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Open End: Modern Works and
In-the-Now Improvisations
THIS EVENT HAS OCCURRED
Sunday, October 23 at 5 PM FREE EVENT The "unusually adept contemporary music specialists" (The New Yorker) of Open End return to MOSA to perform new works, brand-new works, and works as-yet uncomposed. The program will include music of Elliott Carter, Olivier Messiaen, Andrew Waggoner (a new work), and world premiere by Jesse Benjamin Jones, as well as several free improvisations, made in the moment by the group itself. Performers Michael Jinsoo Lim, violin Andrew Waggoner, violins Melia Watras, viola Caroline Stinson, cello Molly Morkoski, piano Program OLIVIER MESSIAEN Pièce pour piano et quatuor à cordes (1991) - Improvisation #1 - CHARLES IVES "Thoreau" from Piano Sonata no. 2, Concord Mass.(1840-1860) ELLIOTT CARTER Duettino, for violin and cello (2008) - Improvisation #2 - - Improvisation #3 - ANDREW WAGGONER Catenary, for cello and piano (2007) SHULAMIT RAN Perfect Storm, for viola solo (2010) - Improvisation #4 - JESSE BENJAMIN JONES 4 Bagatelles, for piano quintet (2011 - World Premiere; Open End Commission) About the Ensemble Open End was formed in 2004, the brainchild of several interconnected musical friendships. Equally committed to new chamber music, particularly by composers with no easily-pegged stylistic affiliations, and to free improvisation, the ensemble is made up of players well-known in other group contexts whose collective experience spans the whole of Western instrumental literature, from the oldest to the newest. Essential to the Open End mission is the reclaiming of improvisation as the birthright of all musicians. Audiences at Open End concerts come to think of spontaneous creation as being part of a natural, ongoing dialogue between performers, composing in the moment, and a written body of work that continues to expand, to transform. At home in venues from galleries and living rooms to concert halls, Open End seeks nothing less than to engage audiences in an experience that is wonderful, intimate, challenging and beautiful. Open End gave its premiere concerts in New York City in 2005 and has since performed in New York, Syracuse, New Orleans, Florence and Strasbourg. More on Open End can be found at www.openendensemble.com. About the Performers Andrew Waggoner was born in 1960 in New Orleans. He grew up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University. Called “the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style” by the New Yorker, his music has been commissioned and performed by the the Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Louis, Denver, Syracuse, and Winnipeg Symphonies, the Cassatt, Corigliano, Miro, and Degas Quartets, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the California EAR Unit, pianist Gloria Cheng, violist Melia Watras, 'cellist Robert Burkhart, the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic of Zlin, Czech Republic, Sequitur, the Empyrean Ensemble, Buglisi-Foreman Dance, the Athabasca Trio, CELLO, Flexible Music, Ensemble Nordlys, of Denmark, and Ensemble Accroche Note, of France. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received grants and prizes from ASCAP, Yaddo, The New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, New Music Delaware, and the Eastman School of Music. He won the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award from Composers Inc. in 2004, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. In 2007 he was awarded the Roger Sessions Prize for an American composer by the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, and was in residence at Bogliasco in the spring of 2008. He has two CD’s on CRI, both now available on the New World label, and can also be heard on the Vienna Modern Masters Music From Six Continents series, as well as on solo CD’s by violist Melia Watras and ‘cellist Robert Burkhart. In addition to his concert works, Waggoner has also composed extensively for theatre and for film, and is an active violinist. He was a founding Director of the Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music in Vinalhaven, Maine, and is currently Composer-in-Residence at the Setnor School of Music of Syracuse University. Waggoner’s music is available through MMB and Subito Music; more information is available online at andrewwaggoner.com. Korean-American violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim has made appearances in the United States, Central America, Europe, and Asia as a soloist, chamber musician, and concertmaster. Mr. Lim’s solo engagements have included appearances with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the International Chamber Orchestra of Girona, Spain, the Indiana University Philharmonic, the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra. Lim has recorded for DreamWorks, Albany Records, CRI, Bayer Records, and Aguava New Music. As co-founder of the Corigliano Quartet (www.coriglianoquartet.com), Lim has won such awards as the Grand Prize at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and the ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming, and has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and Performance Today. The Corigliano Quartet maintains an active performing