The Grammy Award–nominated JACK Quartet, “one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times), is renowned for its expansive programming of 20th- and 21st-century string music. This free outdoor performance, curated in collaboration with the visionary Tania León, features music by four American composers who redefine modern string quartet repertoire. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet 1931 reimagines rhythm and harmony, still sounding fresh almost a century later. Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution (2015) is a thoroughly modern patchwork of “wildly contrasting influences,” weaving together elements from J. S. Bach, Celtic fiddle tunes, The Who, and more. Amy Williams’s new work, Tangled Madrigals, offers a contemporary take on medieval hockets—a dazzling technique in the hands of a string quartet—while the pioneering George Lewis stretches the quartet to its virtuosic limits in a 2022 JACK commission.

Carnegie Hall Citywide: JACK Quartet

Madison Square Park

A “new generation” piano trio featuring three visionary young artists, Stefan Jackiw, Conrad Tao, Jay Campbell.

EPSG:4326

Junction Trio

PPU Pittsburgh Playhouse

Three game-changing musicians combine their talents into one sensational and eclectic group. Violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao have all dazzled Celebrity Series audiences in unexpected pairings, and the trio will deliver a program that interweaves the old and the new: arrangements of chant and madrigals and a Schumann trio sit alongside a Celebrity Series co-commission for the group, Bells and Whistles by Amy Williams.


New England Conservatory

Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s contemporary music ensemble contraBAND presents its first concert of the year.

contraBAND: telephone

Boston Conservatory at Berklee

The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo began a transcription project of Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies in 1998, while in graduate school at the University of Buffalo. The works explore dizzyingly complex rhythmic combinations (often canons with the voices at different speeds) and extremely fast tempos. The Duo will perform 12 of these Studies for four-hands at one piano and one for two pianos. They can be very directly jazz-influenced (3 are from his early “Boogie Woogie Suite”) or highly abstract (a canon where the “melody" is constructed out of long and short repeated notes). After Ligeti discovered Nancarrow’s music in 1981, he said “ His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed, but at the same time emotional... For me it’s the best music of any living composer today.” Though his Three Pieces for Two Pianos (1976) pre-dates this discovery, there are many connections. The Duo will play the middle movement, "Self-portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the background)", which is to be played “as fast as possible—or even faster” and includes canons and phasing, as well as his signature “blocked key” technique and a reference to the end of Chopin’s B-flat minor Sonata. Steve Reich’s ground-breaking minimalist piece from 1967 requires the two performers to pull apart unison patterns as slowly as possible before locking into a new combination. This concert will be a rare opportunity to hear this music performed live. The Duo last performed in Pittsburgh in 2017.

Amy Williams

Events

Past events

Jul 17, 2024

Carnegie Hall Citywide: JACK Quartet · Carnegie Hall

Dec 11, 2023

Junction Trio · Chamber Music Pittsburgh

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