Wednesday 10 April 08:00pm
7pm doors • 8pm show
AMOC
In Concert
About
The American Modern Opera Company, a star-studded collective of the best operatic performers of a generation and a National Sawdust Curator, brings a vibrant program of chamber music to National Sawdust, featuring AMOC artists Keir GoGwilt (violin), Coleman Itzkoff (cello), and Conor Hanick (piano). Pieces will include Its Own Accord, written for GoGwilt by “shockingly vivid” composer (Opera Wire) Matthew Aucoin, and Celeste Oram’s Sanz cuer/Amis, dolens/Dame, par vous (2016), a work that uses a medieval French ballade as a springboard to explore the fluidity space between the sacred and the mundane, the virtual and the real, the performative and the everyday. With their bold vision and consummate artistry, AMOC are musicians who simply must be seen.
Tickets
The Artists
The AMERICAN MODERN OPERA COMPANY is an opera company on a new model. The company serves as the artistic home for seventeen of the most exciting singers, dancers, and instrumentalists of the rising generation. AMOC’s artists are committed to reimagining what it means to make opera in the twenty-first century: unlike a typical opera company, which features a constantly-changing roster of artists in one particular theater, AMOC focuses on deep, long-term artistic relationships among its core members. The company’s goal is to create a body of new, discipline-colliding music-theater works, conceived, developed, and performed by our artists.
In AMOC’s inaugural season, the company launched a new festival, the Run AMOC! Festival, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA in December; held its first major teaching and performance residency at Harvard University in February; performed at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN, in March; and was Artist-in-Residence at Park Avenue Armory in April. Future engagements include performances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (both The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters), The Clark Art Institute, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, and a second, expanded Run AMOC! Festival at the American Repertory Theater, as well as commissions from the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and San Francisco’s ODC Theater.
Keir GoGwilt is a violinist and writer whose work spans the disciplinary range, both creatively and critically. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland and raised in New York, he studied literature at Harvard University, where he was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts.
As a violin soloist he has performed with groups including the Chinese National Symphony, the Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, the Bowdoin International Music Festival Orchestra, the Manhattan School of Music Chamber Sinfonia, members of A Far Cry, the La Jolla Symphony (upcoming), and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (upcoming). As a recitalist and chamber musician he has played at festivals including the Spoleto Festival in Italy, Rockport Chamber Music, Yellow Barn, and Taos. He has appeared as a guest artist at the Portland Bach Festival and the Music Academy of the West.
His first collaboration with dancer Bobbi Jene Smith, “A Study on Effort,” incorporates his own improvisations as well as a retrospective “question score,” written out after several iterations of the piece. They have been featured at the Luminato Festival, PS 122’s COIL Festival, the ODC Theater in collaboration with the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, UCSD Dance&Theater, the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, and the American Repertory Theater.
GoGwilt has worked with composers including Tan Dun, Tobias Picker (recording of violin and chamber music released with Tzadik Records), Carolyn Chen, Celeste Oram, and his longest continuous collaborator, Matthew Aucoin. He has premiered several of Aucoin’s violin works including “Poem,” “This Same Light,” “Celan Fragments,” and “Its Own Accord.” He has composed poems on matrices of 27 words and filmed himself playing Telemann in navy warships and garbage dumps for Celeste Oram’s explorative broadcasts on technological media, “Televisionmann,” and “Vera Wyse Munro: A Radio Séance.”
In addition to his creative work, he is an active scholar. His work moves the conversation beyond the reproduction of musical works to consider the reproduction of technical/interpretive templates that guide musical practice in both physical and graphic space. Identifying such templates can help to determine musicians’ and theorists’ different notions of music’s object, arrived at according to variable social, aesthetic, and political concerns. His work draws from structuralist and post-structuralist semiotics as well as Frankfurt School aesthetics.
He has presented his work in conversational performances and presentations at Fordham University, the Scottish Poetry Library, the Peabody Essex Museum (together with Matthew Aucoin), the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music (with Roger Reynolds), and the Orpheus Institute in Ghent. He has a forthcoming essay in the Orpheus Institute Series published by the Leuven Press and is currently writing a musical theater piece called Enlightenment.
GoGwilt has studied and collaborated with musicians including Lewis Kaplan, Robert Levin, Steven Schick, Charles Curtis, and Anthony Burr. At Harvard he studied poetry and philosophy with Jorie Graham, Helen Vendler, and John Hamilton. He has served as associate concertmaster of the Canadian Opera Company, as faculty on the Wellesley Composer’s Conference, and as backup strings for Chance the Rapper on SNL. He is currently a music PhD student at UCSD in the Integrative Studies area.