schedule, having appeared at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Weill Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall and the Kennedy Center. Lim studied at Indiana University with the legendary Josef Gingold, and at the Juilliard School, where he served as an assistant to the Juilliard String Quartet. Mr. Lim has also taught as an assistant at Indiana University and as a Musical Artist in residence at Dickinson College. He currently holds a first violin position in the American Ballet Theatre Orchestra, of which he has performed as Assistant Concertmaster. More on Michael Lim can be found at michaeljinsoolim.com. Described as “staggeringly virtuosic” by The Strad, violist Melia Watras has long been at the forefront of the American new music scene, performing numerous commissions and world premieres as a soloist and co-founder of the award-winning Corigliano Quartet (www.coriglianoquartet.com). Ms. Watras has performed in Carnegie Hall, Weill Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall and the Kennedy Center and at festivals such as Aspen and Ravinia. As the violist of the Corigliano Quartet, she has received awards such as the Grand Prize at the Fischoff Competition and the ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming. Ms. Watras’s debut solo CD, Viola Solo, was released by Fleur De Son (www.fleurdeson.com) to much critical acclaim. Strings remarked, “Watras is a young player in possession of stunning virtuosic talent and deserving of the growing acclaim,” while the American Record Guide proclaimed, "Watras is a terrific violist." With the Corigliano Quartet, she has recorded for Naxos, Albany, Bayer, CRI, Riax, and Aguava and has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and Performance Today and WFMT-Chicago’s Live from Studio One. Watras attended Indiana University, where she served as Atar Arad’s assistant. She went on to study chamber music at the Juilliard School, and taught as an assistant to the Juilliard String Quartet. Watras is currently Assistant Professor of Viola at the University of Washington School of Music, where she teaches viola and chamber music. For more information on Melia Watras, please visit www.meliawatras.com. A native of Edmonton, Canada, cellist Caroline Stinson performs regularly as a recitalist and as a member of the cello quartet, CELLO, the Athabasca String Trio, the new music and improvisation ensemble Open End, which she founded with her husband and composer Andrew Waggoner, and most recently as a new member of the Contrasts Quartet. She holds a B.M. from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a Performance Diploma with Distinction from the Hochschule für Musik, Köln. While living in Cologne, she performed throughout Germany, France and Holland and was awarded first prize in the Hohnen Foundation Cello Competition in 1999. From 2000-2003, she joined the New York City based Cassatt String Quartet, performing across the United States and Canada and taking part in the commissioning and premiering of some two dozen new works for string quartet. Her collaborations have included performers Lynn Harrell, Paul Katz, Pinchas Zukerman, and composers Peter Eötvös, Steven Stucky, Joan Tower and George Rochberg. Ms. Stinson is currently building programs of new music for solo cello, the first of which she presented last season at the Winnipeg International New Music Festival in Canada. She has recorded solo and chamber works for Naxos, Koch International and Albany Records. Ms. Stinson is a coach for the New York Youth Symphony Chamber Music Program and is on the faculty of Syracuse University and is Concert Artist faculty at Kean University in New Jersey. She can be found on the web at carolinestinson.com. Hailed by the New York Times and The Boston Globe as “strong, profiled, nuanced and beautifully etched” and “outstanding”, pianist Molly Morkoski has performed as soloist and collaborative artist throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She regularly receives invitations to perform at Carnegie Hall, including her appearance in the inaugural concert of Zankel Hall in 2003 under the direction of John Adams. Ms. Morkoski has been a featured soloist on the Making Music Series at Carnegie Hall, and the Tanglewood, Bang-on-a-Can, and Pacific Rim Festivals, as well as appearing as soloist with the Raleigh and Asheville Symphony Orchestras. An avid chamber musician, she has collaborated with the NY Philharmonic Chamber Players, St. Louis Symphony Chamber Players, New World Symphony, Speculum Musicae, the Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, as well as some of today’s leading composers, conductors, directors and solo artists, including Dawn Upshaw, David Robertson, James Conlon, Oliver Knussen, John Harbison, David Del Tredici, Louis Andriessen, and Peter Sellars. Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Paris, France, she was apprentice with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in1999 and 2000. She is also a recent recipient of the Teresa Sterne Career Grant. She holds a doctorate degree from SUNY- Stony Brook where she was a student of Gilbert Kalish. Her performances have been broadcast internationally, and she has recorded for Bridge Records and Indiana University labels. |
