A native of Austin, Texas, cellist Laura Andrade is a prizewinner of the 2019 Sphinx Competition and has appeared as a soloist with the San Antonio Symphony and the Austin Civic Orchestra. Festival appearances include IMS Prussia Cove, Verbier Festival Orchestra, Taos School of Music, Sarasota Music Festival, Music Academy of the West and Moritzburg Festival in Germany. Laura holds a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School with Natasha Brofsky. She also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music, where she was awarded a Performer’s Certificate studying with Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott.
Passionate young violinist Jennifer Liu has performed extensively throughout the United States as a soloist and chamber musician, including at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in Los Angeles, California, Jennifer moved to New York at age 15 to study with Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho at the Juilliard School. Currently, Ms. Liu is a proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship at the Juilliard School under the tutelage of Sylvia Rosenberg and Donald Weilerstein.
Hailed by the New York Times as “ravishing and engulfing,” Gity Razaz’s music ranges from concert solo pieces to large symphonic works. With intense melodies and inventive harmonic languages, Gity’s compositions are often dramatically charged. As described by John Corigliano: “…her Middle Eastern roots have merged with her Western sensibilities to produce music that is both original and startling. She is on her way to becoming a major force in contemporary music.” Gity is an active collaborator involved in projects across disciplines from opera and modern ballet to electro-acoustic sonic landscapes.
Hailed by The New York Times for her "inexhaustible virtuosity", clarinetist Yoonah Kim is rapidly earning recognition as a young artist of uncommon musical depth and versatility. Yoonah is a winner of the 2016 Concert Artists Guild International Competition. The first solo clarinetist to win CAG in nearly 30 years, this Korean-Canadian artist joins the ranks of prominent solo clarinetists discovered by CAG, including David Shifrin, Michael Collins, and David Krakauer.
Harpist-composer Hannah Lash enjoys a varied and active career as a soloist. She has been presented and featured by such venues and organizations as Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, Jordan Hall, NYPhilharmonic Biennial, Chamber Music Northwest, and the Morton Arboretum in Chicago. She has been a concerto soloist with the American Composers Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Colorado Music Festival, and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. She frequently appears with the JACK Quartet and Loadbang, and collaborates with such artists as Jeremy Denk, Samuel Suggs, and David Shifrin. She is a tireless proponent of new music, old music, and everything in between. She also enjoys crossing genres as a performer and improviser.
Called “a powerful success,” “arresting,” and “amazingly lush,” (the Boston Musical Intelligencer), “an attractive mix of the familiar and exotic” (Boston Classical Review), and “invigorating” with a “persistent melodic urge” (American Academy of Arts and Letters), composer Adam Roberts’ music has been performed internationally by the JACK and Arditti Quartets, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, New York New Music Ensemble, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, andPlay, and at festivals such as Wien Modern (Vienna), Tanglewood, the Biennale Musique en Scene (Lyons), and the 2009 ISCM World Music Days (Göteborg). Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fromm Commission, the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center. A dedicated educator, Roberts has taught at Harvard University, Northeastern University, Istanbul Technical University, the University of Georgia, and is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at Kent State University. In addition to this album, other music by Roberts can be heard on Tzadik, New Focus Recordings, and Lila Müzik.
Described by I Care If You Listen as “enthusiastic champions for new music and collaboration” and performing “with a welcoming and dynamic spirit,” andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire by commissioning new works and actively collaborating with living artists. The “genre-busting” (Midwest Records) New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, first played to an eager crowd on Fire Island in the summer of 2012 and has since commissioned over forty works. andPlay’s performances have been described as “sheer virtuosity” (Cinemusical), “otherworldly” (New York Music Daily) and “an awful lot of fun for people who gravitate towards stark, edgy harmonies and textures” (Lucid Culture).
Anastasia Shmytova is a musicologist, singer, and pianist from Saint Petersburg, Russia. A recipient of the Arthur Mendel University Fellowship in Music, Anastasia is currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology at Princeton University, with a focus on medieval and early modern Slavic and Byzantine chant. As a singer and pianist, Ms. Shmytova has performed with groups including the Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Bach Choir, the Byrd International Singers, the Princeton Glee Club, Early Music Princeton, and the international award-winning chamber choir Art Sonus.
