Tippet Rise Announces Highlights of 2023 Summer Season

Tippet Rise Art Center, which celebrates the union between music, art, and nature on a 12,500-acre working ranch, announced today the highlights of its upcoming 2023 season. The art center will open on June 16 for hiking, biking, and sculpture van tours, and the season will include the installation of two sculptures by Alexander Liberman and Louise Nevelson. Tippet Rise's eighth concert season will run for five weeks from August 18 through September 17 and present 15 performances, including the world premieres of new works by Douglas Cuomo and Valentyn Silvestrov, commissioned by Tippet Rise. Complete program details will be announced in early 2023. Registration for the art center's randomized drawing for concert tickets will open on the Tippet Rise website in spring 2023.

"After being isolated for the long years of the pandemic, being together in the Olivier Music Barn had an otherworldly feeling for everyone this past summer. Music seemed truer than usual," said Peter and Cathy Halstead, co-founders of Tippet Rise Art Center. "This coming season, we're going to have both the deep-grounded masterpieces of the past, but also emerging musicians and composers with new approaches to the same profound truths. We will present two new installations, sculptures by artists we have long admired, Alexander Liberman and Louise Nevelson, both born in Ukraine, whose vast steel compositions evoke not only the Industrial Revolution but also the celestial ratios hidden by ancient civilizations in Mayan temples and Tibetan mandala."

New Artworks

Starting in June, the art center's 15 miles of trails will reopen for the season and visitors will be able to hike, bike, or take a sculpture van tour to see more than a dozen outdoor and site-specific works. During the summer, visitors will also encounter Archway II (1984/2016), a newly acquired work by Alexander Liberman (1912-1999). Made of red-painted steel, the 40-foot-tall sculpture will frame the land at Tippet Rise, serving as a metaphorical gateway to the Beartooth Mountain range in the distance. The work is illustrative of Liberman's lifelong fascination with sacred spaces, and the arches and altars people pass through to enter them. Louise Nevelson's Trilogy (1978), a three-piece, large-scale abstract sculpture made of cor-ten, steel, and aluminum will be placed within a short walking distance of the Olivier Music Barn on Tippet Rise's main Cottonwood Campus, separated by a small ridge and installed in a valley on its own. Towering more than forty feet high at its tallest point and extending twelve feet in diameter, the monumental work evokes a family unit or a trio of entities in varied stages of growth and development.

During the 2022 concert season, Tippet Rise added a new large-scale textile work by artist Marie Watt in the Olivier Music Barn's Visitor Center. Depicting a sunset in the clouds, Companion Species (Floating and Held) (2022) evokes the encompassing sense of comfort, warmth, and healing of a cherished blanket. The work also pays tribute to the artist's heritage as a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians, in which blankets are considered precious gifts, and a blessing for the giver and receiver alike.

Returns and Debuts

This summer, Tippet Rise will celebrate the return of pianist, composer, and writer Sir Stephen Hough and the mesmerizing Sandbox Percussion. The art center will also welcome many new artists to its concert spaces for their Tippet Rise debuts, such as pianists Anna Geniushene, 2022 Cliburn Silver Medalist, and Clayton Stephenson, the first Black finalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 and a 2022 Gilmore Young Artist. The sought-after guitarist JIJI will offer a varied program including works by the late Spanish composer Antón García-Abril, father of Ensamble Studio's principal architect of the same name, whose monumental works are integral to the Tippet Rise experience. The celebrated wind quintet Imani Winds and the energetic brass quartet The Westerlies, which have recorded performance films with Tippet Rise, will perform separately at the art center for the first time this summer, in addition to the 2021 Naumburg-winning Merz Trio and the internationally acclaimed Brentano Quartet.

Tippet Rise Commissions and World Premieres

Among the performance highlights for this season will be the world premiere of additional works from Ukrainian composer Valentyn Silvestrov's Five Cycles for Violin and Piano and Five Cycles for Piano, commissioned by Tippet Rise (three pieces already premiered during the 2022 concert season). Sandbox Percussion will premiere a Tippet Rise commission by Douglas Cuomo-composed in response to one of the art center's monumental sculptures by Mark di Suvero, Proverb (2002).

Tippet Rise is also pleased to support the creation of two new works that will premiere outside of the art center. These include the song cycle Songs of Love and Loss by Sir Stephen Hough, a co-commission with Wigmore Hall in London, where it will debut in January 2023. Bookended with two William Butler Yeats poems, Hough's cycle examines the fragility of love. Additionally, Tippet Rise and Palaver Strings have co-commissioned Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen to create a song cycle for Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan and Palaver Strings, the musician-led ensemble based in Portland, ME. The piece will have its premiere in 2023.

New Films

On November 17 in a joint event with Storm King Art Center, Tippet Rise debuted a new performance film created as part of Tippet Rise on Tour, an ongoing project that films artists performing in locations across the country to bring music to people where they are. Directed by Zac James Nicholson at Storm King and set against the backdrop of Alexander Liberman's dramatic and architectural sculpture Iliad (1984), the Grammy-nominated Imani Winds performed Afro Blue by Mongo Santamaria, two movements from Seen by Nathalie Joachim, and Cane by Jason Moran. This film and others from the project series are available to stream on the Tippet Rise website and YouTube channel.

This fall, Tippet Rise partnered with its sister organization the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation to film five Rocky Mountain West-based poets and its co-founder Peter Halstead performing poems on the land in Montana and throughout the art center's artistic spaces. In this special joint series produced in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, celebrated poets Brian Blanchfield, CMarie Fuhrman, Sean Hill, Keetje Kuipers, and M.L. Smoker each offer readings of their own poems and favorites by poets that inspire them. Directed by Matthew Thompson, Above Strands of Earth: Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation at Tippet Rise transcends genre to create a unique transdisciplinary offering, mapping the invisible connections between language, land, sound, and vision. The films will be available at brinkerhoffpoetry.org beginning in January.

Tippet Rise also invites artists to work with in-house sound engineers and filmmakers to record works and albums utilizing its state-of-the-art recording capabilities. A music video of Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No. 5 for Violin, Op. 27 (II. Danse rustique) performed by violinist Will Hagen was recently released and is available to stream on the Tippet Rise website and YouTube channel.

Hiking, Biking, and Sculpture Van Tours

Tippet Rise will reopen to the public on June 16 for hiking, biking, and sculpture van tours of its monumental outdoor sculptures on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Self-guided hiking and biking at the art center are free for everyone. Van tours are priced at $10; free to those under 21. Registration will be available on the art center's website in spring 2023. For the latest information on ticketing, please sign up for the Tippet Rise e-newsletter.

Concert Tickets

Concerts will begin on August 18 and run through September 17 on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays and are priced at $10; free to those 21 and under. Pre-purchased tickets, which are required for concert admission, will be available through a randomized drawing; the drawing will open on the Tippet Rise website in spring 2023. For the latest information on ticketing, please sign up for the Tippet Rise e-newsletter.

Listening To and Watching Tippet Rise from Afar

The Tippet Rise website is a rich and growing multimedia resource, featuring: a Music Download Library of free DXD files, films created by Tippet Rise's in-house and guest filmmakers, photography of scenes from the art center, online events, and conversation through the Tippet Rise Podcast.

Concert footage from several past seasons is now available online. New videos include William Grant Still's Suite for Violin and Piano performed by violinist Geneva Lewis and pianist Audrey Vardanega, and Haydn's Piano Sonata in G Minor, Hob. XVI:44 performed by pianist Pedja Mužijević.

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