ensembleNewSRQ Launches New Season

September 21, 2021 – Sarasota

ensembleNewSRQ (enSRQ), the innovative chamber music ensemble, launches its sixth season with a return to live performance in “Don’t Look Down,” featuring three works by three young American composers. The concert features Yaz Lancaster’s ethereal and reflective “Sequoia.” Pianist Conor Hanick returns with the second-ever performance of Chris Cerrone’s poignant work, “Don’t Look Down,” for percussion quartet and piano (named one of The New York Times’ Best Pieces of 2020). And, two years in the making, Max Grafe’s “Shadow Theatre,” composed specifically for enSRQ’s artistic directors and founders, George Nickson and Samantha Bennett, and for pianist Hanick, will receive its world premiere. The mainstage concert, which will also be live-streamed, is Monday, October 11, 8 p.m., at First Congregational Church, 1031 S. Euclid Ave., Sarasota. Masks and social distancing will be required. Tickets are ^$25 for in-person single tickets; ^$10 for single concert streaming access; ^$115 for a membership that includes both live tickets and streaming access. More information on ticket packages, including student ticket pricing, is available at www.ensrq.org.

According to Nickson, the three works feature “composers who write for and around percussion. Yaz Lancaster’s work explores a sound world and evocative nature that people would not normally expect to come from the percussion world. Max Grafe’s work casts a narrative between the interplay of percussion, piano and violin, creating characters and moods for each as they battle through the score. Chris Cerrone’s work turns the piano on its head and assimilates it back into almost a percussion instrument, making the pianist a chameleon amongst the percussion quartet, mimicking and blending into the huge field of percussion instruments surrounding it, some of which people might not have realized were percussion instruments like bike pumps, harmonicas, tuned beer bottles, large wooden blocks with sandpaper and more.”

Bennett says she’s thrilled to open the season with Lancaster’s “Sequoia,” an “enchanting, reflective work that that calls us all together. And we’ll finally get to premiere Max Grafe’s ‘Shadow Theater.’ It’s always exciting to perform brand-new work. And ‘Don’t Look Down’ is simply an amazing piece. We are so lucky to have Conor Hanick, who premiered the work, with us to give the second performance. The piano part in this piece is really a percussion part and demonstrates why the piano is part of the percussion family.” Bennett adds that the date of the concert is also her birthday—and she invites everyone to come celebrate.

Featured performers are: Samantha Bennett, violin; George Nickson, percussion; Charlie Rosmarin, percussion; Scott Crawford, percussion; and Issac Fernandez-Hernandez, percussion.

Composers:

Yaz Lancaster is a Black transdisciplinary artist who is most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics and the everyday; fragments and collage; and anti-oppressive, liberatory politics. Lancaster performs as a violinist, vocalist and steel-pannist in a wide variety of settings, including DIY/indie venues, contemporary chamber music, and steel bands. Their work is presented in many different mediums and collaborative projects, and often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of identity & liberation to natural phenomena and poetics. 

Max Grafe writes music characterized by “jagged declamations and muffled filigree” (Gramophone) with the aim of striking a distinctive balance between the stylistic immediacy of modernism and the dramatic power of romanticism. Grafe’s music has been performed by a wide range of prominent and emerging ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, Contemporaneous, Yarn/Wire, Quince Ensemble, New Thread Quartet, and Flux Quartet. He has received several of the most prestigious awards available to emerging American composers, including a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a William Schuman Prize from BMI, two consecutive Palmer Dixon Prizes from the Juilliard School, and a Morton Gould Young Composer Award from ASCAP. Of his work, “Shadow Theater,” Grafe writes that it is an “exploration of one of my core artistic beliefs: that music as an art form occupies a dramatic or narrative space on a fundamental level, even more so than a sonic or temporal one. As the title suggests, a plotless play of sorts unfolds over the course of the piece whose only characters are the three instrumentalists, sometimes in intricate dialogue with each other, sometimes left to expound on their thoughts alone.”

Christopher Cerrone is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own. In the 2020–21 season, Cerrone composes a new antiphonal brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony; a new work for Hub New Music premiered via Livestream with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music; and begins work on “In a Grove,” a new opera composed with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann that was commissioned by LA Opera and will premiere at Pittsburgh Opera in February 2022. Cerrone’s opera, “Invisible Cities,” was a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist. “Don’t Look Down,” the composer writes: “…is an accidental diary of having lived through the worst pandemic of the last hundred years. When I started writing this piece in February 2020, it would be inconceivable to imagine the world we live in now. The one thing that kept me sane during this period was clocking into work—that is, working on this piece. So looking back, it’s not at all surprising the piece would wind up reflecting both the strangeness and the instability of the world we live in.”

Guest Artist:

Pianist Conor Hanick “defies human description” for some (Concerto Net) and recalls “a young Peter Serkin” for others (The New York Times). He has performed to acclaim throughout the world with some of music’s leading ensembles, instrumentalists, and conductors, including Pierre Boulez, Alan Gilbert, Ludovic Morlot, and David Robertson. A fierce advocate for the music of today, and the “soloist of choice for such thorny works” (NYT), Hanick has premiered over 200 works to date and worked with musical icons like Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho, and Charles Wuorinen, while also championing important voices of his own generation, including Caroline Shaw, Eric Wubbels, Nina Young, and Marcos Balter. Hanick has recently appeared with The Seattle Symphony, The Juilliard Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Lucerne Academy Orchestra for the New York Philharmonic Biennial, and been presented at Carnegie Hall, the Mondavi Center, the Kennedy Center, and the Metropolitan Museum. He collaborates regularly with Jay Campbell, Joshua Roman, Miranda Cuckson, and Augustin Hadelich and is a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company, with which he will be a co-director of the Ojai Festival in 2022. Hanick is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and a graduate of Northwestern University and The Juilliard School, where he serves on the chamber music and keyboard faculty. He is a Yamaha Artist.