The Miller Theatre's Composer Portrait Series Presents CHAYA CZERNOWIN, 10/23

Miller Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts continues the 2014-15 Composer Portraits series with CHAYA CZERNOWIN featuring the International Contemporary Ensemble, Kai Wessel, countertenor, Noa Frenkel, contralto, and Steven Schick, conductor. On Thursday, October 23, 2014, 8:00 p.m. at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University (2960 Broadway at 116th Street). Tickets are $20-$30 and Students with valid ID: $12-$18.

COMPOSER PORTRAITS

One of New York City's "strongest new-music series" (The New Yorker),Composer Portraits at Miller Theatre allow audiences to become immersed in one composer's singular style, as well as hear from them in-person during an onstage discussion. The 2014-15 season includes a wealth of world premieres and performances from cutting-edge artists such as the JACK Quartet, ICE, Third Coast Percussion, the Brentano String Quartet, and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.

Composer Portraits

Thursday, October 23, 2014, 8:00 p.m.
Chaya Czernowin

Miller Theatre (2960 Broadway at 116th Street)
Although she studied composition in Tel Aviv, Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin has lived all over the globe, and her work draws upon a rich palette of textures, traditions, and instrumentations. Winter Songs, an ongoing cycle of works for low instruments, "reflects on the aspect of winter that has to do with one being pulled into the cave of one's interior, into the passivity of long sleep," she says. In her new work, written for Miller Theatre, Czernowin promises once again to inspire with gorgeous and exotic sonic landscapes.

PROGRAM:
5 pencil action - sketches (2014) - world premiere, Miller Theatre commission
Winter Songs V: Forgotten Light (2014) - world premiere
Winter Songs IV: Wounds/Mistletoe (2013)
Winter Songs II: Stones (2003)

ARTISTS:
International Contemporary Ensemble
Kai Wessel, countertenor
Noa Frenkel, contralto
Steven Schick, conductor

from New Music Box-Chaya Czernowin: A Strange Bridge Toward Engagement

Chaya Czernowin

chayaczernowin.com

Chaya Czernowin was born and brought up in Israel. After her studies in Israel, at the age of 25, she continued studying in Germany (DAAD grant), the United States, and then was invited to live in Tokyo, Japan (Asahi Shimbun Fellowship and American NEA grant), in Germany (at the Akademie Schloss Solitude), and in Vienna. Her music has been performed throughout the world and she has held a professorship at UCSD. She was the first woman to be appointed as a composition professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria (2006-2009) and at Harvard University (2009 to present) where she is the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music. Together with Jean-Baptiste Jolly, the director of Akademie Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart, and with composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Czernowin founded the summer Academy at Schloss Solitude, a biannual course for composers. Takasugi and Czernowin also teach at Tzlil Meudcan, an international course based in Israel founded by Yaron Deutsch of Ensemble Nikel.

Czernowin's output includes chamber and orchestral music, with and without electronics. Her works have been played in most of the significant new music festivals around the globe. She composed two large-scale works for the stage: Pnima...ins Innere (2000, Munich Biennale), which was chosen to be the best premiere of the year by Opernwelt yearly critic survey and was awarded the Bayerischer Theater Preis, and Adama (2004/5) with Mozart's Zaide (Salzburg Festival 2006). She was appointed Artist-in-Residence at the Salzburg Festival in 2005/6 and Artist-in-Residence at the Lucerne Festival, Switzerland in 2013. Characteristic of her work are the use of metaphor as a means of reaching a sound world which is unfamiliar; work with noise and physical parameters such as weight and textural surface (as in smoothness or roughness, etc.) to create sonic entities which "live" in a field where perspective and distance change; the inquiry and problematization of the nature of musical energy, musical time, and unfolding; and the shifting of scale and perspective. All these are in an attempt to peel away the layers of the familiar, exposing something essential underneath, something which is not yet known.

In addition to numerous other prizes, Czernowin represented Israel at Uncesco composer's Rostorum 1981 and was awarded the DAAD scholarship (1983-85), Stipendiumpreis (1988), and Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1992) at the Darmstadt Fereinkurse; IRCAM (Paris) reading panel commission (1998); scholarships of SWR Experimental Studio Freiburg (1998/2000/2001); the composer's prize of Siemens Foundation (2003); the Rockefeller Foundation (2004); a nomination as a fellow to the Wissenschaftkolleg Berlin in 2008; Fromm Foundation Award (2009); and Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2011). She is published by Schott. Her music is recorded on Mode records NY, Wergo, Col Legno, Deutsche Gramophone, Neos, Ethos, Telos, and Einstein Records. She lives near Boston, with composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi and their son.

International Contemporary Ensemble

iceorg.org

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), described by The New York Times as "one of the most accomplished and adventurous groups in new music," is dedicated to reshaping the way music is created and experienced. With a modular makeup of 33 leading instrumentalists performing in forces ranging from solos to large ensembles, ICE functions as performer, presenter, and educator, advancing the music of our time by developing innovative new works and new strategies for audience engagement.

