For three intimate evenings, Philip Glass comes to ISSUE Project Room, New York's City's only European Chamber Music Hall. His only performance in Brooklyn this year, "Philip Glass: Music With Friends" is a rare occasion, with under 200 seats for each performance.
The final evening of this three-night festival opens with a solo performance by Philip Glass. Tara Hugo will sing Philip Glass songs with arrangements/orchestrations by Trevor Gureckis, followed by the music of Ryan Sawyer and Ben Vida. The evening closes with a performance by Laurie Anderson, and a special duo performance between Anderson and Glass.
The VIP ticket includes an exclusive reception with the performers at a private residence prior to the concert.
6:30pm Private Reception for VIP Ticket Holders
8:00pm Concert
Ryan Sawyer and Ben Vida
This newly formed duo consists of two musicians who's musical backgrounds encompass many methods, genres and modalities. What is consistent in both Ryan and Ben's music is an intrinsic dedication to experimentation and improvisation. As a duo they make an ecstatic and enveloping music that is pointillist and percussive, revealing the common ground between man and machine.
Laurie Anderson was born in Chicago in 1947. One of eight children, she studied the violin and played in the Chicago Youth Symphony. She graduated in 1969 from Barnard College in New York, and went on to study at Columbia University, working toward a graduate degree in sculpture. The art scene of the early 1970s fostered an experimental attitude among many young artists in downtown New York that attracted Anderson, and some of her earliest performances as a young artist took place on the street or in informal art spaces. In the most memorable of these, she stood on a block of ice, playing her violin while wearing her ice skates. When the ice melted, the performance ended. Since that time, Anderson has gone on to create large-scale theatrical works which combine a variety of media—music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture—in which she is an electrifying performer. As a visual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, SoHo; as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Brothers, including "Big Science," featuring the song “O Superman,” which rose to number 2 on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged "Songs and Stories From Moby Dick," an interpretation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. She lives in New York.
Tara Hugo is currently recording a solo album of Philip Glass songs (Orange Mountain Music) arranged by Trevor Gureckis, including four Glass melodies she’s written words to. Hugo was the mezzo in Philip Glass’s Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen. Trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she began as a leading actress at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Her eclectic work in music and theatre in the US and London includes The Bacchae (Joanne Akalaitis NYSF), Legacy Falls (off-West End nomination best actress), The Threepenny Opera (Laurence Olivier nomination for Jenny Diver), La Cage Aux Folles (Chocolate Factory), Spin (Time Out Critic’s Choice) and Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana (Edinburgh). As a singer Hugo is noted for her own show directed by Alan Rickman, a provocative recording of The Flick Knife Song (TER Records) and Bilbao, a solo evening of Kurt Weill songs for the Batignano Festival in Italy. Film/TV includes: United 93, In Love and War, Hellboy, The Broken, Big Women, Panama Canal, Silent Weapon, Midsomer, Murder City, Submerged.
Trevor Gureckis, a native of Austin Texas, studied composition and piano at the Yale School of Music and the University of Texas at Austin. His teachers include Kevin Puts (2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner), Ezra Laderman, and Martin Bresnick. He has received numerous awards for his music including a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Young Composer Awards from both BMI and ASCAP Foundations. He is currently co-producing an album of Philip Glass' songs with producer Kurt Munkacsi and singer Tara Hugo. Trevor is providing new arrangements of Mr. Glass' music for the album which will be released on Orange Mountain Records in October. My Great Ghost, his electropop duo with singer Drew Smith, is set to release their self-titled EP in July. My Great Ghost will be featured on the upcoming Philip Glass remix album along with Beck, Cornelius, and Tyondai Braxton among others.
