WHAT: |
April 2, 2018 – On Tuesday April 10, David Fulmer will conduct Mannes American Composers Ensemble in a performance of RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi - a live music and film collaboration by composer Vijay Iyer and the late filmmaker Prashant Bhargava; Bruno Mantovani’s “Streets”; and Fulmer’s own “Sky’s Acetylene”.
Following the performance will be a conversation with Fulmer, Iyer, and actor Anna George, moderated by New School assistant professor of media studies Nitin Sawhney.
“I'm always thrilled to return to MACE, and I'm particularly excited about this program,” says David Fulmer. “Mantovani's “Streets" opens the concert and will delight the audience by its radiant French colors and dramatic contours. "Sky's Acetylene," commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, will be heard here for the first time since its premiere last season. Vijay Iyer's and Prashant Bhargava’s RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi will take the audience on a fantastical journey through the festival of Holi.”
“Holi is known around the world as a joyful, chaotic and colorful celebration of springtime in India,” wrote Vijay Iyer and Prashant Bhargava. “When we were invited to respond to Stravinsky’s own famously chaotic work about springtime, we were intrigued by the possible connection with Holi. This festival provides an occasion to reconsider the aspects of ritual and transformation represented in Le Sacre du printemps.”
This performance of RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi is the first in a multi-event Mannes celebration of Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring, a celebration also including Mannes Orchestra performances of The Rite of Spring with Martha Graham Dance Company on April 12 and 14 at City Center, and a Mannes Orchestra performance of The Rite of Spring on April 16 at Alice Tully Hall.
RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi was created for and commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additional commissioning funds for revision and completion of the work were provided by The Brooklyn Academy of Music/Next Wave Festival, CAP UCLA and The Strathmore.
Music by Vijay Iyer; Film directed, edited and designed by Prashant Bhargava; Director of photography: Craig Marsden
The Mannes American Contemporary Ensemble performance will take place on Tuesday, April 10th at 7:30 pm in The New School's Tishman Auditorium at 63 5th Avenue.
This event is part of the New School’s Nth Degree Series: Creative Minds Creating Change. |
WHO: |
Mannes American Composers Ensemble
Founded in 2012 by Mannes composition department chair Lowell Liebermann and directed in 2017-2018 by Alan Pierson and David Fulmer, Mannes American Composers Ensemble (MACE) presents works by iconic American masters such as John Adams, Mason Bates and Steve Reich, as well as works by young and up-and- coming composers such as David Hertzberg and Nina C. Young. The ensemble aims to embrace a broad view of the vital landscape of contemporary American Music, and to bolster that landscape through premieres and, soon, commissions.
Vijay Iyer
Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer was named Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year for 2012, 2015, and 2016 and Artist of the Year in Jazz Times' Critics' Poll and Readers' Poll for 2017. He received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and a 2011 Grammy nomination. He has released twenty-one albums, including Far From Over (ECM, 2017), with the Vijay Iyer Sextet, which topped numerous year-end critics polls and was cited by Rolling Stone as “2017’s jazz album to beat”; A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) in duo with legendary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork; Break Stuff (ECM, 2015) with the Vijay Iyer Trio, winner of the German Record Critics’ Award for Album of the Year; the live score to the film Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi (ECM, 2014) by filmmaker Prashant Bhargava; and Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project (Pi Recordings, 2013), his third politically searing collaboration with poet-performer Mike Ladd, named Album of the Year in the Los Angeles Times. Iyer’s compositions have been commissioned and premiered by Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Silk Road Ensemble, Ethel, Brentano Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Imani Winds, American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Chamber Orchestra Leopoldinum, Matt Haimowitz, and Jennifer Koh. Iyer is the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, and the director of the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music.
David Fulmer
Winner of the 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, and 2016 Koussevitzky Award, David Fulmer has garnered numerous international accolades for his bold compositional aesthetic combined with his thrilling performances. A surge of recent and upcoming commissions include new works for the New York Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Salzburg Foundation, BMI Foundation, Concert Artists Guild, Washington Performing Arts, Kennedy Center, Fromm Music Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, and Tanglewood. As conductor, Fulmer recently led the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Elision Ensemble, Sydney Modern Music Ensemble, along with appearances at the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Tanglewood Music Festival, and Lucerne Festival. Recent and upcoming highlights include important debuts leading the Ensemble Intercontemporain, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, South Netherlands Philharmonic, and assisting concerts and projects with the New York Philharmonic. Fulmer made a triumphant return to the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra last season, which included a collaboration with IRCAM. This season he will return as curator and conductor of the Mannes American Composers Ensemble in programs of 20th and 21st Century music, and continue his close collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble. Fulmer was recently the recipient of both the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Carlos Surinach Commissioning Award from BMI. He is the first American recipient of the Grand Prize of the International Edvard Grieg Competition for Composers. Fulmer was just appointed Music Director and Conductor of the Hunter Symphony, and is a graduate of The Juilliard School.
Prashant Bhargava
Prashant Bhargava was an award-winning filmmaker and commercial director/designer, whose impressive and unique career was tragically cut short by his sudden death at 42 from cardiac arrest, in the spring of 2015. Described by producer Anthony Bregman as "visionary and soulful", "masterful" by Roger Ebert and "a humanist and a real talent" by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, Bhargava was a meticulous artist and a consummate auteur, whose source materials and canvases were the Indian experience, in India as well as in diaspora. In his groundbreaking work on RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi, which he conceived with Vijay Iyer, Bhargava produced and directed a nearly last-minute, difficult shoot in Uttar Pradesh, meticulously editing the footage to Stravinsky’s original music, before handing the final edit to Iyer, who then wrote an entirely new score, timed to Bhargava’s edit. Born and raised on the southside of Chicago, Bhargava first emerged from the hip hop movement as a graffiti artist. Bhargava studied computer science at Cornell University and theatrical directing at the Barrow Group and at the Actors Studio MFA program. He was a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College and Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. |
