This month I made a wonderful trip to Vienna. I performed two solo concerts at the Alte Schmiede as part of the exciting month-long Wien Modern festival. Please watch, listen and enjoy.

Many thanks to Wien Modern for the invitation, for rescheduling when it was postponed last year, and also for adding a second show. I was asked for two different programs. While the theme of this year’s festival was “Mach doch einfach was du willst”, I decided to adapt the program we’d planned together last year, which explored the idea of microtonality. It was exciting to share an array of music from Georg Friedrich Haas (twice), Manfred Stahnke, Aida Shirazi, Reiko Füting, Carlos Simon, Anthony Cheung, Wang Lu, and Iannis Xenakis. It was a great chance to hear the myriad expressive possibilities of microtones: from the charged angst of every interval in the Haas piece to the lively rustic timbres of Stahnke and Shirazi, from the mercurial atmospheres of Cheung and Wang Lu to the blues bends of Simon to the buzzing sound waves of Xenakis.

These concerts were very personally meaningful to me – not just that it’s a terrific festival and the land of Mozart and Mahler (though that’s all great) but my grandfather and his parents were Viennese and, as a Jew, he had to leave the country, becoming a refugee. It’s unlikely he would’ve emigrated if the Nazis hadn’t been persecuting Jews. So as in any family whose elders had to flee a country (say, Somalia or Venezuela or Myanmar or Syria or Afghanistan) and whose next generations were born and grew up someplace else, it can mean a lot to return and connect personally with that country and its people. Playing there is something I’ve long hoped to do.