Composer Tan Dun led Metropolis artists in an audacious multimedia mesh of Eastern and Western sounds at Lincoln Center with The Martial Arts Trilogy.
“My goal as a performer is to bring across the exact replica of the composer’s vision… in full understanding of the music.”
“I have a tendency to quote some of my most beloved music when the spirit comes over me… it’s a compulsion, really.”
Metropolis Ensemble, a talented freelance orchestra, responded with skill and exuberance to Mr. Tan’s thrusting arms and clutching fingers.
Oracle Hysterical members Elliot Cole, Brad Balliett, and Doug Balliett brought us probably the most twisted hip-hop throw down you’ve ever seen.
Metropolis Ensemble transformed the house into a concert hall. A string quartet and a harpist were stationed in the parlor, percussion and vibraphone could be heard on the second floor, and a violin and a woodwind trio occupied the third floor.
Metropolis composer and pianist Timothy Andres plays a live set for Hammered! on WQXR’s online station, Q2, hosted by Metropolis artist Conor Hanick.
“There’s something irresistibly raw and unpredictable about live performance, and when they’re of the caliber we’ll hear this week, few musical experiences can compare. Kicking off the week is a collection of pieces taken from three concerts. Pianist / composer Timothy Andres pairs one of his own works, Everything Is An Onion, with a movement from Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata in a live performance taken from the Ecstatic Music Festival Marathon.”
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WQXR host Nadia Sirota previews an upcoming Q2 Live Concert at the 2011 MATA Festival.
“The 2011 MATA Festival residency at (Le) Poisson Rouge spans three nights… Metropolis Ensemble closes out the festival on May 12 with works ranging from Brad Balliett and Elliot Cole’s hip-hopera, The Rake, to pieces from Chilean-born, 20-year old Remmy Canedo and New York’s own Ryan Carter.”
John Heuertz of the Kansas City Star reviews the Kansas City Symphony’s premiere of Metropolis composer Avner Dorman’s Frozen in Time on April 30, 2011 with percussion soloist Martin Grubinger.
“Creation stories formed the backdrop of the Kansas City Symphony’s inventive concert Friday at the Lyric Theatre… Dorman, a rising young Israeli composer, scored this three-movement work for full orchestra and 23 different percussion instruments, principally marimba and vibraphone. All 23 of which Grubinger played with breathtaking mastery… The audience got so wound up it applauded after every movement, and kept doing it in the second half.”
WNYC’s John Schaefer of Soundcheck sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steve Reich and Metropolis composer Timothy Andres on April 27, 2011, in celebration of Steve’s 75th birthday.
“Pianist/composer Timothy Andres made it to numerous top-10 lists last year with his debut album, Shy and Mighty. He also raised eyebrows with an eclectic list of influences that ranges from Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem to today’s other guest, Steve Reich. We hear Andres’ distinctive musical voice, as he joins us to play live in our studio.”
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Metropolis composer Ryan Francis introduces his new album, Works for Piano on back-to-back broadcasts for Hammered! on WQXR’s online station, Q2, hosted by Metropolis artist Conor Hanick, from April 25-29, 2011.
“On this specially curated week of Hammered! we spotlight a new album of piano music by New York-based composer Ryan Anthony Francis. The record features Bang On A Can pianist Vicky Chow, who, with Francis, joins Hammered! throughout the week with insights on this exquisite new body of piano music. Among the diverse cast of characters looking over Francis’s compositional shoulder are author Haruki Murakami, artist M.C. Escher and poet Wilhelm Muller. You can hear their whispers: Escher’s interlocking motivic infinities in Francis’s Jacob’s Ladder, Murakami’s polished elegance in the Wind-Up Bird Preludes, and Muller’s prophetic solemnity in Consolations.”
