Vivian Fung Wins Juno Award!

Classical Composition of the Year for “Violin Concerto” commissioned, performed, and recorded by Metropolis Ensemble

The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) announced today that Edmonton-born composer Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto is the winner of the 2013 Juno Award for “Classical Composition of the Year.”

The concerto was released on the new studio album Dreamscapes featuring soloist Kristin Lee and “played with precision and heart by the Metropolis Ensemble” (NPR). Dreamscapes is the first release on the Naxos Canadian Classics label. Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto and Piano Concerto were both commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble and recorded at Tanglewood in 2011.

Many thanks are in order for the entire team, board of directors, and most especially Paul and Libby De Rosa for their vision and generosity in supporting the commissioning of the Violin Concerto as well as the recording of this album; Kristin Lee, solo violinist; our engineer/producer Tim Martyn at Phoenix Audio; all the Metropolis Ensemble artists appearing on the album; and Raymond Bisha and the Naxos label.

Metropolis Artists appearing on Dreamscapes:

Lance Suzuki, Flute; James Austin Smith, Oboe; Carlos Cordeiro, Clarinet; Adrian Morejon, Bassoon; Danielle Rose Kuhlmann, Horn; Paul Murphy, Trumpet; Britton Matthews, Percussion; Sean Statser, Percussion; Bridget Kibbey, Harp; Violin: Owen Dalby, Amalia Hall, Sheryl Hwangbo, Emilie-Anne Gendron, Siwoo Kim, Kristin Lee, Sean Lee (Concertmaster), Miho Saegusa, Emily Smith, Elly Suh, Emma Sutton, Tema Watstein; Viola: Dave Auerbach, Phil Kramp, Eric Nowlin; Cello: Na-Young Baek, Ashley Bathgate, Hiro Matsuo; Bass:Rachel Calin

Andrew Cyr, Artistic Director/Conductor

Listen to the album and explore more about Vivian Fung.

Caroline Shaw Wins Pulitzer Prize for Music

[caption id=“attachment_1164” align=“alignright” width=“300”] Caroline Shaw[/caption]

Caroline Shaw, composer and member of the Metropolis community, is the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music recipient for her a cappella composition “Partita for 8 Voices.” She also has the distinction of being the youngest to ever receive the music Pulitzer. Her album, released on New Amsterdam Records in October 2012, features the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and was inspired by “Wall Drawing 305” by the American minimalist artist Sol LeWitt.

The award citation praised “Partita” as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects.” Since the announcement on April 15, Caroline has received high praise from the press, including feature stories in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and NPR interviews.

Caroline gave insight to her writing process: “Partita is a simple piece, born of a love of surface and structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music, and of our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another.” She told NPR, “sometimes it comes from having a sound in your head that you really want to hear, that you’ve never heard before, and struggling to make that sound happen in any way you can.”

Metropolis Ensemble commissioned Caroline in the Music for Voice concert in 2012 and is a 2012-13 participating composer in our Youth Works education program at The Teak Fellowship in New York City.

Congrats to Caroline! Listen to the album now on iTunes.

eMusic: Home Stretch Review

When Timo Andres made his debut full-length recording for Nonesuch in 2009, with the two-piano set Shy and Mighty, most of the talk focused on how it seemed to announce a genuine young composer of interest. Less mentioned was Andres’s own monstrous technique, yet Andres is not so much a great composer with sufficient piano skills as a pure double threat. That’s going to be harder to ignore, starting with Home Stretch: For this follow-up, Andres has taken on Mozart’s “Coronation” piano concerto, along with a few new compositions of his own. Well: Make that one brand-new composition, and two halvsies.

For example, Andres’s “Coronation” is a “co-composition,” which takes the infamously unfinished left-hand piano part of Wolfgang’s and completes it with a 21st-century American, post-minimalist flair. Andres humbly calls his rumbling additions (mostly found in the left-hand part) a “bastardization” of the Mozart style, but more often than not, his crunchy dissonances and harmonic detours bear some relationship to the master’s roadmap. And the performance, undertaken with the Metropolis ensemble, has a flowing, unified feel. It’s the rare “based on” item that feels impishly creative while remaining sufficiently reverent.

The other two “originals” on this program are strong, too. “Home Stretch,” though it shows up on this album as one long track, is a piano concerto in three movements that’s worth its deliberate pacing. And “Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno” works as a counterpart to Andres’s “completed” Mozart concert. Once again, Andres’s touch steers clear of basking in easy familiarity; his final setting of the Eno song “By This River” is recognizable, but hardly derivative.