Calvin Hitchcock is a composer, performer, and music director based in Jersey City, NJ. Described as “impressive,” and having “a fine ear for sonority” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), his work explores themes of control and resistance, religious subversion through song, and experiments with narrative form and interdisciplinary integration. He holds a BM in Composition from Cedarville University, a Southern Baptist university in southwest Ohio, and is currently pursuing an MM at Mannes School of Music, studying with David T. Little.
PROMPTUS is a transdisciplinary collective of performers and performance-makers committed to curating community-focused happenings. Founded by Robert Fleitz and Tyler Cunningham in 2018, each event poses an instigating question which is interpreted by a curator through performance, pedagogy, composition, or a combination of all three. By asking artists to work in modalities other than their own rigorously trained discipline, a space of vulnerability is created that allows for an audience to engage with complex forms in new and equitable ways.
Ben Murphy is a composer, arranger, engraver, bassist, electronic musician, just-intonation person, sometimes recording and mixing engineer, and even less times other-instrumentalist. These days, he’s been spending most of his time programming just-intonation music in Pure Data (a fantastic open-source visual coding language that he highly recommends), practicing the Shakuhachi (new hobby) and the Bass every day, and staying at home not getting sick.
Cleek Schrey is fiddler, improviser, and composer from Virginia, now based in NYC. Frequent collaborators include David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and the avant-pop collective Exo-Tech. He is currently a Sound Artist-in-Residence on Governor’s Island and pursuing doctoral studies in Music Composition at Princeton University.
Erica Dicker is a New York-based violinist and improvisor making music reflecting her interest in experiencing eidetic memories as aural phenomena, a sensibility she brings to the Brandon Seabrook Trio, Carl Testa’s SWAY, Anna Webber’s Idiom, her electro-acoustic trio Vaster than Empires and Blood Luxury with Dennis Sullivan.
Sergio Tabanico is a tenor saxophonist based in New York City. Originally from Tucson, Arizona, he made way to New York in 2015 to study at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Discovering his passion for saxophone at the age of 10, Sergio’s playing style has been deeply rooted in traditional jazz music and modern era jazz.
Born in Atlanta, Kevin Oliver, Jr, is just a kid with a horn and something to say. He is a saxophonist and stand-up comedian currently pursuing an undergraduate degree at The Juilliard School. Kevin started performing at the age of 11. He started off busking in downtown Atlanta at sporting events, parks and street corners eager to share his gift with the world. He was inspired to keep playing by the happiness that he saw on the faces of people who stopped to listen and meet him.
Immanuel Wilkins is a saxophonist, composer, educator, and bandleader from the greater Philadelphia area. While growing up, Wilkins honed his skills in the church and studied in programs dedicated to teaching jazz music like the Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts…
Aaron Wolff is a New York City-based cellist and performer active in solo, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary capacities. Recent performances include a solo program of music by Philip Glass and Arthur Russell at the New York City Reliquary, Debussy’s Cello Sonata on CNN’s Quest Means Business, collaboration with the Argus Quartet and American Modern Opera Company, and a fourth summer at Yellow Barn music festival in Putney, Vermont.
Lauren Siess is an NYC-based composer, violist, and improviser. Mass, chaos, and irrationality are integral to her work. By combining and manipulating found objects, she enjoys discovering the nuance and life inside of physical materials. 2021 projects included works for National Sawdust Ensemble, SICPP Festival, and and Line Upon Line Percussion…
Praised by the New York Times for her “sweet-toned playing,” violinist Alice Ivy-Pemberton studied with Nurit Pacht at the Kaufman Music Center in New York for ten years before continuing her studies at The Juilliard School under the tutelage of Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho. Alice received her Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School in May of 2019 as a recipient of both a Kovner Fellowship and a Benzaquen Career Advancement Grant, in recognition of “tremendous talent, promise, creativity, and potential to make a significant impact in the performing arts."
Lucie Vítková is a composer, improviser and performer (accordion, hichiriki, synthesizer, harmonica, voice and tap dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York. Their compositions focus on sonification (compositions based on abstract models derived from physical objects) while in their improvisation practice Lucie works with characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In Lucie’s recent work, they are interested in the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life and in reusing trash to build sonic costumes.
