Oct

11

Brad Balliett, bassoon Brad Balliett, bassoon

with Majel Connery & composers Doug Balliet, Bora Yoon, & Nina Young

Sun October 11th, 2015

6:00PM

Main Space

Minimum Age: All Ages

Doors Open: 5:00PM

Show Time: 6:00PM

Event Ticket: $10/$15/$20/$35

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free for members
event description event description

Metropolis Ensemble’s latest Resident Artist Series project at (le) Poisson Rouge:
 
Join bassoonist/composer Brad Balliett and Metropolis Ensemble for five premieres of new works featuring the bassoon, the soulful tenor of the woodwind section. Four composers were commissioned for Balliett to revitalize the solo repertoire for this often-forgetten instrument, placing the bassoon in a multiplicity of sonic situations, ranging from chamber concerto to song cycle.
 
The centerpiece of the evening is a re-imagination of Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto K. 191, in a new version for bassoon with live electronics by composer Bora Yoon. Doug Balliett pits the bassoon against Majel Connery‘s unearthly mezzo-soprano voice in a solo song cycle on texts about Cleopatra.
 
Also on the program, a work featuring the bassoon in a chamber music setting by this year’s Rome-Prize winner, Nina C. Young, and a new bassoon concerto written by the performer, Brad Balliett.
 
Finally, a Vivaldi-inspired work for bassoon and strings by the young composers of ComposerCraft, a program for middle-school composers at the Kaufmann Music Center, in collaboration with Metropolis Ensemble’s Youth Works program.
 
Metropolis Ensemble’s Resident Artist Series:
The Resident Artist Series offers a platform for Metropolis Ensemble performing artists and composers to initiate and realize commissioning projects and produce concerts and musical events, giving our core members unique opportunities collaborate with those who inspire them.
 
Multiphonics, developed by bassoonist Brad Balliett in collaboration with Metropolis Ensemble, is the fifth project in this series. To date, 30 new works have been commissioned and premiered with pianist David Kaplan, harpist Bridget Kibbey, violinist Kristin Lee, and composer Ricardo Romaneiro, with more to come this season with cellist Ashley Bathgate (commissioning The Sleeping Giants) and pianist Conor Hanick (commissioning Elliot Cole).
 
The June Wu Artists Fund:
In 2011,The June Wu Artists Fund was established to honor the vision of Metropolis Ensemble board member June Wu and her passionate dedication to our community of composers and artists. The Artists Fund helped Metropolis launch our Resident Artist Series, among other artist-led creative and career-building endeavors, to more fully engage our mission to emerge the next generation of outstanding composers and musicians.
 
Composers:
Brad Balliett
Doug Balliett
ComposerCraft*
W.A. Mozart
Bora Yoon
Nina Young
 
*A group composition by Austin Celestin, Graydon Hanson, Daniel Ma, Sara Stebbins, Misha Swersey, & Yusei Hata
 
Soloists:
Brad Balliett, solo bassoon
Majel Connery, mezzo-soprano
 
Metropolis Artists Appearing:
Siwoo Kim, violin, leader
Caitlin-Mary Lynch, viola
Madeline Fayette, cello
Doug Balliett, double bass
Sejoon Park, piano
Ashley Jackson, harp
Britton Matthews, percussion
Lance Suzuki, flute
Carlos Cordeiro, clarinet
Nathan Mills, oboe
Andrew Cyr, conductor
 
VIP Opera Box – $35
Table Seating – $20
Standing Room – $15
Student (Standing Room) – $10
 
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TABLE SEATING POLICY
Table seating for all seated shows is reserved exclusively for ticket holders who purchase “Table Seating” tickets. By purchasing a “Table Seating” ticket you agree to also purchase a minimum of two food and/or beverage items per person. Table seating is first come, first seated. Please arrive early for the best choice of available seats. Seating begins when doors open. Tables are communal so you may be seated with other patrons. We do not take table reservations.
 
A standing room area is available by the bar for all guests who purchase “Standing Room” tickets. Food and beverage can be purchased at the bar but there is no minimum purchase required in this area.
 
All tickets sales are final. No refund or credits.

the artists the artists

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Brad Balliett, bassoon

New York City-based musician Brad Balliett is in high demand as a composer and bassoonist. In addition to fulfilling multiple commissions each year, Brad is an artistic director for the innovative and socially-conscious chamber music collective Decoda (Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall), and performs with the leading new music groups in New York, including Signal, Metropolis Ensemble, and Deviant Septet. Brad is principal bassoon of the Princeton Symphony, and has performed with the Houston Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Musicians, New York City Ballet, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Festival performances include Marlboro, Tanglewood, June in Buffalo, Newport Jazz Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, and the Lucerne Festival. His creative collaboration with Elliot Cole and Doug Balliett as the band Oracle Hysterical has yielded a number of operatic works, including a spoken-word opera premiered at the Lucerne Festival as a Spotlight Artist in composition. With his twin brother, Doug, Brad hosts a weekly radio show on WQXR’s Q2 Music called The Brothers Balliett, curates a monthly concert series at Spectrum in the Lower East Side, and will begin teaching a course at the Juilliard School’s Evening Division in the fall. As a teaching artist, Brad regularly leads composition and song-writing workshops in schools, hospitals, prisons, and homeless shelters. Brad graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2005, and holds an MM from Rice University. His hobbies include writing sonnets, running, and blissing out to Shakespeare.

