A great week for creative music in New York

(to be continued)

Monday 04/16/2012

Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival (Monday) Victoria Bond’s festival is particularly expansive this year, touching on jazz, indie classical and more conventional contemporary settings. The Monday installment includes a new work by the composer and electric violinist Cornelius Dufallo, as well as new works by Matt Van Brink, Carlos Carrillo, Alexandra Gardner, Mark Mellits and Ms. Bond. At 7:30 p.m., Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 864-5400,symphonyspace.org; $20, or $15 for students and 65+. (Kozinn) Source: NY Times

Quatuor Diotima (Monday) This Paris-based ensemble has earned a strong reputation performing repertory classics and contemporary fare. Here it focuses on works written in the past 50 years: Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2, Christian Ofenbauer’s “Bruch Stück IX” and Arturo Fuentes’s “Liquid Crystals.” At 7:30 p.m., Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 319-5300, acfny.org; free. (Schweitzer) Source: NY Times

Jason Hwang EDGE 7:30pm
Arts for Art at Clemente Soto Velez, 107 Suffolk Street

Tuesday 04/17/2012

Darius Jones Quartet with Matt Mitchell, Trevor Dunn & Chad Taylor, Jazz Standard 7:30p & 9:30p

UnSound Festival: A night of distinctive female artists working with experimental sounds. LA resident Julia Holter and Norway's Jenny Hval both combine avant-garde structures with music at the edge of pop; they also work with explicit lyrics exploring sex and gender, subverting expectations. Holter's "Tragedy" and Hval's "Viscera" were among 2011's best albums. New Yorker Julia Kent performs work for solo cello.  Issue Project Room, 110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn.

Wednesday 04/18/2012

Klangforum Wien (Wednesday and Thursday) This contemporary music ensemble from Austria returns with a challenging program on the 10th anniversary, to the day, that it played for the inauguration of the recital hall at the Austrian Cultural Forum’s new building. Works by Salvatore Sciarrino, Gyorgy Kurtag, Agata Zubel and other composers are on the bill, which is repeated on Thursday. The program is part of the institution’s seasonlong anniversary celebrations. At 7:30 p.m., Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 319-5300, acfny.org; free, but reservations are required. Call or e-mail reservations@acfny.org. (Tommasini)
Source: NY Times

MATA Festival: The first night of the festival pits two extraordinary quartets: the JACK string quartet, (David Patrick Stearns (Philadelphia Inquirer) proclaimed their performance as being “among the most stimulating new-music concerts of my experience,” and NPR listed their performance as one of “The Best New York Alt-Classical Concerts Of 2010″; and Quartet New Generation, a recorder – yes, recorder! – collective, the likes of which you have not heard, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “mind-blowing” and First Prize Winners of the 2004 Concert Artist Guild International Competition. MATA commissions two talented young composers: Huck Hodge, the 2011 Rome Prize winner, to write a new work from the JACK Quartet, and the Shanghai-based Qin Yi to write for QNG. We begin each night of the festival with one part of  Jacob Cooper’s newly-created hypnotic video series, Triptych. Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn

Thursday 04/19/2012

Klangforum Wien (Wednesday and Thursday) This contemporary music ensemble from Austria returns with a challenging program on the 10th anniversary, to the day, that it played for the inauguration of the recital hall at the Austrian Cultural Forum’s new building. Works by Salvatore Sciarrino, Gyorgy Kurtag, Agata Zubel and other composers are on the bill, which is repeated on Thursday. The program is part of the institution’s seasonlong anniversary celebrations. At 7:30 p.m., Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 319-5300, acfny.org; free, but reservations are required. Call or e-mail reservations@acfny.org. (Tommasini)
Source: NY Times

MATA Festival: The second evening of the Festival is a stunning collection of composer/performers and is highlighted by two works that deal with large-scale installations as sculptural elements and massive hand-constructed instruments: Cecilia Lopez’sMechanical Music for Sheet Metal and Eli Kezler’s Cold Pin, using a monumental collection of piano mechanisms taken apart and re-organized as a motorized, whirring, machine – in both cases, live musicians resonate and play against these giant structures. Matt Marks presents a sneak preview of his new pop opera on love and religion in America, The Little Death: Vol. 2, with Mellissa Hughes; and Kate Soper presents her gripping ten-minute microdrama, Only the words themselves mean what they say. Jacob Cooper presents the second installation of his newly-created video work, Triptych: II. Black or White.

Jenny Q Chai, Piano. Carnegie Hall, 7:30pm
DEBUSSY Études No.3 “pour les quartes” 
LIGETI Études Book I No.1 “Désordre”
MESSIAEN Cantéyodjayâ
GYÖRGY KURTÁG “Quiet talk with the Devil" and
"Les Adieux"
SCHUMANN Kreisleriana
and Works by Inhyun Kim, Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang (World Premieres), and Marco Stroppa (U.S. Premiere)  

American Symphony Orchestra: All George Crumb Program. Variazioni; Echoes of Time and the River
Star-Child: A Parable. Carnegie Hall, 8pm

Update on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 09:32AM by Robert Bielecki

Quatuor Diotima at the conclusion of a sold out concert at the Austrian Cultural Forum last night, 04/16/2012.  Ligeti's String Quartet No. 2, now part of the modern canon, is still performed too infrequently.  Arturo Fuente's "Liquid Crystals," was a revelation, miniature clusters of dissonance coalescing around a series of grand gestures - breathtaking.

Quatuor Diotima at the Austrian Cultural Forum 04/16/2012