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Please enjoy this concert I recently did with Harvard’s Fromm concerts! Filmed at National Sawdust, it features two solo premieres by Dongryul Lee and Jeffrey Mumford and two duo works by Natasha Barrett and Rebecca Saunders with marvelous pianist Conor Hanick. More info at https://frommfoundation.fas.harvard.edu/fromm-players-2021 Also, on their Youtube channel, check out our interviews with the composers, done in the weeks before and after the concert.
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Usually the annual Fromm concerts at Harvard are a pair of live events, co-curated by a professor from their music department and a guest artist. Thanks to musicologist Anne Shreffler for the honor of co-curating with her and for the very enjoyable conversations and collaboration. I met Anne in 2016 at a Tufts/Harvard conference on Luigi Nono’s music, at which Chris Burns and I were invited to perform “La lontananza nostalgia utopia futura”. It’s been wonderful to have a fascinating dialogue with Anne on the music of our time.
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We worked together last year planning two programs, one a recital, one chamber and ensemble music. When they had to be canceled due to the pandemic, I was asked to film a recital. I thought about what would be most fun to work on and share on video right now. I wanted to explore very new works, and music that was exciting and new to me and my collaborators.
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The Saunders Duo focuses on timbres and sustained tensions, exquisitely sensitive or startlingly acute. The Mumford violin piece “fleeting cycles of layered air” evokes billowing gusts of wind with long bursts of notes. Lee’s “A finite island in the infinite ocean” takes us to outer space, the first movement a venturing into the unknown, the second an exploration of an expansive new terrain, its melodies both somehow familiar and foreign. Barrett’s “Allure and Hoodwink” is a piece I programmed for its romantic mood with the instruments enmeshed together in an electronics world of tactile sounds, ranging from lush and dense textures to concrète samples of traffic, sirens, and dripping water.
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These are filmed run-through performances, audio unedited, aside from post-processing the electronic effects on Dongryul Lee’s piece.
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Thank you to Anthony diBartolo and the Harvard team for their work on these videos, and to the National Sawdust team for the filming and recording. Thank you to Yamaha for providing the piano for Conor.
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