Tippet Rise Art Center Announces 2022 Season Details

Tippet Rise Art Center, located on a 12,500-acre working ranch nestled at the foot of Montana's Beartooth Mountains, today announced full details of its seventh concert season, taking place over five weeks from August 26 to September 25, 2022. The programs include three world premieres of Tippet Rise commissions and the performances of more than 50 works and 15 concerts by some of the most sought-after artists along with rising stars. Celebrating the union of music, land, art, and architecture, the art center will add four new sculptures to the large-scale works and innovative architectural structures sited across its hills and rolling meadows.

Registration for the randomized drawing for concert tickets opens on the Tippet Rise website on March 22.

"Over the past two years, our team at Tippet Rise has expanded the wonderful resources on our website, sharing performances and films to move people wherever they live," said Peter and Cathy Halstead, co-founders of Tippet Rise Art Center. "But there is nothing to compare with the experience that Tippet Rise was founded to offer: the immediacy of live music and the personal experience of being alone with sculpture in our vast landscape; music in spaces designed to emulate acclaimed acoustic precedents and art in a triangulation that enlarges music with Montana's immense skies and its rolling hills. We are thrilled and grateful to be able to gather once again with our audience, who this year will discover new concert artists and repertoire, and dramatic new sculptures, which expand the Tippet Rise experience they already know."

New Works

Continuing Tippet Rise's commitment to commissioning new works, the season features four world premieres, three of them Tippet Rise commissions. Composer Reena Esmail's 2022 Tippet Rise commission for solo cello will be performed by Arlen Hlusko. Bojan Louis's 2021 Tippet Rise commission, Dólii for guitar, will be performed by Johnny Gandelsman. Fred Hersch's Tippet Rise commission for piano will be performed by Pedja Mužijević. Mužijević will also perform the world premiere performance of excerpts from Gregory Spears's Seven Days.

This year, Tippet Rise is also celebrating a Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for John Luther Adams's 2019 Tippet Rise commission Lines Made by Walking (String Quartet No. 5), performed by the JACK Quartet and recorded at Tippet Rise. Sandbox Percussion's performance of Andy Akiho's bold, genre-defying work Seven Pillars has been nominated in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance categories after Tippet Rise executive produced and co-presented the digital world premiere.

New Sculptures

When Tippet Rise opens for hiking and biking on June 10, visitors to the art center will enjoy four new sculptures, which join Tippet Rise's nine monumental and site-specific works, and the revitalization of a beloved existing work.

Patrick Dougherty will return to the art center to reimagine his 2015 work, Daydreams. While the interior of the reproduction historic schoolhouse, which features shaped willow branches, will remain the same, Dougherty will remake the outdoor installation of branches into a new tangle of school-day stickworks.

Ensamble Studio (Débora Mesa and Antón García-Abril) have created a new series of works titled Folds (2022). The 16 concrete seats, inspired by and cast from draped canvas and with organic shapes mimicking armchairs, chaises lounges, benches, and even a loveseat, will be installed across the rolling landscape. Visitors will happen upon these hybrid art-seats as they hike and bike the 13.25 miles of trails that wind across the ranch.

New to the rolling foothills of Tippet Rise are Ai Weiwei's Iron Tree (2013) and Mark di Suvero's Whale's Cry (1981-1983). Iron Tree, a meditation on individualism within a larger society, will stand on a rise and, from a distance, blend seamlessly into the landscape. Whale's Cry, which plays with gravity and deftly balances dense materials to allow graceful movement, is the third monumental work by di Suvero to be installed at the art center.

2022 Concert Season Overview

Tippet Rise's 2022 concert season begins on August 26 with Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient violinist Jennifer Frautschi, Grammy-winning cellist Arlen Hlusko, and pianist Zoltán Fejérvári, laureate of the first prize at the 2017 Concours musical international de Montréal, performing Mozart's Violin Sonata No. 22 in A Major and Schumann's Piano Trio in F Major. Hlusko will also perform the world premiere of Reena Esmail's work for cello, a Tippet Rise commission and a celebration of Hlusko's September Commissioning Cello project in which she invited composers to write music she could record while isolated due to the pandemic, resulting in more than 20 works. Violinist Katie Hyun, violists Jordan Bak and Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, and cellist Gabriel Cabezas are joining to perform string sextets by Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky (Aug. 27), which will be followed by a recital by pianist Zoltán Fejérvári featuring Bach's Partita No. 2 in C Minor, waltzes by Schubert and Ravel, and Bartók's Dance Suite arranged for piano (Aug. 28).

