Join Earplay on October 17 for a very special concert performance, originally scheduled to coincide with the centennial birthday of longtime friend of the ensemble, the late composer Andrew Imbrie. In tribute, Earplay will perform the composer's evocative “Dream Sequence”, a large-scale work for mixed octet in three movements. Other highlights on this concert include Hyo-Shin Na, “To the Ice Mountains,” Tyshawn Sorey, “For Fred Lerdahl,” and Fred Lerdahl, “Solitude.”
Performing on this concert will be core Earplayers Terrie Baune (vn), Tod Brody (fl), Peter Josheff (cl), Thalia Moore (vc), and Ellen Ruth Rose (va), conducted by Mary Chun, with guest artist Keisuke Nakagoshi (pn). This concert will be presented in a new venue for the ensemble, as part of the O1C series. Concert begins at 7:30; pre-show dialogue at 6:45. Reception TBD.
About the Music
Imbrie’s “Dream Sequence” moves through states of fading consciousness, dream-state confrontations, and flights of fancy, at turns playful, passionate, and perturbed. Earplay commissioned Hyo-shin Na’s “To the Ice Mountains” for its 2020 season, which was put on hold as the pandemic struck. The composer’s initial idea for the piece emerged from an encounter with Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story, “The Bucket Rider.” “For Fred Lerdahl” is Tyshawn Sorey’s musical tribute to the composer Fred Lerdahl, one of Sorey’s musical mentors. Described in the New York Times as “shadowy and noctural,” “For Fred Lerdahl” at times references the gestural and harmonic language of Morton Feldman, whose music had an outsize impact on Sorey, yet the piece makes a clear break with Feldman in some of its more tonal passages. Written for Earplay as a tribute to the late eminent composer Andrew Imbrie (1921-2007) in honor of his centenary year, Fred Lerdahl’s Solitude is a subtle and evocative work of contemporary musical impressionism, creating a delicate and poignant mood of nostalgic reverence in understated pastel shades.