PS21 Presents the House Blend Summer Concert Series, Brewed with Audiences in Mind

PS21/Performance Spaces for the 21st Century Presents the House Blend Summer Concert Series: Brewed with Audiences in Mind

July 15–16; August 5, August 25, 2023

June 2023
Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, Chatham, NY
Tel. 518-392-6121
email: info@ps21chatham.org
ps21chatham.org

June 27, 2023, Chatham, NY

PS21’s expansive 2023 season continues with PS21 House Blend, a stylistically diverse annual series of cutting edge new music and bold works of the past, creating new contexts for experiencing music in which the familiar becomes surprising.

Brewed specially for our audience, PS21 House Blend invites listeners to experience vital music in stimulating new ways. All programs are developed for our space with an eye toward bringing virtuosic and thoughtful musicians together in genre-defying collaborations. The House Blend Series invites new collaborations specific to our place, venue, and audiences, creating unique programs that can only be heard at PS21.

Audiences are invited to go more deeply into the music with open rehearsals, workshops, artist talks, and informal post-concert discussions designed to guide the listener through the mysteries of these daring works.

First is a weekend-long double-feature, beginning on July 15 with the world premiere of the ensemble version of Susie Ibarra’s Four Meditations on Impermanence, an immersive, musical meditation on forests, and followed the next day, July 16, with House Blend I, featuring works by Igor Stravinsky, Claude Vivier, and Rebecca Saunders. House Blend II on August 5 includes both an intimate afternoon, salon-style concert featuring works by Beethoven and Zosha Di Castri, and an evening concert of music played by a string quartet, harp, and pipa. The final House Blend Concert of the season, House Blend III on August 25, features a program inspired by PS21’s unique sense of place and the birdsong that rings across Columbia County throughout the summer. The concert will be followed by a family-style, farm-to-table dinner from local chef Leah Guadagnoli.

House Blend Special Susie Ibarra – July 15, 7 PM Concert
Four Meditations on Impermanence (2023)*
For solo percussion by Susie Ibarra with guest soloists and ensembles
With guest soloists Tashi Dorji, guitar and Phyllis Chen, piano/sound artist
*World premiere of ensemble version

“Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible” – Thich Nhat Hanh
Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, Susie Ibarra creates four meditative pieces focused on the sonic world of four elements – metal, skin, wood, and water. Drawn into the cultural diversity of languages in nature, she creates a percussive piece in these natural elements that is impermanent and yet is also able to adapt and grow in other parts of an ecosystem.

For the performance at PS21, a new version of the composition will be created for multiple ensembles with soundscape and visuals included by artists in Rhythm in Nature. The performance of Four Meditations on Impermanence, a musical meditation on forests, will close a full day of multidisciplinary engagement with PS21’s grounds and natural setting. The day will include a participatory community performance along the Stony Kill river, a musical procession through the forest, and sonic, visual, and movement projects from Ibarra’s Rhythm in Nature program. Four Meditations on Impermanence will be presented on PS21’s pavilion-theater stage and feature several guest artists along with Ibarra. Guest ensembles including the Empire State Youth Percussion Ensemble and the Troy High School Marching Band will surround the audience providing a spatialized, mobile, and fully immersive percussion environment. Ibarra will also lead a Rhythm in Nature Community Performance Workshop in the morning on July 15 at 9:30 AM.

House Blend I July 16, 5 PM
The first House Blend concert will find violinist Miranda Cuckson, pianist Eric Huebner, and clarinetist Adrián Sandí performing a program including Stravinsky, Vivier, and Saunders. Written for the composer to play with his friend violinist Samuel Dushkin, Igor Stravinsky’s Duo Concertant was his attempt to reconcile the ‘problem’ of mixing string instruments like violin and piano, resulting in this energetic and sensitive duo. Another duo that pairs two different timbres is Pièce pour violon et clarinette by Claude Vivier, a transformative Québécois composer whose complex life was cut short at the age of 34. The concert will conclude with The Underside of Green by Rebecca Saunders, one of the leading international composers alive, whose sculptural approach to sound and timbral complexity sets her compositions apart.

