Tippet Rise Art Center Announces Details of its 4th Concert Season

Tippet Rise Art Center, today announced full program details for its fourth concert season, to be presented over the course of seven weeks from July 12 to September 7, 2019. The season's artists will perform 23 recitals and chamber music concerts both indoors and out at the scenic art center, which is set on a 12,000-acre working ranch at the foot of Montana's Beartooth Mountains. Under the direction of newly appointed Artistic Advisor Pedja Muzijevic, the season will bring together some of the world's most sought-after musical artists along with rising stars, in programs that span more than four centuries of repertoire.

Peter and Cathy Halstead, founders of Tippet Rise Art Center, said, "The artists are engaged, the programs have been set, and we're looking forward to the fourth season at Tippet Rise with joy and gratitude. We thank Pedja Muzijevic for helping create such a satisfying and fascinating season of the old and the new, the musicians for joining what has become a Tippet Rise family of artists, and especially our wonderful audiences, who come from right next door and around the world to share these experiences with us. We have new music to offer this season, including our John Luther Adams world premiere. We have a new place where visitors can gather with friends or contemplate nature quietly, at Francis Kéré's beautiful pavilion, which we will call Xylem. And we have the age-old connection between the land, the sky, and music. We are eager to begin."

Continuing Tippet Rise's commitment to commissioning new works, the season features the world premiere of John Luther Adams's Lines Made By Walking (String Quartet No. 5), to be performed on August 3 by the JACK Quartet. John Luther Adams was in residence at Tippet Rise in summer 2018 and began composing this new work then.

John Luther Adams said, "Throughout my creative life, I've found insight and clarity by walking. Lines Made By Walking took this further. Composing in the mornings and walking in the afternoons, I discovered this music not so much through my fingers on the piano keyboard, but rather through my feet on the ground. On my walks at Tippet Rise, I followed the contours of the land-along animal trails and old roads, or striking out cross-country following watersheds and ridgelines. Then, at my desk, I searched for the most fluid and beautiful routes across the musical landscape."

The Fourth Season: An Overview
The Gryphon Trio will begin the season on Friday, July 12 with a program contrasting early chamber music by Beethoven and Brahms with a work by the globe-trotting, Sri Lankan-born composer Dinuk Wijeratne. The next day, members of the Gryphon Trio will be joined by flutist Brandon Patrick George for a concert with works by Haydn, Debussy, Ravel, and Steve Reich (Vermont Counterpoint, for flute and tape). Internationally acclaimed pianist Stephen Hough will return to Tippet Rise to conclude the first week's schedule on July 13 with a deeply thoughtful and virtuosic program of works by Bach, Chopin, Busoni, and Liszt, as well as his own Sonata No. 4 (Vida Breve).

Also returning to Tippet Rise for this year's concerts is the St. Lawrence String Quartet, whose program on July 19 will combine quartets by Haydn with Latin-tinged contemporary works by Jonathan Berger and Osvaldo Golijov. The following day, members of the quartet will perform works by Bach, Beethoven, and Prokofiev, including a Golijov arrangement of Beethoven bagatelles. Pianist and composer Julien Brocal, who received the 2018 Newcomer of the Year Award from BBC Music Magazine, will return to Tippet Rise on July 20 to perform the world premiere of three of his own compositions - Reflections, Into the Wild, and Snowing on the Moon-as well as two of Chopin's Ballades and works by Bach, and the distinguished nature-inspired Latvian composer P?teris Vasks.

Pianist Aristo Sham made a stir internationally in 2017 by winning prizes at the Verbier Festival and the Clara Haskil, Saint-Priest, and Viotti international piano competitions. On August 2, he will play a Romantic recital with works by Schumann and Brahms, followed the next day by a performance with cellist Gabriel Cabezas and violinist Katie Hyun in works by Haydn and Mendelssohn. The season's third week will reach its climax on August 3 with an all-John Luther Adams program featuring the JACK Quartet, including the world premiere of the Quartet No. 5.

