The Arcos Orchestra ft. Highlights from the Lowlands

Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 7:00 PM

Beth-El Chapel/Temple Sanctuary, Temple Emanu-El - New York, NY

Free admission

Pre-concert talk with Hans Kox and Vanessa Lann at 6:00 PM

Beth-El Chapel, Temple Emanu-El - New York, NY

The Arcos Orchestra shall conclude its 2010-2011 Season at Temple Emanu-El with a fabulous program of outstanding works by composers almost completely unknown in the United States. Highlights from the Lowlands features the North American Première of the Viola Concerto by Holocaust victim Leo Smit (1900-1943) with Emily Deans as soloist, along with music by Hans Kox (b. 1930), Tristan Keuris (1946-1996) and a world première by American-in-Amsterdam Vanessa Lann (b.1968). 

Arcos was founded in 2005 by conductor John-Edward Kelly and concertmaster Elissa Cassini. Inspired by the great creative spirit of Béla Bartók - who himself once sought to found such an orchestra - the Arcos Orchestra offers the listener an artistic bridge from the known to the unknown, extending from the origins of European musical culture to the most exciting contemporary music of our time. Bartók's comprehensive attitudes towards music and music-making, together with his ability to merge the currents of past and future into a language that speaks directly to the human heart, permeate everything the Arcos Orchestra stands for.

Consisting of outstanding young players from around the world, the Arcos Orchestra approaches orchestral playing with the chamber musician's sense of discipline: individual instrumental mastery; in-depth knowledge of the composer's life & music; and selfless co-operation in service of the composer's intentions. Although many chamber orchestras now perform without conductor, the Arcos Orchestra follows a more traditional path, believing that the conductor increases both their scope of repertoire and the musical unity that can be achieved. The relationship of conductor to orchestra is not a typical one, however: by design, the Arcos Orchestra conductor is integrated into the music-making like one player of many, working with the musicians to attain a lively exchange of ideas in rehearsal and spirited focus in concert. The result is a degree of synergy between players and conductor rarely found today.

Merlijn Twaalfhoven receives Unesco award

Merlijn Twaalfhoven during the preperations for Carried by the Wind in the Palestinian refugee camp Jalazon. Photo: Adam Sèbire.

Dutch composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven is to receive a prestigious Unesco award. He will soon be able to call himself the 'Young Artist for intercultural dialogue between the Arab and Western worlds'.

Unesco has announced that Merlijn Twaalfhoven will receive the award for his efforts to transcend the boundaries between people and cultures and unite people through music. In the past few years the Dutch composer organised a number of projects in conflict areas such as the divided Cypriot capital Nicosia, a Slovak gypsy ghetto, the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem. He was able to bridge vast cultural differences through innovative concerts.

Inter-cultural dialogue is also the focus of Merlijn Twaalfhoven’s latest project The Air we Breathe, a vocal performance featuring fragments of pop, jazz and classical music, performed by singers from the Arabian, Bulgarian and Swedish musical traditions.

Merlijn Twaalfhoven will receive his award on 13 April from the hands of Unesco Director General Irina Bokova at the organisation’s Paris headquarters.

For an overview of all twenty young artists recognized for promoting dialogue between Arab and Western countries.

Janine Jansen at Le Poission Rouge

Monday, February 28, 2011 at 6:30 PM

Le Poission Rouge - New York, NY
For tickets

Music review in The New York Times: Recreating a Bill of the Obscure and the Familiar (by Allan Kozinn, Feb 26, 2011)

Ever since her Concertgebouw debut in 1997, Janine Jansen has been a huge star in her native Holland. Today she is internationally recognised as one of the great violinists – a truly exciting and versatile artist.
Janine Jansen is a fresh faced and energetic Dutch violinist who entered the classical music scene in the late '90s. She studied violin at the University of Utrecht and made her debut with the Concertgebouw Amsterdam in 1997. The response to Jansen's debut in Europe was immediate, and her international reputation was established after an appearance made in London with the Philharmonia Orchestra in November 2002. Shortly thereafter she began to record for Decca in the U.K.
Jansen's first album gained generally positive critical notices; however, the response to her second, Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, came as a bit of a reality check to many. Jansen's willful, anti-historic, and highly interventionist reading of the familiar Vivaldi work was a little over the top for many reviewers. The front cover of the disc also made some wonder if the thrust of Jansen's marketing was on her looks rather than her artistic ability. In this respect, her first American tour, held in late 2005 -- early 2006, was inconclusive, though generally well attended. Time will tell if Jansen is an artist of the class that is here to stay, or a player whose primary effect is to make other violinists jealous and serve a magnet for the wrath of classical music purists.

TUNE-IN MUSIC FESTIVAL: PowerFUL ft. Louis Andriessen

 

Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 7:30 PM

Park Avenue Armory - New York, NY

For tickets

Chinua Achebe’s angry dismissal inspires the musical argument for the negative, powerFUL, a concert based around the belief that art can be a political tool. Here is music that gives an impassioned, disruptive clarion call for social consciousness and action. 

Frederic Rzewski’s blistering Coming Together sets a prescient text by a victim of the Attica prison riot, and Louis Andriessen’s ear-shattering Workers Union combines freedom and discipline to “express collective solidarity.” John Cage intended his percussion work Credo in US, with its satirical use of phonograph records, as a pointed critique of American society, while Matt Marks paints a musical portrait of Glenn Beck and David T. Little sings a love song to crude oil.

Festival curators Lisa Kaplan, and Tim Munro of eighth blackbird and the composer David T. Little of Newspeak introduce the context and the concepts behind the concert and introduce the ensembles performing the material.

Great Noise Ensemble - De Materie

October 24, 2010

October 24 at 6:30pm
National Gallery of Art, East Building (Washington)

You can't call "De Materie" small. Louis Andriessen is one of the biggest composers in Europe, and his vocal-orchestra piece "On Matter" opens with a bang, literally, that's repeated 144 times at full volume. And this piece's Washington premiere is by far the biggest thing ever essayed by the still-new Great Noise Ensemble, a group founded a few years ago over Craigslist. In fact, this Oct. 24 performance at the National Gallery shows a small group demonstrating large-scale ambitions -- and one of the most important compositions of the late 20th century. -- Anne Midgette (http://www.washingtonpost.com/)