Since its founding in 2001, ICE has premiered over 500 compositions, the majority of these new works by emerging composers, in venues ranging from alternate spaces to concert halls around the world. The ensemble received the American Music Center's Trailblazer Award in 2010 for its contributions to the field, and received the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming in 2005 and in 2010.

ICE has released acclaimed albums on the Nonesuch, Kairos, Bridge, Naxos, Tzadik, New Focus, and New Amsterdam labels, with several forthcoming releases on Mode Records. Recent and upcoming highlights include headline performances at the Lincoln Center Festival, Musica Nova Helsinki, and Wien Modern. ICE has worked closely with conductors Ludovic Morlot, Matthias Pintscher, John Adams, and Susanna Mälkki. With leading support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ICE launched ICElab in early 2011. This new program places teams of ICE musicians in close collaboration with six emerging composers each year to develop works that push the boundaries of musical exploration.

Kai Wessel

www.kaiwessel.com

The German countertenor Kai Wessel studied music theory, composition, and singing at Lübeck Academy of Music. He received prizes at the German Vocal Competition in Berlin in 1984 and 1988 and at the Musica Antiqua Competition of the Flanders Festival in Bruges in 1990, and stipends from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, Gotthard Schierse Stiftung of Berlin, and the DAAD. He also served as an assistant of René Jacobs in the production of operas (by Cesti, Cavalli, and Gluck) for the International Week of Early Music in Innsbruck, for the WDR Radio, and at the Hamburg State Opera.

Concerts, radio broadcasts, and recordings have followed under René Jacobs, William Christie, Ton Koopman, Martin Haselböck, Reinhard Goebel, Jordi Savall, Hans-Werner Henze, and others. Wessel belongs to the Ensemble Contrapunctus and the Ensemble Vocal Européen de La Chapelle Royale led by Philippe Herreweghe. He was engaged in the Festivals in Innsbruck, Halle, Göttingen, Bruchsal, Frankfurt, among others. He has performed and premiered works of his own composition and works composed especially for him in Germany and abroad.

Wessel teaches singing and Baroque performance practice at the College of Music in Cologne, and regularly gives summer classes in Austria and Poland.

Noa Frenkel

www.noafrenkel.com

After graduating cum laude from the Rubin Academy of music at the Tel-Aviv University, the Israeli contralto Noa Frenkel continued her vocal studies at the Royal Conservatory of The Netherlands in The Hague. Her concert repertoire ranges from Renaissance to contemporary music. Recent performances include a Handel's Belshazzar and Judas Machabeus, Respigi's Il Tramonto, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde,and the Matthew and John passions of Bach.

Frenkel's opera debut was in Mozart's Zauberflöte conducted by Kenneth Montgomery. Other invitations followed, including A. Shapira's Kastner Trial in Tel-Aviv, Phillip Glass'sAkhnaten in Rotterdam, and Luigi Nono's Prometeo at La Scala in Milan. In 2006 Frenkel made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in the world premiere of Mozart and Chaya Czernowin's Zaide - Adama. Frenkel has recently performed with the Basel opera, the Nantes-Angers opera, and the Dutch Reis opera, as well as in a new production of Zaide -Adama at the opera houses of Bremen and Mannheim for which she has enjoyed wide critical acclaim.

Frenkel is also an admired interpreter of contemporary music, performing regularly with renowned ensembles such as the Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt and the Ensemble Recherche, Freiburg, and has performed recently with the Schönberg Ensemble, Amsterdam and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Paris. She is the soloist of the Dutch ensemble MAE whom with she regularly performs and tours Europe, Japan, and the United States. Many of the ensemble's commissions were especially composed for her voice.

Steven Schick

Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher, by commissioning and premiering more than one hundred new works for percussion. Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, and a Consulting Artist in Percussion at the Manhattan School of Music. He was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002, and from 2000 to 2004 served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland. Schick is founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group red fish blue fish, and in 2007 he assumed the post of Music Director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. Steven Schick recently released three important publications. His book on solo percussion music, The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, was published by the University of Rochester Press; his recording of The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies by John Luther Adams was released by Cantaloupe Music; and, a three-CD set of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis, made in collaboration with red fish blue fish, was issued by Mode Records.

Upcoming Composer Portraits at Miller Theatre

Single tickets: $20-$35
Series season tickets: $68-$100 for any four concerts; $136-$200 for all eight
All concerts begin at 8:00 PM

Chou Wen-chung (b. 1923)
Thursday, October 2, 2014

Chaya Czernowin (b. 1957)
Thursday, October 23, 2014

Bernard Rands (b. 1934)
Thursday, November 13, 2014

Keeril Makan (b. 1972)
Friday, December 5, 2014

Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980)
Thursday, February 5, 2015

Stefano Gervasoni (b. 1962)
Thursday, February 19, 2015

Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964)
Thursday, March 5, 2015

Anna Clyne (b. 1980)
Thursday, April 23, 2015

Photo Courtesy of the Miller Theatre

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