Chris Grymes Open G Series:
Lucy Shelton
6pm doors • 7pm show
About
Open G Records, founded by clarinetist Chris Grymes, is committed to producing music that is rooted in the classical tradition, but brings artists and their fans together in new and innovative ways.
On December 15th, legendary soprano Lucy Shelton presents a “tasting menu” of composers with whom she has worked extensively over her decades of performing, including Elliott Carter, Jacob Druckman, Miriam Gideon, Shulamit Ran, and George Rochberg, as well as composers of whose works she provided the first major or complete recordings — songs by John Cage, Ruth Crawford, and Igor Stravinsky. Now in her 75th year, Lucy is a direct link to many of the most important creative minds of the 20th century, and continues to be a proponent of musical and vocal experimentation through her performances and her extensive teaching and coaching in New York City and throughout the world.
Tickets
The Artists
Winner of two Walter W. Naumburg Awards — as chamber musician and solo recitalist — soprano Lucy Shelton continues to enjoy an international career bringing her dramatic vocalism and brilliant interpretive skills to repertoire of all periods. An esteemed exponent of 20th and 21st century repertory, she has worked closely with today’s composers and premiered over 100 works. Notable among these are song cycles by Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen, Louis Karchin, and James Yannatos; chamber works by Carter, Joseph Schwantner, Mario Davidovsky, Stephen Albert, Lewis Spratlan, Charles Wuorinen, Gabriella Lena Frank, Bruce Adolphe, Alexander Goehr, Poul Ruders, Anne Le Baron, and Thomas Flaherty; orchestral works by Knussen, Albert, Schwantner, David Del Tredici, Gerard Grisey, Ezra Laderman, Sally Beamish, Virko Baley, and Ned Rorem; and an opera by Robert Zuidam. In recent seasons, Shelton has premiered works written for her by Shulamit Ran, Dan Visconti, Frank Stemper, Kathleen Ginther, Tamar Muskal, and Fang Man.
An avid chamber musician, she has been a guest artist with ensembles such as the Emerson, Brentano, Enso, Mendelssohn, Chiara, and Guarnieri string quartets, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, 21st Century Consort, Speculum Musicae, Da Capo Chamber Players, Sospeso, New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, Da Camera of Houston, eighth blackbird, Dolce Suono Ensemble, the Ensemble Moderne, Nash Ensemble, Klangform Wien, Schoenberg-Asko, and Ensemble Intercontemporain. Shelton has participated in numerous festivals, including those of Aspen, Santa Fe, Ojai, Tanglewood, Chamber Music Northwest, BBC Proms, Aldeburgh, Caen, Kuhmo, Togo, and Salzburg. In the fall of 2013, she is honored to begin a three-year term as a Board Member of Chamber Music America.
Shelton has appeared with major orchestras worldwide, including Amsterdam, Boston, Chicago, Cologne, Denver, Edinburgh, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Minnesota, Munich, New York, Paris, St. Louis, Stockholm, Sydney, and Tokyo, under leading conductors such as Marin Alsop, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Reinbert De Leeuw, Charles Dutoit, Alan Gilbert, Oliver Knussen, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Helmuth Rilling, Mstislav Rostropovich, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, and Robert Spano.
Shelton’s extensive discography is on the Deutsche Grammophon, Koch International, Nonesuch, NMC, Bridge, Albany, and Innova labels and includes works by Carter, Knussen, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Wuorinen, Del Tredici, Adolphe, Rands, Ginastera, Kim, Le Baron, Baley, Ung, and Schwantner.
https://www.lucyshelton.com/
Performer and composer Robert Fleitz is committed to curating mesmerizing and idiosyncratic concert experiences. As a pianist known for “mesmerizing” and “commanding” playing (New York Times), he has played with Contemporaneous, Ensemble Echappé, the Juilliard Orchestra, Wordless Music, and the RTÉ Irish National Symphony Orchestra. Recent appearances include the Universidade de Aveiro, Latvian National Library, Kyoto Music Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, MATA Festival, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and (Le) Poisson Rouge. He is a founding member of new-music-violin-piano-experience escapeVelocity and toy-music-theater-band Wind-Up Elephant, as well as the Melita Ensemble at St. Paul’s Church. He can be found frequently performing away from the piano, as a mover, performance artist, harpsichordist, toy pianist, and baritone. He is also the founder of PROMPTUS, a post-disciplinary collective that curates community-focused performance events.