The only thing working against this album-as-an-album is that it perhaps doesn’t “flow” in an ideal way; you might be better served by taking each of these divergently structured pieces separately, at different sittings. But, as jaded recital audiences in New York have found whenever the pianist stuns both with his own pieces as well as with repertoire as familiar as Schumann and Chopin, it may only be because Andres is an artist with more talents than a single album’s sequencing can contain.

Seth Colter Walls

Full review »

Vivian Fung Nominated for Juno Award

The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) announced this morning that Edmonton-born composer Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto is nominated for the 2013 Juno Award in the category of “Classical Composition of the Year.”

The concerto was released on the new studio album Dreamscapes featuring soloist Kristin Lee and “played with precision and heart by the Metropolis Ensemble” (NPR). The recording is receiving critical acclaim for its “welcome lyricism and grace” (SF Chronicle) and “intimate, often pensive, but frequently playful sound world” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

“Complete shock and elation!” exclaimed Ms. Fung on hearing the news of the Juno nod. “What an honor to be nominated next to such esteemed and admired Canadian composers. However, the award is symbolic for the entire team of people who worked so hard to make this CD happen.”

Kristin Lee echoed this enthusiasm: “I am absolutely thrilled to hear this incredible news! I feel truly honored to have been a part of this experience.”

Dreamscapes is the first release on the brand new Naxos Canadian Classics label that will feature 6-8 composers from across Canada annually. “It is a terrific roster of composers with whom to be nominated,” said Raymond Bisha of Naxos. “Clearly this nomination is the result of everyone’s hard work and inspiration and congratulations all around are deserved.”

All three of the works on the new recording have drawn their inspiration from Ms. Fung’s travels to Bali. Both the Violin Concerto and Piano Concerto were commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble and recorded at Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in 2011.

“I couldn’t be happier — we’ve covering all bases now between the Grammys and Juno Awards!” remarked Andrew Cyr, artistic director and conductor of Metropolis Ensemble. “This is a truly special nomination which honors Vivian’s vision and the internationally recognized award brings to the spotlight the artistry of our players, soloist Kristin Lee, and our engineering team led by Tim Martyn, who all worked so hard to match Vivian’s inspiration. I also wish to thank Paul and Elizabeth De Rosa for providing the critical support to for Metropolis Ensemble to commission and record this work.”

The 2013 Juno Awards will be presented on April 21 on CTV with host Michael Buble. Dreamscapes is now available on iTunes and Amazon. Show your support for Vivian Fung and Metropolis Ensemble’s album and request Violin Concerto to be played on your local radio station today!

Praise for Dreamscapes

“Played with precision and heart by the Metropolis Ensemble” -National Public RadioDreamscapes, the new Naxos album from Metropolis Ensemble featuring the works of Vivian Fung, is receiving high praise in the media. Here is a roundup of the reviews and commentary on the recording. NPR’s Bob McQuiston lauds the new album on the Deceptive Cadence blog:

“The new album Dreamscapes… features works by one of today’s most eclectic composers, Canadian-born Vivian Fung. John Cage fans will love her solo pieces for prepared piano, while traditionalists should find intriguing the concertos for violin and piano… Violinist Kristin Lee’s performance is not only technically brilliant but her sensitive phrasing and pacing endow the music with both an emotional and intellectual appeal… Pianist Conor Hanick’s performance is laudable for its agility… Both soloists receive magnificent support from conductor Andrew Cyr and the Brooklyn-based Metropolis Ensemble, whose members not only turn in virtuosic performances, but follow their extracurricular instructions to the letter. Also, the recording engineers get a big gold star for a spectacular sounding disc.”

Both local classical stations in New York City have included the new album in recent broadcasts. John Schaefer featured the recordings with its “clear inspiration or influence from Indonesian gamelan music” on

WNYC’s New Sounds

.

And Olivia Giovetti introduced the album on

WQXR’s The New Canon

with the following review:

Two concertos dominate Dreamscapes, Vivian Fung’s new album on Naxos’s Canadian Classics series, and both demonstrate Fung’s prepossessing predilection for cross-cultural conversations. Her own Violin Concerto was written with a symbiosis similar to that of Salonen and Josefowicz’s, responding to Fung’s time spent in Bali with violinist Kristin Lee (the violin often resembles the Balinese gamelan). The Metropolis Ensemble, under Andrew Cyr, gave Fung’s Violin Concerto its world premiere last year and returns here for the recording, which also features Fung’s Piano Concerto, “Dreamscapes.” The study of contrasts is apt for an instrument that can juggle two musical lines at once, and here that honor falls to Q2 Music’s own Conor Hanick.“

Joshua Kosman from the

San Francisco Chronicle

hails the album and its "welcome lyricism and grace.”

