WQXR Presents "20 For 20": Nicolas Namoradze Named an Artist To Watch

WQXR
Clemency Burton-Hill

Today, we are proud to introduce you to our “20 for 20.” From Afghanistan to Iceland, via South Korea, Bulgaria, and our very own New York City, these are 20 singers, instrumentalists, ensembles, and conductors who are redefining what classical music can be, and doing so in diverse and thrilling ways.

Nicolas Namoradze

2018 was a breakthrough year for the dazzling 27-year-old pianist, starting with all the attention he received after winning the 2018 Honens International Piano Competition. That’s a fine credit, and it pairs well with an Emmanuel Ax cosign, who said of Namoradze that he’s “Set to become one of the truly important artists of his generation.” 

To read more, and to see WQXR’s complete list, click here.

WQXR Presents "19 for 19": Artists to Watch in the Upcoming Year

WQXR

Contrary to the misguided and musty reputation often bestowed upon classical music, this art form is very much alive — and in the hands of many talented and creative musicians ushering it forward. That’s why WQXR is kicking off 2019 by introducing “19 for 19,” a group of artists we love that includes long-time heroes, established favorites and newcomers set for stardom. We’re planning all sorts of exciting collaborations across our platforms throughout the year, so stay tuned. Get to know them here, and if you haven’t yet heard what they can do, now’s the time.

Anne Akiko Meyers, violinist

Meyers has been busy on the international professional scene since she was 10 years old. She has a host of honors to her name, but is not one to rest on her laurels. Her 2019 is another year filled with premieres, outreach initiatives and new collaborations. Having given the world premiere in 2015 of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s final work, Fantasia, Meyers resurrects it for its Asian premiere in Japan. In the spring, she heads to London for the launch of The Strad’s new educational conference. On this side of the Atlantic she tours with classical guitarist Jason Vieaux, and joins the Pasadena Symphony for Adam Schoenberg’s Orchard in Fog, written especially for Meyers. Down the road, she’ll play commissions from Arturo Márquez, Michael Daugherty and Julia Adolphe. Catch her live at The Greene Space on January 31, performing music by Arvo Pärt, John Corigliano and John Williams.

Mahan Esfahani, harpsichordist

Throughout his career, Iranian-American Mahan Esfahani has been making a particularly strong case for ushering harpsichord performance practice into the modern era. If you’ve yet to experience his work, allow yourself to be challenged in the best possible way as he encourages you to consider the harpsichord unbound by the straightjacket of history: “Until (it) has the presence that any other mainstream instrument has,” he notes, “my work isn’t done.” Hot on the heels of his acclaimed Carnegie Hall debut last year (in which New Yorker critic Alex Ross singled out his “exuberant, anti-sentimental” playing), in 2019 he crosses the U.S. evangelizing for all that is good about the harpsichord. He has concert dates with the Seattle Symphony, an engagement at Indiana’s Purdue University and a collaboration with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at the 92nd Street Y.

Read more here.

WQXR: The Shanghai Quartet Celebrates Its 35th Anniversary

WQXR

Join us on Facebook Live for Midday Masterpieces, featuring the Shanghai Quartet. The chamber ensemble is marking its 35th anniversary by performing on four valuable instruments loaned to the group for the occasion by J.A. Beare: the 1714 “Kneisel, Grün” Stradivari violin, the 1729 “Stretton” Guarneri violin, a 1700 Matteo Goffriller viola, and 1690 Stradivari cello. On Wednesday, the Shanghai will play chamber music by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as well as some traditional Chinese folk music specially arranged to suit the quartet’s western instrumentation.

Join the Shanghai Quartet live in our studio! They're performing Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as well as traditional Chinese folk music on some really old wood and varnish - they've been loaned...

WQXR: Yeethoven - Great Minds Think Alike: Kanye West vs. Beethoven

WQXR
James Bennett, II

Kanye West and Beethoven

After the success of 2016’s Yeethoven composer and arranger Johan and conductor Yuga Cohler have returned for Yeethoven II, a concert focused on the similarities between the artistry of Kanye West and Ludwig van Beethoven. Besides just having a great name — who wouldn’t want to explore the limits of that wondrous portmanteau — the creators of the project see it as a way to explore the ways in which artists at the top of their game can have a deep impact on the culture beyond their musical influence.

