What if music could be composed and performed simultaneously? Jakub Ciupiński and Cristina Spinei introduce their new project.
Pianist Timothy Andres rehearses Brahms’ “Op. 25” on a Steinway baby grand in the stunning Salon Simón Bolivar at Americas Society, as he prepares for that evening’s Metropolis concert “I found it by the sea” on April 5, 2010. Photo by Sabrina Asch.
Audience members get a front-row seat to performances by Metropolis artists at Brownstone in Clinton Hill.
At moments like this, new music sheds its academic strictures and finds its way back to the era of dinnertime entertainments.
Music may feed the soul, but it still goes best with a drink.
People who came out to the Metropolis Brownstone event last Thursday crossed over the threshold of a beautiful three-story Brooklyn apartment into a different sonic universe.
Everyone seemed to congregate in the kitchen, which is where everyone always wants to hang out during house parties.
Ilona Oltuski of Sequenza 21 interviewed Metropolis composer Avner Dorman ahead of the Israeli Philharmonic’s premiere of his new work.
“On an unusually warm day in September, I am sitting down with Israel-born composer, Avner Dorman, at New York’s Bryant Park Pain Quotidien café. Before long, I am privy to a sneak preview of his freshly finished score for his latest composition, Azerbaijani Dance. Based on a piano piece of the same name, Dorman’s latest composition will have its world premiere this October, with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta in Tel Aviv. This event will also ignite a season celebrating the legendary Maestro’s upcoming 50th Anniversary of his conducting debut.”
I’m not really sure if “concert” is the right word at all. Installation? Event? Happening? Experience?
We hope you will join us to experience the BBC Nature Sound Effects Library in this site-specific composition.
Composer Jakub Ciupinski performs a live set of minimal house loops and electronica beats at le Poisson Rouge on September 16, 2009. Jakub is using a gesture-controlled system of his design that involves two theremins and a laptop. Photo by Sabrina Asch.
“Pro Sound Effects is participating in a unique, location-specific music concert called Brownstone, conceived by the New York City-based chamber orchestra Metropolis Ensemble.”
Metropolis Ensemble is pleased to announce its upcoming 2010-11 season, featuring 12 world premieres and collaborations with (Le) Poisson Rouge, Meet the Composer, MATA Festival, and a new education initiative at The Teak Fellowship. Here is a preview of the upcoming projects:
Brownstone
October 28, 2010 at 224 Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, NY.
An electo-acoustic installation created and composed by Jakub Ciupinski, placing musicians throughout three floors of an historic Brooklyn brownstone. Co-produced by
and
.
It takes a long time to become a good composer
December 9-10, 2010 at 111 West 67th Street, 34D in New York, NY
An intimate solo piano recital featuring composer/pianist Timothy Andres performing the world premiere of his own new suite paired with Schumann’s youthful masterpiece,
Kreisleriana
. A collaboration with
.
Hallucinations
January 27-28, 2011 at (le) Poisson Rouge in New York, NY
A mind-bending concert featuring a world-premiere electro-acoustic
remix
by Ricardo Romaneiro of John Corigliano’s
Three Hallucinations
, from his stunning film score of
Altered States
, paired with new works by Du Yun, Gity Razaz, and Ricardo Romaneiro.
Meet the Composer Festival
April 7, 2011 at Symphony Space in New York, NY
Metropolis Ensemble and
collaborate to present new music by rising star composer Kati Agocs.
MATA Festival
May 12, 2011 at (le) Poisson Rouge in New York, NY
Metropolis Ensemble and
, the new music festival founded by Philip Glass, collaborate to present new works by Ryan Carter (MATA commission) and the world premiere of
The Oracle Hysterical
, a hip-hopera retelling of The Rake’s Progress by Brad Balliett and Elliot Cole (Metropolis commission).
Renderings
May 18, 2011 at Angel Orensanz Center in New York, NY
Metropolis Ensemble presents three world premieres inspired by the music of J.S. Bach:
Violin Concerto
by Vivian Fung (Kristin Lee, solo violin),
Cantata
by Ray Lustig, based on fragments of a lost Bach cantata, an electro-acoustic arrangement by Jakub Ciupinski of Bach’s
The Musical Offering
, and a performance by
, one of New York’s preeminent vocal ensembles.
New Education Initiatives and Partnerships
Metropolis Ensemble is thrilled to collaborate with
, in a newly created partnership with our innovative education program, Youth Works. The Teak Fellowship helps talented New York City students from low-income families gain admission to and succeed at top high schools and colleges.
for Brownstone. Additional details about the upcoming projects will be released over the coming months. We look forward to sharing the full concert experience with you!