House Blend II August 5, 1 PM and 7 PM
House Blend II features both an afternoon salon-style concert, and an evening performance featuring music by Georg Philipp Telemann, Rhiannon Giddens, Luciano Berio, Henriette Renié, Wang Huiran, and Tan Dun.

The Open Stages Afternoon Concert will be an intimate, limited audience, pay-as-you-wish event with the Ulysses Quartet taking audience members on a tour through Beethoven and Zosha Di Castri’s pieces. This interactive concert will have audience members joining the performers on stage as they play Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, the last of his three “Razumovsky” cycle of string quartets, as well as Zosha Di Castri’s String Quartet No. 1, an abstract yet sonically concrete quartet that shifts rapidly between contrasting modes of expression.

For the evening concert, centered around plucked strings and unusual combinations of instruments, the pipa is the star of House Blend II, a Chinese plucked-string instrument that has been played for almost two thousand years. The Ulysses Quartet – Christina Bouey on violin, Rhiannon Banerdt on violin, Colin Brookes on viola, and Grace Ho on cello – are joined by Sun Li, playing the pipa, and Nuiko Wadden, playing the harp. Featuring works composed from 1726 to 2017, House Blend II culminates with Tan Dun’s Concerto for String Quartet and Pipa. Derived from Tan Dun’s theater piece Ghost Opera, this powerful concerto is an example of the composer’s gift in transforming his own music in and out of a narrative structure.

House Blend III August 25, 6 PM
Enjoy dinner and a show at House Blend III, an evening of music by path-forgers of the past Lou Harrison, Johanna Beyer, and Olivier Messiaen, as well as contemporary composers Angélica Negrón, Annea Lockwood, and Allison Loggins-Hull, all followed by a dinner outside in the PS21’s apple orchards landscape.
The evening’s program, inspired by the beauty of late-summer Chatham and the sound of birds, reckons with a sense of place and the sounds and textures of the physical world. Lou Harrison’s Varied Trio, written for rice bowls, violin, vibraphone, and piano, combines the composer’s vocabulary of found-item percussion with his later interest in more classical styles such as Rondo forms into a piece that acts as a summation of his life’s works.

Angélica Negrón’s Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado (translated: Intermittent Fragments of a Fractured Place) is part of a series of pieces Negrón has written which use field recordings taken from her trips to visit family and friends in Puerto Rico. Written for quartet and electronics, this piece is a reflection on the construction of identity when attempting to create a sense of belonging in two places simultaneously. Hub New Music, a quartet of winds and strings consisting of Michael Avitabile (flutes), Jesse Christeson (cello), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet), and Meg Rohrer (violin), are joined by Adam Tendler on piano, and Ayano Kataoka and Matthew Gold on percussion. After the show, enjoy an intimate, family-style farm-to-table dinner with the artists, hosted in our apple orchards. The dinner is from chef Leah Guadagnoli’s garden.

House Blend Dinner/Talk July 9, 5:30 PM
Matthew Gold, the Director of Community Initiatives and PATHWAYS Programming, will lead an interactive discussion exploring the unique House Blend programs to come this summer. Learn about the history of avant-garde composers past and the current composers changing the landscape, as well as the choices behind pairing unexpected pieces together in concert. After the talk, enjoy a locally-sourced family-style community dinner in PS21’s apple orchards.

Programmers: The 2023 House Blend Series has been programmed by pianist Alan Feinberg who is on the faculty of Princeton and NYU, and percussionist Matthew Gold, who is PS21 Director of Community Engagement and an Artist in Residence in Percussion and Contemporary Music Performance at Williams College.

