New Works by Kate Soper and Mario Diaz de Leon at the LA Phil

by Ted Gordon on Sept. 29, 2016, 12:04 p.m.

(photo: Kate Soper: © The New Yorker; Mario Diaz de Leon: © Katrin Albert)

The Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series has become a vital part of America's New Music landscape, commissioning and featuring composers and performers from around the country. On Saturday, October 1, Green Umbrella presents a "composers-as-performers" concert, featuring World Premieres of new works by PSNY Composers Kate Soper and Mario Diaz de Leon, along with PSNY composer Timo Andres performing a new work written for him by Ingram Marshall.

Soper will perform her new work, The Ultimate Poem is Abstract—written for soprano and ensemble—alongside the LA Phil's New Music Group, conducted by John Adams. This work questions the relationship between voice, text, music, and abstraction, setting texts by Soper, Wallace Stevens, and many other contemporary writers in a work that points toward vocal experience over vocal description. To get in the spirit, check out a performance of Soper's Cipher with the composer joining recent PSNY Greenroom artist violinist Josh Modney:

Diaz de Leon's new work, Lightmass, for brass ensemble and electronics, is a three-movement work that turns these two concepts—light and mass—into a descriptive and narrative musical dialectic. The three movements are inspired by urban spaces and architecture; in Diaz de Leon's words, "outward manifestations of inner experience, a living building as a divine body." Listen to a performance of de Leon's Trembling Time II by the Talea Ensemble:

Timo Andres's "The Blind Banister" at Caramoor

by Ted Gordon on July 7, 2016, 10:51 a.m.

After becoming a Pulitzer Prize Finalist this year, Timo Andres's third piano concerto, The Blind Banister, will finally premiere in New York at Caramoor on Sunday, July 10th. Dedicated to and composed for pianist Jonathan Biss, The Blind Banister is Andres's response to Beethoven's second piano concerto, echoing Beethoven's own late revision to this early work. Biss will perform the piece along with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein.


(Illustration by Dadu Shin for The New Yorker) 

In a brief profile for The New Yorker, Russell Platt calls Andres "a modern modernist", and hails The Blind Banister as "a deeply complex tribute to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2". He writes:

Like John Adams and the late Steven Stucky, Andres has succeeded in carrying forward the mainstream tradition of orchestral modernism [...] in a way that is no less distinctive for seeming so ironic and abashed: the piece is at once gently private and powerfully communal in its gestures and devices.

Check out a video of Andres performing his recent completion of Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto:

Timo Andres' "Trade Winds" at the Aspen Festival

by Ted Gordon on July 2, 2016, 12:06 a.m.

In a chamber music program at the Aspen Music Festival that ranges from Schumann to Schoenberg to Boulez, Timo Andres might seem the odd one out: American, under 40, and worlds away from the anxieties of influence that plagued (and drove) so many European Modernists to create stunningly powerful statements about what music could be. And yet, Andres' music does just that; just with a little less anxiety.

His Trade Winds, commissioned by Ensemble ACJW for an ensemble of string quartet, piano, percussion, and clarinet, has at its heart a chaconne—a 17th-century instrumental genre that imagined the New World (from the confines of Europe) in the form of a consistent, repeating, descending harmonic pattern. Andres' piece begins with a chaotic entry into this repetetive, hypnotic harmonic world, and ends with what the composer describes as a "short, hesitant coda." 

Head over to Andres' website to check out an audio sample.