by Daniel Hathaway
On Sunday afternoon, March 4 in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Tim Weiss and his Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble once again made seemingly easy work out of several challenging scores. It must be every composer’s dream come true to have their creations brought to life by an ensemble that can play at such a high level of precision and understanding. Surely that sentiment was shared by the good-sized audience. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
When asked to create a work commemorating the 2013 centenary of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Le Sacré du printemps), composer Vijay Iyer began to think about what lay at the heart of Stravinsky’s groundbreaking ballet score.
“Given that Le Sacre is a fantasy of the folkloric springtime ritual from some mythic ancient past in Russia, I thought it was an opportunity for us to deal in a reality-based way with that transformative period of springtime as it is expressed, celebrated, and experienced in Indian culture,” Iyer said during a telephone conversation from Portugal.
On October 19 at 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, Vijay Iyer and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) will perform Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, with film by Prashant Bhargava. The program will also include the premiere of an arrangement of The Rite of Spring by Cliff Colnot. The concert is presented in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition, Art and Stories from Mughal India. [Read more…]
This week the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Performing Arts series will present three musically diverse concerts in Gartner Auditorium.
On Thursday, December 11 at 7:30 pm, The Tallis Scholars make their CMA debut with a program of Renaissance choral music by William Byrd, Josquin des Prez, and Edmund Turges. Director Peter Phillips founded The Tallis Scholars in 1973. Through recordings and concert performances, the ensemble has established itself as the leading exponent of Renaissance sacred music throughout the world. Phillips has worked with the group to create, through good tuning and blend, the purity and clarity of sound that he feels best serves the Renaissance repertoire, allowing every detail of the musical lines to be heard. It is this resulting beauty of sound for which The Tallis Scholars has become so widely renowned.
by Mike Telin
Deemed by the New York Times as “a hotbed of contemporary-classical players” and a “rural experimental haven,” the Oberlin Conservatory of Music has a history of cultivating innovation and entrepreneurship in its students. “Oberlin gives students the opportunity to experiment,” says Tim Weiss, director of Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble. “Undergraduates don’t really think about the limited number of ways one has to enter the music industry, they are only thinking about music as an art form. It’s very pure and they have no fears about entering the industry so I think that students are better equipped to be entrepreneurs because of their involvement in experimentation.”
On Friday, October 4 at 8:00 pm in Warner Concert Hall, Tim Weiss will lead the Contemporary Music Ensemble (CME) in a concert featuring guest artists and three-time Grammy-winning eighth blackbird, a group originally formed at Oberlin. The program includes music by composer-in-residence Benjamin Broening, Kaija Saariaho, Lisa Kaplan, Derek Bermel, and David Lang. The concert also features the premieres of pieces by Oberlin Technology in Music and Related Arts (T.I.M.A.R.A.) professors Tom Lopez and Peter Swendsen
Weiss, who reluctantly takes credit for forming eighth blackbird, says that he first put them together as a chamber group. [Read more…]