“How about a Cleopatra-inspired cantata with obbligato bassoon? Sounds awesome to me.”
“It’s exciting to premiere five new works that feature the bassoon on a single evening – it’s a rare occurrence.”
Metropolis Ensemble’s Debut in Central Park with Creative Time – The Round-Up
According to T Magazine, Creative Time’s Drifting in Daylight was “the most geographically expansive arts project in Central Park since the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 installation The Gates was placed along 23 miles of paths in 2005.”
From May 15th through June 20th Central Park was transformed into a multimedia installation piece. Drifting in Daylight: Art in Central Park, celebrated Central Park Conservancy’s 35th anniversary.
For the 12 days the exhibition was open to the public, it was estimated that over 100,000 people encountered the exhibition. Doug Blonsky, the conservancy’s president and C.E.O. said it is intended to celebrate “the quiet of the park and the surprises one can find wandering its paths.”
In Drifting in Daylight, Metropolis Ensemble collaborated with the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson to reprise his balletic sculpture and endurance art-piece, S.S. Hangover, originally commissioned for the 2013 Venice Biennale. The piece was inspired by a photo still from the 1935 film, Remember Last Night which Kjartansson found in a vintage cocktail recipe book.
Metropolis Ensemble musicians performed on a refurbished 1930’s fishing vessel, in full tux and concert gown regalia. It was not all smooth sailing – the boat arrived last February from Venice frozen solid with ice and snow. Members of The Northern Brooklyn Boating Club worked tirelessly to patch the holes, replace the flooded one-of-a-kind engine, and repaint the infamous fat Pegasus sail. The piece was performed (with music from Sigur Ros composer Kjartan Sveinsson) about 30 times a day from memory and over 375 times over the course of the exhibition.
Here’s a quick catch up of some of the artists featured at this exciting event: Lauri Stallings and her dance activist collaborators known as glo, performed a dance and spoken word piece inspired by the musical legacy of Harlem and the Great Migration of African Americans northward. Spence Finch gave out delicious solar powered sunset soft served ice cream, to match the sky near the parks conservatory garden. And finally, performance, video, and photo artist David Levine reenacted famous films that took place in Central Park.
See below the complete social and press roundup!
The Social Media Buzz…
#DriftingInDaylight was used on Instagram over 2400 times, and hundreds more photos were certainly taken without the hashtag.
The Drifting in Daylight post on @instagram got over 1 million likes and 7,800 comments!
The Press…
For Its Next Big Project, Creative Time Heads to Central Park in T Magazine
S.S. Hangover is Coming to Central Park This Year in Gothamist
America’s Best Public Art for Summer 2015 in Bloomberg Business
Calvin Klein Collection and Creative Time Celebrate Drifting in Daylight in Vogue
Fantastical Performance Art Drifts into Central Park in Time Out New York (Print)
Central Park Pop-Up Art in The New Yorker
Creative Time to Take Over Some of Central Park This May in Art Observed
Marisa Tomei’s Perfect Proportions in The New York Times
The 10 Most Crazy/Beautiful Art Happenings This Most Wild Of Frieze Weekends in Huffington Post
Review: ‘Please Touch the Art’ and 'Drifting in Daylight,’ Outdoor Art at the Parks in the New York Times
Meet first female director of major NYC art institution on MSNBC
post by: Sequoia Sellinger
Jonah Reider is the culinary half of the duo behind “Brownstone,” a food- and music-based pop-up billed as “an experiential treasure-hunt of sound, taste and color.”
It may seem surprising to hear that Vivian Fung, born and raised in Edmonton, has built an international reputation as a classical music composer that has led her to a commissioned orchestral work for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, as a way of introducing its 2015 season in September. But there it is. Fung knows no bounds, nor does her compositional groove.
Two ship captains—Fung Lin and Duke Riley, Nordic boat specialists—emerged and entered the boat, followed by dapperly dressed brass players from the Metropolis Ensemble, a non-profit professional chamber orchestra.
Mr. Kaplan played “New Dances of the League of David,” a 60-minute suite that incorporates new miniatures by this 21st-century band of composers into Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” a project commissioned by Lyrica Chamber Music and Metropolis Ensemble.
Du Yun: The Ocean Within
World premiere of Du Yun’s The Ocean Within, featuring harpist Bridget Kibbey, performed on January 11 & 15, 2012 at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City. This is Metropolis Ensemble’s inaugural concert for its new Resident Artists Series. Video by Aleksandr Sasha Popov. Audio by Ryan Streber.
In the Upper East Side townhouse that the American Irish Historical Society calls home, a violinist ambled down the stairs while tuning her instrument and a harpist improvised with electronic sounds that came from the walls.