Week four of the season will be a mini-residency for pianist Roman Rabinovich, violinist Paul Huang, and the Escher String Quartet. Their wide-ranging programs will span repertoire from Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Dvo?ák, and Saint-Saëns to György Ligeti's trailblazing 1951-53 Musica ricercata.

Celebrated pianist Behzod Abduraimov will make his Tippet Rise debut on August 16 in a concert of music by Liszt and Mussorgsky, including Liszt's transcription of Wagner's Liebestod. On August 17, the Rolston String Quartet will perform works by Haydn and Debussy in the morning, followed by an evening performance by pianist Jenny Chen. A rising star who has performed annually at Tippet Rise since the 2016 inaugural season, she will appear at the art center this year after making her Carnegie Hall debut, playing an ambitious selection of pieces by Chopin and Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Opus 101, a turning point to the composer's late style.

A special "festival weekend" on August 23 - 25 will feature the art center's Artistic Advisor and pianist Pedja Muzijevic, joined by seven musicians in residence. They are acclaimed violinist Benjamin Beilman; violinist Jennifer Frautschi, a two-time GRAMMY nominee and Avery Fisher career grant recipient; violists Ayane Kozasa and Nathan Schram from the Aizuri and Attacca quartets, respectively; cellist Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir; oboist James Austin Smith; and bassist Anthony Manzo. They will join forces for five concerts, each sixty minutes long, with a feast of solo and chamber music by Telemann, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Dvo?ák, Dohnányi, Berio, and Reich.

Tippet Rise will close the season by welcoming members of Ensemble Connect, a two-year fellowship program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. These rising young talents will showcase pieces by Boccherini, Kodály, and Brahms on September 6, and by Mozart, Paul Wiancko, Alexandra Gardner, and David Bruce on September 7. Piano duo Anderson & Roe will perform the last concert of the season with a program of Mozart, Stravinsky, Piazzolla, and Paul Schoenfield, along with the duo's arrangements of the ballet music from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story Suite and their own Hallelujah Variations (Variations on a Theme by Leonard Cohen).

The Experience of Music at Tippet Rise
Friday and Saturday evening concerts at Tippet Rise are performed in the 150-seat Olivier Music Barn, an intimate space that combines the size and proportions of some of Europe's most historic halls with the beautiful simplicity of rural Montana's vernacular architecture. Providing exceptional technical sophistication within a structure built by Gunnstock Timber Frames, the Olivier Music Barn was recently awarded LEED® Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Weather permitting, late morning and afternoon concerts take place at the open-air Domo, a 98-foot-long, 16-foot-tall, acoustically rich sculptural structure designed by the innovative Ensamble Studio. Performances may also be scheduled at other large-scale sculptures that are seamlessly set within the landscape. Pre-concert lectures are offered at the Tiara, a 100-seat outdoor acoustic shell, and at Stillwater cabin, a gathering and rehearsal space.

Performances showcase Tippet Rise's growing collection of outstanding pianos. Visiting artists are offered the opportunity to select their pianos from among some of the finest and most historic instruments in the world, including CD-18, the concert piano of Vladimir Horowitz and Eugene Istomin.

In addition to regularly scheduled programs, two family concerts especially designed for younger audiences will also be presented, with details to be announced at a later date.

For those who are unable to attend concerts in person, the Olivier Music Barn is equipped with state-of-the-art recording technology, and recorded performances are added regularly to the Tippet Rise website and to the art center's YouTubechannel.

A New Gathering Space Opens at Tippet Rise
Summer 2019 will feature the inauguration of a major addition to the extraordinary ensemble of built structures and outdoor sculpture at Tippet Rise: a new 1,900-square-foot pavilion, Xylem, designed by the world-renowned architect Francis Kéré. Named to evoke the vital internal layers of a tree's living structure, Xylem is a place where visitors may gather to converse, contemplate the views of the aspen and cottonwood trees near the bank of Grove Creek, or sit and meditate in solitude.

