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​Featuring works by Aldo Clementi, Augusta Read Thomas, Caroline Shaw, Marcos Balter, Michael Gandolfi, and Tristan Murail
Saturday, April 26, 2025 | 2pm
Benzaquen Hall, DiMenna Center
450 W 37th St, New York, NY 10018
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PROGRAM
David Kaplan, piano
Argento New Music Project
Michel Galante, conductor
Concerto for piano and 14 instruments (1986)
Aldo Clementi
David Kaplan, piano
Overture, Scherzo, Finale (1841)
Robert Schumann arr. Kimmy Szeto
arrangement for chamber ensemble WORLD PREMIERE
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Intermission
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Excerpts from New Dances of the League of David (2014)
miniatures for piano commissioned by David Kaplan
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Mirrors and Sidesteps
Michael Gandolfi
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Davidsbündlertänze Op 6, No 1 'Lebhaft'
Robert Schumann
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Morse Code Fantasy
Augusta Read Thomas
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Davidsbündlertänze Op 6, No 3 'Etwas hahnbüchen'
Robert Schumann
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***
Marcos Balter
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XVI 'Mit gutem Humor, un poco lol ma con serioso vibes'
Caroline Shaw
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Davidsbündlertänze Op 6, No 18 “Ganz zum Überfluss meinte Eusebius noch Folgendes, dabei sprang aber viel Seligkeit aus seinen Augen.”
Robert Schumann
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David Kaplan, piano
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Une relecture des Kinderszenen de Robert Schumann (2020) US PREMIERE
Tristan Murail
for flute,cello and piano
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When Daniel Barenboim said “Schumann has a concept of music, but not really a concept of sound,” he was referring to works like Syrinx, which, in place of music, simply has three signs on the score : ***, or works like Humoresque, which includes notated musical lines that the performer is instructed not to actually play, but instead to hear only in their mind. In short, Schumann’s music raises more questions than it answers. It’s because of this that many contemporary composers have been tempted to step into his fertile creative ideas, ideas that take tremendous pleasure in free musical thought, invention, and fantasy, often breaking out of the world of sound into a world of inspired abstractions. This concert focuses on contemporary composers who responded to Schumann’s provocations: Aldo Clementi, Augusta Read Thomas, Caroline Shaw, Michael Gandolfi, Marcos Balter, and Tristan Murail.
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Aldo Clementi creates a spatialized image of Schumann’s musical brain through his “Concerto for Piano and 14 Instruments.” The source material is Schumann’s Novellette no. 8, op. 21, which juxtaposes utterly tragic music sections in F-sharp minor with completely light, carefree character music in D-flat major, and idealistic music in D major, never reconciling them, as if they are homeless fragments from disparate works. Clementi takes these fragments and interpolates them at different stations in the concert hall: one station for the solo piano, flute, and violin; one station for clarinet, violin, and oboe; one station for horn, viola, and trumpet, one station for bassoon, cello, and bass, and then one station for celesta, harp, and glockenspiel. Clementi’s Concerto is completely unique and unlike any other work in contemporary music. It is a graphic, 3D, experiential metaphor for Schumann’s compositional mind.
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Schumann’s “Overture, Scherzo, and Finale” is a collection of fragments on a different scale: this piece was meant to be his first "symphony" in three movements, but he was unable to find way to create a slow movement to balance the symphonic form that was expected at the time. Composed simultaneously with his "Spring" Symphony, in the early months of his marriage to Clara, Robert experienced a creative "spring" -- renewed musical energy flowed into the scores, only held back by the sound of the orchestra. Kimmy Szeto's arrangement for chamber ensemble polishes the sound apparatus to a crystalline clarity for Schumann's music to glimmer.​
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Tristan Murail, who established an international presence outside of France through his 12 year residency in New York, wrote that Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood has musical, expressive and evocative potential that far surpasses Schumann's version for piano. Almost all of them are little masterpieces, with great inventive power, based however on simple and concise ideas.” For his work for alto flute, cello, and piano entitled “Une relecture des Kinderszenen de Robert Schumann, Murail writes “for my vision of Scenes from Childhood, I did not hesitate to use the entire modern palette of instrumental techniques, thus multiplying available timbres and the acoustic effects resulting from their combinations.”
