American Composers Showcase: Adán, Galante, Iglesia, with Stravinsky’s Les Noces

This concert is made possible with the support of the Fritz Reiner Fund, the Columbia University Music Performance Program, and The Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies at Columbia University.

This concert is free and open to the public; no reservation is needed.

The Argento Chamber Ensemble, in conjunction with the Princeton Chamber Choir and Columbia Classical Performers, presents a concert of three world premiere intermedia concert works alongside Stravinsky’s Les Noces.

Stravinsky’s masterwork, alongside his creations with Diaghilev for the Ballet Russes, exemplified a composer working across genres and media to create a unified interdisciplinary work. Les Noces here functions as the touchstone for three new pieces that take such boundary-crossing composition to exciting new limits.

The first is Fonoptera, by Víctor Adán, for four player pianos and eight composer-built one-bit mechanical instruments. Electronics precisely control all instruments, allowing incredibly detailed small-scale interactions to scale upwards into masses of spatialized sound. Along the way are explorations of the blurry boundaries between rhythm, timbre, and space. Composer, conductor, and Argento Chamber Ensemble leader Michel Galante premieres the movement ‘Duos and Trios’ from Lean-To, a collaborative work with choreographer Kate Weare. Written for three filmed dancers and two instruments, it contains a variety of nuanced relationships within the instruments, within the dancers, and between the two groups. In American Engineer, Daniel Iglesia combines an instrumental ensemble, electronic sound, and live video for 3D glasses into one fused sensory experience. Iglesia takes samples from a mid-20th-century industrial film and weaves a tangible, though ever-shifting, network of correlations between the three media.

The premieres will be performed by the Argento Chamber Ensemble. As the finale, Les Noces will be performed by soloists from the Ekmeles Ensemble, the Princeton Chamber Choir, pianists from Columbia Classical Performers, the Percussion Ensemble of Queens College, and conducted by Michel Galante.

The concert will be presented free of charge due to generous support from the Harriman Institute, the Music Performance Program at Columbia University, the Fritz Reiner Fund at Columbia University, Yamaha, and Miller Theatre.

Information on Argento, as well as a video preview of the concert, can be found at http://www.argentomusic.org