By Daniel Hathaway
No Exit’s recent foray into art song brought new takes to sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay and traditional lullabies on Friday, May 29 at The Bop Stop. Cycles by Robert Honstein and Annika Sokefeldt were vividly realized by soprano Anika Kildegaard and the No Exit ensemble — Cara Tweed (violin), Nicholas Diodore (cello), Sean Gabriel (flutes), Gunnar Owen Hirthe (clarinets), Shuai Wang & Rob Kovacs (pianos), and Katalin La Favre (percussion).
The composers had colorful texts to work with. Millay’s sonnets follow the traditional fourteen-line format in which the final couplet often contains a surprise, and Sokefeldt has deconstructed familiar “Mother Goose” rhymes — along with English and French songs — into what she calls “feminist rager lullabies,” “retelling old lullabies for a new, queer age.”
There was not an open seat to be had at Praxis Fiber Workshop on Saturday, October 25 when the adventurous new music ensemble No Exit began their 17th season with a program of four thoroughly engaging works.
Although great strides have been made in audio technology, latency issues (lag in time due to internet connection) still prevent musicians from seamlessly passing musical lines from multiple locations in real-time. In their most recent collaboration, “New Sound Worlds,” Cleveland-based No Exit and St. Paul-based Zeitgeist bring life to a new work by Scott Miller during which members of both ensembles perform from their homes and studios. The concert is available on-demand 
The new music ensemble No Exit continues its longstanding collaboration with Zeitgeist, their counterparts from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, with “New Sound Worlds,” a free 
New music concerts can run the risk of sinking under the weight of their own self-importance, especially when “world premieres” are involved. Happily, while No Exit takes itself seriously, it goes about its business with a redemptive playfulness, as demonstrated in several of the entries in the hour-long concert that debuted on the ensemble’s YouTube channel on January 29.
With the onslaught of streamed concerts, whether live or pre-recorded, ensembles are now faced with the task of deciding how to present themselves on-screen to an at-home audience.
In a Northeast Ohio music world recently energized amid multiple anniversary seasons, ensembles have faced the challenge of honoring their histories while plunging headlong into the future. Leave it to No Exit new music ensemble, ten years young this season, to prove itself among the most forward-thinking of all. In a concert of world premieres on Saturday, February 16, the chamber collective played a program defined more by promise than by pomp.