August in New York usually means the concert calendar is still on summer vacation. Orchestras retreat to ski towns and wooded corners of New England, chamber ensembles play breezy amphitheaters and barns, while the opera houses and halls back in the city stay dark as they prepare for the fall season. And yet the anticipated lull gets filled up with some of the most concentrated new music programming we’ll see all year.
TIME:SPANS takes over The DiMenna Center for two weeks with some of the best contemporary groups performing today for an exploration in twenty-first century music. JACK Quartet plays Georg Friedrich Haas’s Eighth Quartet bookended by two striking pieces by Cenk Ergün, while Parker Quartet goes for a Kurtág-heavy program (he turned 100 in February and is still writing!). Alarm Will Sound takes on Haas’s in vain, seventy minutes with the hall in the dark for stretches, which we’ve seen Parlando do earlier this year. Talea Ensemble opens the festival with Wolfgang Rihm on the 8th and closes with Rihm’s student, Rebecca Saunders, on the 22nd.
After back to back years of astounding performances on Little Island, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo returns for five nights for a “Minimalism” residency. NY Phil principal clarinetist Anthony McGill plays a Sora salon at Hotel Chelsea, then a Billy Childs premiere with his brother Demarre a few days later. We add a new venue to our watchlist with Jazz sensation Hiromi bringing her piano quintet to Blue Note with PUBLIQuartet. Here’s what I’d show up to this month.
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