“The scales and rhythms of Balinese and Javanese gamelan suffuse the three pieces represented here… Yet the further Fung strays from that stylistic foundation, the more fascinating and rewarding her music becomes… The year-old Violin Concerto that leads off the disc boasts a certain winsome charm, especially in the fluid performance of soloist Kristin Lee… the final Piano Concerto, in a powerhouse rendition featuring soloist Conor Hanick. Here at last is music of dramatic urgency and depth, in which Fung draws on ideas from gamelan while also adding plenty of her own original material – clangorous, dissonant harmonies, off-kilter rhythms and a sense of wild unpredictability.”

David Patrick Stearns from the

Philadelphia Inquirer

suggests that with the

Violin Concerto

, "Fung is in her own more intimate, often pensive, but frequently playful sound world, which indeed lives up to the album’s title… At every point in the disc, Fung has a strong sense of thematic control and structural overview that suggests more great things to come.” David Olds from

The Whole Note

praises the release saying “the disc lives up to my expectations.”

“All three of the works presented here are based on gamelan motifs and melodies giving the disc a wonderful continuity… Like a number of composers before her Fung has taken inspiration from her own travels to Indonesia and truly made this music her own.”

Dreamscapes Review: "A Powerhouse Rendition"

Joshua Kosman from the San Francisco Chronicle hails the new Metropolis Ensemble album, Dreamscapes, and its “welcome lyricism and grace.” Here’s an excerpt from his review:

“The year-old Violin Concerto that leads off the disc boasts a certain winsome charm, especially in the fluid performance of soloist Kristin Lee….the final Piano Concerto, in a powerhouse rendition featuring soloist Conor Hanick. Here at last is music of dramatic urgency and depth, in which Fung draws on ideas from gamelan while also adding plenty of her own original material – clangorous, dissonant harmonies, off-kilter rhythms and a sense of wild unpredictability.”

Read the complete review…

Dreamscapes on WNYC and WQXR

Dreamscapes, the new album from Metropolis Ensemble featuring the works of Vivian Fung, is already turning heads and getting airplay ahead of the formal Naxos release on September 25 (and the Metropolis CD launch event on October 1). Both local classical stations in New York City have included the new album in broadcasts this week. John Schaefer featured the recordings with its “clear inspiration or influence from Indonesian gamelan music” on WNYC’s New Sounds. And Olivia Giovetti introduced the album on WQXR’s The New Canon with the following review:

Two concertos dominate Dreamscapes, Vivian Fung’s new album on Naxos’s Canadian Classics series, and both demonstrate Fung’s prepossessing predilection for cross-cultural conversations. Her own Violin Concerto was written with a symbiosis similar to that of Salonen and Josefowicz’s, responding to Fung’s time spent in Bali with violinist Kristin Lee (the violin often resembles the Balinese gamelan). The Metropolis Ensemble, under Andrew Cyr, gave Fung’s Violin Concerto its world premiere last year and returns here for the recording, which also features Fung’s Piano Concerto, “Dreamscapes.” The study of contrasts is apt for an instrument that can juggle two musical lines at once, and here that honor falls to Q2 Music’s own Conor Hanick.

Send a request to your local classical radio station to get

Dreamscapes

played near you!

Celebrating the June Wu Artists Fund

[caption id=“attachment_861” align=“alignright” width=“150” caption=“June Wu, Metropolis board member and patron, at the Glimpses concert with Artistic Director Andrew Cyr.”][/caption] Last year, the June K. M. Wu Artists Fund was established to honor Metropolis Ensemble board member, June Wu, and her vision and passionate dedication to our young performing artists. The Fund helped Metropolis launch a new Resident Artist Series, supported two studio recordings at Tanglewood with NAXOS and Nonesuch Records, and continued our mission to emerge the next generation of outstanding composers and musicians. As Metropolis embarks on several exciting new projects supported by the Wu Artists Fund, including the creation of our own record label, launching new albums and concerts, and expanding the Resident Artist Series, we wanted to reflect on the past year through the eyes of some of the artists who benefited from these generous gifts. [caption id=“attachment_847” align=“alignright” width=“150” caption=“Timothy Andres - pianist and composer”][/caption] Timothy Andres: An Ambitious New Album