The Loop is the official blog of Metropolis Ensemble, a new destination for ensemble updates, exclusive interviews, and music discussion.
Metropolis Ensemble is a nonprofit professional chamber orchestra in New York City dedicated to emerging the next generation of performers and composers. Part of our mission is to provide our community of arts enthusiasts access to leading composers and musicians, helping to break down the barriers between artists and audiences, and inspiring a new generation of music lovers. That’s where
The Loop
comes in. [caption id=“attachment_276” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Concert rehearsal at The Times Center in April 2008 for "LOOP” by composer Ryan Francis.“]
[/caption] The blog gets its name from our April 2008 concert
, that featured the works of Ryan Francis, Maurice Ravel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Erik Satie (arranged by David Bruce). Ryan’s world premiere
explored repeating electronic patterns that at once were metrically complex and harmonically lucid. He was inspired by early 20th century works of Ravel and Satie, while looking to evolve his own
and reshape the listener’s expectations. In many ways, the LOOP concert and Ryan’s premiere in 2008 was an important step forward for Metropolis Ensemble. We started to recognize that our concerts could present works from diverse musical spheres and offer a kaleidoscopic sense of intertwined musical dialogue between artists and genre and between the present and past. And we opened up the lines of communication and artistic discussion between composer, musician, and arts enthusiast, largely through the medium of our website and social media sites. This, in our humble opinion, is a complete re-imagining of the entire concert experience. A concert doesn’t simply take place in one night, but begins with behind-the-scenes access to the artistic and production process, and reverberates in the world of contemporary classical music, long after the musicians have left the stage. A concert never truly ends when it can continue to be relived, reinterpreted, and rediscovered online. Thus our web environment continues to adapt and respond to this changing landscape, so we can best accommodate these ideals and give the audience a broad, detailed, honest, and uplifting perspective into music.
We are striving to take you further up and further into the lives of the outstanding composers and musicians we have the privilege to collaborate with in each concert.
We are fostering the commission and creation of outstanding new music by publishing online media and providing digital downloads.
We are reaching into the community to serve schools with arts education opportunities.
And perhaps most importantly, we are inviting you to be a vital, relevant, and enthusiastic voice in the Metropolis family.
,
,
, and
. We can’t wait to get to know you! Thanks for reading! Armistead Booker Editor of
The Loop
reminds me that the Metropolis Ensemble has uploaded audio of its
at the Angel Orensanz Center, on the Lower East Side. Of particular interest is
’s startling performance / recomposition of Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto. The score is missing most of the left-hand piano part (you can follow along in the
, with the solo beginning on p. 9); Andres, in a fine display of creative bravado, decided to fill in the gaps in his own early twentieth-first-century style. I attended the concert, and, to be honest, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing at first. All manner of odd things have been done in the cadenzas of classical concertos over the years — Schnittke’s
, Gilles Apap’s
Gyspy-bluegrass improvisations
— but it is much rarer to hear a performer tampering with the main body of a score. A lot of people will cry sacrilege when they hear this. After recovering from the initial shock, I found Andres’s approach mesmerizing, if not always entirely convincing. And it’s a relief to witness a serious young artist treating a canonical masterpiece with something other than passive reverence. On a deeper level, it’s Mozartian in spirit. I also strongly recommend giving a close listen to Anna Clyne’s
.
Soprano Kiera Duffy and Metropolis musicians performs “Five Images from Sappho” by composer Esa-Pekka Salonen on April 10, 2008 at The Times Center in New York City. This performance was part of the Metropolis concert “LOOP.” Photo by Vern Kousky.
Eleven-year-old Zachary Detrick might barely stand as tall as a cello, but his imagination soars as high as a New York City skyscraper.
For all their eclecticism, these pieces reveal a strong common profile—with tragic ferocity lurking under the sparkling surfaces.
Artistic Director and Conductor Andrew Cyr explains the new left-handed part for Mozart’s Coronation Concerto at Angel Orensanz Center in New York City on May 20, 2010. Composer and solo pianist Timo Andres was commissioned by Metropolis to reimagine the work, as well as an entirely new solo cadenza. Photo by Adi Shniderman.
The music of Israeli composer Avner Dorman is so vivacious and so technically proficient that it’s hard to resist… most rewarding is the Mandolin Concerto, which fuses Baroque and Middle Eastern gestures in unusual ways, and which ends with a surprising flourish.