(le) poisson rouge

Founded in 2001, Premiere Commission, Inc. is a non-profit foundation that promotes the commissions and premieres of new compositions by some of today's most talented and thoughtful artists. Led under the artistic leadership of its founder, pianist Bruce Levingston, the organization seeks to explore and develop the work of emerging as well as established composers and artists from different mediums.

premierecommission.org/

Pianist Bruce Levingston is one of today's leading figures in contemporary music. Many of the world's most important composers have written works for him and his Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center world premiere performances of their works have won notable critical acclaim. The New York Times has called him "one of today's most adventurous musicians" and praises his performances as "graceful", "dreamy, and "hauntingly serene." The New Yorker has described him as "elegant and engaging... a poetic pianist who has a gift for glamorous programming," while The Washington Post has lauded his "wonderfully even touch" and "timeless reverie, which Levingston projected beautifully."

Born in San Francisco into a musical family, Lisa Bielawa played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. She moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University, and became an active participant in New York musical life. She began touring with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992, and in 1997 co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. She is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition.

Bielawa often takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock,” and The New York Times describes her music as, “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart.”

Recent highlights include performances of Bielawa’s chamber music in New York at the Weill Recital Hall, City Winery, Merkin Concert Hall and Trinity Church. Her music is also frequently performed at concert venues in Paris, Italy, the UK and Rome. World premieres of Emerald Waltz, Graffiti dell’amante, Portrait-Elegy, The Project of Collecting Clouds, Chance Encounter, and In medias res have been performed in cities across the United States.

Bielawa’s discography includes Chance Encounter (Orange Mountain Music); In medias res (BMOP/sound), A Handful of World (Tzadik 8039), The Trojan Women on a disc entitledFirst Takes (TROY941), Hildegurls: Electric Ordo Virtutum (Innova), a 1998 re-envisioning of 12th-century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s musical drama The Order of the Virtues, and The Trojan Women in a version for string quartet performed by the Miami on The NYFA Collection (Innova). Another album, The Lay of the Love, will be the inaugural disc of Premiere Commission Recordings.

In addition to a 2009 Rome Prize, Bielawa has received fellowships and awards from the Alpert-Ucross Foundation, Creative Capital, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation, ASCAP, and the Fondation Royaumont in France. In 2007-2008, Lisa Bielawa was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow.

An enthusiastic advocate for the field, Bielawa now serves on the board of the MATA Festival. In addition, she has served on the board of the American Music Center and taught composition through the New York Youth Symphony Making Score program. In addition to her work as a vocalist with the Philip Glass Ensemble, she tours and records with John Zorn and has premiered and recorded works by numerous other composer colleagues. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.For more information, visit www.lisabielawa.net.

Johnny Gandelsman, violin
Colin Jacobsen, violin
Nicholas Cords, viola
Eric Jacobsen, cello


The adventurous, genre-defying string quartet Brooklyn Rider combines a wildly eclectic repertoire with a gripping performance style that is attracting legions of fans and drawing critical acclaim from classical, world and rock critics. NPR credits Brooklyn Rider with “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble."” The musicians play in concert halls and clubs, in venues as varied as Joe's Pub in New York City, the San Francisco Jazz Festival, Todai-ji Temple in Japan, the Library of Congress and the South By Southwest Festival. Through creative programming and global collaborations, Brooklyn Rider illuminates music for its audiences in ways that are “stunningly imaginative” (Lucid Culture).

This past season Brooklyn Rider appeared at the Cologne Philharmonie, American Academy in Rome, Malmö Festival in Sweden, and SXSW Festival as the only classical group invited to play there. The quartet made its Spoleto Festival USA debut to capacity crowds in June, following an extensive cross-country tour from California to Philadelphia's Kimmel Center and New York City. “The dazzling fingers-in-every-pie versatility that Brooklyn Rider exhibits is one of the wonders of contemporary music,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

Highlights of Brooklyn Rider's 2010-11 season include the CD release of the string quartets of Philip Glass, an appearance at the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, a European tour with Persian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, and North American tours in the fall and winter, including concerts with the Washington Performing Arts Society in D.C. and Lincoln Center's inaugural Tully Scope Festival at Alice Tully Hall.

