Hornist Adam Unsworth performs with the Slee Sinfonietta!

We’re excited about our Second Fall Slee Sinfonietta concert coming up on Tuesday, October 30, at 7:30 p.m., and are happy to have received a thoughtful write-up in this week’s Buffalo Artvoice by Jan Jezioro, which is largely about the evening’s conductor Daniel Bassin, “Now in his third academic year as the UB Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Daniel Bassin enjoys his hectic schedule of music making. In addition to his duties as the UBSO music director, Bassin has also been conducting some very challenging works on this season’s Slee Sinfonietta series, yet he also somehow manages to find the time to perform often as a trumpeter with jazz ensembles in venues throughout the city. And he does this all while pursuing his PhD in musical composition at the University.” Read the entire article here.

We thought we'd do a little profile on french hornist Adam Unsworth, who will be joining us for the evening, hailing all the way from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His ensemble, the Adam Unsworth Ensemble, has recently released two CDs, Next Step, and Excerpt This!, which received rave reviews, including a terrific piece in All About Jazz, by Ken Kase, "Unsworth's debut recording does what the best jazz should do by asking questions, shunning orthodoxy and predictability and having a few laughs along the way. His virtuosity is undeniable... Unsworth and his group have created something rare and distinctive." Read more about Unsworth's work here. 

Next Step by the Adam Unsworth Ensemble

Some background on Unsworth from his extensive biography:

“Adam Unsworth is Associate Professor of Horn at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Prior to his joining the faculty at Michigan, he spent nine years as a member of the horn section of The Philadelphia Orchestra and three years in the Detroit Symphony. Adam has appeared as a recitalist and clinician at many universities throughout the United States, and has performed repeated solo and chamber concerts at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall. He is the leader of his own jazz group, the Adam Unsworth Ensemble, which recorded the critically acclaimed CD, Excerpt This! and now has completed a second recording, entitled Next Step. The group embarked on its first U.S. tour in October 2007.

“Next Step, the Adam Unsworth Ensemble's 2008 release, is a culmination of work done after his leaving the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2007, a move made in order to devote more time and energy to teaching and creative endeavors. It features new Unsworth compositions for jazz quintet of horn, woodwinds, vibraphone, bass, and drums, and two original works by multi-woodwind virtuoso Les Thimmig.

“In 2006, Unsworth released Excerpt This!, a groundbreaking recording for the French horn that looks to redefine the virtuosic boundaries of the instrument. Highlighted on the CD are five of Unsworth's compositions for jazz sextet. The instrumentation of horn, violin, alto flute, bass clarinet, vibraphone, bass, and drums is unique and creates a texture that truly embodies the term chamber jazz. Joining Unsworth on Excerpt This! are Philadelphia jazz greats Tony Miceli, Diane Monroe, Ranaan Meyer, and Cornell Rochester, as well as Les Thimmig from Madison, WI. In addition to the works for sextet, the CD includes unaccompanied jazz works for horn by Unsworth, Les Thimmig, and Dana Wilson.”

Adam Unsworth, Yuki Numata, and Eric Huebner,
rehearsing György Ligeti's Trio for horn, violin, and piano,
in UB's Slee Hall, 

Rehearsals over the weekend have been going swimingly, as Maestro Bassin recently tweeted, “Great 1st rehearsal of Feldman's "De Kooning" - my first time conducting his music! These musicians are fantastic! #SleeSinfonietta10/30/12”

Slee Sinfonietta

Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 7:30 pm

Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall

Daniel Bassin, conductor

Yuki Numata, violin

Adam Unsworth, horn

Eric Huebner, piano

Ticket information can be found here. 

Link to this here.

Soundcloud up and new audio available!

We at the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music are happy to announce a new and improved soundcloud page -- so far we've uploaded 36 tracks of audio from past concerts and festivals, and the page is proving to be a great resource to listen to pieces and excerpts of large works from a tremendous variety of contemporary composers, including Hilda Paredes, Eric Chasalow, John Cage, Reiko Futing, Morton Feldman, Sofia Gubaidulina, Roger Reynolds, David Felder, and may more. All are invited to browse our page here.

Some of the most recently uploaded audio is from June in Buffalo 2012, which was given some very thoughtful press by the The Buffalo News, as well as by our good friend Allan Kozinn at the New York Times, who offered some insightful commentary on David Felder's Rare Air, a four movement work for piano, clarinet, and electronics:

Jean Kopperud performing Felder's Rare Air
photo by Irene Haupt

"Mr. Felder was represented by three movements from Rare Air (2009), a work that explores various aspects of the clarinet or, more properly, the agility of the group’s extraordinary clarinetist, Jean Kopperud. In “Blews” Ms. Kopperud performed on a tube instrument that she and Mr. Felder built for the score. It looks like a boa constrictor; it’s hard to say how it sounds, since the score is heavily layered with electronic timbres and evokes a forest full of banshees. The other movements, “Boxmunsdottir” and “Boxmunsson,” are more conventional, if only by comparison. In both, Mr. Kopperud played a bass clarinet energetically and sometimes with a jazzy tinge, but always enmeshed in Mr. Felder’s evocative electronic scoring." You can read the rest of the review here, and listen to David Felder's "Boxmunsson" from Rare Air, on our soundcloud here.

Brad Lubman from SIGNAL conducting Julia Wolfe's Impatience
photo by Irene Haupt

In a second review, Allan Kozinn offered some thoughts on a few of the larger ensemble pieces at the festival, including Impatience, by Julia Wolfe, "Ms. Wolfe’s Impatience (2005), an insistent, sometimes painterly accompaniment to a peculiar film of that name by the 1920s avant-garde director Charles Dekeukeleire, uses repeating figures and steady, tolling harp, percussion and piano pulses to evoke a tense emotional landscape, and odd touches like eerie accordion chords and sliding violin lines to create an otherworldly atmosphere. If those qualities seem conflicting, they capture the essence of Dekeukeleire’s primitive jump cuts and juxtapositions, and work splendidly on their own." Read the full review here and listen to Julia Wolfe's Impatience on our soundcloud here.

Our first Slee Sinfonietta concert of the 2012-2013 season was a great success as well, and we were happy to be visited by Daniel J. Kushner, who had kind words for the program, and gave a glowing review of Robert Treviño's debut conducting performance with the Slee Sinfonietta, "It felt as if the conductor were prying open the dense orchestration to illuminate the sumptuous yet terse melodies nested inside, waiting to be discovered by the listener." You can read the rest of the review at the The Buffalo News, and listen to Ligeti's Melodien on our soundcloud here.