The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, will present American Modern Opera Company: the echoing of tenses, on May 18, 2023 at 7:30pm ET in the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at $25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/american-modern-opera-company.
From the enterprising artistic collective and masters of interdisciplinary experimentation the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*) – the New York premiere of a new work presented in collaboration with 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center.
the echoing of tenses is a new staged song cycle with music by composer Anthony Cheung and poems by seven of today’s most compelling Asian-American poets, including Jenny Xie, Ocean Vuong, Arthur Sze, Monica Youn, and others. Their texts, which are sung, spoken, and interwoven throughout the production, are interconnected through the themes of memory, identity, and diaspora. Performances by tenor Paul Appleby, violinist Miranda Cuckson, and pianist Conor Hanick.
AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), founded in 2017 by Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur, builds and shares a body of collaborative work. As a group of dancers, singers, musicians, writers, directors, composers, choreographers, and producers united by a core set of values, AMOC* artists pool their resources to create new pathways that connect creators and audiences in surprising and visceral ways.
In 2022, AMOC* served as Music Director for the Ojai Music Festival-the second ensemble and first explicitly interdisciplinary company to hold the position in OMF’s 75-year history. Over the Festival’s four days, AMOC* offered 18 performances, eight world premieres, and six new theatrical productions. In the 2022/23 season, AMOC* premiered a new production of Harawi at Festival Aix-en-Provence, an affecting interpretation of Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle that breaks open its explorations of love and death into a newly physicalized and theatrical dimension. In the spring, the production will continue to DeSingel (Antwerp), Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), and stARTfestival (Leverkusen).
The 2022-2023 season also includes the world premiere of Bobbi Jene Smith’s Broken Theater at UNC Chapell Hill and OZ Arts in Nashville; a chamber version of John Adams’s El Niño, conceived by Julia Bullock, at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine; and the New York premieres of Carolyn Chen’s How to Fall Apart at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Anthony Cheung’s the echoing of tenses at the 92nd Street Y. Additional activities include an interdisciplinary performance residency at Brown University, a concert of new music written by AMOC* artists at the Clark Art Institute, and exhibition opening performances at Tina Kim Gallery (“House of the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate,” curated by Charlap Hyman & Herrero) and Hauser & Wirth (Jenny Holzer’s “Demented Words”).
Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. Described as “gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” (San Francisco Chronicle) and praised for its “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), his music reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre. Representations of space and place are achieved through allusions in spatialization, orchestration, and recorded sound.
He has been commissioned by leading groups such as the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Cleveland Orchestra (as the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow), Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. His work “Lyra” was commissioned for the New York Philharmonic at the request of Henri Dutilleux, as part of the orchestra’s inaugural Kravis Prize for New Music. In addition, his music has been performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Chicago Symphony Orchestra (on its MusicNOW series), Minnesota Orchestra, Ensemble Linea, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, wild Up, eighth blackbird, and Dal Niente. His music has been programmed at festivals such as Ultraschall, Cresc. Biennale, Présences, impuls, Wittener Tage, Tanglewood, Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Transit, Heidelberger Frühling, Helsinki Festival and Musica Nova Helsinki, Centre Acanthes, Musica, and Nuova Consonanza.
His recordings include three portrait discs: Cycles and Arrows, with the Spektral Quartet, ICE, and Atlas Ensemble (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal, with the Talea Ensemble and Ensemble Intercontemporain (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts, with the Ensemble Modern and Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). As a performer and advocate for new music, he was a co-founder of the Talea Ensemble, performing as a pianist and serving as artistic director.
The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, Cheung has also won awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP, and first prize in the Sixth International Dutilleux Competition (2008), as well as a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2012). He received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He studied composition with Tristan Murail and Bernard Rands, and piano with Robert Levin and Paul Hersh. He taught at University of Chicago from 2013-20, and is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University.
Admired for his interpretive depth, vocal strength, and range of expressivity, tenor Paul Appleby is one of the most sought-after voices of his generation. Mr. Appleby graces the stages of the world’s most distinguished concert halls and opera houses and collaborates with leading orchestras, instrumentalists, and conductors. Opera News writes, “[Paul’s] tenor is limpid and focused, but with a range of color unusual in an instrument so essentially lyric… His singing is scrupulous and musical; the voice moves fluidly and accurately.”
Paul Appleby’s calendar of the 2022-23 season includes the principal role of Caesar in the world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams at San Francisco Opera conducted by Music Director Eun Sun Kim. Appleby reprises his internationally acclaimed title role portrayal of Bernstein’s Candide for the Opéra de Lyon in a new production by Daniel Fish led by Wayne Marshall and returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic for performances of Girls of the Golden West under the baton of the composer, John Adams. No less impressive is the tenor’s international concert diary, which includes Bach’s Matthäus-Passion both with the New York Philharmonic and Hong Kong Philharmonic conducted by Jaap van Zweden as well as performances in Chicago with Music of the Baroque and Dame Jane Glover; a collaboration with the Met Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in a presentation of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings; performances with the American Modern Opera Company; and a recital at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
A “fearless, visionary and tremendously talented artist” (Sequenza21), Miranda Cuckson delights listeners with her playing of a remarkably wide range of music and styles, from older eras to the newest creations. Known for her organic expressivity, dexterous virtuosity, imagination, insight, and love for music, she is sought after as a soloist and collaborator. A violinist and violist, she performs internationally at venues large and small, concert halls, and informal spaces.
