a brief dispatch from london
an old-fashioned missive with news about upcoming musical events
Greetings from a hotel room near London’s Paddington Station. It’s been a whirlwind, jet-laggy kind of trip. Lots of fumbling for a light switch in the dead of night, then reading til dawn—or I suppose not really dawn: my first stop overseas was in Pernaja, Finland, where, at this time of year, there’s just six hours of sunlight per day. By eight o’clock, only the patchiest traces of light had begun to leak through the window.
Now, in London, I’m catching my breath, and thought I’d take a moment to let you all know about some music on the horizon.
On Thursday, January 18, at London’s Southbank Centre, I will join the BBC Concert Orchestra and Choir with No Name for the UK premiere of emergency shelter intake form, my oratorio exploring economic inequality through the lens of housing issues. My co-conspirators Alicia Hall Moran, Holland Andrews, and Holcombe Waller will be singing as well under the baton of Kwame Ryan. The few remaining tickets can be found here.
The following week, I head back to the U.S. for San Francisco Performances’ PIVOT Festival, which I’ve curated. There are three concerts:
January 24 - Attacca Quartet, performing music by Maurice Ravel, Paul Wiancko, and me. This concert will feature the revised premiere of my string quartet, Klee, as well as a new arrangement of Final Privacy Song for voice & piano quintet, for which I’ll join as singer and pianist. We’ll also do a handful of my songs spread out across the program.
January 25 - Roomful of Teeth, performing music by Caroline Shaw, Angélica Negrón, Peter Shin, plus the California premiere of my Elevator Songs, for which I’ll be on hand as singer/pianist/guitarist. I’m very much looking forward to getting to do this piece again.
January 26 - Attacca Quartet & Roomful of Teeth, performing music by François Couperin, Louis Couperin, Caroline Shaw, and Paul Simon. The basic premise of this concert is an antiphonal conversation between keyboard music by the Couperin family (transcribed for string quartet) and Caroline Shaw’s modern classic Partita for Eight Voices, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. I’ll sing a song at the top of each half (arranged for all thirteen of us!), and we’ll finish the program with an arrangement of Paul Simon’s “American Tune.”
I’d be delighted to see you at any or all of these programs; tickets and more information here.
February 3 - I’ll appear again with Roomful of Teeth in Santa Barbara on a program to include Elevator Songs as well as a short solo set of my tunes. Caroline’s The Isle, from Teeth’s Grammy-nominated LP Rough Magic, rounds out the evening. Tickets and info can be found here.
Later this spring, I’ve got a duo recital with my dad in Salem, OR; a solo concert at the Gilmore Festival in Kalamazoo; and the first tour with Council, my duo project with Pekka Kuusisto, with whom I walked on the frozen Baltic Sea a few days ago.
For a full rundown of this spring’s activities, click here.
Thank you as always for reading. I’ll be back with more essay-ish material in a few weeks!
It's great to hear about all the music you are writing and how busy you are doing music all around the world. I might go with wife to your Beaverton concert in May, hope to see you do something with the Oregon Symphony again.