In the Upper East Side townhouse that the American Irish Historical Society calls home, a violinist ambled down the stairs while tuning her instrument and a harpist improvised with electronic sounds that came from the walls.
This site-specific electro-acoustic composition living art installation by Jakub Ciupinski will not only be performed this weekend, but it will be performed by Metropolis Ensemble through the historic, Victorian-era Kimball House at the Capitol Center for the Arts.
The New York-based ensemble, with roots in Maine, will perform at the Portland mansion on Oct. 3.
“With its performers dispersed throughout the Olin Arts Center at Bates College, Metropolis presents the innovative site-specific piece Brownstone.”
Nina Simone's creepy-while-somehow-soothing voice is a perfect paint for the canvas that the string-heavy beat provides.
The angular melody, dissonant background strings and Simone’s nervous, vibrato-laden voice establishes a menacing presence.
It manages to balance its weird orchestra breakdown with a rather contemporary beginning and ending.
The composer and pianist Timo Andres’s take on the “Coronation” (otherwise known as the Piano Concerto No. 26 in D) felt necessary — not a lark but a surprisingly moving dazzler.
Cecelia Porter from The Washington Post reviewed Metropolis Ensemble’s performance at The Phillips Collection with the Phillips Camerata, Bridget Kibbey, and Quartet Senza Misura.
The Washington premiere Sunday of a bold new harp concerto capped an engaging and powerful performance of recent music by members of the Phillips Camerata, the resident ensemble of Washington’s Phillips Collection; the Quartet Senza Misura; and musicians from the New York-based Metropolis Ensemble.
Sunday’s combination of forces was a fortunate grouping of young musicians dedicated to contemporary music and sharing a truly visionary outlook. (We clearly need another way to distinguish between avant-garde compositions of the 1950s, still called “contemporary,” and today’s “contemporary” music hot off the press.)
The forceful collaboration was conducted by Grammy-nominee Andrew Cyr, a prominent influence in the world of newly emerging music. The afternoon opened with the Washington premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s “High Windows,” for solo string quartet and string ensemble. It is an imaginative work in a personal minimalist fashion calling for powerfully lunging bows, sighing harmonics and perky half-tone statements. Cyr led the players with tasteful panache, emphasizing the fluidity of the music. One of the lush moments in the ever-changing texture of the Cerrone echoed Samuel Barber’s elegiac temperament.
Cyr then led his players with driven, but elegant force in Steve Reich’s “Duet for Two Violins and Strings” and Elliott Carter’s Bariolage for solo harp. Both Reich and Carter’s music reflected an earlier version of Reich’s minimalist style of continually overlapping processes and Carter’s ever-fluctuating ideas. For the Reich, the players tackled insistent syncopations and interlocking motifs with seeming ease. In the Carter, harpist Bridget Kibbey, at once confident and delicate, displayed her instrument’s wide-ranging vocabulary for music, revealing ever-fluctuating tempos, lightning-fast leaps and the chordal richness of the piece.
Joined by a string quartet, Kibbey gave nuanced voice to the black atmosphere of Nathan Shields’ brooding “Tenebrae,” underlining its snatches of elusive luminance. In Vivian Fung’s Concerto for Harp, which was commissioned by the Phillips and other musical organizations, Kibbey’s bravura and sensitivity, especially in her cadenza, outlined the music’s intriguing mix of timbres, thorny sonorities, wailing glissandos and chirping pizzicatos echoed in the strings. In between, amusing parodies of a waltz and tango lightened up the texture. The drums and other percussion joined in, giving zest and a shade of violence to the composition.
Three of Sunday’s compositions were Washington premieres: Cerrone’s “High Windows,” Shields’ “Tenebrae” and Fung’s Concerto for Harp. Both Cerrone and Shields were on hand to explain their compositions. The concert’s end brought enthusiastic applause and cheering, concluding the Phillips’ Sunday musical 2013-2014 season.
Metropolis Ensemble joined The Roots on May 20, 2014 for a live performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to celebrate the Philadelphia hip-hop group’s newly released album “…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin,” which also features Metropolis artists and conductor Andrew Cyr. The performance, bathed in all white, included the album’s trip-hop “Never” with Canadian DJ A-Trak, Black Thought, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and Raheem DeVaughn.
The Washington premiere Sunday of a bold new harp concerto capped an engaging and powerful performance of recent music by members of the Phillips Camerata, the resident ensemble of Washington’s Phillips Collection; the Quartet Senza Misura; and musicians from the New York-based Metropolis Ensemble.