Leonard returns to Milan’s Divertimento Ensemble as a guest conductor following his performance in the final concert of the International Divertimento Ensemble Academy.

PROGRAM
David Antúnez Rodríguez: Son mis voces cantando para que no canten ellos

Antonio La Spina: Efemeride II

Enno Poppe: Schrank

Beat Furrer: Cold and calm and moving

BlackBox Ensemble presents a reprise performance of Borrowed Landscape following our premiere at the Noguchi Museum.

Dai Fujikura: Being As One

Tauchgold/Dai Fujikura: Borrowed Landscape

BlackBox Ensemble opens their series at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art with a companion program to tauchgold and Dai Fujikura’s Borrowed Landscape, which follows on Thursday evening.

Angélica Negrón: Espacios, objectos, sonidos y tiempo

Baldwin Giang: butterfly, posthumously

Tristan Murail: Paludes

George Lewis: Arcades

The BlackBox Ensemble closes out our festival with a special New York performance of The Sound of Space Between Us, an interdisciplinary, live-Art-infused performance experience connecting sound and movement through and within physical space.

PROGRAM

Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Ró

Tristan Murail: Paludes

Angélica Negrón: Espacios, objectos, sonidos y tiempo

Seth Cluett: Interference is partial/afterimage

Morton Feldman: Dance Passage from Piano and String Quartet

Dai Fujikura: Being As One

Annie Nikunen: The Sound of Space Between Us

Stick around after the festival opening concert for a late night electroacoustic show featuring solo and chamber performances by members of the BlackBox Ensemble!

Brittany J. Green: Thread and Pull

Nina Shekhar: Vocalise

Kaija Saariaho: Cendres

Lucy McKnight: fated joy

Paul Kerekes: new work

Yaz Lancaster: wind_down2

Leonard leads the opening concert of BlackBox’s inaugural festival, a weekend-long celebration of our community of artists and collaborators highlighting cross-genre curation and interdisciplinary collaboration.

PROGRAM
Paul Novak: somatic interludes

Bobby Ge: Pupil of Light

Jessica Meyer: The dappled light just beyond her skin…

Baldwin Giang: butterfly, posthumously

Yaz Lancaster: Gender Envy

BlackBox Ensemble performs new works by University of Florida graduate composers at the HARN Museum of Art. Featuring choreography and dancer performances by students from the University of Florida School of Dance.

BlackBox Ensemble performs Erich Barganier’s Flyover Country, an evening-length multimedia work based on poetry by John McCarthy, as part of our residency at the University of Florida.

The BlackBox Ensemble and The Noguchi Museum present a program of sonic landscapes that explore our relationship with space, time, objects, and memory. The program will feature the world premiere of the English-language version of “Borrowed Landscape,” a narratorio by playwright duo tauchgold (Heike Tauch und Florian Goldberg) and composer Dai Fujikura, as well as compositions by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inti figgis-vizueta, and Toru Takemitsu.

The play “Borrowed Landscape” tells the story of three special instruments: a famous Stradivarius walled up for years in a cellar in Budapest, a double bass left behind in 1939 when fleeing from Poland to Erez Israel, and a piano silenced after the Hiroshima bomb killed its young owner. The musicians of a trio approach the stories of their three special instruments. What secrets are hidden in them?

What meanings do we assign to instruments, or objects, that become tied to our own experiences? What is memory, and how is it embodied in objects? What does it mean when those objects are forgotten and uncovered? Can an instrument remember, and does it remember those who have played it?

These are the questions the musicians of a piano trio explore when they are invited to a memorial concert in Hiroshima. They tell the story of their historic instruments, which for decades they were considered lost. As they are rediscovered and played again, their stories - a singular archive where individual experiences intersect with historical narratives - are revealed.

Conceived by the German playwright duo tauchgold as a “narratorio” - a dramatic play based on the musical structure of an oratorio - this piece was originally broadcast as a radio play in 2022. This performance will be the work’s live premiere.