House Blend Key Dates and Tickets
Tickets for each evening concert are $35, but with a House Blend Season Pass you can save $40 over all four House Blend concerts. Additionally, the House Blend Open Stages Afternoon Concert is pay as you wish. Links for all individual concerts are below:

July 9 House Blend Talk: 5:30 PM, Matthew Gold Talk and Dinner
Make it a weekend of Music (July 14–16):
July 14 Global Music (Spain): 8 PM, La Banda Morisca, PS21 Pavilion Theater
July 15 House Blend Special: 7 PM, Susie Ibarra, Four Meditations on Impermanence, PS21 100-acres of meadows and trails and PS21 Pavilion Theater
July 16 House Blend I: 5 PM, PS21 Pavilion Theater
August 5 House Blend Open Stages Afternoon Concert: 1 PM, PS21 Pavilion Theater
August 5 House Blend II Evening Concert: 7 PM, PS21 Pavilion Theater
August 25 House Blend III: 6 PM, PS21 Pavilion Theater
Tickets, $10-$35 for all of PS21’s 2023 season are available on the PS21 website.

For complete information about PS21’s current season, go to https://ps21chatham.org/upcoming-events/

About PS21
A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times): adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists in music, dance, and theater, and visionaries creating entirely new genres.
On our open-air Pavilion Theater stage, across our expansive, unspoiled grounds, and in the diverse surrounding communities, PS21 cultivates and presents productions that transcend aesthetic boundaries and revitalize existing artistic languages and grammars. Throughout the year, PS21 hosts residencies for dancers, choreographers, musicians, composers, actors, and creators of unclassifiable innovative and multimedia theater pieces.

Rooted in community collaboration, PS21’s programming engages creatively with critical global and social issues. It is a mecca for innovative and original artistic voices, a destination for a variety of performance that can be experienced nowhere else in the region.

Our 2023 Season
On June 2, PS21 launched its 2023 season with the 10th anniversary edition of The NEXT Festival of Emerging Artists, the first of more than fifty unique events, featuring a constellation of celebrated and emerging dancers and choreographers, musicians and singers, actors, directors, and international street artists.
Among the season’s highlights:

Dance: From Italy: Save the Last Dance for Me, Italian theatermaker Alessandro Sciarroni’s inventive reincarnation of the polka chinata, a nearly lost Bolognese courtship dance from the last century; Paul Taylor Dance Company, in a program of three Taylor masterworks; An Immigrant’s Story, by Wanjiru Kamuyu (Kenya/France), and Never Twenty One, SmaÏl Kanouté & Compagnie Vivons! (Mali/France)

International Theater: US premiere of L’Étang (The Pond), Gisèle Vienne’s adaptation of Robert Walser’s bitter family drama, with Pina Bausch veteran dancer Julie Shanahan and César winner Adèle Haenel and music by doom metal band Sunn O))) frontman Stephen O’Malley

Contemporary Performance: ANIMA, from France, a collaboration between French photographer and visual artist Noémie Goudal, theater director Maëlle Poésy aerial artist Chloé Moglia, and composer Chloé Thévenin. An immersive, multi-media installation of photography, projected video, and live performance, ANIMA is grounded in Goudal’s interest in recent discoveries in the field of paleoclimatology. Runners, an invigorating work of Czech New Circus from Cirk La Putyka. A hit at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Guardian calls Runners “a moving exploration of time . . . through dance, music, acrobatics and dialogue.”

Music: Attractions include global sounds and a dance party in our Pavilion Theater from Spain’s La Banda Morisca and Puerto Rico’s Plena Libre, our distinctive House Blend chamber music series, and the World Premiere of Four Meditations on Impermanence, a new work created especially for PS21 by visionary composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra. Plus a vastly-expanded schedule of PATHWAYS activities on-campus, in Hudson, and across Columbia County, in programs involving 3 local public schools and 13 community-based partners; Movement Without Borders masterclasses with visiting international artists, and ecology walks; a participatory installation; and much more.