With Kanye’s release of 2013’s Yeezus, the Yeethoven creators were taken by his abandonment of verse-chorus-verse conventions of most popular music and his embrace of a freer, more adventurous sound. Johan and Cohler worked backwards to find Beethoven, but believe their connections fit. For example: the dynamic shifts in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony share a similar quality with Kanye’s “Blood On the Leaves.”

Some may bristle at the mere mention of these two names in the same breath, but if you look hard enough, it isn’t difficult to find parallels between the two — or of many great artists, for that matter.

For the full story by WQXR, click here.

WQXR: The Cliburn Winners' First Public Appearance

WQXR

Less than a week after the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, the gold, silver and bronze medalistscome to The Greene Space at WQXR for their first public appearance as winners. WQXR’s Elliott Forrest hosts this special sold-out evening of music and conversation.

The Winners:

Yekwon Sunwoo (Gold)
Kenneth Broberg (silver)
Daniel Hsu (Bronze)

Every four years, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition convenes the most promising rising star pianists from around the world for 17 days of intense competition. Established in 1962, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is widely recognized as “one of the world’s highest-visibility classical music contests.” Winners are chosen by an esteemed panel of judges and awarded significant cash prizes, as well as three years of comprehensive career management and concert tours. Previous laureates include Radu Lupu, Olga Kern, Joyce Yang, Haochen Zhang and Vadym Kholodenko.

Cliburn Gold 2017 will be available on Decca Gold digitally on June 23; physically on August 18. Cliburn Silver 2017 and Cliburn Bronze 2017 albums are digital-only, also out on August 18.

WQXR: Ethan Hawke Cameos in Pianist Bruce Levingston's Philip Glass Survey

'Bruce Levingston: Philip Glass | Dreaming Awake' (Orange Mountain Music)

WQXR
By Daniel Stephen Johnson

Bruce Levingston, no stranger to the music of Philip Glass, has finally issued an in-depth, two-disc survey of Glass's piano music, and the result is a surprisingly passionate and spontaneous portrait of the composer. Dreaming Awake (Sono Luminus) is a boldly individual approach to the keyboard works of an American master.

Interpreting the piano music of Glass offers a unique dilemma to the pianist. The construction of the music is often severe and mathematical, the materials lucid to the point of total transparency in order to better showcase the clockwork operation of the rhythms. Instead of plunging forward through a series of contrasting episodes, the music coolly repeats its cadences as if displaying itself in a mirror, allowing the listener to examine the same material from multiple angles.

But at the same time, the harmonic language of the music is undeniably steeped in affect. While the music's transparency and poise pull back towards restraint, the substance of those cadences push forward into warm-hearted sentiment. Should the pianist treat the score like a strict MIDI grid, metronomically obeying every rhythm in order to heighten the transparency of the music? Or should the performer take a cue from those ecstatic harmonies?

From the almost impulsive opening of this record, those first few notes of Glass's magnificently subtle Etude No. 2, it becomes clear that Levingston has given himself over to feeling. This is Glass the Romantic.

In addition to a generous helping of the Etudes, arguably the composer's most substantial solo works, Levingston also offers the rarer title track, his own arrangement of Glass's tuneful film music for The Illusionist, and the earlier Allen Ginsberg hymn Wichita Vortex Sutra.

Even Levingston's stellar choice of collaborator fits the bill. Instead of sampling Ginsberg's own delightfully idiosyncratic reading of "Wichita," Levingston recruits thespian Ethan Hawke, Hollywood's Gen-X embodiment of Romanticism, and Hawke's breathless delivery is absolutely of a piece with the almost cinematic heroics of Levingston's vision for these pathbreaking works.

WQXR: Bite-Sized Bytes: Ray Lustig Composing in 15 Seconds

WQXR's Q2 Music

What would you do with 15 seconds? For composer Ray Lustig, it's the perfect amount of time to set up a low-stakes creative lab and ongoing audio-visual experiment. He explains below the inspiration behind his 15-second Instagram compositions, dubbed "composagrams," and how they feed his artistic growth.

