The Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can Present Jenny Lin

Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum's 2018-2019 concert season, pairing innovative music with the Museum's exhibitions and showcasing leading female performers and composers, continues on Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 7:30pm.

Mystical Soviet-era Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya meets American minimalist master composer Philip Glass in a brilliant contrast of works for solo piano, featuring the New York premiere of Glass' Passacaglia, performed by the remarkable Jenny Lin. Set alongside the Jewish Museum's exhibition Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922, this concert features a collision of recently re-discovered music from early 20th century Russia with some of the most acclaimed piano works by contemporary legend Philip Glass. Jenny Lin is a New York-based pianist by way of Taiwan and Austria. Celebrated for her performances of classical and contemporary music, she has joined Philip Glass over the last five years in his ongoing world tour of his complete Piano Etudes.

Program:

Galina Ustvolskaya: Preludes Nos. 1, 2, 5 (1953)

Philip Glass: Etudes (selections) (1994-2012)

Galina Ustvolskaya: Sonata No. 5 (1986)

Philip Glass: Passacaglia (2017) NY Premiere

Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922 traces the fascinating post-revolutionary years when the history of art was shaped in Vitebsk, far from Russia's main cities. Through nearly 160 works and documents, the exhibition presents the artistic output of three iconic figures - Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich - as well as works by students and teachers of the Vitebsk school. The exhibition is organized by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with the Jewish Museum, New York.

The 2018-2019 season marks the fifth year of the Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can's partnership, producing dynamic musical performances inspired by the Museum's diverse slate of exhibitions. Additional performances this season will feature the string quartets by Julia Wolfe performed by ETHEL (Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 7:30pm) and a final concert in spring 2019 to be announced.

About Jenny Lin

Jenny Lin is one of the most respected young pianists today, admired for her adventurous programming and charismatic stage presence. The Washington Post praises "Lin's confident fingers... spectacular technique... ", "...surely one of the most interesting pianists in America right now..." and Gramophone Magazine has hailed her as "an exceptionally sensitive pianist". Her orchestral engagements have included the American Symphony Orchestra, NDR and SWR German Radio orchestras, and Orchestra Sinfonica Nationale della RAI. Her concerts have taken her to Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center's Great Performers, SF Jazz, MoMA, Stanford LIVE, and National Gallery of Art, appearing at Festivals such as Mostly Mozart, BAM's Next Wave, Spoleto USA, Kings Place London, Chopin Festival Austria, and Schleswig-Holstein Festival Germany.

Since 2000, Jenny's discography includes more than 30 recordings on Steinway & Sons, Hänssler Classic, eOne, BIS, New World and Albany Records. She is also the central figure in "Cooking for Jenny" by Elemental Films, a musical documentary portraying her journey to Spain. Other media appearances include CBS Sunday Morning, NPR Performance Today, and "Speaking for Myself," a film about Manhattan as seen through the eyes of eight contemporary artists by filmmaker Bert Shapiro. Born in Taiwan and raised in Austria, Jenny studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the Fondazione Internazionale per il pianoforte in Como, Italy. She holds a bachelor's degree in German literature from The Johns Hopkins University.

Highlights of the 2018/19 season include performances throughout North America, Europe, and Latin America; her continuing "Melody's Mostly Musical Day" children's concerts; the release of the complete Nocturnes of Chopin, piano music of Artur Schnabel, and the complete Piano Etudes of Philip Glass. Since 2014, she has joined Mr. Glass in his ongoing world tour of his Etudes. Jenny is a Steinway Artist.

About Galina Ustvolskaya

Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) studied from 1937 to 1939 at the Music College in her native St. Petersburg and at the Rimski-Korsakov Conservatory there until 1947. Her composition teacher, Dmitri Shostakovich, supported her against the resistance of his colleagues in the Composers' Union. Alongside Sofia Gubaidulina, Ustvolskaya is considered Russia's most significant woman composer.

Ustvolskaya's compositions are "symphonic" in thought, regardless of their actual scoring or temporal scale. Her music carries an incredible rhythmic energy; bar lines are often missing from her scores, resulting in astonishingly asymmetrical polyphonic constructions, and dynamic developments are marked by extreme contrasts. Her works bear witness to a strict, independent spirit, an inexorable will, and deep religiosity.

About Philip Glass

Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble, and wide-ranging collaborations, Philip Glass (b. 1937) has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School, in Aspen with Darius Milhaud, in Europe, with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble - seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; ten symphonies; two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Tickets for the November 15, 2018 program are $20 general public; $16 students and seniors; and $12 for Jewish Museum members and Bang on a Can list members, and include exhibition admission prior to the performance. Further program and ticket information is available by calling 212.423.3337 or at TheJewishMuseum.org/calendar. The Jewish Museum is located at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, NYC.

Support

Public Programming at the Jewish Museum is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About Bang on a Can

Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents, and records new work, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Bang on a Can plays "a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn't concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come." (The New York Times)

Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother's Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. "When we started Bang on a Can, we never imagined that our 12-hour marathon festival of mostly unknown music would morph into a giant international organization dedicated to the support of experimental music, wherever we would find it," write Bang on a Can Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. "But it has, and we are so gratified to be still hard at work, all these years later. The reason is really clear to us - we started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act - that people needed to hear this music and they needed to hear it presented in the most persuasive way, with the best players, with the best programs, for the best listeners, in the best context. Our commitment to changing the environment for this music has kept us busy and growing, and we are not done yet."

Current projects include the annual Bang on a Can Marathon; The People's Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world every year; recording projects; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA - a professional development program for young composers and performers led by today's pioneers of experimental music; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can's extreme street band that offers mobile performances re-contextualizing unusual music; Found Sound Nation, a new technology-based musical outreach program now partnering with the State Department of the United States of America to create OneBeat, a revolutionary, post-political residency program that uses music to bridge the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries; cross-disciplinary collaborations and projects with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and more. Each new program has evolved to answer specific challenges faced by today's musicians, composers and audiences, in order to make innovative music widely accessible and wildly received. Bang on a Can's inventive and aggressive approach to programming and presentation has created a large and vibrant international audience made up of people of all ages who are rediscovering the value of contemporary music.

About the Jewish Museum

Located on New York City's famed Museum Mile, the Jewish Museum is a distinctive hub for art and Jewish culture for people of all backgrounds. Founded in 1904, the Museum was the first institution of its kind in the United States and is one of the oldest Jewish museums in the world. Devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, the Museum offers intellectually engaging exhibitions and programs, and maintains a unique collection of nearly 30,000 works of art, ceremonial objects, and media reflecting the global Jewish experience over more than 4,000 years.

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