Talea Ensemble Presents:
Anthony Cheung CD Release
Dystemporal
Friday, November 11th @ 7pm
Tickets
About the Show
New York’s acclaimed and adventurous Talea Ensemble celebrates the release of music by its co-founder Anthony Cheung. The album, released this past June on the Wergo label, collects together six works written over a seven year period (2005-12). From atmospheric evocations of nature to complex, irregular grooves, to field recordings blending seamlessly with enhanced instrumental colors, Dystemporal covers a wide range of musical and extra-musical ground. In addition to four ensemble works recorded by Talea and conductor Jim Baker, Cheung himself performs a short, fiery solo piano work and the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by its former music director Susanna Mälkki, gives a lively account of the album’s title track. The concert at National Sawdust includes music from the album (Centripedalocity) and features Cheung performing his piano suite Roundabouts, saxophonist Ryan Muncy and harpist Nuiko Wadden diving into the fierce improvisatory and microtonal world of Refrain from Riffing, and violinist Yuki Numata Resnick performing the mercurial Character Studies, the second of which will be a world premiere. Of Cheung’s music, critic Paul Griffiths has written, “[it] is music of spectacular sound – of brilliantly imagined solos and gatherings – but it is also music of spectacular time. Harmony being for this composer a condition of movement, we feel ourselves to be travelling through time’s spaces: its zooms and its lulls, its turns and its stallings. The trip is never ordinary.”
About Anthony Cheung
Anthony Cheung is a composer and pianist. His music has been commissioned by leading groups such as the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, New York Philharmonic, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, and also performed by Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Linea, the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and the French National Orchestras of Lille and Lorraine, among others. From 2015-17, he is the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP, and first prize in the Sixth International Dutilleux Competition (2008), as well as a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2012). As a performer and advocate for new music, he is co-Artistic Director of the Talea Ensemble, which he co-founded in 2007. His music has been programmed at festivals such as Ultraschall, Cresc. Biennale, Wittener Tage, Présences, Heidelberger Frühling, Mostly Mozart, Tanglewood, Helsinki Festival and Musica Nova Helsinki, Centre Acanthes, Musica, and Nuova Consonanza. A portrait CD, Roundabouts, was released by the Ensemble Modern in 2014, and a recent disc on Wergo, Dystemporal, features performances by Talea and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Anthony received a B.A. in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago.
