Sunday November 20

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

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New this season, Orpheus teams up with Music Alive Composer-in-Residence Gabriel Kahane for two concerts at Galapagos. The 29-year-old Brooklyn-based artist joins Orpheus as composer, curator, and performer—fusing chamber music, art song, and indie rock into a musical language all his own.

Gabriel Kahane, Curator and Composer-In-Residence
Writing and performing music that moves effortlessly from dense modernism to vernacular song, Gabriel Kahane has established himself as a leading voice among a generation of young composers redefining music for the 21st century. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times for “an all around dazzling performance” in his orchestral debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic earlier this year, Kahane moves with ease as a performer between musical realms. Collaborations have included sold out concerts with artists as varied as Chris Thile and Brad Mehldau, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and his father—noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane—as well as Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright, Punch Brothers, and Audra McDonald. For more information, visit http://gabrielkahane.tumblr.com.

The residency of Gabriel Kahane is made possible through Music Alive, a residency program of the League of American Orchestras and Meet The Composer. This national program is designed to provide orchestras with resources and tools to support their presentation of new music to the public and build support for new music within their institutions. Funding for Music Alive is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and The ASCAP Foundation.

Program:
HINDEMITH, Kammermusik No. 1
KAHANE, Orinoco Sketches (New York Premiere)
KAHANE, Songs from Where Are the Arms

Featuring Gabriel Kahane, voice, piano, and guitar

Orpheus presents music inspired by the rhythms of a world in flux. Hindemith’s wry and raucous Kammermusik No. 1 put the young composer on the map in 1921, before he fled his native Germany. Receiving its New York premiere this evening, Kahane’s Orinoco Sketches for chamber orchestra and voice draws from the diary of another figure who fled Nazi Germany—the composer’s grandmother, whose journey took her to Los Angeles via Havana. The program concludes with selections from Kahane’s brand new album, Where Are the Arms—songs that are hauntingly beautiful, “sinewy and direct, elevating common-place subjects with intricate arrangements (Brooklyn Vegan).”

Sunday, March 18, 2012
Featuring Chris Thile, mandolin

JOHN ADAMS Selections from John’s Book of Alleged Dances
THILE (arr.) Fiddle Tunes
COPLAND Appalachian Spring Suite (original version)

Experience a collage of Americana interpreted by two of our foremost composers, John Adams and Aaron Copland, and bluegrass phenomenon Chris Thile (who performs his Mandolin Concerto with Orpheus at Carnegie Hall on March 24). Thile’s inventive take on traditional fiddle tunes will be interspersed with movements from Adams’ quirky and bittersweet Alleged Dances. We conclude with Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite in its original version for 13 players, a masterwork infused with homespun beauty that continues to define the American sound.