Rothko Chapel, Little Match Girl Passion, and an Adam Roberts Premiere: Secular Sacred Music
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Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Admission: $15 |
Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational, broadly ecumenical center, was designed by Jewish abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko (born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz). Originally conceived of as a Catholic chapel, the deeply spiritual, but abstract work of Rothko was quickly felt to be more fitting for a place of holiness open to all religions, belonging to none.
It was this work of Rothko’s that inspired Morton Feldman’s epic masterwork Rothko Chapel (1971). A work of great abstraction and spiritual depth, Rothko Chapel begins in what Feldman describes a "synagoguey type of way” and ends with what Feldman called a “quasi-Hebraic” melody in the Viola. In 2007 David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, self-consciously attempted to secularize and universalize the Passion story, by setting a Hans Christian Anderson fable in the manner of a J. S. Bach Passion. In both of these works, abstraction and universalization are Jewish responses to being in dialogue with artistic representations of Christian spirituality.
Join us for a performance of these two choral masterworks featuring the young artists of the Os Ensemble, led by Raquel Acevedo-Klein, including the performance of a new secular sacred work by composer Adam Roberts, commissioned for the occasion.
Following the performance there will be a panel discussion on the evening’s compositions and the topic of secular sacred art and music more broadly which will feature composers David Lang and Adam Roberts as well as Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko.
This event is part of the Smithsonian Year of Music. For more information, please visit music.si.edu.
About the Participants
Led by conductor Raquel Acevedo-Klein, Os Ensemble is a group of adventurous and committed young singers who interpret and transform new works for voice. With an inaugural commission by composer Eve O’Donnell, Os Ensemble made its performance debut at National Sawdust. Since its launch in September 2017, Os Ensemble has premiered works by composers including Guido López-Gavilán and David Lang, and performed with members of Sō Percussion and the Harlem Quartet among others.
Over the course of 16 years, Raquel Acevedo Klein has been a member and subsequent conductor for the Grammy Award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus. She has participated in the premieres of works by Philip Glass, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Paola Prestini, Missy Mazzoli, Shara Nova, and Aleksandra Vrebalov, to name a few. Raquel has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall, Town Hall, BAM, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Celebrate Brooklyn! and elsewhere. She has recorded and performed with the likes of Glen Hansard, Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, The Knights, the NY Philharmonic, and the Marinsky Orchestra among others.
David Lang is one of the most highly esteemed and performed American composers writing today. His works have been performed around the world in most of the great concert halls.
Lang’s score for Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, among others. Other recent work includes man made, a concerto for So Percussion and orchestra, co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony; his opera anatomy theater, written in collaboration with visual artist Mark Dion, at Los Angeles Opera; the public domain, a commission from Lincoln Center for 1000 amateur singers; and his opera the loser, based on the novel by Thomas Bernhard, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and for which Lang served as librettist, composer, and stage director. His opera prisoner of the state, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam's de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, and Bruges’s Concertgebouw, will premiere June 6-8, 2019 in New York, conducted by Jaap van Zweden.
Lang is a Professor of Music Composition at the Yale School of Music and is Artist in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His music is published by Red Poppy Music (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc.
Adam Roberts writes music that takes listeners on compelling sonic journeys while drawing on a vivid array of sonic resources. Roberts’ music has been performed by ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, the JACK Quartet, le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Callithumpian Consort, Earplay, andPlay duo, Transient Canvas, Ums ‘n Jip, Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble, the Association for the Promotion of New Music, violist Garth Knox, Guerilla Opera, and at festivals such as Wien Modern (Vienna), Tanglewood, the Biennale Musique en Scene (Lyons), and the 2009 ISCM World Music Days (Sweden).
Roberts is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fromm Foundation Commission, the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Bernard Rogers Prize (Eastman), the New York Bohemians Prize (Harvard), the André Chevillion-Yvonne Bonnaud Prize from the Orléans Piano Competition, the Earplay Donald Aird Award, the Christoph and Stefan Kaske Fellowship from the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, the Blodgett Prize (Harvard), and other awards. Commissions have come from the Callithumpian Consort, the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble, pianist Nolan Pearson, the Tanglewood Music Center, Guerilla Opera, and others.
Roberts’ music has been called “a powerful success,” “arresting,” and “amazingly lush,” (the Boston Musical Intelligencer), “an attractive mix of the familiar and exotic,” and “otherworldly” (Boston Classical Review), and “invigorating” with a “persistent melodic urge” (American Academy of Arts and Letters citation).
Roberts obtained his Bachelor’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music in 2003 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010. Roberts also studied at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna from 2007-2008 on a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. Roberts’ primary teachers have included David Liptak, Augusta Read Thomas, Julian Anderson, and Chaya Czernowin. Roberts has taught at Harvard University, Northeastern University, Istanbul Technical University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Music, and the University of Georgia’s Hugh Hodgson School of Music. He is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at Kent State University.