The second week opens on September 2 with a recital by renowned pianist Pedja Mužijević, who serves as Tippet Rise's artistic advisor, featuring the world premiere of Fred Hersch's Barcarolle (a Tippet Rise commission). The piece is an example of music connecting people, celebrating the late Charles Hamlen, a champion and friend of Hersch and Mužijević, former artistic advisor at Tippet Rise, and a beloved figure in the music business. Mužijević's performance also includes Haydn's Piano Sonatas in G Major, E-flat Major, and G Minor (Hob. XVI: 40, 44, and 52), and the world premiere performance of three of the 21 movements from Gregory Spears's cycle Seven Days, which was inspired by a pandemic year filled with isolation and solitude and created as a daily listening experience connecting listeners with the present moment and the cycle of the week.

On September 3, the acclaimed ensemble Sandbox Percussion, a leading proponent of contemporary percussion chamber music, perform John Luther Adams's formative work in nine movements, songbirdsongs, with Brandon Patrick George, one of America's leading flute soloists and chamber musicians, and multifaceted artist and flutist Alex Sopp, who has toured and recorded with composers and songwriters including Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and St. Vincent, among others. Internationally acclaimed pianist Marc-André Hamelin, recipient of 11 Grammy nominations, offers a recital showcasing C.P.E. Bach's Sonata in A-flat Major, included in Hamelin's new and praised album, and Beethoven's Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major (Sept. 4).

Pianist Richard Goode, one of today's most revered American recitalists, starts the third week on September 9 with a solo program featuring Haydn's Andante con variazioni in F Minor (Hob. XVII:6), along with Beethoven's Bagatelles No. 6 in G Major and No. 7 in C Major from Opus 119 and his Diabelli Variations. Rising stars cellist Sterling Elliott, winner of the 2019 National Sphinx Competition (Senior Division) and currently a Kovner Fellow at The Juilliard School, and pianist Wynona Wang, winner of the 2018 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, play Brian Raphael Nabors's and Shostakovich's cello and piano sonatas, and Saint-Saëns' Havanaise (Sept. 10). Violinist Geneva Lewis, recipient of a 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and pianist, performing arts entrepreneur, and composer Audrey Vardanega, who toured in Europe, China, and the United States, perform William Grant Still's Suite for Violin and Piano, Gareth Farr's Wakatipu for Solo Violin, and Schumann's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D Minor (Sept. 11).

The esteemed Calidore String Quartet, currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's The Bowers Program, returns to Tippet Rise for the fourth week, which begins on September 16 with a program coupling excerpts of Wynton Marsalis's At the Octoroon Balls with Brahms's String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat Major. Canada's Gryphon Trio, winner of three Juno Awards for Classical Album of the Year, follows with Haydn's Piano Trio in A Major (Hob. XV:18) and Beethoven's Piano Trio in B-flat Major, "Archduke" (Sept. 17). On September 18, the Gryphon Trio will feature Kelly-Marie Murphy's Give Me Phoenix Wings to Fly for Piano Trio and cellist Roman Borys will join the Calidore String Quartet in Schubert's String Quintet in C Major.

The fifth week starts on September 23 with the Aizuri Quartet, recipients of the Grand Prize and the CAG Management Prize at the 2018 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition, performing Schumann's String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor and the Aizuri Songbook, which includes classical lieder, traditional tunes, and a collection of works from composers admired by the quartet, such as Eleanor Alberga and Anna Roberts-Gevalt. Pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, who first made waves as the 2010 Chopin Competition First Prize winner, plays a recital comprising Chopin's Polonaise-fantaisie in A-flat Major, Władysław Szpilman's suite The Life of the Machines, and Prokofiev's Sonata No. 8 in B-flat Major (Sept. 24). Grammy-winning violinist and guitarist Johnny Gandelsman, a founding member of Brooklyn Rider, brings Tippet Rise's 2022 concert season to a close with a program including selections from This is America, the violinist's commissioning project celebrating the diversity of the United States and comprising more than 20 new works for solo violin created by American and US-based composers, including the World Premiere of Dólii for guitar (a Tippet Rise commission), written by Bojan Louis, a poet, composer, and member of the Navajo Nation (Sept. 25).

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