Sti.ll, you turn me on.
Joseph Branciforte and Taylor Deupree extend a landmark studio recording onstage, plus more recommended live new-music events March 11–18.
In a record review column I wrote last year for the Summer 2024 issue of Chamber Music magazine (unavailable online, I’m sorry to say), I wrote at length about the excellent British label Another Timbre, among the very few currently operating labels whose consistent high quality and curatorial vision compels me to want to hear everything owner Simon Reynell opts to issue.
After covering four recent Another Timbre recordings by the chamber ensemble Apartment House, I cited a handful of newer labels that have shown a similar consistency of vision and success:
Another Timbre isn’t the only label combining musical discoveries with superb performances, brilliant recordings, and an attractive, unified design approach. Further examples include Kuyin, the four-year-old imprint run by Swedish composer-performer Kristofer Svensson; Sideband, founded by Chicago composers Chris Mercer and Hans Thomalla; and Neu Records, a Barcelona-based collective whose high-end releases are genuine objects of desire.
That transition prefaced a final section concerning greyfade, a label run by composer, performer, and recording engineer Joseph Branciforte—and specifically about the label’s newest initiative:
In launching the new Folio series, Branciforte begins with a fundamental question: “Why release music in physical form today?” The first release in the series, Kenneth Kirschner’s Three Cellos, responds to that query in the form of an elegant hardcover book produced in a limited edition of 100 copies. Inside are essays about this music—an acoustic realization by Branciforte of what was originally an electronic piece by Kirschner, July 8, 2017—plus score excerpts and photographs.
The second Folio release on greyfade, Sti.ll, offered Branciforte’s illuminating instrumental arrangement of Stil., a transporting 2002 album of ambient electronic pieces by Taylor Deupree. Performers featured on the album include flutist Laura Cocks and clarinetist Madison Greenstone of TAK Ensemble, Ben Monder on acoustic guitar, Christopher Gross on cello, and Sam Minaie on acoustic bass, plus Branciforte and Deupree on percussion and lap harp. Again, from the review:
Branciforte chooses instruments judiciously, evoking rather than mimicking the original album’s synthetic jitter and purr. The arrangements are at once faithful and revelatory, illuminating the bustling particles of sound that constitute Deupree’s repetitive loops.
I bring all of this up now because tomorrow night at Roulette, Branciforte and Deupree will reunite onstage with two more participants from the Sti.ll sessions, Greenstone and Monder. The group doesn’t promise a replication of an uncannily beautiful initial meeting, but rather fresh variations and new directions. The stuff of a future record? Could be. Hear it here, first.
Branciforte/Deupree/Greenstone/Monder perform at Roulette on Wednesday, March 12 at 8pm; details below.
Starting next Thursday, March 20, Issue Project Room will present With Womens Work, a series of concerts and other events honoring Womens Work, a magazine edited and self-published by composers Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood in 1975. Before the concerts start, Issue partners with Anthology Film Archives for two screenings documenting works created by Audrey Chen, Sydney Spann, Annabelle Playe, crys cole, and Maayan Tsadka for Issue’s With Womens Work Series, a 2021 virtual festival that offered fresh realizations of scores from the 1975 magazine. The second screening also includes a filmed account of Lockwood’s notorious 1968 piece Piano Burning, curated by Lawrence English for the 2021 Brisbane Festival. The screenings are on Wednesday, March 12 and Thursday, March 13, and the details are here.
The Night After Night Watch.
Concerts listed in Eastern Standard Time
NOTAFLOF = no one turned away for lack of funds.
