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Crosstown Arts presents The City of Tomorrow: Waves, Breaths, Dead Cities in The Green Room.
TICKETS: $15 plus fees ($5 student ticket with ID at the door)
Doors open at 7pm | Performance begins at 7:30pm
*Crosstown Arts is requesting proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test for this event. Please be prepared to present your vaccination card or a negative Covid test taken within 72 hours at check-in.
Featuring works by J.S. Bach, Olof Cornéer, Adam Scott Neal, Jacob Druckman, Luciano Berio, Leander Star, and Daniel Cueto.
Elise Blatchford, flute
Stuart Breczinski, oboe
Rane Moore, clarinet
Nanci Belmont, bassoon
Leander Star, horn
The City of Tomorrow is a wind quintet that is always more than a wind quintet. Live shows feature lighting, staging and set pieces, electronics, and the kind of ritualistic feel reminiscent of a Yoko Ono or Marina Abramović conceptual performance. The City of Tomorrow: Waves, Breaths, Dead Cities is no exception, featuring a custom set by Memphis carpenter Celeste Von Ahnen, video work by Breezy Lucia, also of Memphis, and choreography by the ensemble’s horn player, Leander Star.
The first half of the show recalls the shutdown and the long months of quarantine, starting with a blithe reworking of a Vivaldi Concerto and concluding with Jacob Druckman’s mournful Delizie Contente Che L’Alme Beate, a work for electronics and live winds that quotes liberally from Francesco Cavalli’s 1649 aria of the same name. Olof Cornéer’s minimalist work, Waves, Breaths, Dead Cities and Leander Star’s quarantine project Shoulder to Shoulder take the audience through memories of empty streets and monotonous days.
The second half begins with Luciano Berio’s intricate and vibrant work, riccorenze. Appropriately, the score calls for the musicians to be spread out as far as possible from each other on the stage, the perfect music for social distancing. As the musicians become situated closely again, the concert comes to a powerful and hopeful ending with Puma by the young Peruvian composer Daniel Cueto.
About The City of Tomorrow:
The City of Tomorrow is an experimental wind quintet with a fearless aesthetic and a commitment to 21st-century music. Their U.S. tours have included concerts at Trinity Wall Street, Spectrum, and IN\TER/SECT, (co-presented by Bryant Park and Chamber Music America) as well as the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Series in Chicago, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in Michigan, and Red Note New Music Festival in Illinois. The quintet’s work has been supported by residencies at the Banff Center for the Arts & Creativity and the Avaloch Farm Music Institute.
In 2015, the quintet began exploring physical movement and spatial relationships in their concert programming. Collaborating with lighting designer Alex Deahl, the quintet has experimented with an ensemble-controlled lighting setup and choreography to create a seamless and immersive musical experience.
From 2012 to 2014, the quintet was engaged in a musical exploration of climate change, which culminated in the commissioning of major new works from composers Hannah Lash, Nat Evans, and John Aylward. The City of Tomorrow’s first album, Nature, released on PARMA/Ravello in 2014, further wrestled with questions of human involvement in the natural world. Exploration of these natural themes resulted in a new work from Hannah Lash, which was supported by a 2014 Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant.
The City of Tomorrow’s members are based in New York, Boston, and Memphis and are in demand as new music specialists, curators, collaborators, and teachers. As an ensemble, they have recently given residencies at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Berklee College of Music, Indiana University, Tufts, and Yale. Members of the ensemble can also be heard with some of the finest ensembles in New York and beyond, including Talea Ensemble and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
