Present Music presents
In the Key of Now
Threaded Spaces
Michael Mizrahi, piano
Saturday, February 20, 2021 | 7:30 pm CDT
Present Music Digital Stage
Program
David Werfelmann: Suite à l'antique (2016)
I. Prelude
II. Pavane
III. Two Minuets
IV. Sarabande
V. Passepied
Yiheng Yvonne Wu: Threaded Spaces (2018 / 2019)
Andrea Mazzariello: Fall Down Five Times Get Up Six (2008)
Short pause
Chiayu Hsu: Games (2017)
I. Follow the Line
II. Repeats Rock
III. Breath
IV. All in One
Joanne Metcalf: The Undreamt-Of Center (2019)
I. Undreaming
II. Celestial Clockwork
III. Infinite Aftertime
Sarah Kirkland Snider: The Currents (2013)
Present Music’s 2020-2021 Season, Limitless, is made possible with generous support from the United Performing Arts Fund, the sponsorship of Saint John’s on the Lake, and grants from the Milwaukee Arts Board and the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.
About the artist
Praised as "intrepid" (Philadelphia Inquirer), "engaging" (Houston Chronicle), and "endlessly fascinating" (WQXR New York), pianist Michael Mizrahi has won acclaim for his compelling performances of a wide-ranging repertoire and his ability to connect with audiences of all ages. He has appeared as concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and teaching artist across the United States and abroad.
Mizrahi has performed in the world’s leading concert halls including Carnegie Hall, Toyko’s Suntory Hall, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Jordan Hall and the Gardner Museum in Boston, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the Chicago Cultural Center and Houston’s Jones Hall. He has performed as soloist with the Houston Symphony, National Symphony, Haddonfield Symphony, Sioux City Symphony, and Prince Georges Philharmonic, among others. He has given solo recitals at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and has made repeated appearances on the Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago. His chamber music festival appearances include Music@Menlo, Verbier, the Yellow Barn Music Festival, and the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival.
Dedicated to the music of our time, Mizrahi has commissioned and given world premieres of several new works by today’s leading composers, including Missy Mazzoli, Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Mark Dancigers, and John Luther Adams. He is a founding member of NOW Ensemble, a chamber group devoted to the commissioning and performing of new music by emerging composers. Mizrahi's celebrated albums The Bright Motion and Currents, both albums of new solo piano works commissioned by Mizrahi, was released on the New Amsterdam Records label. Mizrahi co-directs the New Music @ Lawrence concert series.
Mizrahi is also a member of Decoda, a chamber ensemble comprised of virtuoso musicians, entrepreneurs, and passionate advocates of the arts. Based in New York City, Decoda creates innovative performances and engaging projects with partners around the world. Mizrahi teaches each summer at the prestigious Decoda Skidmore Chamber Music Institute. Drawing from his work with Decoda, Mizrahi has worked to foster partnerships between Lawrence University’s Conservatory of Music and the surrounding community, and helped found Lawrence’s Music For All project that brings classical chamber music to children and populations who ordinarily do not participate.
Michael Mizrahi received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, where his concentrations were in music, religion and physics. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Claude Frank. He is currently Professor of Piano at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin.
About the composers
David Werfelmann: Suite à l'antique (2016)
David Werfelmann is an award-winning American composer of instrumental, vocal, and electronic music whose works are widely performed and recorded by ensembles and soloists throughout the United States. His orchestral music has been performed by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra as well as the major orchestras of the USC Thornton School of Music, IU Jacobs School of Music, and the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music. Among the many saxophone quartets that perform his work are the Zzyzx, Red Rock, Lawrence University, and Georgia Southern University Quartets, as well as the Fischoff Award-winning Barkada Saxophone Quartet.
Originally, from Portland, Oregon, David has received degrees from USC (DMA), Indiana University (MM), and Lawrence University (BM). In addition to writing music, David is a percussionist and committed educator having held teaching positions at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music and USC Thornton School of Music. David is currently Assistant Professor of Music and Director of the B.A. in Music Program at Webster University in St. Louis.
Yiheng Yvonne Wu: Threaded Spaces (2018 / 2019)
Yiheng Yvonne Wu studied composition at the University of California, San Diego (Ph.D., M.A.) and Yale University (B.A.). She has received commissions from the La Jolla Symphony conducted by Steven Schick, Arraymusic, Palimpsest, Michael Mizrahi and the Wisconsin Music Teachers Association, Figmentum, Bonnie Whiting, Jessica Aszodi, Carla Rees, Rachel Beetz, and Dustin Donahue. Her music has been performed by MIVOS string quartet and Ensemble SurPlus and featured in the WasteLAnd concert series, the University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Festival, New Music on the Bayou, SoundSCAPE Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and Schloss Solitude Summer Academy. Dreams of a Young Piano, for solo piano with chamber ensemble, was awarded the 2018 Judith Lang Zaimont Prize by the International Alliance for Women in Music. Her string quartet Utterance, released on Carrier Records, won the 5th Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize. Primary composition teachers have included Katharina Rosenberger, Kathryn Alexander, John Halle, Sophia Serghi, and Steven Takasugi. She teaches composition and music theory and leads the InterArts Ensemble at Beloit College in Wisconsin.