Six Etudes for Piano (function(){var s=function())(); Consolations (function(){var s=function())(); Wind-Up Bird Preludes (function(){var s=function())(); Moonlight Fantasy (function(){var s=function())(); Read the full article…
Composer Ryan Francis has a box of musical toys that’s finally ready to share. His new album Works for Piano was released on Tzadik Records April 19, and features Vicky Chow performing ten years of Ryan’s piano music, including one he wrote at age 19. His Six Etudes for Piano, a series of rhythmic musical concepts, was commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble in 2007 and premiered at the Digital Sustain concert at Chelsea Art Museum in 2008. Etudes then developed into a more cohesive Piano Concerto, also a Metropolis commission (with American Composers Forum and funds provided by the Jerome Foundation), that premiered at the LOOP concert later that spring. Ryan explains how the recording project was born out of these two performances:
“Andrew Cyr originally approached me about a chamber orchestra piece, and I countered with the idea of a chamber piano concerto. I mentioned that I had the idea of writing a set of companion etudes to the concerto, sort of like what György Ligeti did with his, and Andrew jumped at the idea, and commissioned the etudes as well, to be used as a prelude, or an introduction to the larger concerto. Vicky Chow, who is a close collaborator of mine, premiered several of the etudes on the Digital Sustain concert, and went on to perform the whole set many times, which drew the attention of John Zorn, who is the composer/co-founder of Tzadik Records. He offered me and Vicky the opportunity to record a CD, and because I’ve spent so much time writing piano music over the years, the proposed project we came back with was my complete piano works. Neither Vicky nor I had ever been in charge of a recording project, and Zorn basically cut us a check and said "go make it; this will be a learning experience for you”, which it was. I originally hoped that we would release somewhere in the range of a year after we got the offer, but it ended up taking over two years to finally come out in stores. One of the first and biggest challenges we encountered in making the recording was simply deciding where we were to record. We didn’t have a very big budget, and finding a space in New York that both had a good piano and had good acoustics for piano turned out to be one of the hardest things to find! We got lucky that our mutual friend Ryan Streber, a composer and recording engineer, was taking the leap and opening his own studio, Oktaven Audio, in Yonkers. I’ve worked with Ryan rather extensively through the years as he has been on site for a lot of live recordings of my music, and we have a close working relationship (and I also put him in touch with Metropolis Ensemble way back in the day!) so working with Ryan just felt like the best, easiest decision.“
[caption id="attachment_655” align=“alignright” width=“326” caption=“Ryan Francis and Vicky Chow”]
[/caption] The new album is now available on
,
,
, and
. From April 25-29, WQXR’s online station,
, is featuring the curated “loops, ladders, and wind-up birds” of Ryan Francis’ body of work, culminating in a complete broadcast of the new album on Friday. Each
Hammered!
broadcast is hosted by Metropolis artist
, who is also a pianist and regular contributor on WQXR. During the Q2 broadcasts, Ryan will be giving some background on his compositions, including
Etudes
,
Consolations
,
Wind-Up Bird Preludes
, and
Moonlight Fantasy
; and Vicky Chow will perform new works by fellow composers Andy Akiho, Evan Ziporyn, Eliot Britton and Daniel Wohl.
Follow the complete series here.
Listen to
Six Etudes for Piano
here:
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Patrick Neas of the Kansas City Star previews Kansas City Symphony’s premiere of Avner Dorman’s Frozen in Time on April 30, 2011.
The Symphony also will perform the U.S. premiere of Avner Dorman’s percussion concerto Frozen in Time. According to Dorman, the work was inspired by Earth’s geology. “It’s divided into three movements: Indoafrica, Eurasia, and The Americas,” he said. “The percussionist Martin Grubinger asked me to write a concerto for him. He knew my music well and felt that my style was very global, and he thought that reflected our generation’s view of the world. So he asked me to write a truly global concerto.” Indeed, Dorman’s work encompasses the entire planet and its very beginnings.
Sequenza 21 featured Metropolis composer Elliot Cole’s new album release on April 21, 2011.
“Some of you might know Elliot Cole as a composer of concert music, Contributing Editor here at Sequenza 21, or as a doctoral student at Princeton. But do you know Cole as a… rapper? De Rerum, Elliot’s debut EP as a fast-talking MC, under the project moniker Oracle Hysterical, tackles lofty subject matter. According to Cole, "It’s a verse history of the world as I understand it (to c.2000BCE, after which, I discovered, history is mostly redundant), and also a general synthesis of, well, most every (nonfiction) book I’ve read in the last decade. The EP is available for free download via his website. If you enjoy this taste of Oracle Hysterical, you can check out their performance of a retelling of the Rake’s Progress alongside the Metropolis Ensemble at the MATA festival in NYC on May 12.”
David Peironnet of KCMetropolis interviewed Metropolis composer Avner Dorman ahead of his premiere of Frozen in Time on April 30, 2011 with the Kansas City Symphony.
DP: Frozen in Time is music composed for percussion. That’s always interesting. How do you, as a composer, develop a musical idea when you are essentially limited to banging on things? AD: Well, listeners will notice that I use both unpitched and pitched percussion instruments. The pitched percussion instruments (marimba, vibraphone, crotales, glockenspiel, etc..) are as melodic as, say, a piano (the piano simply has hammers “banging on things.”) As far as non pitched instruments, I feel those allow for more primal music, music from before the age of tones, scales, chords etc. I also love the fact that in a percussion concerto the percussion soloist is upfront, turning our focus to it.
Metropolis composer David Bruce was interviewed in April 2011 for his new commission for Silk Road Project.
“David’s music draws inspiration from folk traditions around the world, and he enjoys collaborating with musicians who have strong connections with both classical and folk or world traditions, which made him a prime candidate for working with the Silk Road Ensemble.”
Hallucinations, Metropolis Ensemble’s recent production at (Le) Poisson Rouge, was a mind-bending juxtaposition of acoustic, orchestral instruments with electronics.
Avner Dorman’s music works its magic by melding far-flung influences and making them sound natural together.
Pianist Eliran Avni shows his flair for the dramatic during a rehearsal of Avner Dorman’s “Concerto in A” with Metropolis Ensemble at The Times Center in Midtown. Metropolis artists were invited to test the Times Center’s new state-of-the-art auditorium and digital audio system on September 14, 2007. Photo by Vern Kousky.
On a beautiful early spring evening, over 150 friends and patrons of Metropolis Ensemble gathered to honor our “founding visionaries.”