His “dreamy…ambrosial” compositions (Boston Music Intelligencer) employ systems of fragmented expressivity based on performers’ physicality, the athletic rigor of classical training, imagined relationships, and queerness. Notable recent commissions and performances include the score for the Off-Broadway dance theater piece Babel, Hilary Easton Dance Company, JUX, and Concerts for Compassion. Born and raised in Lakeland, FL, where he began studying piano with his father at age four, and recently completed his BM and MM at the Juilliard School where he studied piano with Hung-Kuan Chen. A fervent educator, he works as a teaching artist of the New York Philharmonic. He is also a a recipient of Juilliard’s Career Advancement Fellowship.
He also loves avocados, Florida clouds, and cartoons.
http://www.robertfleitz.com/
Described as “vividly colored” (New York Times), “replete with imaginative textures” (Dallas Morning News), and “exhilarating” (Philadelphia Inquirer), Jeremy Gillʼs music has earned him residencies and fellowships with the Bogliasco Foundation (2017), Copland House (2015), American Opera Projects (2013–14), and the MacDowell Colony (2013), and grants from New Music USA (2017, 2015) and Chamber Music America (2011). In 2017, Boston Modern Orchestra Project released a recording of his orchestral music, conducted by Gil Rose and featuring clarinetist Chris Grymes, oboist Erin Hannigan, pianist Ching-Yun Hu, and the Marsh Chapel Choir. He has worked extensively with the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet, who recorded his hour-long Capriccio for Innova Recordings in 2015. Recent and upcoming collaborators include conductors JoAnn Falletta, Stuart Malina, Gemma New, Steven Osgood, Gil Rose, and Jaap van Zweden.
Premieres of his music during the 2019–20 season include …and everywhere the sea for clarinet and piano to open the Kennedy Centerʼs REACH, The Journey, a theater piece for soprano, bass-baritone, choir, and Pierrot ensemble, on the Illuminate Rotherhithe migration festival in London, and Concerto dʼavorio, a concerto for four-hands piano and orchestra, featuring pianists Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Gemma New.
http://jeremytgill.com/
A pianist, educator, and entrepreneur, Yoon Lee is the Special Prize winner of the Anton G. Rubinstein International Piano Competition. Yoon Lee is a member of faculty of SUNY Purchase College and Heifetz International Music Institute, as well as a staff pianist of the Juilliard School. Her performance of Beethoven has been described as “equal to Beethoven’s virtuosic demands” by New York Concert Review. As an international concert pianist, she has been on the stages of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Château de Fontainebleau, Hamarikyu Asahi Hall, and Seoul Arts Center, and featured on WQXR and KBS. As a collaborative pianist, Yoon has collaborated with members of the Juilliard String Quartet, Borromeo String Quartet, Orion String Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Elmar Oliveira, Catherine Cho, and Laurie Smukler. Yoon Lee has been the pianist for master classes by Itzhak Perlman, Leonidas Kavakos, Steven Isserlis, Frans Helmerson, and David Geringas. Yoon has taught piano and chamber music at Kneisel Hall ACMI, Manhattan School of Music Precollege and served as a judge of Manhattan School of Music Concerto Competition and Chamber Music Competition, YMF by the Schubert Club, and NFMC Junior Music Festival. Yoon received Doctor of Musical Arts from Manhattan School of Music and a Graduate Diploma from The Juilliard School. She is an Artistic Director of Noree Chamber Soloists, a chamber ensemble she founded in 2017.
http://www.yoonleepianist.com/
Georgia-born Sophiko Simsive started to play the piano at the age of three, taught by her mother. At only eleven years old she performed Beethoven’s second Piano Concerto with the student orchestra of Georgia at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Germany, and played the same concerto in a Rudolf Buchbinder master class in Switzerland. At 15, she was admitted to the Sweelinck Conservatory of Amsterdam as its youngest pupil.
During her first year at the Conservatory, Sophiko won the first prize at the Princess Christina Concours in the Netherlands. This prize included a performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the Residential Orchestra of The Hague under Jan Willem de Vriend and a chamber music tour in the USA and Canada. In 2008 she won the Yamaha Piano Competition in Amsterdam. Sophiko played a solo recital at the Canterbury Festival in England in 2011 and was invited to the academy program of the International Music Festival of Verbier in 2013.
In 2015 she toured with Eduard Sistek on cello in the series New Masters on Tour, organized by The International Holland Music Sessions, and made her debut at Carnegie Hall in New York with cellist Kian Soltani. Sophiko was the winner of the GrachtenfestivalPrijs 2016 of the Netherlands and was Artist in Residence during the Grachtenfestival 2017. Most recently she was selected as the winner of Music Academy of the West’s second Solo Piano Competition, which will take her on a multi-city recital tour that includes appearances at St. Luke’s in London, Chicago, Santa Barbara, and LA.
Sophiko is represented by Interartists Amsterdam Classical Music Management and is currently working towards her Doctor of Musical Arts at Manhattan School of Music under Dr. Solomon Mikowsky.