As soloist these have included the Berlin Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Casa da Musica Porto, Teatro Colón, Cleveland Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Strathmore, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, National Sawdust, and the Bard, Marlboro, Portland, Music Mountain, Ojai, West Cork (Ireland), SinusTon (Germany), Wien Modern (Austria), and LeGuessWho and Soundsofmusic (Netherlands) festivals. Miranda made her Carnegie Hall debut playing Piston’s Concerto No. 1 with the American Symphony Orchestra. She recently premiered concertos written for her by Georg Friedrich Haas in Tokyo, Stuttgart and Porto, and by Marcela Rodriguez in Mexico City. Her upcoming solo performances include the Grafenegg Festival and San Francisco Performances.
Reflecting her deeply felt perspective as a multiethnic American, Miranda works with an array of artists from many backgrounds. Composers who have written major works for her also include Jason Eckardt, Reiko Füting, Michael Hersch, George Lewis, Wang Lu, Jeffrey Mumford, Aida Shirazi, Steve Lehman, Rand Steiger, Harold Meltzer, Dongryul Lee, and Stewart Goodyear. In addition to collaborating with many of today’s emerging artists, she has worked with celebrated composers including Dutilleux, Adams, Carter, Sciarrino, Boulez, Crumb, Iyer, Glass, Saariaho, Davidovsky, Ran, and Murail. She is a member of the interdisciplinary collective AMOC, and founder/director of non-profit Nunc. While remaining dedicated to the Western classical repertoire, Miranda has played countless concerts and premieres of new works, playing an inspirational role in bringing new creations more to the center of concert life.
She has released eleven albums to great praise, including the Ligeti, Korngold, and Ponce concertos; music by American composers Finney, Shapey, Martino, Sessions, Carter, Eckardt, Glass, Hersch; her ECM Records album of Bartók, Schnittke and Lutoslawski sonatas; Melting the Darkness, an album of microtonal and electronics pieces; and Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, which was named a Best Recording of the Year by the New York Times.
Miranda teaches at the Mannes School of Music at New School University. She is an alumna of The Juilliard School, having studied there from Pre-College through her doctorate, and she was awarded Juilliard’s Presser Award.
Pianist Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master.” (New York Times) Hanick has recently been presented by The Gilmore Festival, the New York Philharmonic, Caramoor, Cal Performances, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Park Avenue Armory, and performed with the Seattle Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Orchestra Iowa, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. A fierce advocate for the music of today, Hanick has premiered over 200 pieces and collaborated with composers ranging from Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, to the leading composers of his generation, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, Matthew Aucoin, and Christopher Cerrone. In the 22-23 season, Hanick premieres a new piano concerto by composer Samuel Carl Adams with the San Francisco Symphony and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen; appears with soprano Julia Bullock at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi; and performs recitals at the Library of Congress, Hancher Auditorium, Ensemble Music Society of Indianapolis, the 92nd Street Y, and elsewhere. With the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*), Hanick served as an artistic director of the Ojai Festival in 2022. He is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and serves on the faculty of the Peabody Institute and The Juilliard School.
2022/23 TISCH MUSIC SEASON
In this first season curated by 92NY’s new Vice President of Tisch Music Amy Lam, the season features 39 events, more than 20 92NY debuts, 31 premieres, and four 92NY commissions. The 22/23 season includes premieres of Joseph Schwantner’s guitar quintet Song of a Dreaming Sparrow, a song cycle by Anthony Cheung, and works by Laurie Anderson, Timo Andres, Marcos Balter, Christopher Cerrone, Nicholas DiBerardino, Reena Esmail, inti figgis-vizueta, John Glover, Ted Hearne, Fred Hersch, Stephen Hough, Jimmy López, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Angélica Negrón, Mary Prescott, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Darian Donovan Thomas, Scott Wollschleger, Pamela Z, and more.
Select Highlights:
This season marks the first time 92NY is presenting a fully integrated concert season across genres, including performances by Kate Baldwin, Joshua Bell, Regina Carter, Angela Hewitt, Larisa Martinez, Branford Marsalis,Kelli O’Hara, Eric Owens, Pepe Romero, Caroline Shaw, Sir András Schiff, Daniil Trifonov, and Jessica Vosk.
The World Premiere of a 92NY-commissioned piece from composer Jimmy López, performed by J’Nai Bridges and theCatalyst Quartet.
The New York premiere of Difficult Grace by cellist Seth Parker Woods and dancer Roderick George, presented in collaboration with Harkness Dance Center.
An in-depth two-day Julius Eastman retrospective featuring LA-based music collective Wild Up in three concerts, as well as exhibits, and panel discussions with Eastman friends and scholars examining the life of one of the 20th century’s most iconoclastic voices.
The Bach Collegium Japan, conducted by Masaaki Suzuki with baritone Roderick Williams
92NY’s signature series exploring the American songbook, Lyrics and Lyricists, continues to explore the best of Broadway, while also highlighting significant contributions to American culture by singer-songwriters across a variety of musical genres such as Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, the Mamas and the Papas, and more.
Two performances as part of an ongoing partnerships with The Curtis Institute of Music.
Jazz, which has been a staple of 92NY’s Tisch season since Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus took to the stage in 1955, will be performed by world-class musicians like Branford Marsalis, Fred Hersch, and Regina Carter not just within the renowned Jazz in July series, but throughout the year.
The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a world-class center for the arts and innovation, a convener of ideas, and an incubator for creativity. 92NY offers extensive classes, courses and events online including live concerts, talks and master classes; fitness classes for all ages; 250+ art classes, and parenting workshops for new moms and dads. The 92nd Street Y, New York is transforming the way people share ideas and translate them into action all over the world. All of 92NY’s programming is built on a foundation of Jewish values, including the capacity of civil dialogue to change minds; the potential of education and the arts to change lives; and a commitment to welcoming and serving people of all ages, races, religions, and ethnicities. For more information, visit www.92NY.org.
Dr. Andy Hildebrand accepts his technical Grammy in 2023. (Photo: Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images)
Photo: Victor R. Caivano, AP
Photo: Chris Hondros, Getty Images
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