The Anagram Ensemble: I Looked at the Eclipse by James Ilgenfritz & Sarah Krasnow
Composer James Ilgenfritz’s Anagram Ensemble presents I Looked At The Eclipse—a new opera that blends video, theater, language games, free improvisation, and chamber music. The bilingual work is presented in French and English. Using a solar eclipse as a metaphor for a widespread epidemic of problematic human interactions that range from the mundane to predatory, the work is a surreal vision of self-regulation in a society obsessed with shifting culpability and consequence.
Monday, December 9 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $18 online, $25 doors
Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
Judith Berkson and Ordinary Affects
Soprano, pianist, and composer Judith Berkson premieres new work in collaboration with the new music chamber ensemble, Ordinary Affects, and avant-metal guitarist Mick Barr presents a solo set.
Tuesday, December 10 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $18 online, $25 doors
Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep
Hannah Lash–Photo courtesy hannahlash.com
loadbang and American Opera Projects present Hannah Lash’s The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep
Wednesday, December 11 at 7:30 PM
The Church of the Intercession Crypt, West 155th and Broadway, New York, NY
..:: Website
A Very Merry Minimalistmas
Come to Scholes St. Studio for a play-along of Carrie Freiley’s In C(hristmas). It’s based on Terry Riley’s classic In C but with a hefty dose of holiday twist. There will be music and festive snacks and beverages!
Wednesday, December 11 at 8:00 PM
Free
Scholes Street Studio, 375 Lorimer Street, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
Bearthoven and Ed Pastorini
Katherine Balch–Photo by Ted Moore
Ed Pastorini will present a spontaneous mixture of songs or song fragments, compositions, standards, popular songs from the 1800s and unplanned noises using (at least) piano and voice. Bearthoven performs Trio (2019) by Katherine Balch and American Dream (2017) by Scott Wollschleger
Thursday, December 12 at 7:30 PM
$10 suggested donation
The Owl Music Parlor, 497 Rogers Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
Julián De La Chica
Composer & pianist Julian De La Chica returns to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, to premiere his new ambient/minimal Piano Cycle Op. 10 “Voyeuristic Images”. In this intimate, solo recital, De la Chica explores raw scenes from watching people’s everyday life from a friend’s apartment window in Soho, NY.
Thursday, December 12 at 7:30 PM
Tickets $25
The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, 450 West 37th Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
KHORIKOS presents: O Antiphons (Night One)
KHORIKOS performs the world premiere of Andrew Smith’s O Antiphons.
Friday, December 13 at 7:00 PM
Tickets $20
Church of the Blessed Sacrament, 152 West 71st Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
Éliane Radigue: Occam Ocean | Blank Forms
Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) is a French composer of undulating continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible transformations that purposively unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics and inherent distortions. Occam Ocean is an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces composed by Radigue for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece.
Friday, December 13 and Saturday, December 14 at 7:00 PM
Free
Blank Forms at Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
Kinds of Kings
Shelley Washington–Photo by Peter Yankowsky
Artists-in-Residence Kinds of Kings are a collective of six composers who actively advocate for underrepresented voices in the music landscape. In the first of four concerts this season, they present Shelley Washington’s electric guitar quartet The Workers’ Dreadnought, performed by Brooklyn-based group Real Loud. Taking inspiration from the left-wing newspaper of the same name, the piece explores the continual, backbreaking crusade for intersectional equality across the globe. The evening opens with a conversation with composer Angélica Negrón about the compositional process and representation in classical and new music.
Friday, December 13 at 7:30 PM
Tickets $25
National Sawdust, 80 North 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
Wet Ink Collaborations: Huddersfield Composers and Charmaine Lee
Wet Ink Ensemble
Wet Ink presents a concert of collaborations from the 2019 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, featuring the US premieres of sextets written for Wet Ink by UK-based composers Kristina Wolfe, Bryn Harrison, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, plus a work by Charmaine Lee. Wet Ink debuted these works at hcmf// in November 2019 and recorded them for release on Huddersfield’s HCR label.
Friday, December 13 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $10, free for students
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 346 West 20th Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
Central Conservatory of Music Symphony Orchestra of Beijing
This performance is the Carnegie Hall debut of the Central Conservatory of Music Symphony Orchestra of Beijing. Central Conservatory President Feng Yu, also in his Carnegie Hall debut, will conduct works for modern symphony orchestra and traditional Chinese instruments by eight Chinese composers. There will be six U.S. premieres and two composers, Danbu Chen and Weiya Hao, will have works performed at Carnegie Hall for the first time.
Friday, December 13 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $20-$150
Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Avenue, New York, NY
..:: Website
KHORIKOS presents: O Antiphons (Night Two)
KHORIKOS performs the world premiere of Andrew Smith’s O Antiphons.
Saturday, December 14 at 7:00 PM
Tickets $20
St. Anthony of Padua Church, 151 Thompson Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
John Zorn: Heaven and Earth Magick
Composer John Zorn returns to Roulette to present a concert for piano, vibraphone, bass, and drums featuring pianist Stephen Gosling and vibist Sae Hashimoto accompanied by the bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. In a blend of classical and jazz, Gosling and Hashimoto play virtuosic exactly notated music while Roeder and Sorey improvise along with it. This evening of new work will feature a world premiere by the composer.
Saturday, December 14 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $35 online, $40 doors
Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
Impossible Tasks | TAK Ensemble
TAK Ensemble–Photo by David Bird
TAK premieres new works by Brandon Lopez and Bethany Younge as part of their 2019-2020 commissioning project. Lopez’s epic fifty-minute Empty Church of Plenty, featuring Lopez on bass, plays with improvisation, processes, group physicality, and dissent. Younge’s at midnight I walked into the middle of the desert deals in physical precognition and unworldly memory through fantastical textures and texts written in collaboration with the composer and ensemble.
Saturday, December 14 at 8:00 PM
$10-$20 suggested donation
Saint Mary’s Harlem, 521 West 126th Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
Tan Dun & The Orchestra Now
Tan Dun will take the podium for the opening concert of The Orchestra Now’s Rose Theater series at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The program will be highlighted by the U.S. premiere of Dun’s 2018 Violin Concerto: Rhapsody and Fantasia featuring the award-winning Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing. Other works on the concert include Stravinsky’s Fireworks, Debussy’s Rhapsody for Clarinet with Hungarian soloist and TŌN musician Viktor Tóth, and Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin Suite.
Sunday, December 15 at 3:00 PM
Tickets $25-$50
Jazz at Lincoln Center, Frederick P. Rose Hall, 10 Columbus Circle, New York, NY
..:: Website
Lucy Shelton
Soprano Lucy Shelton presents a “tasting menu” of composers with whom she has worked extensively over her decades of performing, including Elliott Carter, Jacob Druckman, Miriam Gideon, Shulamit Ran, and George Rochberg, as well as composers of whose works she provided the first major or complete recordings — songs by John Cage, Ruth Crawford, and Igor Stravinsky.
Sunday, December 15 at 7:00 PM
Tickets $29
National Sawdust, 80 North 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
Rotunda Holiday Concert with Roomful of Teeth, Caroline Shaw, and Tigue
Celebrate the season with the sounds of holiday music and a new Works & Process commission of composer Caroline Shaw. Roomful of Teeth and the three percussionists of Tigue perform as part of this annual tradition in the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda.
Sunday, December 15 at 7:00 PM
Tickets $20-$60
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, New York, NY
..:: Website