Please enjoy this concert I recently did with Harvard’s Fromm concerts! Filmed at National Sawdust, it features new solo pieces by Dongryul Lee and Jeffrey Mumford and duo works by Natasha Barrett and Rebecca Saunders with the marvelous pianist Conor Hanick. More info. Also, on their Youtube channel, check out our interviews with the composers!

The annual Fromm concerts at Harvard are customarily a pair of live events, co-curated by a professor from the music department along with a guest artist. Thanks to musicologist Anne Shreffler for the honor of co-curating with her and for the very enjoyable conversations and collaboration. I met Anne in 2016 at a Tufts/Harvard conference on Luigi Nono’s music, at which Chris Burns and I were invited to perform “La lontananza nostalgia utopia futura”. It’s been wonderful to have a fascinating ongoing dialogue with Anne about the music of our time.

Rebecca Saunders’ Duo focuses on timbres and sustained tensions, exquisitely sensitive or startlingly acute. The Mumford piece “fleeting cycles of layered air” evokes billowing gusts of wind with long bursts of notes. Lee’s “A finite island in the infinite ocean” takes us to outer space, the first movement a venturing into the unknown, the second an exploration of a new terrain, its melodies both somehow familiar and foreign. Barrett’s “Allure and Hoodwink” has the instruments enmeshed in a world of textured electronic sounds, ranging from lush and dense textures to concrète samples of traffic, sirens, and dripping water.

Thank you to Anthony diBartolo and the Harvard video team and to the National Sawdust team for the filming and recording. Thank you to Yamaha for providing the piano for Conor.
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