Category: 2021 – 2022

  • Nadia Shpachenko

    Nadia Shpachenko

    GRAMMY® winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko will present five World Premieres of pieces written for two of her upcoming recording projects. She will perform soccer-inspired pieces by Ian Dicke, Dana Kaufman, David Sanford, and Adam Schoenberg written for her GOAT project, as well as a new work by Lewis Spratlan written for Shpachenko’s all Spratlan recording project. Shpachenko’s GOAT Project was supported, in part, by New Music USA.

    A “gifted and versatile pianist” (San Francisco Chronicle) and GRAMMY® winner Nadia Shpachenko enjoys bringing into the world things that are outside the box – powerful pieces that often possess unusual sonic qualities or instrumentation. Nadia’s concert highlights include recitals at Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, Disney Hall, on the Piano Spheres and Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella and Chamber Music Series, and with numerous orchestras in Europe and the Americas. An enthusiastic promoter of contemporary music, Nadia premiered more than 90 works by Elliott Carter, Paul Chihara, George Crumb, Daniel Felsenfeld, Tom Flaherty, Annie Gosfield, Vera Ivanova, Leon Kirchner, Amy Beth Kirsten, Hannah Lash, James Matheson, Missy Mazzoli, Harold Meltzer, Isaac Schankler, Adam Schoenberg, Lewis Spratlan, Gernot Wolfgang, Iannis Xenakis, Peter Yates, Jack Van Zandt, and many others.

    Described as “an exceptional recording of newly composed piano works” (Textura Magazine), Nadia’s Reference Recordings CD Woman at the New Piano was nominated for 58th GRAMMY Awards® in 3 categories. Described as “a most invigorating and distinctive release” (Fanfare Magazine), Nadia’s 2018 Reference Recordings release Quotations and Homages features premieres of solo and collaborative works for 6 pianists (performed with Ray-Kallay Duo, HOCKET and Genevieve Feiwen Lee) inspired by a variety of earlier composers and pieces. Described as “superb… evocative… pure magic” (I Care If You Listen), Nadia’s 2019 Reference Recordings CD The Poetry of Places features premieres of solo and collaborative works (performed with LA Phil pianist Joanne Pearce Martin and LAPQ percussionists Nick Terry and Cory Hills) inspired by diverse buildings. The Poetry of Places album won the 2020 62nd Best Classical Compendium GRAMMY® Award. She is also featured on Isaac Schankler’s 2019 Aerocade Music album Because Patterns, Gernot Wolfgang’s 2019 Albany Records album Vienna and the West, José Serebrier’s 2021 Reference Recordings album Last Tango Before Sunrise, and Wouter Kellerman’s 2021 South African Music Award winning album We’ve Known All Times. She is a Steinway Artist and professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona University.

    FREE ADMISSION, RESERVATIONS REQUIRED

    More info: http://nadiashpachenko.com/

  • Hub New Music

    Hub New Music

    Due to the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, this performance has been postponed. We will update this site when Hub New Music’s performance is rescheduled for the 2022-23 season.

    Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music – composed of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello – is forging new pathways in 21st-century repertoire. The ensemble’s ambitious commissioning projects and “appealing programs” (New Yorker) celebrate the rich diversity of today’s classical music landscape. Its performances have been described as “gobsmacking” (Cleveland Classical), “innovative” (WBUR), and “the cutting edge of new classical music” (Taos News).

    Highlights for the 2020-21 concert season include performances presented by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Williams Center for the Arts at Lafayette College, Texas Performing Arts, Celebrity Series of Boston, Sacramento State Festival of New American Music, and a European debut at the Alba Music Festival (Italy). The season features premieres of new works by Christopher Cerrone and Eric Nathan; and multiple performances of recent commissions by Hannah Lash, Kati Agócs, Takuma Itoh, and Michael Ippolito.

    Hub’s debut album, Soul House, released on New Amsterdam Records in 2020 was called“ingenious and unequivocally gorgeous” by the Boston Globe. The ensemble’s upcoming recording with Silkroad’s Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and Asia-America New Music Institute (AANMI) will be released on Tōrō Records. 

