Nasher Sculpture Center

Innovative Music Series Premieres November 12 & 13 with the Juilliard String Quartet, A Far Cry, and Music from Yellow Barn.

DALLAS, Texas (October 4, 2010) – The Nasher Sculpture Center is pleased to introduce Soundings: New Music at the Nasher, an innovative, new music series, which explores the definition of music and tests the very boundaries of the art form. Created in partnership with Seth Knopp, a founding member of the Peabody Trio and artistic director of Yellow Barn Music School and Festival, Soundings presents six groundbreaking concerts showcasing both today’s music and that of the great composers of the past, performed by nationally and internationally renowned musicians amid the art-filled spaces of the Nasher Sculpture Center.

 

“With the Soundings series, we initiate a conversation between sculpture and music," said Jeremy Strick, Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, "as well as a dialogue between the most advanced contemporary musical forms and their historical antecedents. In effect, Seth Knopp has curated this series much as we would curate an exhibition or a presentation of the Nasher Collection: juxtaposing and weaving together disparate musical themes and forms, highlighting individual works, while creating a comprehensive experience that resonates with and references the art and architecture of the Sculpture Center."

 

The 2010-2011 inaugural season of Soundings: New Music at the Nasher launches with two days of exciting performances at the Nasher Sculpture Center on Friday, November 12 and Saturday, November 13 featuring Music from Yellow Barn, A Far Cry, and the Juilliard String Quartet, a group widely recognized as the quintessential American string quartet and the most widely recorded string quartets of our time.

 

Seating is limited and tickets are required for performances. Tickets for the Friday, November 12 program are $20 for Members ($25 for Non-Members) and include a lecture with Seth Knopp and the Juilliard String Quartet, the evening concert, and champagne reception. The two concerts on Saturday, November 13 are free with admission ($10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students), free with Friday night concert tickets and RSVP, and free for members.

 

“It is my great pleasure to be working with the director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, Jeremy Strick, and its wonderful staff in making preparations to launch the series Soundings: New Music at the Nasher,” said Seth Knopp, Artistic Director of Soundings.  “In calling itself a ‘center’ and not a ‘museum’ the Nasher reflects its commitment to preserving art and its tradition in the most exciting way possible; by presenting works that show those traditions to be ever evolving through the artists that build upon them.”

 

 

 SOUNDINGS 2-DAY INAUGURAL CONCERTS

King George III found in music a refuge for his mental illness while Beethoven offered this miraculous string quartet in thanks for his own return to physical health. The Nasher’s Soundings seriesopens with this exploration of the role music plays as one of our most personal forms of expression in a program featuring one of Georg Frederic Händel’s Concerto Grossi, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, a chamber music tour de force vividly depicting the tragic insanity of King George III, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet opus 132.

 

Tickets: Seating is limited. $20 for Members ($25 for Non-Members). Tickets may be used for Saturday concerts with RSVP at 214.242.5151.

 

For centuries the soul of a nation, expressed through its folk melodies and traditional dances, has inspired composers of every generation and from every corner of the world. From the gypsy influences found in Bela Bartók’s Divertimento for string orchestra, the Latin jazz flavors of NanáVasconcelos’ Berimbau and Alejandro Viñao’s tumblers for violin, marimba and electronics, to the “sing-song call” of the Texas panhandle auctioneer in Alexis Bacon’s Cowboy Song, this rich diversity continues to connect a people with a common past.

 

The final concert presented in celebration of the opening of the Nasher’s Soundings series opens with the sound of 100 metronomes creating their mesmerizing chance rhythms in György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique, evolving seamlessly into the organized rhythms of Roberto Sierra’s Bongo-O before finding melody in Donald Martino’s Canzone e Tarantella sul nome Petrassi for clarinet and cello. In the second half, we enter the strange and visionary harmonic world of the late Renaissance composer Don Carlo Gesualdo with performances of his madrigals adapted for string orchestra and then hear composer Brett Dean’s haunting musical depiction of his tragic crime in passion, the murder of his wife and her lover, in his haunting Carlo.

 

Tickets: Seating is limited. Free with admission ($10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students), free with Friday night concert tickets and RSVP, and free for members.

 

Tickets and Information: www.NasherSculptureCenter.org/Soundings

 

 

The Juilliard String Quartet is internationally renowned and admired for performances characterized by a clarity of structure, beauty of sound, purity of line and an extraordinary unanimity of purpose. Celebrated for its performances of works by composers as diverse as Beethoven, Schubert, Bartók and Elliott Carter, it has long been recognized as the quintessential American string quartet.

 

In its history, the Juilliard String Quartet has performed a comprehensive repertoire of some 500 works, ranging from the great classical composers to masters of the current century. It was the first ensemble to play all six Bartók quartets in the United States, and it was through the group's performances that the quartets of Arnold Schoenberg were rescued from obscurity. An ardent champion of contemporary American music, the Quartet has premiered more than 60 compositions of American composers, including works by some of America's finest jazz musicians.

 

The ensemble has been associated with Sony Classical, in its various incarnations, since 1949. This season saw the digital release of classic JSQ recordings on iTunes. In celebration of the Quartet's 50th anniversary, Sony released seven CDs containing previously unreleased material as well as notable performances from the Quartet's award-winning discography. With more than 100 releases to its credit, the ensemble is one of the most widely recorded string quartets of our time. Its recordings of the complete Beethoven quartets, the complete Schoenberg quartets, and the Debussy and Ravel string quartets have all received Grammy Awards. Inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Academy for Recording Arts and Sciences in 1986 for its recording of the complete Bartók string quartets, the Juilliard Quartet was awarded the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik Prize in 1993 for Lifetime Achievement in the recording industry. In 1994, its recording of quartets by Ravel, Debussy, and Dutilleux was chosen by the Times of London as one of the 100 best classical CDs ever recorded.