Last summer I started a new little creative habit: making tiny 15-second compositions with video, a new one, roughly every week, to post to my sleepy little Instagram account. I’d heard that Instagram, formerly dedicated to photos, had recently started hosting video posts, but only up to a 15-second max, and this constraint grabbed my interest. Was it possible to do anything musically meaningful in just 15 seconds? At first I wasn’t sure. Many of my favorite works — Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, and Steve Reich’s Drumming — are over an hour long. 

I gave 15 seconds a try. And then another, and another. I started calling them "composagrams" and even started tagging them with the hashtag #composagram to encourage others to do it, too.

Then I started to realize that my little collection of composagrams was serving as a kind of creative lab for me. I was testing new things out, putting new spins on old things, dipping my toe in waters I might not have gotten to in my larger more visible projects, actually expanding my experimentation. Yet at the same I noticed I was following the evolution of my sound preferences with more focus, via these little bits of experimentation.  

And now, 15 seconds seems to me kind of perfect. It’s too short to even give a listener time to become bored, yet it’s longer than a gesture, even longer than a phrase. It can be a sentence, a concise one, a to-the-point sentence. While it’s an actual public post of my music, it's low-stakes. If one turns out not so satisfying for me, well it’s only 15 seconds, and I can just start another one.

There's using social media creatively for self-promotion and dissemination of one’s work, but this is different. This is using it as an actual creation platform, music written just for the consumption style of the social media feed. And it's not simply an opportunistic niche. There's something to casting work into the public light regularly that helps you hear it differently, gives you that crucial new perspective on something we artists spend all our time so close to, our own work.

Composers out there, give it a try if you don't believe me. And use the hashtag #composagram so that people who see one and like it can check out a few more. Instagram changed its limit to 60 seconds, but that's an eternity in social media time, so discipline yourself to keep it to that perfect little 15-second window, that bite-size, to-the-point little sentence. If you can't decide what to do, do a bunch of them so you don't have to decide. Make it a habit that feeds your artistic growth. — Ray Lustig

Born in Tokyo and raised in Queens, N.Y., composer Raymond Lustig is deeply inspired by science, nature, and the mind. Also a published researcher in molecular biology, he studied cell division, the cell skeleton, and cell polarity at Columbia University and Massachusetts General Hospital before beginning his graduate studies in composition at Juilliard, where he completed his MM and DMA degrees.

WQXR: Album of the Week - Exiles' Cafe

WQXR

Over the last decade, the San Francisco pianist Lara Downes has made several recordings around some stimulating themes, including “American Ballads” as interpreted by a broad swath of composers, and “Dream of Me,” featuring various nocturnes and reveries.

Downes’s latest album, "Exiles' Café," focuses on the concept of music written in exile, expressed through short pieces by composers including Chopin, Milhaud, Bartok, Weill, and Rachmaninoff. As Downes recently explained, “cafes have historically housed and sheltered exiles and emigres in every corner of the globe, through so many journeys and displacements." In other words, think Cafe Centrale or Les Deux Magots, rather than your typical chain coffee shop.

Displacement due to war and political turmoil is a major thread. Two of Chopin’s Mazurkas -- Op. 6 No. 1 and Op. 68 No. 4 -- reflect his 18-year exile in France, prompted by revolution in his native Poland. Bartok's three Hungarian folksongs from the Csik District were composed in 1907, long before he was exiled in New York, but they have the spirit of nostalgia for a simpler place and time.

The gathering war clouds of the 1930s forced many composers to leave for the United States. Among those featured here are Kurt Weill and Erich Korngold, and while the latter composer is represented with an early work (a movement from his Second Sonata in E major of 1910), Weill’s Lost in the Stars hails from 1949, and is heard in an arrangement by New York pianist-composer Jed Distler.

Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev both went into exile around the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917-18; the former is represented with his Fragments, the latter with the Pastoral Sonatina in C major. Among the album’s gems are two Dumkas by Bohuslav Martinu, a composer who spent a greater proportion of his life in exile from his native Czechoslovakia.

Finally, not to be overlooked is Mohammed Fairouz’s Piano Miniature No. 6, “Addio,” a piece which draws on his Arab-American roots. Downes plays with a sensitivity and alertness to the many styles represented on "Exiles' Cafe."

Exiles' Cafe
Lara Downes, piano
Steinway and Sons
Available at Arkivmusic.com