Transformations:
Front Porch, Jeff Siegfried, & Hayley Boggs
Featuring music of Daniel Zlatkin, Maria Victoria Paterno, Gala Flagello, and Ari Sussman
6pm doors • 7pm show
About
A showcase of new chamber and solo music presented by University of Michigan student composers, Transformations features world premieres from Gala Flagello, Maria Paterno, Ari Sussman, and Daniel Zlatkin, performed by mixed quartet Front Porch (violin, bassoon, piano, percussion), saxophonist Jeff Siegfried, and soprano Hayley Boggs.
Tickets
The Artists
Maria Victoria Paterno (b. 1994) is a composer currently pursuing her MM in Composition at the University of Michigan. She creates music through a combination of intuitive and pattern-based decision making, often finding inspiration in mathematical and astronomical concepts. Her work is most often focused on where gestures are placed over time, and how the silence between gestures impacts the listener.
Maria graduated with degrees in Music Composition and German from Western Michigan University. In addition to her double major, she received a minor from the innovative Multimedia Arts Technology program. She also spent a semester studying at the University of Bonn in Germany. She was named the Theodore Presser Scholar of the School of Music for the 2016–17 academic year, served as the vice president of the Western Student Composers Alliance during the Fall 2016 semester, and worked as a technology assistant to the composition studio from 2014–2016. She has studied piano with Lori Sims and Edisher Savitski, and composition with Evan Chambers, Kristin Kuster, Lisa Coons, David Colson, and Christopher Biggs.
Jeff Siegfried combines a “rich, vibrant tone” (South Florida Classical Review) with “beautiful and delicate playing” (Michael Tilson Thomas) to deliver “showstopper performances” (Peninsula Reviews).
Siegfried received first prize at the Luminarts Competition and the Frances Walton Competition and was runner-up in the Carmel Music Society Competition and the North American Saxophone Alliance Quartet Competition. He is the recipient of the 2016 Hans Schaueble Award.
Siegfried has appeared as a soloist with the University of Portland Wind Ensemble, the Oregon State University Wind Ensemble, the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own”, and the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble. He has also appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New World Symphony, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, and the Spoleto Festival, USA. Siegfried serves as Assistant Professor of Saxophone at West Virginia University.
Hayley Boggs is currently pursuing her MM at the Mannes School of Music for Opera Performance, having received her BM from the University of Michigan. Passionate about contemporary opera, she has premiered new works including Ne’er and A World Apart with NANOWorks, and was the first to play Kitty Packard in the revised version of William Bolcom’s Dinner at Eight with Michigan’s University Productions. She has also played numerous other roles including Zerlina (Don Giovanni) with the Trentino Music Festival and Soeur Constance (Dialogues of the Carmelites) with Michigan’s Green Opera. Musical theatre credits include: Johanna (Sweeney Todd), Inga (Young Frankenstein), and Penny (Hairspray). In her free time, Hayley is also a content creator with video gaming and various entertainment on Twitch.
Composer Gala Flagello’s music “is both flesh and spirit, intensely psychological without sacrificing concrete musical enjoyment” (Lana Norris, I Care If You Listen). She is also the co-founder and Festival Director of the nonprofit contemporary music festival Connecticut Summerfest (www.ctsummerfest.org). Gala is a recipient of the Edward Diemente Prize for Excellence in Creative Activity (The Hartt School), the Artist Scholarship (Artists for World Peace), and the Dorothy Greenwald Graduate Fellowship (University of Michigan). She has received two EXCEL Enterprise Grants for her projects Educational New Music for Developing Voices (2017) and The Contemporary Solo Horn (2018). Gala’s piece Self-Talk, which was premiered at National Sawdust in August 2018, will be featured on Vanguard Reed Quintet’s forthcoming debut album. She also scored the 2018 short film Break a Leg.
Gala holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition degree from the Hartt School and is currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition degree at the University of Michigan under the tutelage of Michael Daugherty and Kristy Kuster. For more information, visit www.galaflagello.com and www.soundcloud.com/galaflagello.
Front Porch is a mixed quartet that invites audiences to engage personally with music by passionate, youthful voices, reimagining the classical concert experience with warmth and love as its foundation. Feeling equally at home with opera singers, composers, folk artists, and everyone in between, Front Porch is committed to exploring the expressive possibilities of its uncommon configuration of violin, bassoon, piano, and percussion.
Ben Jackson – violin
Maddy Wildman – bassoon
Karalyn Schubring – piano
Jacob Rogers – percussion
Find us at frontporchensemble.org
Daniel Zlatkin’s music aspires to tell a story and stretch reality. Listeners often describe it as visceral, clear, austere, and humorous.
His works have been performed by leading and emerging artists, including the Da Capo Chamber Players, Calidore Quartet, soprano Lucy Dhegrae, the Brass Project, Choral Chameleon, Vanguard Reed Quintet, Khorikos, American Modern Ensemble, New Haven Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestra Now. His music has been featured by National Sawdust (Brooklyn), Music From Angel Fire (New Mexico), I Care If You Listen, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts (Hudson Valley).
As a cellist he has extensive orchestral and chamber music experience, and frequently performs his own music. He is a recipient of a 2015 Davis Projects for Peace grant. He has been a finalist three times for the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, and was a runner-up in the 2019 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. He holds an MM in composition from the University of Michigan. For more information, visit www.danielzlatkin.com.
Praised for his work that “weave(s) a trance-like mystical aura” (Zamir Chorale), Ari Sussman (b. 1993) is a Philadelphia–born and Ann Arbor–based pianist and composer of vocal, chamber, orchestral, choral, and electronic music. His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe by ensembles such as the Chicago Ensemble, the KC VITAs Chamber Choir, Zamir Chorale of Boston, Ensemble Ipse, American Modern Ensemble, Zemer Chai, the Juventas New Music Ensemble, and others. Kabbalah, nature, cosmology, meditation, metaphysics, ancient and contemporary poetry, and the human condition are among Sussman‘s non-musical influences and interests. As a result, Sussman’s music illustrates equivocal worlds of sounds that are ambient, euphonious, and ethereal in nature.
Recently named composer-in-residence with the Boise–based 208 ensemble, Sussman has won awards from the American Composers Forum and the University of Michigan for his work. He is a two-time finalist for the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, and his orchestral work Kol Galgal was the recipient of a 2018 BMI Student Composer Award. In Summer 2019, Sussman will be a composition fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center.
An accomplished concert pianist, Sussman has performed many concerts and recitals throughout Philadelphia, Boston, and Ann Arbor. With a fondness for musical theater, Sussman has held music directorships for productions of Hairspray, Les Misérables, and The Last Five Years. With a love for folk/traditional music, he is also a member of the Butternut Squad, a folk/roots ensemble dedicated to playing the traditional musics of the British Isles and Appalachia with a unique and modern approach.
Sussman received his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music with Honors in Composition from the New England Conservatory of Music. He is currently pursuing the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition at the University of Michigan. His primary musical mentors include Joel Rothstein, Ellen Bildersee, Michael Gandolfi, Kati Agócs, and Evan Chambers.
Sussman enjoys long walks, playing basketball, drinking tea, playing clawhammer banjo, Broad City, mancala, and avidly rooting for Philadelphian and University of Michigan sports teams. Sussman is a member of the Landscape Music Composers Network.
