After a four-year hiatus from the New York concert scene, Ensemble Sospeso returns to present Morton Feldman’s three-hour-long duet for flute and keyboards, For Christian Wolff. The concert on December 8, 2011 at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room will inaugurate Sospeso’s 2011-2012 season.
Written and premiered in 1986, For Christian Wolff will be performed here by the group's new Artistic Director Nicholas DeMaison on keyboards and Amelia Lukas on flute. Generally regarded as the most austere of Feldman’s late works, For Christian Wolff is described by DeMaison as “fantastically quiet, full of pitches and yet somehow never quite emerging from a perpetual state of almost-being."
The performance will last approximately 180 minutes without pause, and the audience will be invited to come and go at leisure throughout the evening.
About Ensemble Sospeso
Since its Carnegie Hall debut in 1998, Ensemble Sospeso’s performances have been described as “stunning” (The New York Times), “a wonder to watch” (The Wall Street Journal) and “gorgeously rich” (The Village Voice). The group has performed at the Lincoln Center Festival, Carnegie Hall’s Making Music series (under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen), and at venues including Alice Tully Hall (with Pierre Boulez in a critically acclaimed retrospective of his work), Zankel Hall, Whitney Museum of American Art, Weill Recital Hall and Columbia University’s Miller Theatre.
About the Performers
Artistic Director Nicholas DeMaison is a highly regarded interpreter of new music and contemporary opera. A Composer and conductor, he also serves as Music Supervisor for the critically acclaimed production company Giants Are Small, which received national acclaim for their stagings of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen with the New York Philharmonic. (For the latter, the Philharmonic commissioned DeMaison to contribute an original electronic soundscape for Avery Fisher Hall.) He has conducted premieres and led recording projects of new pieces by over forty living composers, and was founding Music Director of Chicago’s Opera Cabal, called “Chicago’s most daring opera company” (Chicago Magazine). DeMaison’s own music has been described as “emotionally provocative” (Time Out NY) and “faster and blippier…both ominous and playful at the same time” (Lucid Culture). This season he will direct new productions of Milhaud’s Le Pauvre Matelot and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine with Pocket Opera New York, the premiere of James Ilgenfritz’s opera The Ticket That Exploded (based on the writings of William S. Burroughs), a new production of Georges Aperghis’s L’origine des espèces and a revival of his opera Ursularia.
Flutist Amelia Lukas performs with "a fine balance of virtuosity and poetry" (Allan Kozinn, The New York Times) and has "a buoyancy of spirit that comes out in the flute, a just beautiful sound" (The Boston Globe). Recent projects include performances at Carnegie's Zankel and Weill Halls, The Stone, Bargemusic, (Le) Poisson Rouge, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Orford Sound Art Festival, and premieres of works by Columbia University composers at Lincoln Center. Additionally, she has appeared with such ensembles as the London Sinfonietta and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Lukas currently works for music publisher G. Schirmer and produces chamber music concerts throughout the city. Her ground-breaking Ear Heart Music series at The Tank was called “innovative…a staple in the New York new-music soundscape" (Time Out NY). She received her Master's degree in Contemporary Flute Performance from the Manhattan School of Music, and attained her Bachelor's degree from the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, where she won three prizes for musical excellence.
