Mariel Roberts premieres new works for solo cello by Andy Akiho, Sean Friar, Alex Mincek, Tristan Perich, and Daniel Wohl.
New York-based cellist Mariel Roberts is quickly gaining recognition as a deeply dedicated interpreter and performer of contemporary music. She holds degrees from both the Eastman School and the Manhattan School of Music, where she specialized in contemporary performance practice while studying with Alan Harris and Fred Sherry. Mariel performs internationally as a member of the Mivos String Quartet, and has performed with a variety of other ensembles in venues around the world as an advocate of living composers, including Signal, Wet Ink Ensemble, the Eastman Broadband, and NouveauClassical. Furthermore, she has been a resident artist at the Darmstadt New Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Aldeborough Music Festival, a participant in the Bang on a Can Festival, and the Lucerne Summer Festival led by Pierre Boulez.
Her debut CD, nonextraneous sounds, tests the limits of contemporary cello technique in a group of five exhilarating solo works by New York-based composers in their late 20s and early 30s. Two are for cello alone, three incorporate electronics. Each piece on this album lives in a distinct and unique sound world that is like no other. Ultimately this is what the record tries to convey- that contemporary music is fantastically diverse and flexible and changing all the time. An instrument is a tool- and there is truly no limit to the different personalities and voices you can use that tool to convey. Each piece in the collection uses a completely different language- they are all musical languages but each expresses sound in a remarkable and singular way. This album is not just a collection of pieces, but an expression of a city and the distinct artistic community in it.