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Carnegie Premieres program returns for second residency
The second in this year’s Carnegie Hall Premieres series, featuring a return residency and concert by Ensemble ACJW, is scheduled Feb. 14-16 on campus. Musicians of Ensemble ACJW wowed the Skidmore and greater Saratoga community with Carnegie Hall commissions in their debut concert on campus last fall.
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The concert program features the upstate premieres of two Carnegie Hall commissions: “Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain,” by Angel Lam, and “Music for a Royal Place,” by Christopher Adler. Other selections to be performed are “Estampes,” by Debussy; Balinese Ceremonial Music, by McPhee; and Piano Trio in A minor by Ravel.
Both the performance and talk will take place in Filene Recital Hall on the Skidmore campus. Admission is free and open to the public. The residency that follows the concert will include teaching and coaching sessions by Ensemble members.
The Carnegie Hall Premieres series brings to Skidmore and the region one of the hottest new ensembles to hit the New York scene in some time. Following an Ensemble ACJW concert earlier this year, Steve Smith of The New York Times called the ensemble “buzzworthy,” and wrote, “Their concert was among the most adventurous presented in New York or anywhere else this season.” Members of this new ensemble are post-graduate fellows from the Academy, a program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education.
Established in 2007, the Academy is a two-year fellowship program that provides extensive performance opportunities and intensive music education training for post-graduate musicians. As Ensemble ACJW, the fellows of the Academy will perform in 19 concerts at Carnegie Hall and Juilliard this season. The fellows will make a major contribution to New York City’s public school music education programs, working with teachers in all five boroughs.
The Skidmore residencies, October 2007 and February 2008, include encore presentations of new works that Carnegie Hall commissioned for the 2006-07 season. Following the Skidmore performances, Ensemble ACJW will take these same programs immediately to Carnegie Hall. The visit by the fellows marks an important step toward the Academy’s goal to broaden its reach outside of the city of New York.
About the composers
Angel Lam grew up in Hong Kong and Los Angeles and began composing at the age of nine. Today her compositions express detailed attention to the beauty of soundscape and instrumentation, conveying memories and imagery through musical poetry. She blends the subtle and evocative expressiveness of an ancient form of East Asian aesthetic with the power and perpetual energy coming from her Western musical training.
Ranging from the gentle depiction of a drop of water for unconventional instrumentation, to the telling of a forgotten hero from ancient China written for orchestra and narration, Lam retells the beauty she finds in everyday life. Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble toured with her composition “Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain,” and the work has been released by SONY/BMG on the Silk Road Ensembles CD New Impossibilities. The piece features the marimba and the shakuhachi, and is rooted in the composer’s reflections on the death of her grandmother when she was five. Ms. Lam is a two-time winner of the Carnegie Hall emerging composer commission. She is a doctoral candidate at Peabody Conservatory and an artist diploma candidate at Yale University.
Christopher Adler is a leading performer of both new and traditional music for the khaen, a free-reed mouth organ from Laos and northeast Thailand. Drawing on more than a decade of research into traditional musics of those regions, and on his background in mathematics, he has composed works for solo khaen, for khaen in combination with Western instruments, and for the ranaat ek (a Thai classical xylophone) in ensemble with Western and other Thai instruments. Currently an assistant professor of music at the University of San Diego, Adler has performed his works for khaen with members of ensembles including Seattle Creative Orchestra, Hazardous Materials String Quartet, the Ciompi Quartet, and others. He is the pianist and composer-in-residence with the ensemble NOISE.
His work may be heard on Tzadik, pfMENTUM, Nine Winds Records, Artship Recordings, and Accretions. In “Music for a Royal Palace,” Adler pays homage to the Bang Pa-In Palace in Ayuthaya, Thailand, which was built in the 19th century with an opulent juxtaposition of Thai, Chinese, and Western architectural styles. The last half of the composition uses an old Thai classical melody, and both the structure and broadly embellished form are characteristic of Thai classical music, while the parts for each individual instrument are an invented hybrid of Thai, Chinese, and Western idioms.
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