631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
USA
Nothing is Real
Serie Blanc (Pierre Jodlowski)
Commission TBA (Kate Moore)
All the Pretty Colours of the Rainbow (Brian Shepard)
Nothing is Real (Alvin Lucier)
Pasaka (Vykintas Baltakas)
White Parasol (Ian Dicke)
Three Etudes (Nico Muhly)
Brooklyn, October 5, 1941 (Annie Gosfield)
Strange times are these in which we live. New classical music has become so fragmented that it is impossible to speak of in terms of a codified style. Post-minimalism, totalism, serialism, neoromanticism, Brooklyn—these are all words used to describe new music. Indeed, the very definition of classical music has become elusive, and hotly debated.
Nothing is Real is a kaleidoscopic concert of fleeting sonic images and epic tales that celebrates our current situation. Pierre Jodlowski’s Série Blanche stacks layers of gentle piano textures for a cumulative, crushing effect, while Ian Dicke’s White Parasol meditates on the loss of shelf-ice on the High Arctic. The validity of equal temperament is up for grabs in Brian Shepard’s vertigo-inducing All the Pretty Colours of the Rainbow, while George Crumb deconstructs the nature of the piano itself in A Little suite for Christmas A.D. 1979. Vykintas Baltakas challenges the pianist to recite a story in Lithuanian in the high-flying Pasaka, while the pianist’s fingers never touch the keys in Annie Gosfield Brooklyn, October 5, 1941. Luminary Alvin Lucier captures strawberry fields in a teapot in Nothing is Real, while Kate Moore provides a new work in her rippling, swirling and vibrating musical language.
Strange times, indeed. But, it’s “nothing to get hung about…”