Soper, Lash, and Pintscher Performances on the East Coast

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 16, 2015, 11:06 a.m.

Brooklyn's National Sawdust has already become one of the most vital venues for new music in New York, adding to an already-vibrant cultural scene on the East Coast. The New York Philharmonic has recognized this by holding their 2015 CONTACT! Series in this new venue, and on November 16th, they give a performance of Kate Soper's Into That World Inverted, for horn and piano.

Inspired by the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Into That World Inverted imagines the inside of instruments, "where left is always right,/where the shadows are really the body,/where we stay awake all night,/where the heavens are shallow as the sea[...]". Check out a recording of it below. 

 This performance comes on the heels of the world premiere of Hannah Lash's Two Movements for Violin and Piano and the US Premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Profiles of Light triptych, both given brave and empassioned debut performances on November 13 by the Ensemble InterContemporain at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. A Washington Post review of the performance sums it up:

A work of almost prayer-like gentleness opened the program. Hannah Lash’s lovely, understated “Two Movements for Violin and Piano” (a commission by the Library’s McKim Fund, in its premiere) used the simplest of means — a cantabile violin line over a spare and open piano accompaniment — to create a sense of wistful reflection, then hesitation, before finding release in the soaring second movement.

Anthony Cheung Shares Award from the Inaugural Marie-Josee Kravis Prize

by Ted Gordon on July 10, 2012, 3:03 p.m.

PSNY composer Anthony Cheung has been chosen to share in the inaugural Marie-Josee Kravis Prize for New Music at the New York Philharmonic, at the request of legendary composer Henri Dutilleux.

The Kravis Prize for New Music is bestowed every two years for extraordinary artistic endeavor in the field of new music, and was awarded to Henri Dutilleux in 2011. At the award ceremony, Dutilleux announced that he would share the $200,000 award with three composers, each of whom would write a work to be performed by the Orchestra in his honor. 

On June 26, 2012, the New York Philharmonic announced that Anthony Cheung, along with Franck Krawczyk and Peter Eötvös, had been chosen to share the award and to compose a new work for the orchestra.

Congrats to Anthony from all of us at Schott!

(And belated congratulations to Schott composer Henri Dutilleux! Read our newsletter story about his award here.)