Andrea Mazzariello: Fall Down Five Times Get Up Six (2008)
Andrea Mazzariello (he/him/his) is a composer, performer, writer, and teacher. His musical practices include writing songs, making electronic music, and working in notated traditions. His work explores spoken and sung treatments of his own original text, plays with computers and other kinds of electronics, and engages the physiology of performance in novel ways.
His concert music, created through commissions by and collaborations with Sō Percussion, fivebyfive, Mobius Percussion, Jason Treuting, Eric Cha-Beach, David Degge, Matthew McCright, and many others, has been performed widely in North America and Europe. His collaborators in film, visual, and site-specific work include filmmakers Mark DeChiazza and Emily Carmichael, director Stephan Koplowitz, and artist Holly Streekstra. He performs his own music frequently, in instrumentations ranging from one-person-band to piano and voice. The McKnight Foundation, New Music USA, ASCAP, and the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council have recognized and supported his work. New Amsterdam Records, SEAMUS, Proper Canary, and his own One More Revolution Records have recorded and released his music.
He currently teaches composition, music technology, and music theory at Carleton College, and directs the composition program at the Sō Percussion Summer Institute. He completed a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Princeton University, an M.M. at the University of Michigan, and a B.A. in music and English at Williams College.
Chiayu Hsu: Games (2017)
Chiayu Hsu is an active composer of contemporary concert music. Chiayu has been interested in deriving inspirations from different materials, such as poems, myths, and images. Particularly, however, it is the combination of Chinese elements and western techniques that is a hallmark of her music.
Chiayu’s music has been performed by the Detroit, San Francisco, Toledo, Spokane, Nashville and Taiwan Symphonies, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, eighth blackbird, Prism Quartet, and Ciompi Quartet. Born in Banciao, Taiwan, Chiayu is an associate professor of composition at UW-Eau Claire. She has received her Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music, Master’s degree and Artist Diploma from Yale School of Music, and Ph.D. from Duke University. Her teachers have included Jennifer Higdon, Martin Bresnick, Roberto Sierra, Ezra Laderman, David Loeb, Anthony Kelley, Jeffrey Mumford, Donald Crockett, Jonathan Berger, Christopher Rouse, Robert Beaser, Joseph Schwantner, Joan Tower, Marco Stroppa, Scott Lindroth, and Stephen Jaffe.
Joanne Metcalf: The Undreamt-Of Center (2019)
The music of Joanne Metcalf, critically acclaimed as “music of great beauty” (Klassik-Heute) and “extraordinarily beautiful” (International Record Review), is known for its evocative lyricism, rhythmic extravagance, “beguiling yet subtly dissonant language” (MusicWeb International) and “beautiful use of vocal colours and texture” (Glasgow Herald). Drawing inspiration from Renaissance and medieval polyphony, ancient Georgian music, and contemporary extended vocal techniques, Ms. Metcalf has forged a compelling musical voice that “evoke[s] earlier musical forms” (The Globe and Mail, Montreal) yet is “unmistakably contemporary” (Glasgow Herald). Her chamber, orchestral, and vocal compositions have been commissioned, performed, and recorded by leading ensembles and soloists throughout the world.
Joanne Metcalf has received awards and fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, Copland House, the McDowell Colony, the Netherland-America Foundation, and the International Association of Women in Music. She studied composition with Scott Lindroth and Stephen Jaffe at Duke University and with Louis Andriessen as a Fulbright Fellow at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and is Associate Professor of Music at Lawrence University. Her compositions are recorded on the Linn Records, Oehms Classics, and ECM New Series labels.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: The Currents (2013)
Recently deemed “one of the decade’s more gifted, up-and-coming modern classical composers” (Pitchfork), “a potentially significant voice on the American music landscape” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and “an important representative of 21st century trends in composition” (New York Classical Review), composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” (The New York Times), “groundbreaking” (The Boston Globe), and “poignant, deeply personal” (The New Yorker). With an ear for the poetic and the architectural, Snider’s music draws upon a variety of influences to render a nuanced command of immersive storytelling.
Snider’s works have been commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Britten Sinfonia, and National Arts Centre Orchestra; vocalist Shara Nova (formerly Worden), eighth blackbird, A Far Cry, Ensemble Signal, The Knights, and yMusic; Roomful of Teeth, Cantus, and Trinity Wall Street Choir; and many others. Penelope, her acclaimed song cycle inspired by The Odyssey on text by Ellen McLaughlin, has been performed over fifty times in North America and Europe.