REWIND January 19, 2008

The West Coast Premiere of a Revolutionary Classical Event!

The New Century Chamber Orchestra will be joined by Paul Haas and Anne Akiko Meyers for a concert that connects 400 years of music history with newly commissioned works by modern composers Joshua Penman and Judd Greenstein and DJ Mason Bates. The event will also feature installation art designed by Berkeley-based visual artist Reuben Margolin, the winner of the NCCO’s REWIND Installation Art Competition.

REWIND is generously sponsored, in part, by the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation.

Check out the trailer for REWIND at www.youtube.com/nccosf.

PROGRAM:

January 19, 2008, REWIND with Paul Haas
Anne Akiko Meyers, violin
Mason Bates, DJ
Jan. 19 at 8pm, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, San Francisco

Schnittke: Concerto Grosso for 2 Violins, Harpsichord, and Strings
Raskatov: 5 Minuten aus dem Leben WAM
James MacMillan: As Others See Us (T. S. Eliot)
Stravinsky: Suite from Pulcinella
Villa-Lobos: Bachianas brasileiras No. 4
Stravinsky: Suite for Small Orchestra No. 2
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht
Mozart: Divertimento K. 136
Corelli (arr Greenstein): Concerto Grosso in C minor, Op. 6, No. 3
Biagio Marini: Passacaglio
Purcell: A Bird’s Prelude from A Faerie Queen

It’s time to bring classical music into the 21st century. Paul Haas, artistic director of the production company Sympho, created REWIND, a visceral, unconventional concert that appeals to your eyes and ears. REWIND features installation art and lighting, masterworks of the past, and newly commissioned acoustic and electronic pieces linking it all together for a seamless musical experience. Digital sampling enables the composers and musicians to include the audience in the sonic landscape. Even the way the audience views this concert is unusual – the orchestra plays in the center of the room, with audience members surrounding them.


WHERE AND WHEN:

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco
Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 8pm

TICKETS: To order tickets, please visit www.ybca.org or call 415.978.ARTS (2787).
$50 General Admission. Student tickets ($25) available the day of the event if the show is not sold out.
For more information, call the NCCO at 415.357.1111 or visit the website at www.ncco.org

THE PLAYERS:

New Century Chamber Orchestra

The New Century Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1992, looks for fresh, exciting new ways to present classical music in the San Francisco Bay Area by combining performances of extraordinary quality with innovative programming. For NCCO subscription concerts, the Music Director or guest concertmaster chooses the programs and guides the artistic vision, but the seventeen members of the orchestra perform without a conductor. Musical decisions are made collaboratively, resulting in an enhanced level of commitment on the part of the musicians to concerts of remarkable precision, passion and power. In 2002, Sir Simon Rattle was the first conductor to lead the orchestra in a full-length concert, a celebration of the NCCO’s 10th Anniversary performed in conjunction with Marin Academy. The January 2008 REWIND performance, led by Paul Haas, will be the second time an entire concert has been led by a conductor.

The NCCO education program provides violin lessons to underserved students in Marin City and San Rafael’s Canal District, as well as intimate classroom performances by string quartets to students in Bay Area elementary schools.

The orchestra has released four compact discs, one of which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1997.

Paul Haas

According to The New York Times, Paul Haas “is surely on the brink of a noteworthy career.” His conducting engagements have included performances with the San Antonio Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, among others, as well as festival appearances. Recently, Paul conducted the National Symphony Orchestra with Itzhak Perlman as soloist. In addition to his orchestral engagements, Paul Haas is the founder and artistic director of Sympho, a groundbreaking concert production company. Sympho’s first concert, REWIND, is a revolutionary visual and sonic experience that has been lauded by critics. “REWIND Refits the Classical Experience for a New Century,” blared The New York Times headline for the premiere June 8, 2006.

Mr. Haas is a graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, where he studied conducting as a Bruno Walter Fellow with Otto-Werner Mueller.

Anne Akiko Meyers

Anne Akiko Meyers’ dynamic and compelling music making has catapulted her to the top of her generation. At the age of 11, she was featured, twice, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. At 15, she joined the Young Concert Artists roster. At 23, she was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, the only artist to be the sole recipient of this annual award. Today she performs around the globe as a featured soloist with the most recognized names in classical music and has performed for dignitaries including the Emperor and Empress of Japan.

Additional information on Anne Akiko Meyers may be found on her website at www.AnneAkikoMeyers.com.

Joshua Penman

Joshua Penman enjoys simultaneous careers as a concert composer, film composer, ambient artist, record producer, consciousness researcher, and teacher. He has worked with the American Composers Orchestra, Gamelan Galak-Tika, SONYC, and the Cedar Rapids Symphony, as well as trance star Kenji Williams and kirtan artist Govindas; he has received commissions from the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Prism Saxophone Quartet, Arraymusic, the Foundation for Universal Sacred Music, and the New York Youth Symphony. Recent projects include the score for the art film Caravan of Light, an ambient remix for santur virtuoso Alan Kushan, and a commission for early-music vocal ensemble Lionheart. He is finishing a DMA in composition at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Judd Greenstein

Judd Greenstein received degrees from Williams College and the Yale School of Music, studying with Martin Bresnick, David Kechley, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Ezra Laderman. Mr. Greenstein has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music, and was chosen as an Emerging Composer in last season's ZOOM: Composers Close Up series at Merkin Hall. Recent awards and commissions include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a First Music Commission from the New York Youth Symphony, and a Morton Gould Young Composer Award from the ASCAP Foundation. Mr. Greenstein is the co-Artistic Director of NOW Ensemble and is in his second year of studies for a PhD in Composition at Princeton University.

Mason Bates

DJ and electronica artist MASONIC (Mason Bates) has appeared at an enormous variety of spaces, from clubs to classical concert halls, from San Francisco to Berlin to Rome. His unique blend of downtempo hip-hop, trip-hop, and French house, often performed with jazz and classical musicians, has been heard in clubs and lounges such as Temple, 111 Minna, Sugar, Skylark, Sip, Mint, and Fuse, as well as in art spaces such as the SFMOMA and the Berkeley Art Museum. A composer of symphonic music who often includes live electronica in his orchestral music, Mason Bates has become known as a unique artist who moves fluidly between those two worlds — performing on electronic drumpad and laptop, for example, with The National Symphony Orchesta in his Liquid Interface at Carnegie Hall. Now living in the Bay Area, Mason Bates studies at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies with Edmund Campion. For more info, visit www.MasonicElectronica.com.

Reuben Margolin

Berkeley artist Reuben Heyday Margolin’s wave installations are a series of monumental mechanical mobiles inspired by water that combine the logic of mathematics with the sensuousness of nature. He has completed six of these suspended installations that undulate in different patterns. They have been made of wood, aluminum, and copper, and are driven by overhead structures containing electric motors, cams, levers, hundreds of pulleys, and thousands of feet of aircraft cable. Their motion is produced by layering the effects of simple mechanical components. People’s delight in the dynamic (but quiet) overhead structures as well as the vitality and beauty of the suspended wave has been immensely gratifying. He has shown kinetic art at the Exploratorium, Chabot Space and Science Center, the Emeryville Art Show, and currently has an installation at the Aquarium of the Pacific, in Long Beach. www.reubenmargolin.com

Official Website: http://www.ncco.org/concerts.htm#rewind