CMS Of Lincoln Center Presents Zosha Di Castri's SPRUNG TESTAMENT, Performed by Kristin Lee and Orion Weiss

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will present a free online concert, New Milestones I: Transitions (Endurance and Evolution), available starting Thursday, December 3, 2020 at 7:30pm ET and remaining on demand. The performance features composer Zosha Di Castri's Sprung Testament for Violin and Piano (2017-18) performed by violinist Kristin Lee and pianist Orion Weiss. Chamber Music Society will inaugurate its new series, Composers In Focus, with a live, free webinar with Di Castri on Monday, November 16, 2020 at 6:30pm ET. She will talk with Weiss and Lee - musicians who have worked with her and know her work - about motivation, influences, inspiration, and in particular, Sprung Testament.

Zosha Di Castri's Sprung Testament is written for violin and piano with flexatone, vibraslap, and minor preparations. The 12-15 minute piece was commissioned by Jennifer Koh as a sister piece to Beethoven's Spring Sonata, a piece Di Castri studied as a young pianist, and was premiered by Koh and Di Castri at Brooklyn's National Sawdust in March 2018. Sprung Testament is part of a larger project called Limitless, in which Koh commissioned duos in order to perform them with the composers themselves. Di Castri says, "Having not performed publicly in seven years, this unique engagement brought about a substantial personal challenge of getting over old fears and reckoning with past demons. Though of course my issues were not nearly of the same scope as Beethoven's, I found myself inspired re-reading his famous Heiligenstadt Testament from 1802, a letter written to his brothers describing his despair over his hearing troubles and his passionate resolve to overcome his physical and emotional issues to fulfill his artistic aspirations. "

The second source of inspiration for the project is Rose-Lynn Fisher's book The Topography of Tears. Di Castri describes, "I was immediately drawn to her duotone microscopic photographs of tears captured on glass slides. These images reminded me of macro-topographic shots of sprawling landscapes, yet were also weirdly delicate, poetically complex, and intimate. In her book, Fisher gives captions to each image, translating the visuals into something evocative of our interior lives. The captions of the images that inspired the composition have been added as subtitles for the movements, though these are meant for the performers alone, much like the titles of Debussy's preludes."

New Milestones I: Transitions (Endurance and Evolution) also includes Trevor Weston's Shape Shifter and Helen Grime's Aviary Sketches with violinist Arnaud Sussmann, violist Matthew Lipman, and cellists David Finckel and Mihai Marica.

Program Information

Composers In Focus I: Zosha Di Castri
Monday, November 16, 2020 at 6:30pm ET
Tickets: Free, but advanced registration is required.
Link: www.chambermusicsociety.org/cms-front-row-2020/online-events/online-events/composer-in-focus-i-november-16-2020

New Milestones I: Transitions (Endurance and Evolution)
Available Thursday, December 3, 2020 at 7:30pm ET and Remain On Demand
Tickets: Free
Link: www.chambermusicsociety.org/watch-and-listen/live/new-milestones-december-3-2020/

Performers:
Orion Weiss, Piano
Kristin Lee, Violin
Arnaud Sussmann, Violin
Matthew Lipman, Viola
David Finckel, Cello
Mihai Marica, Cello

Program:
Trevor Weston - Shape Shifter for Cello (2011)
Helen Grime - Aviary Sketches (after Joseph Cornell) for Violin, Viola, and Cello (2014)
Zosha Di Castri - Sprung Testament for Violin and Piano (2017-18)

About Zosha Di Castri
Zosha Di Castri is a Canadian composer/pianist living in New York. Her work (which has been performed in Canada, the US, South America, Asia, and Europe) extends beyond purely concert music, including projects with electronics, sound arts, and collaborations with video and dance. She recently completed a commission titled Hunger for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with improvised drummer, which is designed to accompany Peter Foldes' 1973 silent film by the same name. She also wrote Long Is the Journey, Short Is the Memory for orchestra and chorus, that opened the first night of the BBC Proms, featuring the BBC Symphony, the BBC Singers, and conductor Karina Canellakis in July 2019 at Royal Albert Hall. Other large-scale projects include a 25-min piece for soprano, recorded narrator and orchestra entitled Dear Life (based on a short-story by Alice Munro), and an evening-length new music theatre piece, Phonobellow (co-written with David Adamcyk) for ICE with performances in New York and Montreal. Phonobellow features five musicians, a large kinetic sound sculpture, electronics, and video in a reflection on the influence of photography and phonography on human perception.

Her orchestral compositions have been commissioned by John Adams, the San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Esprit Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and the BBC, and have been featured by the Tokyo Symphony, Amazonas Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra among others. Zosha has made appearances with the Chicago Symphony, the L.A. Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in their chamber music series and has worked with many leading new music groups including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, Ekmeles, Yarn/Wire, the NEM, Ensemble Cairn, and JACK Quartet. She was the recipient of the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for her work Cortège in 2012, and participated in Ircam's Manifeste Festival in Paris, writing an interactive electronic work for Thomas Hauert's dance company, ZOO.

Other recent projects include a string quartet for the Banff International String Quartet Competition, a piece for Yarn/Wire for two pianists, two percussionists and electronics premiered at her Miller Theatre portrait concert, a solo piano work for Julia Den Boer commissioned by the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust Fund, a piano/violin duo with Jenny Koh, and a string octet premiered by JACK Quartet and Parker Quartet at the Banff Centre. Upcoming projects include a Koussevitzky commission from the Library of Congress for percussionist Steve Schick and ICE and a commission for the Grossman Ensemble in Chicago.

Zosha completed her bachelors of music in piano performance and composition at McGill University, and has a doctorate from Columbia University in composition. She is currently the Francis Goelet Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia, and just finished a year-long fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Her debut album, Tachitipo, released November 2019 to critical acclaim, can be found on New Focus Recordings. Learn more at www.zoshadicastri.com

About The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) is one of eleven constituents of the largest performing arts complex in the world, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which includes the New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center Theater, and The Metropolitan Opera. With its home in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, CMS is known for the extraordinary quality of its performances and its programming, and for setting the benchmark for chamber music worldwide. Through its many performance, education, recording, and broadcast activities, it brings the experience of great chamber music to more people than any other organization of its kind. Under the leadership of Co-Artistic Directors David Finckel and Wu Han, CMS presents a wide variety of concert series and educational events for listeners of all ages, appealing to both connoisseurs and newcomers. The performing artists constitute a revolving multi-generational and international roster of the world's finest chamber musicians, enabling CMS to present chamber music of every instrumentation, style, and historical period. Annual activities include a full season in New York, as well as on national and international tours. CMS continues its leadership position in the digital arena, reaching hundreds of thousands of listeners around the globe each season with live streaming, more than 750 hours of performance and education videos free to the public on its website, a 52-week public radio series across the US, radio programming in Hong Kong and mainland China, appearances on American Public Media, the new monthly program In Concert with CMS on the ALL ARTS broadcast channel, and performances featured on Medici.tv, Tencent, and SiriusXM's Symphony Hall channel.

Photo credit: David Adamcyk