Kéré drew inspiration for his design from the traditional togunas of the Dogon culture of Mali: sacred shelters with wooden pillars and layered roofs of wood and millet straw, which protect from the sun and provide ventilation for the space. Xylem is being constructed of locally and sustainably sourced ponderosa and lodgepole pine, and features a canopy of vertical logs above the seating areas, to create both shelter and a play of light and shadow.

In keeping with the educational mission of Tippet Rise, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is supporting Kéré in his work to build environmentally sustainable and climatically appropriate schools in West Africa. Tippet Rise is funding the construction of the Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School, a new school the architect has designed in his birthplace, the village of Gando in Burkina Faso.

Tippet Rise in New York at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
In celebration of "Nature-Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial," co-organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Cube design museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands, Tippet Rise Art Center is organizing a special concert in New York on June 13 (6PM) for the museum's "Cocktails at Cooper Hewitt" summer series. Flutist Brandon Patrick George, violinists Jennifer Frautschi and Katie Hyun, violists Nathan Schram and Caeli Smith, cellist Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, and bassist Anthony Manzo will perform works by Haydn, Debussy, Reich, Boccherini, Bartók and Lanner in the museum's Arthur Ross Terrace and Garden. The concert-which includes excerpts from Tippet Rise's 2019 program, to be performed by some of the same musicians-also celebrates Ensamble Studio's large-scale, site-specific outdoor installation as part of the Triennial, titled Petrified River. The work is comprised of a 40-foot-long concrete "river" bookended by a "lake" and "mountain" that represent the transformation process of Manhattan from wild nature to an urbanized flattened landscape, and is a petrified metaphor for the rich landscape that was once Mannahatta or "island of many hills." Ensamble Studio's project as part of the Triennial is supported by the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, and Petrified Riverwill be showcased at Tippet Rise during a future season.

Art and More at Tippet Rise
Tippet Rise is anchored in the belief that art, music, architecture, and nature are inextricably linked in the human experience, each making the others more powerful.

The art center has a growing collection of large-scale sculptures and other works by some of the world's foremost artists and architects. Many are site-specific compositions, aiming to transcend the boundaries between art, architecture and nature. Artworks set within the landscape include several sculptural structures by Ensamble Studio, including the 25-foot-tall Beartooth Portal (2015), composed of two vertical rocklike forms that stand approximately 25 feet apart at ground level and lean together at the top; the similarly designed 26-foot-tall Inverted Portal (2016), and the 98-foot-long, 16-foot-tall Domo (2016). Tippet Rise is also home to two monumental works by the internationally renowned sculptor Mark di Suvero:Beethoven's Quartet (2003) and Proverb (2002); two site-specific works including Satellite # 5: Pioneer (2016) by Stephen Talasnik and Daydreams (2015) by Patrick Dougherty; and two works by Alexander Calder on loan from the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: Two Discs (1965) and Stainless Stealer (1966). Two paintings by Isabelle Johnson, an original owner of part of the land on which Tippet Rise Art Center is situated and one of Montana's first Modernist painters, have been acquired by Tippet Rise and hang in the Olivier Music Barn.

As an institution founded to serve its neighbors in Montana as much as visiting musicians, artists, and audiences, Tippet Rise develops and supports year-round education programs in schools at the K-12 level, local colleges and universities, and other organizations.

Ticketing Information and Access
Tippet Rise will reopen to the public on Friday, July 5, 2019, one week before the start of the summer music series, for tours of its monumental outdoor sculptures on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Concerts and van tours are priced at $10; free to those 21 and under. Hiking and biking at the art center are free for everyone. Prior registration via the website is required for all visitors, available beginning on March 13 at 8:00 AM Mountain Time.

Tickets for the season's performances will be available through a randomized drawing, for which registration via the Tippet Rise website is required. The registration period opens at 12 PM (noon) Mountain Time on Tuesday, February 19 and closes on Monday, March 11 at 5:00 PM Mountain Time. Winners will be selected at random on Tuesday, March 12, and notified by email. Winners may purchase up to four tickets to one performance or divide their tickets among multiple performances. For additional details and to enter the drawing for Season Four, please visit www.tippetrise.org. Registration for the drawing is limited to one entry per person.