Cellist Mariel Roberts to Launch CATOGRAPHY Solo Album, 5/19
By: Christina Mancuso Apr. 11, 2017
Cartography, the second solo album by intrepid cellist Mariel Roberts, comes out Friday, May 19 on New Focus Recordings, with a 7 pm release show that evening at National Sawdust. Cartography features first recordings of dauntingly virtuosic pieces written for Roberts by four New York-based composers: Cenk Ergün, Davi∂ Brynjar Franzson, George Lewis, and Eric Wubbels, who joins her on piano for his gretchen am spinnrade. Inspired by Roberts' technical wizardry and interpretive élan, her collaborators have created music that takes the cello into uncharted realms, requiring intense concentration, razor-sharp precision, and almost superhuman endurance. Yet in Roberts' hands, the works transcend their technical demands to emerge as deeply moving meditations on time - the cartography of subjective human experience.
"What the works have in common is an exceptionally focused approach to their material, a clear and acute method of expressing musical ideas. These works make me excited to be a performer...they create experiences that have the power to transfix and transform the listener."
Alongside her solo career, Mariel Roberts is the cellist for the Mivos Quartet, and performs regularly with Signal, Wet Ink, and other ensembles. She has premiered nearly 50 solo works, and hundreds more as a chamber musician - impressive for any artist, let alone for one under 30.
Her first solo album, nonextraneous sounds (Innova, 2012) earned widespread praise. It made several "Best of Year" lists, including NPR, Chicago Reader and Time Out Chicago, who wrote, "In the laboratory that is new music, with its accumulation of extended techniques, there are two kinds of performers: those who play 'at' these often intractable methods, and those who organically inhabit them. Cellist Mariel Roberts spends the entirety of her outstanding debut album...in the latter category, executing demanding scores with the familiarity of a Bach cello suite."
Tickets for the release show are $25 in advance, $30 at the door, available at nationalsawdust.org.
A B O U T C A R T O G R A P H Y
Cartography opens with gretchen am spinnrade (2016) by Eric Wubbels, a rising composer who is also the pianist and Executive Director for the Wet Ink Ensemble. His debut album, Duos with Piano, Book I, was released last year on the Carrier label. gretchen am spinnrade references Goethe and Schubert's Gretchen at the spinning wheel, but also "the wheel of karma (Bhavachakra) / turning of cause and effect / compulsive loops of thought and action / repetitive behavior and cycles of history." Wubbels describes it as "a manic, hounded piece, alternating relentless motoric circuits with plateaus of regular, 'idling' motion."
The music of Turkish-born composer/improviser Cenk Ergün has been described by The New York Times as "intense" and "haunting," and by NewMusicBox as "psychedelically meditative." Ergün's ominous Aman is written for cello with live electronic signal processing, using a software instrument of his own design that allows him to speed up, slow down, loop, stretch, contract, and transpose four layers of amplified cello sound in real time. Notes Ergün, "While in its language of origin, Arabic, the word 'aman' means 'security,' in Turkish it is sometimes used to alert one of an imminent danger, as in, 'Watch out!' Throughout the middle east, as well as in Greece, the word is often used in songs to express deep sorrow, loss, and hopelessness."
George Lewis is revered as a composer, trombonist, electronic performer, installation artist, and scholar in both the new-music and creative improvised music worlds. Vice-Chair of Columbia University's Department of Music, he has performed and recorded with Anthony Braxton, Count Basie, Frederic Rzewski, Gil Evans, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, and Wadada Leo Smith, among many others. Spinner takes as its touchstone the Greek myth of the three Fates: Clotho, who spins the thread of an individual's life; Lachesis, who measures the thread; and Atropos, who cuts it off. "In Plato's account, the Fates become integral to the transmigration of souls after death, while in life, leaving the responsibility of choice to humans themselves," says Lewis, who calls Spinner "[a] meditation on the materiality and poetics of [the] instrument, and the very perilous situation in which our world finds itself at the time of the work's composition."
Based in New York, Davi∂ Bryjar Franzson has become one of the leading composers to emerge from Iceland. Recent projects include a cello concerto, on Matter and Materiality, composed for Severine Ballon and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov. The Cartography of Time provides both the title for this disc and its overriding theme. In his program note, Franzson quotes Wittgenstein: "How is it possible that one should measure time? For the past cannot be measured, as it is gone by; and the future can't be measured because it has not yet come. And the present can't be measured for it has no extension." Franzson's piece, which closes the album, is a tour de force of meditative concentration, hovering in a limbo between stasis and movement, foreground and background, noise and pitch.
A B O U T M A R I E L R O B E R T S
"Trailblazing" cellist Mariel Roberts (Feast of Music) is widely recognized as a deeply dedicated interpreter of contemporary music. Recent performances have garnered praise for her "technical flair and exquisite sensitivity" (American Composers Forum), as well as her ability to "couple youthful vision with startling maturity" (InDigest Magazine). Roberts' work emphasizes expanding the technical and expressive possibilities of her instrument through close relationships with innovative performers and composers of her generation. Her passion for collaboration and experimentation has led her to premiere hundreds of new works by both emerging and established artists.
Roberts has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician across four continents, most notably as a member of the Mivos String Quartet, as well as Wet Ink Ensemble and Ensemble Signal. She performs regularly on major stages for new music such as the Lincoln Center Festival (NYC), Wien Modern (Austria), Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), Cervantino Festival (Mexico), Klang Festival (Denmark), Shanghai New Music Week (China), Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse fu?r Neue Musik (Germany), and Aldeburgh Music Festival (UK). Mariel has been featured as a chamber musician on recordings for Innova, Albany Records, New World Records, New Amsterdam, Carrier Records, New Focus, and Urtext Records. Mariel's premiere solo album, nonextraneous sounds, was released to critical acclaim in September 2012. New York's WQXR radio wrote, "By playing a program this well-curated, with this much confidence, precision and good old-fashioned muscle, Roberts is not so much 'making a statement,' artistically speaking, as she is sounding an alarm. Listeners should come running." She holds degrees from both the Eastman School and the Manhattan School of Music, where she specialized in contemporary performance practice while studying with Alan Harris and Fred Sherry. Website: marielroberts.com.Comments
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