Taka Kigawa, Mariel Roberts, Will Lang, and Iktus Percussion present Xenakis

Critically acclaimed pianist TAKA KIGAWA has earned outstanding international recognition as a recitalist, soloist, and chamber music artist since winning First Prize in the prestigious 1990 Japan Music Foundation Piano Competition in Tokyo, and the Diploma Prize at the 1998 Concurs Internacional Maria Canals De Barcelona in Spain, with such accolades from The New York Times as “Mr. Kigawa’s feat deserves the highest praise, especially since it was combined with such alacrity and sensitivity to the musical material. Brilliantly done, a careful and serious-minded musician, quietly poetic and considerate” and from The New Yorker “Unbelievably challenging program. Kigawa is a young artist of stature.” Kigawa’s New York City recital in 2010 was chosen as one of the best concerts of the year by The New York Times. Also his New York City recital in August 2011 was picked as one of the most notableconcerts in the first half of the 2011-2012 season by Musical America.
 
He has performed extensively as a recitalist and soloist in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Cleveland, Paris, Milan and Barcelona, with appearances in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Kosciuszko Foundation, Severance Hall in Cleveland, Cité de la Musique, and Salle Gaveau in Paris, Plau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, and Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. He frequently tours in his native Japan, appearing in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagano and Kyoto, both as a recitalist and a soloist with orchestra and in chamber music groups. He has performed with such distinguished institution as The Cleveland Orchestra. He has been a featured artist on many television and radio networks throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.
 
His repertoire is extremely large and varied, ranging from the baroque to avant-garde compositions of today. He has collaborated closely with such renowned musicians as Pierre Boulez, Myung-Whun Chung and Jonathan Nott.
 
Mr. Kigawa grew up in Nagano, Japan, where he began piano studies at the age of three, winning his first competition at the age of seven. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Shinsyu University, and his Master of Arts degree from Tokyo Gakugei (Liberal Arts) University, graduating with honors in Piano Performance. During both his undergraduate and graduate years, he also studied composition and conducting, receiving high honors in both disciplines. He furthered his studies in the United States at The Juilliard School in New York, where he earned his Master of Music degree. Mr. Kigawa currently lives in New York.
 
Taka Kigawa official site
 
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“Trailblazing” cellist Mariel Roberts (Feast of Music) is quickly gaining recognition as a deeply dedicated interpreter and performer of contemporary music. Recent performances have garnered praise for her “technical flair and exquisite sensitivity” (American Composers Forum), as well as her ability to “couple youthful vision with startling maturity”. (InDigest Magazine). She holds degrees from both the Eastman School and the Manhattan School of Music, where she specialized in contemporary performance practice while studying with Alan Harris and Fred Sherry. Mariel performs internationally as a member of the Mivos String Quartet, and has performed with a variety of other ensembles in venues around the world as an advocate of living composers.
 
As a performer, Mariel has been working to expand the technical and expressive possibilities of her instrument through close relationships with other innovative performers and composers. Her passion for collaboration and experimentation has led her to premiere a huge number of new works by both emerging and established composers. She has performed in such venues as the the Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim Museum, Zankel Hall, MoMA, The Stone, Issue Project Room, and Roulette, and has appeared on many international concert series including Wien Modern (Vienna, Austria), Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, Germany), Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf, Germany), KLANG Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark) Cervantino Festival (Guanjuato, Mexico), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Beijing Modern Festival (China) Shanghai New Music Week (China), and Aldeburgh Music (UK). Praised for her wide-ranging tastes and musical flexibility, Outside Left writes: “To say Mariel Roberts is a good cello player is like saying your smartphone makes good calls; the statement is true but ignores the capabilities and implications of what’s before you.” She has appeared with SIGNAL Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, Dal Niente, SEM Ensemble, and the Wordless Music Orchestra. Furthermore, she has been a resident artist at the Darmstadt New Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Aldeburgh Music Festival, and has participated in the Bang on a Can Festival, and the Lucerne Summer Festival led by Pierre Boulez.
 
In addition to frequent far-reaching international tours with the Mivos Quartet, Mariel has recently made appearences as a soloist at the Avant Music Festival, the Symphony Space “Music of Now Marathon”, as a guest artist at Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), as a teaching and performing artist at the Unviersity of Denver, on the Gerswhin Hotel’s “Contagious Sounds” series, the UnTied series in Baltimore, and the World Science Festival. Mariel has been featured as a chamber musician on recordings for Innova Records, Albany Records, New World Records, New Amsterdam Records, and Urtext Records.
 
