World Premieres: PRISM with Special Guest Marilyn Nonken

The PRISM Quartet presents a breathtaking program of freshly minted saxophone quartets by Barlow Prize winner Ben Hjertmann; Goddard Lieberson and Guggenhiem Fellow James Primosch; Pew and Guggenhiem Fellow Anna Weesner; Jay Reise, whose work has been supported by the Fromm Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts;Kyle Bartlett, of counter)induction fame; and Jane Lange, winner of the PRISM/Walden School Commissioning Award.

Primosch’s new work, scored for sax quartet and piano, will feature guest artist Marilyn Nonken, hailed by The Cleveland Plain Dealer as “a supreme interpreter of new music who blends audacity with sensitivity.”

THE COMPOSERS DISCUSS THEIR NEW WORKS

THE ARTISTS

Marilyn Nonken (Director of Piano Studies, Associate Professor of Music and Music Education, NYU Steinhardt) commands a repertoire comprising the complete piano music of Schoenberg and Boulez, as well as works by pioneers of the New York School, the New Complexity and musique spectral. Her performances have been presented at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, the Guggenheim Museum, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and Roulette (New York), IRCAM and the Théâtre Bouffe du Nord (Paris), the ABC (Melbourne), Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano (Santiago), the Music Gallery (Toronto), the Phillips Collection, and Menil Collection, and conservatories and universities around the world. Upcoming premieres include works written for her by Marcos Balter, Edmund Campion, Richard Carrick, Victoria Cheah, Brian Erickson, Christopher Trapani, and Nina C. Young. Recent releases include her monograph The Spectral Piano: From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the Digital Age (Cambridge) and the recordings Voix Voilées: Spectral Music for Piano (Metier), A Distant Music (New World), and Subject (Tzadik). She has recorded additionally for Lovely Music, Albany, Divine Art, Innova, CRI, BMOP Sound, New Focus, Kairos, Mode, and Bridge.

PRISM Quartet: Intriguing programs of great beauty and breadth have distinguished the PRISM Quartet as one of America’s foremost chamber ensembles. Two-time winners of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, PRISM has been presented by Carnegie Hall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and as soloists with the Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra. Champions of new music, PRISM has commissioned over 200 works, many by internationally celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning composers. PRISM’s discography includes fourteen recordings for the Albany, Innova, Koch, Naxos, New Dynamic, and New Focus labels. PRISM may also be heard on the soundtrack of the film Two Plus One and has been featured in the theme music to the weekly PBS news magazine “NOW.” PRISM performs exclusively on Selmer saxophones and mouthpieces.

PRISM performing “15 Places At The Same Time” by Steve Lehman

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This program is presented with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. Inc. PRISM Quartet, Inc. also receives generous support from the Amphion Foundation, New Music USA’s Cary New Music Performance Fund, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., and individual donors.

New works by James Primosch, Anna Weesner, and Jay Reise have been commissioned by PRISM Quartet, Inc. with support from The Presser Foundation, in celebration of The Foundation’s 75th anniversary for special programs highlighting the role of Philadelphia-born or based composers and performers in the development of American concert music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Program Subject to Change