11
Moby-Dick
Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center
30 Lincoln Center Plaza; Upper West Side
Tuesday, March 11 at 7:30pm, Saturday, March 15 at 8pm; $42–$400
metopera.org
Karen Kamensek conducts the Met Opera premiere of a 2010 opera by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, which handily adapts Herman Melville’s classic novel into a lean, effective lyric drama resourcefully staged by Leonard Foglia. As I wrote in The New York Times about the world premiere at Dallas Opera (gift link), you’ll hear echoes of Debussy, Puccini, Britten, Glass, and more, deployed with shrewd dramatic instincts. The solid cast here includes Brandon Jovanovich, Stephen Costello, Peter Mattei, Ryan Speedo Green, and Janai Brugger.
Karen Slack
92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Ave., Upper East Side
Tuesday, March 11 at 7:30pm; $40, livestream $25
92ny.org
Grammy Award-winning soprano Karen Slack – about whom, read Olivia Giovetti – comes to the 92nd Street Y with pianist Kevin Miller and a program titled “African Queens,” featuring suitably regal new art songs by Jessie Montgomery (who’s having quite the season herself), Carlos Simon, Shawn Okpebholo, Fred Onovwerosuoke, Joel Thompson, and more. If you can’t attend in person, livestreaming tickets are available.
12
Branciforte/Deupree/Greenstone/Monder
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave.; Brooklyn
Wednesday, March 12 at 8pm; $30, advance $25, seniors and students $10
roulette.org
See essay above. If you can’t attend in person, this event will be livestreamed and archived for on-demand viewing on the Roulette website and YouTube.
JACK Quartet
Leonard Nimoy Thalia, Symphony Space
2537 Broadway; Upper West Side
Wednesday, March 12 at 7:30pm; $30
symphonyspace.org
Appearing under the banner of composer and conductor Victoria Bond’s long-running Cutting Edge Concerts, the innovative JACK Quartet presents canonical 20th-century works by Anton Webern, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Philip Glass, and Heinz Holliger.
13
Dream Brigade
The Jazz Gallery
1158 Broadway, 5th floor; Midtown East
Thursday, March 13 at 7:30 & 9:30pm; $29–$38, livestream $22
jazzgallery.org
Individually, pianist Phillip Golub and percussionist Lesley Mok are among the most resourceful and individual composer/performers coming up in New York’s creative-music scene. Together, they’re Dream Brigade, with a compelling new self-titled album coming this Friday on Infrequent Seams that shows what happens when they throw caution to the wind for a set of spontaneous inventions and reconstituted canon, with exhilarating results.
Morning Mist Night Thunder: Du Yun and Friends
Asia Society
725 Park Ave.; Upper East Side
Thursday, March 13 at 7:30pm; $25, senior and student discounts available
asiasociety.org
Award-winning composer, performer, educator, and activist Du Yun mixes sound and storytelling in a new Asia Society-commissioned project featuring violinist Lun Li, percussion duo NOMON (Nava and Shayna Dunkelman), and violinist, composer, and performance artist yuniya edi kwon.
Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival 2025
DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 W. 37th St.; Midtown West
Thursday, March 13–Saturday, March 15 at 7:30pm; $35, premium seating $60, festival pass $80, reserved seating $145
ucmfnyc.com/2025
Amid a year in which geopolitical politics have proved tumultuous already, the adventurous, ambitious Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival digs deep into connections between Ukrainian music and literature with a series titled “Letters and Notes.” Tonight’s opening concert features the fearless TAK Ensemble in a program rooted in science fiction. On Friday, string quartet The Rhythm Method joins vocalists in an evening of poetry, art song, and chamber works. PinkNoise hooks up with the Ukrainian Music Initiative and the NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble on Saturday for a wide-ranging finale titled “Ukrainian Tone Poems,” followed by a ticketed late-night hang. (Devotees can complete the experience with an introductory roundtable covering music and literature in Ukraine on Wednesday, March 12 at 5pm at the NYU Jordan Center; learn more and register here.)