Majel Connery

Majel Connery is co-founder and Executive & Artistic Director of Opera Cabal, an arts think tank for the conjunction of academic and creative work on opera. Connery serves as a scholar, vocalist, actress, producer and stage director with Opera Cabal and other national ensembles. Recent collaborations include the world stage premiere of G.F. Haas’s ATTHIS (with ACME, The Kitchen); stage direction for Kurt Rohde’s opera Death With Interruptions (with Left Coast Ensemble, Oberlin Dance Collective); and Hecuba and Passionate Pilgrim, albums in progress co-created by Oracle Hysterical (Doug Balliett, Brad Balliett, and Elliot Cole). She is currently vocalist and producer for Hong Kong Graft, a new opera co-created with Ken Ueno and Thomas Tsang. Connery holds degrees in composition, ethnomusicology and musicology from Princeton University and from the University of Chicago and recently served as Visiting Assistant Professor and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, where she was a fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and at the Art Research Center. 

composers Doug Balliet, Bora Yoon, & Nina Young

Doug Balliett is a prolific artist whose career has spanned classical performance, composition, rap, rock, spoken word, period performance and conducting. As a double bassist he has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony (principal and assistant principal) and the Metropolis Ensemble. 
 
He has earned fellowships at Tanglewood, where he performed as principal bass under James Levine, Aspen (principal under Jane Glover), National Orchestral Institute (principal under Andrew Litton) and the Lucerne Academy (principal under Boulez). He also maintains an active life as a recitalist, including live radio recitals, solo recitals throughout New York, and recital tours. Recent engagements have included double bass concerto performances at Alice Tully Hall and the ACFNY, commissions for new works from SOLI San Antonio and New York’s The Millenials, and tours with his band The Oracle Hysterical in Germany and Switzerland. 
 
Mr. Balliett’s compositions have been heard throughout the US, garnering several awards, including prizes in the Frederick Delius Competition, the Leonard Bernstein Scholarship, the Kirkland House Music Award and Harvard’s first annual Artist Development Grant. Recent compositional projects include a late-night events at the Chelsea Art Museum (as part of his continued residency at the Chelsea Music Festival) and the composer-in-residence Spotlight with The Oracle Hysterical at the Lucerne Festival, where he and his collaborators presented an evening of Grimm songs and a new hip-hopera based on Melville’s Billy Budd. Mr. Balliett graduated from Harvard in 2007 with high honors and is recently completed a master’s at The Juilliard School in Historical Performance.
 
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Bora Yoon is an award-winning, Korean-American composer, vocalist, and sound artist  who creates immersive audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice and found objects and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries — to create a unique language of storytelling with music, space, and sound.
Inspired by architecture, she has composed for the 55,000 sq. foot abandoned McCarren pool, historic churches, a Frank Gehry building, galleries and black box theaters, and the digital film and video realm with music art films, live dance, and multimedia performance.  Collaborators include DJ Spooky, poet Sekou Sundiata, artist Ann Hamilton, choreographer Noemie Lafrance, Kaki King, live visualist R. Luke DuBois, digital artist Joshue Ott, LEMUR, among others.
 
Named one of the “14 Artists Who Are Transforming the Future of Opera” by Huffington Post, Yoon’s pioneering works have been presented by Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Nam June Paik Museum (Korea), Singapore Arts Festival, MADE Festival (Sweden), Festival of World Cultures (Poland), Park Avenue Armory, and Walker Art Center, among others.
 
Yoon’s latest album SUNKEN CATHEDRAL (Innova) was released to a sold out theater at Asia Society New York in April 2014 and was named Album of the Year by ABC Australia.  The world premiere of the theatrical staged multimedia performance of SUNKEN CATHEDRAL was presented at the 2015 PROTOTYPE Festival, co-produced by HERE Arts Center and Beth Morrison Projects.
 
Classically trained and steeped in a first love of choral music. She is endlessly fascinated by the intersection of space and sound, maps, human Venn diagrams, handsome sounding kitchenware, subconscious association, memory, and the pulleys and strings that hold everything together.  Yoon is a Music / Sound fellow with the New York Foundation for the Arts, a TED Fellow and a doctoral fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University.
 
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New York-based composer Nina C. Young (b.1984) writes music characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her experience in the electronic music studio informs her acoustic work, which takes as its given not melody and harmony, but sound itself, continuously metamorphosing from one state to another.
 
Young’s music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Orkest de ereprijs, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the US Army Band, Argento, Either/Or, the JACK Quartet, Sixtrum, and Yarn/Wire. A recipient of the 2015 Rome Prize, Young has received a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize, and honors from BMI, IAWM, and ASCAP/SEAMUS. Young has held fellowship residencies at the Atlantic and Aspen Music Festivals, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne’s 2014 Forum, and the Tanglewood Music Center.
 
Recent commissions include a piece for orchestra and baritone voice for the American Composers Orchestra Underground with support of the Jerome Foundation, a bassoon pocket concerto for Brad Balliett and the Metropolis Ensemble, as well as new works for the Divertimento Ensemble at the 2015 Milano Expo, the American Brass Quintet, the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, and WildUp.
 
A graduate of McGill and MIT, Nina is currently pursuing her DMA at Columbia University. She worked as a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab and CIRMMT and is now an active participant at the Columbia Computer Music Center.
 
Nina Young official site

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