PS21’s Mission

PS21, Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, is committed to:

Presenting innovative performances by leading and emerging artists in our state-of-the-art, green-energy black-box and open-air pavilion theaters

Fostering creativity through residencies and collaborations between performers working across disciplines and genres

Serving the community via free and low-cost workshops, performances, and other programming

Preserving our more than 100 acres of open spaces, meadows, woodlands, and orchards as an important resource for artists and the community

Extending opportunities for arts engagement to all, regardless of age, economic status, and cultural background

Our commitments are incorporated in the design of our new theater and the surrounding grounds: open, inviting, and optimized for the public’s enjoyment and to encourage citizen expression and participation

PS21’s Theater and History
A true cultural crossroads, PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, is a state-of-the-art theater complex completed in 2018 a mile from the center of Chatham village. PS21’s new theater is a 350-seat open-air proscenium stage protected by a pavilion roof, which converts in cooler months to a geothermally-heated and air-conditioned black box seating 99. The new facility is built with technologically advanced systems that can accommodate all levels of artistic needs—from the analog use of our extensive system of sprung dance floors so critical for the safety of movement-based performance, to our state-of-the-art lighting and sound capacities. The theater features one of the only fully LED green theatrical lighting systems in the country. Our new building sits above a nineteenth-century apple orchard at the apex of over 100 acres of beautiful Hudson Valley land, at the foothills of the Berkshires. Just five acres have been developed; the rest are meadows and woodlands. Nearby are the Dance Barn, a rehearsal and performance venue, and two artists’ residences accommodating 16 visitors, and the Chatham Animal Haven, an animal farm sanctuary.“A beautiful, reconfigurable indoor-outdoor space that appears to have landed like an exotic bird in the midst of a 100-acre former apple orchard in this tiny Hudson Valley town. It’s not the first place you would expect to encounter cutting-edge performance, yet PS21 offers little else.” The New York Times.

Founded in 2006, PS21 has evolved into a mecca for innovative programming by leading and emerging artists in music, dance, theater, contemporary performance, and the visual and multimedia arts in the Hudson Valley. PS21 supports artists’ creative endeavors, connecting them to a broad, diverse audience outside the conventional urban setting, and offers the region’s year-round inhabitants the opportunity to engage with the arts regardless of economic status, age, or cultural background.

PS21 PATHWAYS: Education and Enrichment Programs
Through our own programming and partnerships with local organizations, PATHWAYS has emerged as the linchpin of PS21’s activities, fostering collaboration among community groups and increasing participation by low-income families. We strive to shatter the “glass barricade” that often discourages nearby residents from sharing, as both spectators and participants, in the wealth of cultural, recreational, and intellectual programming on offer. PATHWAYS programs are engaging, accessible, participatory, and welcoming to all. Community workshops and residencies, open to all ages and levels.

Movement Without Borders
This summertime cure is a weekly series of innovative experiences dedicated to the mind, body, and spirit. PS21 offers yoga, fitness, ballet, and movement classes in the PS21 Dance Barn, Theater, and on the trails, led by Hudson Valley-based artists.

Free Resident Artist Workshops
Throughout the summer, artists, ensembles, and companies in residence offer free performance and participatory workshops to the community. People of all ages and abilities can discover new ways to move with dancers from the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Nouveau Cirque artists Cirk La Putyka, celebrated Pina Bausch company veteran Julie Shanahan, and Amoukanama Circus. Explore new ways of listening and creating sound with Hub New Music, the Ulysses Quartet, La Banda Morisca, and Susie Ibarra. And dive into a summer of social and contemporary dancing with the Plena Libre Orchestra, Polka Chinata dancers Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini, popping and hip-hop workshops with Compagnie Vivons!, and others.
Unfolding Dramaturgies of the Anthropocene

The PATHWAYS 2023 season continues PS21’s multifaceted engagement with climate issues, with films, talks, and educational programs that expand the reach of programs including ANIMA, Four Meditations on Impermanence, and other artistic productions throughout our expansive, natural grounds.

PS21: An Open Laboratory
PS21 is an open, creative laboratory where, throughout the season, artists are at work in our theater, barns, and fields. PS21 is open from dawn to dusk every day, and while wandering the trails, meadows, and woodlands, visitors can see creative artists in action while experiencing our untamed natural landscape.