Trinity Wall Street launches new-music ensemble
Trinity Wall Street launches its new-music ensemble NOVUS NY on May 19. The newly formed group joins the Trinity Choir in an evening concert showcasing the complete works for chorus and orchestra of Boston-based composer Elena Ruehr, conducted by Julian Wachner, Trinity Wall Street’s director of music and the arts. The program includes Ruehr’s cantata based on American poet Louise Glück’s Averno, which Wachner premiered with the Washington Chorus in early April. Ruehr, born in 1963 and raised in rural Michigan, has been declared “a composer to watch” by Opera News; her music is written “with heart and a forceful sense of character and expression,” according to the Washington Post. Gramophone magazine called her music “unspeakably gorgeous.” Earlier in the day, at 1 pm, there will be a free preview concert.
Interviewed by Classical WETA in Washington, DC, prior to the premiere of Averno, Ruehr explained that this collection of Glück’s poems is “about humans’ relation to the natural world,” with a connection to the myth of Persephone.
Wachner, a longtime friend and colleague of Ruehr’s, will also lead Trinity performances of Ruehr’s Cricket, Spider, Bee (on texts by Emily Dickinson) and Gospel Cha-Cha (text by Langston Hughes). The soloists on the program include baritone Stephen Salters, a close Ruehr collaborator, and soprano Marguerite Krull.
In 2008, Ruehr was a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, where she wrote Averno. An instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ruehr was composer-in-residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project from 2000 to 2005, and the orchestra premiered her pieces Shimmer, Sky Above Clouds and Ladder to the Moon, as well as her opera Toussaint Before the Spirits. Ruehr’s string quartets have been performed by the Borromeo, Biava, Lark, Shanghai and Cypress quartets, with the latter group recording Nos. 1, 3 and 4 on the album How She Danced (Cypress String Quartet, 2010). The recordings devoted to Ruehr’s music also include the opera Toussaint Before the Spirits (Arsis, 2007) and a collection of chamber pieces, Jane Wang Considers the Dragonfly (Albany, 2009).
Like all concerts at Trinity Wall Street, the May 19 performance of Ruehr’s music will be professionally filmed and broadcast live at trinitywallstreet.org. Trinity Church is located on Broadway at Wall Street, New York City. Tickets are $20 (general admission), $10 (student/senior, available at door); tickets can be purchased at trinitywallstreet.org/tickets or at the Trinity Church gift shop.
“Bach at One”
On March 21, J. S. Bach’s birthday, Trinity Wall Street’s “Bach at One” series debuted, offering motets of Heinrich Schütz and cantatas of J.S. Bach in a liturgical setting. Over the next five years, all of Bach’s 200-plus cantatas will be heard inside the historic St. Paul’s Chapel, which dates back to 1766. Bach’s cycles of cantatas on the themes of the sacred calendar comprise a vast body of peerless music, and Trinity’s ambitious program enables chapel visitors to wonder at these ever-inspiring examples of musical and religious art. Conducted by Trinity’s Director of Music and the Arts, Julian Wachner, each “Bach at One” installment features the Trinity Choir and Trinity Baroque Orchestra. “Bach at One” takes place each Monday at 1pm in St. Paul’s Chapel (Broadway and Fulton Street).
Trinity Wall Street
One of the oldest, largest and most vibrant of all Episcopal parishes, Trinity Wall Street is located in the heart of New York’s financial district, where it has created a dynamic home for great music. Trinity Wall Street opened its 2010-11 season with an exciting new appointment, as noted conductor, composer and keyboardist Julian Wachner took over as director of Trinity’s Music and the Arts program. Serving as principal conductor of the Trinity Choir and Trinity Baroque Orchestra, he also oversees all liturgical, professional and community Music and Arts programming at Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel. For Wachner’s season-opening debut, he led an account of Handel’s oratorio Israel and Egypt that the New York Times praised as “superbly performed.” In December, Wachner continued Trinity Wall Street’s 240-year-old tradition of presenting Handel’s Messiah.
The Trinity Choir and Trinity Baroque Orchestra offer a full season of concerts ranging from large-scale oratorios to intimate evenings of a cappella singing and chamber music. Trinity Wall Street, located at Broadway and Wall Street, also presents the popular “Concerts at One” recital series. Presented on Thursdays at 1 pm, these concerts feature an array of soloists and ensembles – and they’re free and open to the public. All concerts at Trinity Wall Street are professionally filmed and broadcast live at trinitywallstreet.org.
www.trinitywallstreet.org
www.facebook.com/pages/Music-at-Trinity-Wall-Street/171550559539121
twitter.com/trinitywallst