14
LiveSounds: Teodora Stepančić
Third Street Music School Settlement
235 E. 11th St.; East Village
Friday, March 14 at 7pm; free admission
eventbrite.com
Composer and pianist Teodora Stepančić is on a roll just lately with a splendid new CD, O A | F G, just out on Another Timbre, and another with Andrea Young, between chords, coming soon on Love Records, the label she operates with her partner, Assaf Gidron. Appearing as a part of LiveSounds, the Third Street faculty concert series, Stepančić and her fellow LCollective players perform a new work, chords from a different place, alongside pieces by Pauline Oliveros, Laura Cetilia, Katie Porter, and Germaine Sijstermans.
15
Anthony de Mare and Adam Sherkin
Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center
129 W. 67th St.; Upper West Side
Saturday, March 15 at 8pm; $40, seniors $35, students free
kaufmanmusiccenter.org
Pianists Anthony de Mare and Adam Sherkin join forces for a program of Canadian works for one and two pianos, including newly commissioned duo pieces by Sherkin and Jared Miller. The program also includes Rodney Sharman’s ingenious transcriptions of Don Giovanni, La Rondine, and I Capuleti e i Montecchi, as well as compositions by Ann Southam, Linda Catlin Smith, and Vivian Fung, among others.
Chris Jonas Deserts Quartet
Soup & Sound
292 Lefferts Ave.; Brooklyn
Saturday, March 15 at 7:30pm; $20 suggested donation
soupandsound.org
Having hit the east coast last week to play a star-studded Anthony Braxton concert at the Library of Congress, Santa Fe-based saxophonist, composer, and visual artist Chris Jonas has stuck around to perform in drummer Andrew Drury’s beautifully nourishing Soup & Sound series, where a hot bowl of something good always precedes the musical main course. Joining Jonas and Drury are trumpeter Thomas Heberer and bassist Cyrus Campbell; if we’re lucky, we’ll be hearing music from Jonas’s new album, backwardsupwardsky, featuring pieces he wrote under vast western skies during three years of winter solo camping in Arizona’s 2 million acre Barry Goldwater Missile Range.
16
Bryan Eubanks
Feldstein Immersion Room at Bobst Library, New York University
70 Washington Square S., 7th floor; Greenwich Village
Sunday, March 16 at 4pm; free admission, RSVP required
diapasonsoundart.org
Venerated sound-art gallery Diapason resumes its occasional listening series, curated by composer and sound artist Michael J. Schumacher, with a program devoted to a portion of a 24-hour work-in-progress by Berlin-based composer/performer Bryan Eubanks presented in surround sound. Because of the setting, an RSVP is mandatory and you can make one here.
17
David Murray Octet
Blue Note Jazz Club
131 W. 3rd St.; Greenwich Village
Monday, March 17 at 8 & 10pm; table seating $45, bar $30
bluenotejazz.com
Tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist David Murray has played in every configuration under the sun across his decades on the global jazz stage, from solo to big band. But you could argue it was his beautifully boisterous 1980s octet recordings Ming, Home, and Murray’s Steps that cemented his renown as a composer and bandleader. Continuing his ongoing burst of local activity after decades abroad – a process reported by Piotr Orlov of Dada Strain in a story we completed for WNYC and Gothamist in 2023 – Murray is breaking in a potent new octet; my account of its March 3 debut is here.
18
Copland House Ensemble
Elebash Hall, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave.; Midtown East
Tuesday, March 18 at 6:30pm; free admission with registration
gc.cuny.edu
Music from Copland House dispatches its house ensemble to midtown Manhattan for an early-evening program featuring compositions inspired by visual art and film. Included are the world premiere of Lightplay, a newly commissioned work by Bobby Ge, alongside pieces by Robert Sirota, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Viet Cuong. Admission is free with registration, here.
More vital directories of new-music destinations:
Find even more events in Night After Night Watch: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.
Lesley Mok is seemingly EVERYWHERE this month. Saw them perform at the Stone with Jen Shyu pre-pandemic and been loosely following since. Great stuff
With this weeks title I was expecting to hear about the Gypsy Queen in a glaze of Vaseline.