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No Exit Presents: pianist Jenny Lin featured in METROPOLIS Reimagined

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by Mike Telin

This week, No Exit presents pianist Jenny Lin featured in METROPOLIS Reimagined at Heights Arts at 7:00 pm on Friday, February 13. The concert is free.

For this multimedia event, Lin will be joined by electronic artist Drake Andersen performing a new score to the 1984 restoration of Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. This new score was created collaboratively by the ten composers of ICEBERG New Music.

This interview is reposted with the permission of the ensemble and author. 

No Exit’s Laura King spoke with the pianist and began by asking what excites her about this project.

[Read more…]

No Exit kicks off season 
with a quartet of events

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by Mike Telin

During the past couple of years, No Exit has taken the online concert format to a new level. As ClevelandClassical.com’s Jarrett Hoffman noted: “Plenty of pre-recorded concerts have offered audiences some sort of new and compelling experience. But few organizations have mined that format with as much joy and silliness — and in general, personality — as Cleveland’s new music ensemble No Exit.”

Keeping that tradition alive, the ensemble chose to open their 2022-23 season with an online concert in collaboration with St. Paul-based Zeitgeist. “As far as the presentation goes it’s probably the best online concert we’ve ever done,” No Exit artistic director Timothy Beyer said during a recent telephone conversation.

The playlist includes Stephen Dembski’s Alta, Per Nørgård’s Night Descending, and the world premiere of Nasim Khorrassani’s Primary Call. That concert, released last week, is available for viewing on No Exit’s website. Click here to watch. 

Beyer noted that beginning this week, the ensemble will put on its presenter hat. “I’m very excited about the next three events, because each one will be amazing. I know we’re always saying that, but it’s really true.” 

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CD Review: Jenny Lin – Stravinsky Solo Piano Works

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by Daniel Hautzinger

Jenny-Lin-Stravinsky-CoverIf Igor Stravinsky were alive today, he would probably get along quite well with the kind of people who live in Brooklyn, sport wispy facial hair, don ugly-patterned sweaters, and qualify their interests and appearance as “ironic.” For irony seemed to be intrinsic to Stravinsky, especially once he entered middle age and began co-opting other styles of music, from Baroque to jazz. Parody is particularly evident in his solo piano works, recently recorded by Jenny Lin for the Steinway & Sons label.

Stravinsky did not compose much for piano, and many of the works he did write are short character pieces. Lin’s CD consists of two larger works, the Sonata and Serenade in A, thirteen small pieces (one of which is a simple arrangement of Mussorgsky and two of which are unfinished sketches), and an arrangement of music from the Firebird Suite. [Read more…]

CD Review: Piano two ways: new recordings by Alexander Schimpf and Jenny Lin

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by Daniel Hathaway

OnSchimpf-CD February 1, shortly after his appearance with the Akron Symphony this weekend, 2011 Cleveland International Piano Competition winner Alexander Schimpf will release his new CD on the OEHMS Classics label. Simply titled “Ravel, Scriabin, Schubert” and recorded at the Munich studios of Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio) not far from Schimpf’s home in Würtzburg, the album is devoted to three works: Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, Scriabin’s Five Preludes, op. 74, and Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat.

Though Schimpf confesses in his thoughtful liner notes that “the only determining idea for this CD” was “recording works that are particularly dear to my heart”, once his program was chosen, he noticed interesting bits of connective tissue between the pieces. They happen to be each composer’s final compositions for the piano, “late works” even for those who, like Schubert, died young. For Scriabin, op. 74 was the last music he wrote. Additionally, Ravel and Scriabin’s pieces date from 1914, “a highly charged period in Central Europe in every respect — socially, artistically and philosophically.” And the “dance-like elements” in Ravel’s suite “also determine large sections of the 3rd and 4th movements of the Schubert Sonata.”  [Read more…]

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