Named a Rising Star on the alto saxophone four years in a row by the Downbeat Magazine International Critics Poll, acclaimed by publications from The Wire to The New York Times, Steve Lehman is a saxophonist and composer whose multilayered work stands at the frontiers of contemporary music. He marries the esoteric math- and computer-driven compositional principles of “spectral harmony” to the looseness and fluidity of jazz. Lehman will be playing with his handpicked octet, whose luscious smears of horns and vibraphone float over a sizzling rhythm section.

SOLOS^2 was a performance that demonstrated the acoustics of EMPAC’s Concert Hall (designed by Grimshaw Architects with acoustical consultants Kirkegaard Associates). Subtitled Sopranos + Piano, the concert featured Gaudeamus Prize-winning soprano Tony Arnold, soprano Haleh Abghari, and pianist Jacob Greenberg performing short works from the medieval, romantic, and contemporary eras. Unlike typical recitals, the musicians performed from a variety of vantage points—above the fabric canopy suspended over the Hall, as well as the front and rear balconies. The audience was encouraged to move around the space while the performance was happening to better experience the acoustics, and to hear the music from the performer’s perspective by standing next to the pianist as he played. Greenberg played a Debussy etude twice, first with the Hall in its natural state, and second with motorized fabric panels—designed to variably “tune” the space—lowered to demonstrate the audible change in reverberation. The finale, a Schubert duet, was also performed twice, first with the sopranos on the far extremes of the stage and then together in the traditional spot in front of the piano.

Kicking off the first night of onedotzero DJ superstar Diplo will perform with a cadre of the area’s best VJ’s. Expect the unexpected mixed seamlessly with irreverence and the touch of an international tastemaker. Local live video luminaries dazzling your ocular fluid and flipping your wig will include Ray Cutler, Adam Grossman, Ryan Jenkins, David Lublin, Kevin Luddy, Blair Neal, Fernando Orellana, Misha Rabinovich, and Jack Turner.

Diplo’s 2009 documentary film Favela on Blast will be screened Saturday evening in the Theater.

EMPAC's Eric Ameres and Ryan Jenkins run through the audio controlled lighting setup for Diplo.

As part of the lengthy production process for this EMPAC-commissioned opera, composer Sean Griffin worked in residence with staff as well as auditioned regional actors. He also developed the Cold Spring set by researching, and acquiring on loan, artifacts drawn from the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, NY, the General Electric Company collection, and from several other historic collections of upstate New York industrial history. Griffin worked in collaboration with EMPAC engineers on integrating the computer-based lighting system and cue-based computer-controlled rigging with his compositional approach, blending these technologies with dancers, musicians, actors, and a roller derby team.

Sean Griffin’s unique compositional works rely on interdisciplinary incongruities positioned at the intersection of sound, image, performance, and the archive. His works manifest as music, large and small-scale operas, collaborative installations, historically weighted musical performance works, and numeric choreographies. His pieces have been commissioned and presented internationally by venues including LA’s REDCAT, Hammer Museum, and Contemporary Museum of Art, London’s Royal Academy and Tate Modern, among others. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Victor Herrero will be unable to perform at tonight's concert with Josephine Foster. Foster will instead be joined by folk maven Rachel Mason. What makes a song a song? To what extent does it depend on the presence of a human voice? This question lies behind the last of the Spring New Nothing concerts, in which two charismatic performers offer their idiosyncratic take on the song. Josephine Foster (“a Grace Slick for the 21st century” — Arthur magazine) transforms the poems of Emily Dickinson with her otherworldly soprano. And Victor Herrero performs new songs for the Spanish guitar.

A rare US performance of work by one of the most influential living European composers, as interpreted by two exciting new music ensembles. The German composer Helmut Lachenmann is known for his musique concrète instrumentale—music that uses an iconoclastic vocabulary of instrumental sounds, recombined to create imaginary timbres. The result can be uncanny: imagine a string quartet able to sound like a car crash.