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Between 2013 and 2015, American pianist David Kaplan commissioned 17 composers to create a cycle of piano works inspired by Schumann. Argento presents four outstanding works from this collection, all by American composers. To name a few, Augusta Read Thomas’s Morse Code Fantasy, leaves the most memorable impression of all the works because it completely captures the raised-question spirit of Schumann. It does so by working on several levels: a purely musical level, and an implied “signaling” level derived from its morse code. The listener has no choice but to listen in two ways simultaneously. Caroline Shaw’s mit gutem Humor, un poco lol ma con serioso vibes, is the briefest possible representation of Schumann’s extroverted Florestan followed by his introverted Eusebius. Marcos Balter insists on Schumann’s mind bending eccentricity in his work ***.
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Discussion with members of Argento to follow the concert.
Around the World
​Featuring works by William Grant Still, Tania León,
Arthur Kampela, and Joël Mérah
PROGRAM
Argento New Music Project
Michel Galante, conductor
Arthur Kampela
A Máquina do Mundo (2021)
for solo bass clarinet
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Entre dedos e bocas- estreia mundial (2022)
for flute, saxophone, percussion, guitar and violin
US PREMIERE
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William Grant Still
Mother and Child (1943)
for violin and piano
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Intermission
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Tania León
Permutation 7 (1981)
for snare drum, flute, saxophone, percussion, guitar and violin
Michel Galante
For Miro
for violin and piano
WORLD PREMIERE
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Joël Mérah
Derrière les Tableaux d'une exposition (2021)
for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano
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French composer Joël Mérah has come up with the brilliantly mad idea of a new reading of Pictures at an Exhibition, giving birth to a new Russian melody cycle with chamber ensemble, creating a vocal part and attaching a poem to each scene of this work filled with mystery. Composed by Modest Mussorgsky after the untimely death of his painter and architect friend Victor Hartmann, in the emotion of the retrospective exhibition devoted to him in St. Petersburg in 1874, these “tableaux” contain a highly developed visual aspect, but also a cyclical and narrative aspect: in the Promenades that punctuate the piece, between each tableau, Moussorgsky paints himself as seen from above,
outside himself...
Les Catacombes, Cum Mortuis in lingua mortua, and La grande porte de Kiev refer of course to a painting by Hartmann, but also seem to contain a metaphysical, almost autobiographical and troubling aspect. The modernity of the language and form gives this work for solo piano an enormous potential that has attracted many composers: Ravel, of course, with his superb orchestration that truly reveals the richness of the work, but also Michail Touchmalov, Henry Wood, Elgar Howart for the orchestral versions... and a host of arrangements, from solo guitar to progressive rock, via Michael Jackson... but never before has a composer invited the voice or the spoken word to take part.
The singularity and formidable instinct of Joël Mérah's approach is to have associated the visual, almost cinematographic aspect of the work with a literary and poetic aspect, omnipresent in the rest of the work of Mussorgsky, who dedicated his life to opera, and dreamed of capturing “the art of human speech, with its finest nuances.” The vocal line seems completely self-evident, wonderfully balanced with the orchestration, and it's only natural that poems by Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Nicolas Nekrassov, Aloysius Bertrand, Nikolay Gumilev or Colette should join Hartmann's paintings, Mussorgsky's music and Joël Mérah's language, in a certain global vision of Art.
Arthur Kampela is one of the preeminent composers of a generation of composers that use noise as featured musical material. His rhythmic language has a different source: his native Brazilian roots and years of playing Samba as a guitarist. Argento performs the US PREMIERE of Entre dedos e bocas
- estreia mundial, a work that seamlessly fuses a noisy musical surface with complex dance rhythms to create what can really be called an orchestra, out of just 5 instruments. Carol McGonnell also gives the US Premiere of Kampela’s virtuoso work for bass clarinet, A Máquina do Mundo. Like Arthur Kampela, Tania Leon absorbed the music of her native country, fusing Cuba’s musical vernacular with the muscular rigor of late 20th century American post-tonal harmonic language like Elliott Carter. Argento has been playing Tania León’s music for 20 years, first collaborating with her in 2002, and presents one of her most extroverted “Ivesian” works: Permutation 7, featuring a rambunctious mobile snare virtuoso performing around a stationary quintet.
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Discussion with members of Argento to follow the concert.