Mariel’s premeire solo album, Nonextraneous Sounds, was recorded at the unrivaled EMPAC studio in Troy, NY, and released on Innova Records in September 2012. The record, consisting of brand new works commisioned by Mariel, received high accolades from sources such as TimeOut NY, TimeOut Chicago, the American Composers Forum, New Sounds with John Schaefer, and WQXR radio. New York’s WQXR radio writes, “By playing a program this well-curated, with this much confidence, precision and good old-fashioned muscle, Roberts is not so much “making a statement,” artistically speaking, as she is sounding an alarm. Listeners should come running.”
 
“There was some hand-wringing in recent years over the future of new music, going something like this: With no dominant musical paradigm to rebel against, will today’s young composers lack a certain edge? Won’t they lose focus, now that eclecticism is the order of the day?
 
Cellist Mariel Roberts’s solo debut, “Nonextraneous Sounds,” demonstrates that any such anxieties were, to put it mildly, misplaced. The music on this disc, by a range of rising young composers, is nothing short of gripping from the first note to the last, and it’s thanks largely to the intense focus of these highly individual musicians.”
WQXR.
 
Mariel Roberts official site
Mariel Roberts on Facebook
 
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Originally from Long Island, trombonist William Lang is an active performer, improviser, and teacher in New York City and Boston. He can be found playing in all setting and styles, from the avant-garde and classical to salsa and indie chamber pop. He has given unaccompanied trombone recitals throughout the United States, played concertos with large ensembles, and recorded with such artists as Philip Glass and Jónsi (of Sigur Rós.) Intensely passionate for chamber music, he regularly performs alongside his groundbreaking ensembles loadbang (an original and unique group of musicians interested in cutting edge music) and the Guidonian Hand (a trombone quartet dedicated to breaking boundaries within the brass community.) He is also a member of the Boston Microtonal Society, where he explores the definition of pitch and technique, working alongside like-minded composers.
 
William Lang official site
 
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Based in New York City, Iktus Percussion is an ambitious, dynamic young ensemble committed to expanding the boundaries of the percussion genre. Iktus is a collective-based operation, featuring an array of industrious and multi-talented percussionists with Chris Graham, Justin Wolf, Josh Perry, Sean Statser, and Piero Guimaraes at the core. As a group with strong ties to the local artistic community, Iktus is dedicated to collaboration with emerging artists, having commissioned over fifty new works for percussion from such composers as Angélica Negrón, Aaron Siegel, Lisa R. Coons, Jenny Olivia Johnson, Stefan Weisman, and Billy Martin (of Medeski, Martin and Wood), among others.
 
With an exciting and diverse range of repertoire, Iktus has performed at such venues and festivals as the Bang on A Can Marathon, Galapagos Arts Space, Le Poisson Rouge, Roulette, Issue Project Room, Symphony Space, The Tank, and Trinity Church. Iktus has been appointed to several residencies including SUNY Purchase College (where they performed Laura Kaminsky’s Terra Terribilis, a concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra), CUNY Brooklyn College, and the Pre-College Music Program at Stony Brook University. As performer-educators, Iktus has also performed concerts and hosted master classes at the Eastman School of Music, Oberlin College, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Michigan, University of Western Michigan, Grand Valley State University, Michigan State University, William Paterson University, Western Washington University, University of Washington, and Onondaga Community College, as well as various public schools.
 
Community outreach and public performance is an essential aspect of Iktus’ mission: in September of 2011, Iktus performed an exciting all-percussion outdoor concert in Fort Greene Park, including works by Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe, and Iannis Xenakis, as well as Stockhausen’s Musik im Bauch in Central Park as part of Make Music New York in 2012.
 
Iktus was selected as a Time Out New York Critic’s Pick: Top Ten Concert of the Year in 2010, received critical acclaim from the New York Times for their performance with the St. Petersburg Chamber Symphony in the “Wall to Wall” series: Music of the Soviet ERA and a concert of selected works of John Cage at Le Poisson Rouge, and sold out the final evening of the 2012 Gaudeamus Muziek week at Issue Project Room. Iktus is endorsed by Vic Firth and Black Swamp Percussion.
 
Iktus Percussion official site