The Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces Schedule For MET MUSEUM PRESENTS

MET MUSEUM PRESENTS – JANUARY 2013 is a series of Performances and Talks at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Performances & Talks Include: Jordi Savall Performing in the Spanish Renaissance Vélez Blanco Patio; DJ Spooky's The NAURU ELEGIES, a Live Performance/Multimedia Event, Companion Talk, and Tour of the Galleries for Oceanic Art; Paco Peña Flamenco Dance Company; Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert 10th Anniversary Season.

Performances:

On Friday, January 11, 2013, at 7:00 pm in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert:

"It's hard to find better chamber-music playing in New York than in the cellist Edward Arron's series," said the New Yorker about the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert. For its 10th anniversary season, the ensemble's artistic coordinator, cellist Edward Arron, has assembled three programs of the lively mix of repertoire that has elicited critical praise over the last decade. In this first program, Reiko Aizawa, piano; Colin Jacobsen, violin; Nicholas Cords, viola; and Edward Arron, cello, perform a Boccherini String Trio; Kurtag's Jelék for Solo Viola, Op. 5; and Dvorák's Piano Quartet in D Major, Op. 23.

This series is made possible in part by Isabel C. Iverson and Walter T. Iverson.
In addition to leading the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert, cellist Edward Arron is also the artistic director, host, and resident performer of the Musical Masterworks concert series in Old Lyme, Connecticut (succeeding Charles Wadsworth), as well as concert series in Beaufort and Columbia, South Carolina. He is also the artistic director of the Caramoor Virtuosi, the resident chamber ensemble of the Caramoor International Music Festival.

Tickets are priced at $35.

On Friday, January 18, 2013, at 7:00 pm in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, THE NAURU ELEGIES – A live performance/multimedia event featuring Members of Face the Music; Part of The Met Reframed: DJ Spooky in Residence.

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, describes his work: "THE NAURA ELEGIES is a technical synthesis of a live string ensemble (members of Face the Music, the new music ensemble comprised of some of New York's most outstanding student musicians), projected high-definition video footage, digital animation, and live internet feed of GPS coordinates of specific aspects of the island and its physical and financial infrastructure. It is an orchestration of content retrieved and processed in multiple localities, including research in New York City and documentation in Nauru. The ELEGIES are a statement of technology and media processes in the 21st century that is exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.

"The Republic of Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It was, by consensus of several 'Great Powers,' used as a raw resource until there was literally nothing left. Nauru has been mined throughout the last two centuries for its phosphate deposits, which occupied 90% of the island. A small territory with no [other] exploitable resources, Nauru in the 1990s turned to off-shore financing and the creation of 'virtual banks' as a way of earning sorely needed foreign currency. THE NAURU ELEGIES posits that Nauru reflects many of the issues facing our contemporary information economy.

"The music component of THE NAURU ELEGIES reflects colonial and postcolonial issues facing the digital economy of the 21st century translated into a string quartet, while the literary and multimedia component of the project spatializes and formalizes otherwise invisible economic flows and irreversible ecological devastation." For more information visit www.djspooky.com/nauruelegies/.

On Wednesday, January 23, Paul Miller will host a companion conversation to THE NAURU ELEGIES, IN/VISIBLE: THE ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT, AND CULTURE OF THE ISLAND NATION, and on Saturday, January 19, he leads a public tour of the galleries for Oceanic Art (see below).

The Met Reframed, an unprecedented Metropolitan Museum artist residency, breaks new ground as a collaboration between artist and institution. The Met's Limor Tomer, General Manager of Concerts & Lectures, conceived this year-long association as an opportunity to engage the curiosity and talents of the composer, multimedia artist, and writer Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid with the extensive artistic and human resources of the Museum to create both new work and dialogues between artists, scholars, curators, and Museum visitors.

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