Brooklyn Rider's newest CD, Dominant Curve, made the Billboard classical chart, and is one of NPR Music's 50 Favorite Albums of 2010. It has received glowing reviews from Gramophone, Strings, The Strad and Huffington Post, as well as the online indie magazines Pitchfork, Vice, Nerve and Lucid Culture. “Forgive the hyperbole,” wrote Strings, “but I've seen the future of chamber music and it is Brooklyn Rider.”

Born out of a desire to use the rich medium of the string quartet as a vehicle for communication across a large cross section of history and geography, Brooklyn Rider is equally devoted to the interpretation of existing quartet literature and to the creation of new works. The musicians have worked with such composers as Derek Bermel, Lisa Bielawa, Ljova, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Jenny Scheinman and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, and they also regularly perform pieces written or arranged by members of the group. Another integral part of their work involves creative collaborations with other artists. Some recent special guests include Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Syrian/Armenian visual artist Kevork Mourad, traditional and technology-based Japanese shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki, Irish fiddle player Martin Hayes, the trio 2 Foot Yard, and singer/songwriters Christina Courtin and Suzanne Vega. Courtin's widely released debut album on the Nonesuch label features several tracks with the quartet, as does Vega's new album, Close Up 2: People & Places. A long-standing relationship between Brooklyn Rider and Kayhan Kalhor resulted in the critically acclaimed 2008 recording, Silent City, on the World Village/Harmonia Mundi label, selected by Rhapsody.com as one of World Music's Best Albums of the Decade.

Brooklyn Rider often appears under the umbrella of outside initiatives begun by all four members of the group. Brothers Colin and Eric Jacobsen are co-founders of The Knights, a chamber orchestra based in New York in which all the members of Brooklyn Rider play. The Knights recently performed at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, and opened the 2009 Dresden Musikfestspiele. They have two albums on the Sony Classical label, as well as an all Mozart disc with violinists Lara and Scott St. John on Lara's label, Ancalagon, released this past summer.

In 2003 violinist Johnny Gandelsman created In A Circle, a series of performance events in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn that explore connections between music and the visual arts. In A Circle Records was launched by Gandelsman in 2008 with the release of Brooklyn Rider's eclectic debut recording entitled Passport, followed by Dominant Curve in 2010. The quartet also founded the Stillwater Music Festival (MN) in 2006 as a place to unveil new repertoire and collaborations. As educators, the quartet has been in residency at Williams College, MacPhail Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Texas A&M University, and Denison University.

Much of Brooklyn Rider's desire to extend the borders of conventional string quartet programming has come from their longstanding participation in Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. As individual members of the ensemble, they have performed throughout the world, recorded three albums for Sony Classical, and taken part in educational initiatives, family concerts and media broadcasts. Members of Brooklyn Rider have been involved in a series of museum residencies initiated by the Silk Road Project at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Reitberg in Zurich, and the Nara National Museum in Japan. They have also participated extensively in Silk Road Ensemble residencies at Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

A public radio favorite, Brooklyn Rider has been featured recently on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, All Songs Considered and All Things Considered, WNYC's Soundcheck, and American Public Media's Performance Today, and NY1 News TV in New York City. Their recordings are played across North America on stations ranging in focus from classical to world, jazz, pop and new music.

The quartet's name is inspired in part by the cross disciplinary vision of Der Blau Reiter (The Blue Rider), a pre World War I Munich-based artistic collective whose members included Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Scriabin. In this spirit, Brooklyn Rider has created an online art gallery that showcases the work of some of the quartet's friends. Proceeds are used to support new commissioning projects. In the eclectic spirit of Der Blau Reiter, the quartet also draws inspiration from the exploding array of cultures and artistic energy found in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, a place they call home.