PROGRAM

Anna Thorvaldsdottir Ró

Toru Takemitsu Rain Spell

inti figgis-vizueta Form the Fabric

Tauchgold/Dai Fujikura Borrowed Landscape (live premiere)

The Sound of Space Between Us is a site-specific, Live-Art-infused, interdisciplinary performance experience connecting sound and movement through and within physical space. Conceived and co-curated by our flutist - composer, dancer, choreographer and Annie Nikunen - space is used as a meeting place for music and dance to converse from both ecological and interpersonal perspectives; our public place in the ecosystem and our private paths with(in) it. Stationed around the serene reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute, overlooking the Berkshire mountains, the musicians become choreographic agents, responding to each other, the dancers, and audience, and the surrounding landscape, working as individual parts in a predetermined map or improvising as a unit. The program traverses a spectrum of notated scores, sonic maps and choreographic exercises by Annie Nikunen, Meg Stuart, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Dai Fujikura, Morton Feldman and inti figgis-vizueta with choreography by Annie Nikunen and Joelle Santiago.

PROGRAM

Meg Stuart Choreographic Exercises

Anna Thorvaldsdottir Spectra

Seth Cluett Interference is Partial / Afterimage

Morton Feldman Clarinet and String Quartet (excerpt)

Dai Fujikura Being as One

Annie Nikunen The Sound of Space Between Us

inti figgis-vizueta Form the Fabric

Leonard conducts Milan’s Divertimento Ensemble in the final concert of the International Divertimento Ensemble Academy Conducting Masterclass.

PROGRAM

Benjamin: At First Light

Ligeti: Piano Concerto

Final concert of the Budapest Conducting Masterclass with Maestro Jorma Panula

PROGRAM

Ari Sussman: Apophenia

Igor Silva: Smart-alienation

Cole Reyes: Shadowstains

Eliza Brown: In the Age of the Rise

Jimena Maldonado: Constelaciones

inti figgis-vizueta: Form the Fabric

BlackBox presents an evening of spatial music in the beautiful St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University on their Sacred Music series.

PROGRAM

inti figgis-vizueta: Form the Fabric

Jessie Cox: Existence Lies In-Between

George Lewis: Arcades

BlackBox presents a portrait concert of Jessie Cox, featuring solo, chamber, and ensemble pieces by Cox and his influences. Leonard conducts Cox’s “Existence Lies In-Between” alongside Dai Fujikura’s “Abandoned Time” for electric guitar and chamber ensemble.

The BlackBox Ensemble presents their OUTSIDE THE BOX Festival, a free, outdoor, multidisciplinary marathon on Pier 45 in Hudson River Park. The lineup features a new dance piece choreographed by Joelle Santiago and performed by Liana Kleinman, a family-friendly musical storytelling workshop presented by Art Beyond the Ink, a poetry reading by Connie Li, and BlackBox performances of works by Ari Sussman, Cole Reyes, Paul Novak, Annie Nikunen, and Tanner Porter.

BRITTEN: Les Illuminations
Melissa Wimbish, Soprano

Leonard conducts Britten’s Les Illuminations, a song cycle on poetry by Arthur Rimbaud, on a program that also features a new arrangement of Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla for string septet by Jessie Montgomery. Curated in partnership with featured artists, the concert creates a portrait of Eastman’s New York City: through an immersive reflection by Eastman scholar Isaac Jean-François, with a new film by Ashanti Soldier and Kham Owens, and through works of Eastman’s colleague and contemporary Tania León. Watch the livestream recording.

BlackBox performs new works by the members of Nevermind the Noise, NYU’s graduate student composer collective, as the collective’s spring 2022 ensemble-in-residence.

BlackBox performs the world premiere of Erich Barganier’s “Flyover Country,” an evening-length multimedia work based on poetry by John McCarthy.

The BlackBox Ensemble performs at the Williams College I/O Festival of Contemporary Music hosted by the Clark Institute, with a program featuring Heather by Tanner Porter, Everything Is… Distorted by Bekah Simms, and prisms and mirrors by Paul Novak, and …To Experience Life. by Brittany J. Green. To conclude the program, the Williams College I/O Contemporary Music Ensemble will join BlackBox for a performance of Brittany J. Green’s Intersections.