A pianist that “defies human description” for some (Concerto Net) and recalls “a young Peter Serkin” for others (New York Times), Conor Hanick is one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music old and new.
He has performed internationally to wide acclaim in repertoire ranging from the early Baroque to the recently written, and collaborated with conductors Alan Gilbert, James Levine, David Robertson, Pierre Boulez, James Conlon, Anne Manson, Carlos Izcaray, Jeffrey Milarsky, and others. In addition to the Kennedy Center, Mondavi Performing Arts Center, the Kultur und Kongresszentrum Luzern, Kyoto Concert Hall, the Dewan Pilharmonik Peronas in Malaysia, Hanick has performed in virtually every prominent arts venue in New York City, ranging from (le) Poisson Rouge and The Kitchen to Alice Tully Hall and all three halls of Carnegie Hall.
A fierce advocate for the music of today, Hanick has premiered over 200 scores and worked with composers as diverse as Charles Wuorinen and Caroline Shaw. As the “soloist of choice for such thorny works” (New York Times), Hanick recently performed Milton Babbitt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Juilliard Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall; György Ligeti’s Piano Concerto with Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic Biennale; Pierre Boulez’s sur Incises with James Levine at Carnegie Hall; and the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Piano Concerto with the Alabama Symphony.
This season Hanick plays Morton Feldman at The Clark Museum in the Berkshires; Luciano Berio and John Luther Adams at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota; Béla Bártok’s piano/percussion Sonata with members of the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall; Matthew Aucoin’s Piano Concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) at Jordon Hall; György Ligeti’s Piano Concerto in Iowa City and Chicago; and recitals in Denver, Los Angeles, and Aspen with violinist Augustin Hadelich. As a soloist, he will be artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa and Northwestern University.
Hanick is a solo piano faculty artist at the Music Academy of the West, an elite summer festival in Santa Barbara, and holds degrees from Northwestern University and The Juilliard School, where he completed his Master’s and Doctorate studying with Yoheved Kaplinsky and Matti Raekallio.
Hailed by Alex Ross and The New Yorker for his “flawless technique and keen musicality,” cellist Coleman Itzkoff enjoys a diverse career as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator.
Coleman made his professional debut at the age of 15 with the Dayton Philharmonic and has since appeared as soloist with orchestras across the country, most recently the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, and American Youth Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall. He has worked alongside conductors including David Allan Miller, Carlos Izcaray, Eckart Preu, and Tomáś Netopil. Gold Medalist in the 2017 International Berliner Music Competition, Coleman was a multiple prize winner at the 2016 Irving Klein Competition and in the 2016 Boulder International Chamber Music Competition. He has also taken prizes at the Fischoff, Johansen, Blount Slawson, and Young Texas Artist Competitions. In January 2013, Coleman was a featured guest artist for a weeklong residency on NPR’s Performance Today, recording interviews with host Fred Child and a full recital program.
Chamber Music is at the heart of Coleman’s musical life, beginning early on with weekly quartet readings with his parents, both professional violinists themselves. At the age of 10 Coleman began attending the Greenwood Music Camp where he began playing with other musicians of his generation and where his love of chamber music deepened. Since that time he has attended a great many summer music festivals including Aspen Music Festival and School, the International Heifetz Institute, La Jolla SummerFest, YellowBarn, and Music@Menlo. Coleman has also had the great honor of collaborating with distinguished artists of older generations, including Pamela Frank, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Cho-Liang Lin, Glenn Dicterow, Lucy Shelton, David Finckel, Johannes Moser, Roger Tapping, Gil Kalish, and Peter Frankl.
Aside from his performing career, Coleman is a devoted and dynamic educator, and has taught and given masterclasses across the US at such institutions as the International Heifetz Institute, the Lev Aronson Cello Festival, Virginia Tech, NYU, and Harvard University. Coleman has also performed outreach concerts in schools, community centers, and hospitals around the county. He has received several grants and awards for these purposes, including the Sviatoslav Richter Grant for Music Outreach from Rice University, the Roman Goronok Fellowship from the 2016 Irving Klein Competition, and, in 2015, the Cleveland Clinic Arts and Medicine Award for his engaging talks and accessible performances for clinic patients. Upcoming projects include an artist residency at the Willie Mays Boys & Girls Club in Hunters Point, San Francisco.
Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Coleman was born in 1992 into a musical family and began playing cello at the age of 4. He holds a BM from Rice University and his Master’s Degree at the Thornton School of Music at USC under the tutelage of Ralph Kirshbaum. Coleman performs on a Paul Siefried bow on loan to him from the Maestro Foundation and on a 1730 Gennaro Gagliano Cello, generously loaned to him by the Amatius Foundation of Austin, TX.
