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Academic Series in Jazzy Surroundings

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Maybe location really is everything. When Mannes College the New School for Music presents its annual summer festival concerts in its auditorium on the Upper West Side, they seem low key and academic, no matter how vividly played and well attended they are. But following in the footsteps of the Keys to the Future festival, which was held at the similarly quaint Greenwich House Music School until this year, Mannes has moved a few of the concerts in its Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance to Le Poisson Rouge.

The difference between the staid, sometimes dreary atmosphere of the opening concert at Mannes on Tuesday and the vital, fresh installment the festival staged at Le Poisson Rouge on Sunday was enormous.

The Sunday evening program, the fourth of the festival's seven, was billed as a concert by TimeTable Percussion, a trio consisting of Matthew Gold, Alex Lipowski and Matt Ward. But three of the six works were solo piano pieces, performed by Yejin Gil. Ms. Gil opened the program with a sharply etched reading of Pascal Dusapin's Etude for Piano No. 2 ("Igra," 1999), in which a mechanistic chordal figure evolves slowly into an easygoing, slow trill with an almost Minimalist spirit.

In the Dusapin Etude No. 3 ("Tangram," 1999), Ms. Gil used a light touch in the rolled chords that begin the piece and become its structural columns, and a singing tone in the gentle melodic strands that flit between them. That same flexibility enlivened the complex cross-rhythms and glittering textures of Unsuk Chin's Etude No. 1 (1999, revised 2003).

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