo is an improvisation-focused duo of violinist Katherine Kyu Hyeon Lim and pianist Joey Chang. They are recipients of Chamber Music America’s Ensemble Forward Grant and currently are mentored by Tyshawn Sorey.
Alessandro Apolloni
Alessandro is an Italian composer based in London, working in Film, TV and Advertising.
In the last few years he has worked on a number of projects ranging from Features Films to TV series,
short films, advertisements, animations and documentaries that have been broadcast by the BBC,
on Netflix, on the Italian national television, and shown in countless festivals around the world. He also writes
library tracks for EMI Production Music.
He graduated from the Royal College of Music in 2015 with a master’s degree in Composition for Screen.
In his final year at the RCM he won the Film Orchestra composition contest.
Olivia Valentine
Paula Matthusen (live-electronics) & Olivia Valentine (live-textiles) have collaborated for the past five years under the project between systems and grounds. The project exists through shared space and time, in which sound and textile are woven together simultaneously. The materials presented here are short loops from excerpts of durational events, traversing field recording, multiple layers of feedback, idiosyncratic synths, and, of course, weaving.
Omri Cohen
Based in Germany, Omri Cohen fell in love with the modular environment and modular synthesis through his work with VCV Rack, a free and open-source virtual modular synthesizer. Combining virtual and hardware, Omri adds also acoustic instruments into the mix like a flute, kalimba, piano, field recordings, and more.
Mike Ladouceur
American composer Mike Ladouceur is among the most exciting and significant talents emerging today‚ with many high-profile film and TV projects to his name. Renowned on both sides of the Atlantic, his musical style blends orchestral and ambient electronic textures, and has been described by distinguished conductor and orchestrator Jeff Atmajian as “like listening to a beautiful impressionist painting”. Mike’s distinctive sound is constructed from many intricate lines and textures that combine to create a rapturous force. He employs a diverse sonic palette which allows the listener to become entranced in a meditative state, often triggering deeply emotional responses.
Elizabeth A. Baker
The Honourable Elizabeth A. Baker is a new renaissance artist whose work is best expressed as a constantly evolving practice that doesn’t fit neatly into definition or expectation boxes. It is an artistic body of work vast in scope and scale outside of the confines of a simple elevator pitch, unrestrained and unencapsulated. Elizabeth has received international recognition from press, scholars, and the public for her conceptual compositions and commitment to inclusive programming. Fanfare Magazine proclaimed in Fall 2019 “Perhaps Baker will be the Pauline Oliveros of her generation, and perhaps she will be more than that.” Elizabeth is the 2021-2022 Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music at Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Clara Kim
Adventure and collaboration are at the heart of NYC-based violinist Clara Kim’s multi-faceted career as new music performer, chamber music artist, and educator. By commissioning, premiering, and championing the works of living composers, Clara has quickly established herself at the forefront of her generation in the interpretation of contemporary music.
Olivia De Prato
Internationally recognized as a soloist as well as a chamber musician, Austro-Italian violinist Olivia De Prato has been described as “flamboyant ... convincing” (The New York Times) and an “enchanting violinist” (Messaggero Veneto, Italy). After moving to New York City she has quickly established herself as a passionate performer of contemporary and improvised music, breaking boundaries of the traditional violin repertoire and regularly performs in Europe, South America, China and the United States.
Dana Kelley
Violist Dana Kelley, praised for her rich and beautiful tone, has been a top prizewinner in the Sphinx Music Competition and the Irving M. Klein International String Competition. She is a member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and a former member the Argus Quartet. Dana received an Artist Diploma in String Quartet Studies with Argus as the 2017-2019 Graduate Quartet in Residence at The Juilliard School. The Argus Quartet was named the First Prize Winners of both of the 2017 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition and the 2017 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, and were recipients of the 2018 Classical Recording Foundation Award and the 2018 Salon de Virtuosi Award.
Ramón Carrera-Martínez
Sarah Rommel
Cellist Sarah Rommel is a top prizewinner of the 2014 George Enescu International Cello Competition. She has been the recipient of several awards and grants including a Frank Huntington Beebe Fund Grant and Jack Kent Cooke Young Artists Award.
Sarah has given recitals at Caramoor’s Evnin Rising Stars Showcase and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in addition to solo performances in Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, France, Italy, England, and Romania. She has actively participated in classes at the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, Academie Musicale de Villecroze, and IMS Prussia Cove where she has worked closely with distinguished professors such as David Geringas, Gary Hoffman, Frans Helmerson, and Paul Katz.