Lachenmann’s demanding, imaginative music was performed in concert by SIGNAL, one of the most exciting chamber orchestras playing in the US today, and the JACK Quartet, praised for its “explosive virtuosity” by the Boston Globe. The composer was in attendance, performing a work for piano and taking the speaking role in an ensemble piece with SIGNAL. SIGNAL is a large ensemble comprising some of the most gifted and innovative musicians in New York City. JACK Quartet commissions and performs new works, working closely with composers in the US and Europe and touring extensively.

The German composer Helmut Lachenmann is known for his musique concrète instrumentale — music that uses an iconoclastic vocabulary of instrumental sounds, recombined to create imaginary timbres. The result can be uncanny: Imagine a string quartet able to sound like a car crash. Lachenmann's demanding, imaginative music will come alive in this concert by SIGNAL, one of the most exciting chamber orchestras playing in America today, and the JACK Quartet, praised for its “explosive virtuosity” by the Boston Globe. The composer will be in attendance, performing a work for piano and taking the speaking role in a large ensemble piece with SIGNAL.

PROGRAM

Helmut Lachenmann Pression
Helmut Lachenmann String Quartet No. 2
Helmut Lachenmann Ein Kinderspiel
Helmut Lachenmann ,,…Zwei Gefuhle…”

For the past two years, EMPAC has hosted a residency by The OpenEnded Group, an innovative digital arts collective specializing in the creation of 3D digital works. Now audiences can see the result. Upending, a work commissioned by EMPAC and appearing here in its world premiere, is a revelatory stereoscopic theater performance, an actor–less drama of disorientation and reorientation that compels us to rethink our relationship with the material world. Using ordinary flat photographs and processing them with non-photorealistic rendering and stereoscopic HD video, Upending transfigures familiar objects, spaces, and persons in ways that are both beautiful and uncanny. The play of images is accompanied by a gutsy EMPAC-made recording of Morton Feldman's first String Quartet by the FLUX Quartet, which The New Yorker's Alex Ross describes as “legendary for its furiously committed, untiring performances.” The music provides an aural lens that renders the video almost balletic, even as the visuals allow us to hear Feldman as never before. Listen to a short interview on WAMC with Curator Micah Silver and Paul Kaiser of The OpenEnded Group

VIDEO

In the late 1960s, Frederic Rzewski left his native U.S. to embark on a 40-year career composing and playing music that addresses not just artistic questions but sociopolitical ones, music meant not just for the conservatory but the street. “It seemed to me,” he explained, “(that) there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could not be understood by a wide variety of listeners.” Today, Rzewski's compositions display that same audacity, along with a range that encompasses the minimal and the epic. They're political music in the tradition of Cornelius Cardew, Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Weill. And Rzewski plays them with a mastery that can be nothing less than breathtaking. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians calls him “a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.” The performance will be followed by a talk by Frederic Rzewski.

If any one band can heal the rift between the raw and the cooked, artifice and intensity, it's Extra Life. The brainchild of composer and virtuoso guitarist Charlie Looker, the Brooklyn-based quintet plays songs in which zig-zagging guitar lines give way to sudden, dramatic silences and a voice as pure as a choirboy's soars above a rhythm section from hell. Extra Life is “scarily focused and ruthlessly complex . . . with a dark, sumptuous art-pop vibe,” says Time Out New York. “The end product is relentless, enveloping and frequently gorgeous." In the course of his career, Baltimore-based Dan Deacon has evolved from a producer of hypnotic, wordless electronica to a galvanic showman who flails audiences into ecstatic motion. He'll be making good on his thwarted (we're glad he's better) attempt at shaking EMPAC's studios with a wave of exuberant indie noise dance with cohorts Nuclear Power Pants, whose latest album was described as “a warping, Salvador Dali-surreal glob of sneering synth[s]… and dinky, Dark Meat-esque noisemaking.” (City Paper) Nuclear Power Pants have unfortunately cancelled due to the inclimate weather further down the east coast.