TRACES
Orchestra. Circa Now.
An exhilarating sonic experience brought to you by Sympho, the creators of REWIND. These discs are live recordings of Sympho’s TRACES concert in March 2008.
TRACES explores the concept of musical inspiration, tracing a line from each piece of music to its source – from spiritual ceremony to narrative tales, and from dance forms to folk music. And Judd Greenstein’s newly-commissioned music references the pre-existing pieces on the program, adding another layer of traces to the experience.
TRACES spans five centuries of music, from commissioned and spontaneously-created acoustic and electronic pieces by Greenstein and live electronica artists, to pieces by Gorecki, Pärt, Corelli, Copland, and others. Internationally-renowned violinist Nurit Pacht join forces with soloists from the orchestra SymphoNYC, conducted by Sympho artistic director Paul Haas.
Bios:
Sympho founder and artistic director Paul Haas has led the National Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony, and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, among others, as well as various festival orchestras. Critics have been unanimous about his “fresh thinking and visceral engagement”, as well as his “keen musical mind and an impressive feeling for the natural pulse and trajectory of a score” (Washington Post). Mr. Haas maintains an active role in the contemporary music scene, having commissioned dozens of new works, including one for every concert he conducted as Music Director of the New York Youth Symphony. His numerous television and radio appearances include features on a "CBS Sunday Morning" special entitled "American Maestro" and the McGraw-Hill Young Artists Showcase on New York's WQXR. He also was recently selected out of hundreds to perform in the American Symphony Orchestra League’s prestigious National Conductor Preview. Paul Haas is a graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, where he studied conducting as a Bruno Walter Fellow with Otto-Werner Mueller.
Sympho is dedicated to revitalizing the classical music concert experience for a modern audience. Sympho has created a new performance concept, more accessible and visceral, that enriches the musical experience and connects audiences to the vitality of the music itself. The success of this concept was evident with the reception of Sympho’s first concert production, REWIND, which was performed to sold-out audiences in New York City and San Francisco and TRACES, which soon followed. According to The New York Times, the concert “refits the classical experience for a new century”. “Something momentous has occurred,” rejoined the San Francisco Chronicle. And Symphony magazine declared, “Something important was happening, something with emotional stakes.” Sympho’s second concert, TRACES, premiered in March 2008 to widespread acclaim. Sympho’s latest hit concert is FLECTION, with a New York City premiere in May 2009. For more information, please visit www.SymphoConcerts.org.
Composer Judd Greenstein was born and raised in New York City, where he began his compositional life by writing hip hop beats as a teenager. His concert works reflect those origins as well as his traditional piano background, combining an urban, beat-oriented sensibility with a late Romantic harmonic language. Locally, Mr. Greenstein has had his music performed at Carnegie Hall (a First Music commission from the New York Youth Symphony) and Symphony Space, as well as at Joe’s Pub, Bam Café, and the Knitting Factory. Outside of New York, recent performances have taken place in Seattle, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. An active promoter of new music, Mr. Greenstein is the director of NOW Ensemble, the co-director of New Amsterdam Records, and the co-director of Free Speech Zone Productions. He attended Williams College, the Yale School of Music, Tanglewood, and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, and he is a fifth-year doctoral Fellow at Princeton University.
Violinist Nurit Pacht was selected as one of the "Stars of the Year 2000" by Le Monde de la Musique and since then her career has blossomed with appearances in London's Wigmore Hall, Vienna's Musikverein, Moscow's Great Hall, Washington's Kennedy Center, Carnegie's Weill Hall, The People's Hall of China in Beijing and at Ravinia's Rising Stars Series. Chosen by director Robert Wilson to be the featured musician in his multi-media piece Relative Light, featuring solo violin works by John Cage, and J.S. Bach, Nurit is equally at home in the standard repertoire and in the contemporary.
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