 

Download High Res Images: http://www.colbertartists.com/artistbio.asp?ID=26&DT=Pho

 

Hailed by the Boston Globe as “one of Boston’s most promising classical music groups,” A Far Cry is making waves, experimenting with how music is performed and heard. A tightly-knit group of 17 young professional musicians, A Far Cry formed in early 2007, seeking the freedom and flexibility of a string quartet as well as the power and beauty of an orchestra. Operating with rotating leadership and no conductor, A Far Cry is generating interest not only in the concert hall, but also with its innovative model. All artistic decisions are made by vote as a collective, and the musicians take care of all the behind-the-scenes work, from booking concerts to designing programs.

 

Download High Res Images: http://www.afarcry.org/?page_id=919

Yellow Barn is an internationally respected chamber music school and festival. Its principal

activities are a five week summer chamber music festival/training program for young professional

musicians, a 2 ½ week training program for high school instrumentalists and composers (Young

Artists Program) and a year round series of artist residencies and workshops, all based in Putney,

VT. The program is distinguished by Yellow Barn’s renowned faculty, innovative programming,

and extraordinary participants who are selected on the basis of highly competitive nationwide

auditions each spring. From its inception, Yellow Barn has been admired for its supportive and

collegial environment. Building on that quality, this combination of faculty, programming and

participants has brought the program wide acclaim. Participants and faculty alike are attracted to

Yellow Barn as a place of artistic renewal and ongoing musical exploration.

 

 

 

In spite of the highly engineered nature of the keyboard and the primal beginnings of the world of percussion, these instruments have become deeply connected in the music of our time. Theatrical, humorous and spiritual, this Soundings programexplores the relationship of piano and percussion and the ways in which they have grown both inseparable and independently from one another featuring works by Paul Lansky, Georges Aperghis, Johann Sebastian Bach, Dmitri Shostakovich, and George Crumb.

 

The Brentano String Quartet brings two of contemporary music’s most individual voices to the Nasher in works by the American composer Steven Mackey and Soviet composer Sophia Gubaidulina. On this program they are linked by their shared homage to Bach’s masterpiece Art of Fugue. The Brentanos underscore how deeply the music of our time is influenced by the genius of past generations with a performance of one of Beethoven’s final works, the inconceivably forward-looking String Quartet, opus 135 and Alban Berg’s String Quartet, opus 3.

Kafka Fragments, György Kurtág’s monumental seventy-minute song cycle for soprano and violin, sets texts by Franz Kafka. Composed of 40 songs in four books, Kafka Fragments presents a selection of journal entries, excerpts from letters, and aphorisms by the Czech author set with extraordinary theatrical intensity and economy by the Hungarian composer Kurtág.

 

The eminent Kafka scholar, Stanley Corngold, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University whose translation is being used in this performance says that Kurtág’s music "celebrates Kafka’s mind, his sensibility, his inwardness in burning-bright musical vision." The settings provide "an intense fusion of two subjectivities."

 

Violinist Violaine Melançon adds that "Kafka’s words and Kurtág’s music are kindred spirits. Both creators are masters of the oblique, of the minimal, of expressing worlds of atmosphere between the words, between the notes.

 

Pianist Seth Knopp is a founding member of the Peabody Trio, recipient of the 1989 Naumburg Award. Since making their Alice Tully Hall debut in 1990, the trio has performed on the most important chamber music series, nationally and internationally. Their reputation as champions of new music garnered them an invitation to the first Biennale for contemporary music, Tempus Fugit, in Tel Aviv. The ensemble is in residence at the Peabody Conservatory, where Mr. Knopp serves on the piano and chamber music faculties. He is the Artistic Director of the Yellow Barn Music School and Festival, an international chamber music festival, which brings musicians to Putney, Vermont each summer. Seth Knopp studied with Leonard Shure at New England Conservatory, Nathan Schwartz at San Francisco Conservatory, and with Leon Fleisher. His solo and chamber music performances can be heard on the Artek, Koch, and New World Records labels.     

 

About the Nasher Sculpture Center:
Open since October 2003, the Nasher Sculpture Center is dedicated to the display and study of modern and contemporary sculpture. The Center is located on a 2.4-acre site in the heart of the Dallas Arts District. Renzo Piano, a world-renowned architect and winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1998, is the architect of the Center’s 55,000-square-foot building. Piano worked in collaboration with landscape architect Peter Walker on the design of the two-acre sculpture garden.

The Nasher Sculpture Center was the longtime dream of the late Raymond and Patsy Nasher, who together formed one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary sculpture in the world. The Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection includes masterpieces by Calder, de Kooning, di Suvero, Giacometti, Hepworth, Kelly, Matisse, Miró, Moore, Picasso, Rodin, and Serra, among others, and continues to grow and evolve.

The Nasher Sculpture Center presents rotating exhibitions of works from the Nasher Collection as well as special exhibitions drawn from other museums and private collections. In addition to indoor gallery space, the Center contains an auditorium, education and research facilities, a cafe, and a store.  

The Nasher Sculpture Center is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm. General Admission to the Center is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students, and free for members and children 12 and under. For more information, visit www.NasherSculptureCenter.org.

 

 

For more information and photos, please contact:

 

Kristen Mills Gibbins

Associate Director of Media Relations

972.514.2099