La Chute d'Icare
Brian Ferneyhough
Carol McGonnell, clarinet
Argento New Music Project
We are proud to release this special video performance of British composer Brian Ferneyhough’s virtuosic concerto for solo clarinet and ensemble La Chute d’Icare (1988), with Carol McGonnell as the featured soloist. This work depicts the violent and dramatic flight, fall, and ultimate death of Icarus, which is captured through the virtuoso interactions you will see in this short film. Ferneyhough took inspiration from a 16th century painting originally attributed to Brueghel called la Chute d’Icare (the fall of Icarus). According to mythology, Icarus donned wings made of feather and wax, only to fly over the ocean, and mistakenly, fly too close to the sun, whose hot rays melted the wax and caused him to fall to his demise.
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​The musicians joining Carol McGonnell are: flutist Francesca Ferrara, oboist Kathy Halvorson, percussionist Sean Statser, pianist Steven Beck, violinist Mari Lee, cellist Michael Katz, bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause, and conductor Michel Galante. All of these artists give their very best efforts to this extreme, surprising, and often violent work. What makes this work unique is that it has an immediate surface appeal, but because of its many layers of musical activity, it can be enjoyed even more and more with each repeated listening.
Argento's 2024-25 season programming is made possible by the BMI Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the generosity of individual supporters. Additional support is provided by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
"AN ESSENTIAL SOURCE OF ADVENTUROUS NEW MUSIC"
- ALEX ROSS
ARGENTO
NEW MUSIC
PROJECT
Under the direction of Michel Galante, Argento has become an essential source of adventurous new music.
– Alex Ross, The New Yorker
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The Argento New Music Project’s fierce emotional commitment onstage and relentless determination to master all technical aspects of its repertoire has inspired world renowned composers such as Tristan Murail, Beat Furrer, and Georg Friedrich Haas to regard them as the best interpreter of their music in the United States. Argento first gained prominence at New York’s “Sounds French Festival” in 2003 and were shortly thereafter invited to work closely with Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez for the opening concert of the French American Cultural Exchange. From its inception, the group has dedicated itself to a thorough command of the microtonal challenges of contemporary Spectral composers, an effort that culminated in their first CD Winter Fragments, winner of the prestigious Record Geijutsu 2010 Record Academy Award for best recording.
Argento has presented world premiere performances of works by leading composers such as Tristan Murail, Helmut Lachenmann, Bernhard Lang, Sebastian Currier, Fred Lerdahl, and Philippe Hurel, as well as exciting emerging composers including Sabrina Schroeder, Murat Yakin, Erin Gee, Yoni Niv, Victor Ádan, Hila Tamir, Sang Song, Daniel Iglesias, and many others. Argento brought one of the most influential recent masterpieces of contemporary music, in vain, by Georg Friedrich Haas, to New York, at a time when the composer was unknown and unperformed in America. US premieres include works by Salvatore Sciarrino, Luca Francesconi, Michael Jarrell, Olga Neuwirth, Enno Poppe, Gérard Pesson, Mathias Spahlinger, Gérard Grisey, and Eva Reiter. Equally important, Argento introduced American composers to foreign audiences in its many performances at international festivals throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Argento has produced over thirty studio recordings, many of which have been professionally released on well-known labels such as Bridge, Aeon, and Harmonia Mundi. As a guest ensemble, it has worked closely to develop new works with graduate students from universities including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia.
Argento is committed to expanding the reach of contemporary music to new audiences. From 2009-2015, Argento and the Austrian Cultural Forum co-produced the Moving Sounds Festival, merging contemporary concert music with other artistic worlds including dance, architecture, sound art, electronica, and turntablism. In recent concerts, the group has endeavored to expand its reach beyond contemporary music audiences by including works by 14th, 19th, and early 20th century composers in a musically driven, innovative, and non-conformist manner.
Recent highlights include a performance with legendary soprano Frederica von Stade at Weill Hall in Sonoma, California, and world premiere performances of the following works: Ann Cleare’s eyam ii, commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland and premiered at the Library of Congress; Jérôme Combier’s Conditions de lumiere, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and premiered in both New York and Paris; and Beat Furrer’s spazio immergente, commissioned by the Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg and premiered in its entirety at the composer’s first American portrait concert at Carnegie Hall.
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Argento's reputation builds on its cohesion as a chamber ensemble, demanding technical preparation, and a probing interpretive commitment to the music. Independent of commercial endeavors, the Ensemble relies on the hard work of its musicians, volunteers, board members, and your generous support.