My work with Metropolis last year was a continuation of a scheme Andrew Cyr and I had been formulating since 2008. At first, it resulted in the concert Home Stretch in the spring of 2010; now it has evolved into the production of a CD. The album is centered around my piano concerto Home Stretch, bookended by my “re-composition” of Mozart’s Coronation concerto and my Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno, which were both Metropolis commissions. A recording is not just a concrete item to be sold, or a promotional tool, but an artifact of our musical culture at a specific time. These artifacts can be much more powerful than a one-off concert, which by nature has limited reach and duration. A recording is a commitment, a way of saying ‘this is what we feel most strongly about, and we need to share it as widely as possible’. The scope of this recording project is ambitious, especially for a group as young as Metropolis; recording an orchestra is simply a very time-consuming and expensive proposition. Such propositions are dependent on people like June Wu, who understands the importance of such projects, shares our ambitions, and helps both things come to fruition. I will always be grateful to June not just for helping me in my career, which is small in the scheme of things, but for helping my entire field.

[caption id=“attachment_848” align=“alignright” width=“150” caption=“Bridget Kibbey - harpist and composer”]

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Bridget Kibbey: One Woman Tour-de-Force

Over the course of three years, I conceived a project entitled Music Box in which composers - all born abroad and recent immigrants to the United States and mostly living in New York City - wrote solo works for the harp based on folk music from their native country. Metropolis presented the project in January. It was a powerful personal journey, because it allowed me to showcase some of my own arrangements and explore multiple genres of harp-writing in a single evening. What was most helpful was working alongside Metropolis to give this project the “kick-off” the composers deserved. Many in the audience at each sold-out concert had never heard a full solo harp program. It was incredibly satisfying to perform these new fun, eclectic works for such enthusiastic guests. I also walked away from the concerts with high-definition video and fabulous audio to show other interested presenters. I’m happy to say that I will be presenting the project next season in other venues in the United States as a result!

[caption id=“attachment_849” align=“alignright” width=“150” caption=“Kristin Lee - violinist”]

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Kristin Lee: From Bali to the Studio and Beyond

In 2010, I joined composer Vivian Fung on a trip to Bali to understand where her ideas came from in her music. It was remarkable to visit these communities filled with gamelan music and a tangible artistic energy. It gave me an entirely new perspective on living and breathing art every day. Vivian was inspired by our trip and wrote a new Violin Concerto that we premiered at Renderings last fall with Metropolis. From there, we recorded the work at Tanglewood with the extraordinary help of audio engineer Tim Martin and the whole Metropolis gang. Professionally it really means everything to have my first recording on a major label, NAXOS, which wouldn’t be possible without June’s help and the Fund. Premiering a concerto takes money to support the commission, book the beautiful concert space at Angel Orensanz Center, and bring in the audience. As a result, I performed Vivian’s cadenza on WQXR Cafe Concerts and Metropolis received a lot of publicity. It was a huge leap in every way. As a musician, this new work written specifically for me opened new doors for commission projects with other composers and the opportunity to build programs around innovative pieces. I’m looking forward to working with Andrew Cyr and Metropolis to produce new projects for the Resident Artist Series.

[caption id=“attachment_857” align=“alignright” width=“150” caption=“Conor Hanick - pianist”]

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Conor Hanick: Teamwork and Remarkable Opportunity

In the past year, I premiered Ray Lustig’s beautiful vocal work Compose Thyself from Renderings, recorded works by Ryan Francis with the superlative Kristin Lee, and, perhaps most significantly, participated not only in Timothy Andres’ new recording on Nonesuch, but also recorded world premiere recordings of Vivian Fung’s Glimpses for prepared piano and her titanic piano concerto called Dreamscapes, both supported by the Wu Fund. I’m indebted to June for her generous and unparalleled support of Metropolis. These remarkable projects simply wouldn’t happen without her, and it’s hard to adequately thank her for giving us such remarkable opportunities through the Fund. Metropolis Ensemble afforded me some of the most extraordinary and artistically rewarding experiences of my career. It’s touching to be offered opportunities like this and hard to overstate what a privilege its been to be associated with the ensemble. Vivian’s recording is a great example: it’s a professional boon to having a widely-released commercial recording of such high quality. I am humbled to be listed alongside Andrew, Vivian, Kristin, and others. These were experiences that for me will continue to inform my musical activities and serve as benchmarks for artistic quality.