    Hub New Music brings its passion for adventurous and relevant programming to global audiences as both a quartet and as collaborative artists. Recent projects include Terra Nova with composer/songwriter collective Oracle Hysterical; The Nature of Breaking, a 30-minute collaborative work with composer/harpist Hannah Lash; and a choreographed production of Robert Honstein’s Soul House with Boston’s Urbanity Dance. Upcoming projects include Requiem for the Enslaved, an evening length mass by Carlos Simon supported by Georgetown University’s GU272 Project that honors the lives of 272 African American slaves and their descendants; a new ‘modular’ work by Sō Percussion’s Jason Treuting; and new works by composers Nina C. Young, Nathalie Joachim, and Laura Kaminsky. 

    For its visionary programming, HNM was named one of WQXR’s “10 Cutting-Edge Artists that Have Captured the Imagination” in 2016, and has been featured in major press outlets including the Boston Globe, New York Times, WFMT (Chicago), The New Yorker, WBUR (Boston), Houston Chronicle, and several others. 

    More info: http://www.hubnewmusic.org/

  • Longleash

    Longleash

    Longleash (Pala Garcia, violin; John Popham, cello; Julia Den Boer, piano) is an ensemble with a traditional instrumentation and a progressive identity. The “expert young trio” (Strad Magazine) takes its name from Operation Long Leash, a Cold War era CIA operation that promoted American avant-garde artists in Europe. “Fearlessly accomplished” (Arts Desk UK), Longleash has quickly earned a reputation in the US and abroad for innovative programming, artistic excellence and new music advocacy. 

    Recent and upcoming engagements include Five Boroughs Music Festival (NYC), Electric Earth Concerts (New Hampshire), Princeton Sound Kitchen (New Jersey), (le) Poisson Rouge (NYC), Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series (Chicago), Bowerbird (Philadelphia), Ecstatic Music Festival (NYC), National Sawdust (Brooklyn), and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, NY). Appearances abroad include Jeunesse (Vienna), Átlátszó Hang (Budapest), FUAIM Music (Cork, Ireland), Trondheim International Chamber Music Festival (Norway), Echoraum (Vienna), and Open Music (Graz, Austria).

    In the 2019-20 season, Longleash collaborates with Greek collective meta.ξ, filmmakers Pascal Perich and Caroline Mariko Stucky, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, and composers Wang Lu, Anthony Vine, Johan Svensson, Reiko Fueting, and Sarah Hennies. The recipient of grants from New Music USA, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Music Academy of the West, and Chamber Music America, Longleash has premiered over 30 works, and received critical acclaim for their “tight playing,” “lucid interpretations,” and “inspired” premiere recordings (Tempo).

    Longleash has given workshops at University College Cork, Royal Irish Academy of Music, The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, Manhattan School of Music, Hunter College, New York University, The Graduate Center (CUNY), and Ohio University. In 2015, Longleash founded The Loretto Project (Kentucky), an annual new music series and tuition-free composition workshop that supports promising collegiate composers while presenting socially-minded programs and celebrating diverse cultural perspectives.

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: https://www.longleash.org/

    Download the Concert Program

  • Now Hear Ensemble

    Now Hear Ensemble

    Now Hear Ensemble combines the intimacy of the classical concert experience with electronic music, video art, installation art, and contemporary theater, embracing both contemporary music and pop culture, as they believe a cross-genre approach leads to new territory for creativity.

    Based in Los Angeles, the Now Hear Ensemble has performed at renowned venues such as the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley, the Conrad Prebys Music Center at UC San Diego, the Center for New Music in San Francisco, the Fisher Museum at the University of Southern California, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara and the Carlsbad Music Festival. Now Hear has held residencies at Avaloch Farm Institute, UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara and has had their music featured by BBC Radio 3.

    Since their founding in 2012, the ensemble has commissioned and premiered over 25 new works from composers such as Florent Ghys, Dan VanHassel, Carolyn Chen, Anthony Paul Garcia, Nick Norton, Constantin Basica, Joshua Carro, Jon Myers, Luke Taylor, Federico Llach, Marc Evans, Anders Lind, Mateo Lugo, Daniel Miller, Fernando Rincón Estrada, Eoin Callery, Kevin Zhang, David Gordon, Iván Naranjo, Brandon Rolle, Mason Hock, Heena Yoon, David Werfrelmann, and Todd Lerew. Past projects have included a collaboration with California-based composers that resulted in their debut album and tour, “Made in California,” as well as commissions of  installations and concert music made with bicycle wheels, paper shredders, ping-pong tables, megaphones, and custom-made instruments.

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: http://www.nowhearensemble.com/

    Download the Concert Program