The New Yorker: Goings On

Oussama Zahr from The New Yorker recommends Infinite Staircase in their weekly guide to what to watch, listen, and do. More info »

When composers have milestone anniversaries, a company might trot out the influential pieces that made them memorable in the first place, but the Brooklyn-based new-music incubator National Sawdust honors the restless spirits of the boundary-breakers John Zorn and György Ligeti with fresh material. Two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Zorn unveils “Love Songs,” the third in a set of chameleonic, genre-spanning projects with the lyricist Jesse Harris (Sept. 16-17). For Ligeti’s centennial, the pianist Han Chen has commissioned a companion piece for each of the composer’s eighteen études, eruptive works thinly disguised as keyboard exercises. Here, Chen plays the new pieces, paired with the originals, for the first time (Sept. 24).