About the Video:
This 30-minute MIT Video Productions documentary, Awakening: Evoking the Arab Spring through Music, features the March 2012 premiere of Awakening, a piece commissioned by MIT Music and Theater Arts from Jamshied Sharifi ‘83 with funding from the MIT Visiting Artists program.  It was performed in Kresge Auditorium by the MIT Wind Ensemble conducted by Frederick Harris, Jr., music director.  This video production was made possible in part by A. Neil ’64 and Jane Pappalardo.  It was broadcast on the Boston PBS affiliate WGBH 2 on Friday, May 31, 2013.

Credits:
Lawrence Gallagher, Producer; Chris Boebel, Documentary Director; Bob Comiskey, Performance Director; Jean Dunoyer, Film Editor; Craig Milanesi, Technical Director; Anthony Di Bartolo, Audio Engineer

Links:
SHASS:  http://bit.ly/10KrKFC
MIT News: http://bit.ly/AoVecQ
Slice of MIT: http://bit.ly/147Vqlx

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2013 Tech Night at Pops on Thursday, June 6 at Symphony Hall will feature two John Harbison compositions and student jazz musicians and faculty from MIT Music and Theater Arts

 The 2013 Tech Night at Pops concert will showcase the MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble and members of the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble: Dylan Sherry, G, (tenor saxophone), Max Maybury ’15 (soprano saxophone), Ariel Wexler ’13 (trumpet), and Otto Briner ’15, (percussion).  In addition, the MIT Faculty Jazz Combo, a.k.a. Strength in Numbers, comprised of John Harbison (piano), Mark Harvey (trumpet), Frederick Harris (drums), and Keala Kaumeheiwa (bass) will perform with the students.

John Harbison’s Rhumba for Rafael Reif, premiered at President Reif’s inauguration in the fall, will be performed this time by the MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble, members of the Festival Jazz Ensemble and the MIT Faculty Jazz Combo (Strength in Numbers).  In addition, Harbison’s “In Praise of MIT,” premiered at MIT’s 150th Convocation in 2011, will be now performed with the Pops orchestra in a new orchestral arrangement by the composer.

Harbison explains, In praise of MIT is an arrangement of the MIT school song for vocal jazz choir, jazz combo, and full orchestra; a grandiose, outsize, loony expansion of a very modest enterprise?  I certainly hope so. We are very much looking forward to our collaboration with the BSO on June 6.”
It is a formidable closing event for the 50^th Anniversary of Jazz at MIT festivities. The students are very excited about the opportunity to perform at Symphony Hall with the Pops.  In the words of Otto Briner ’15, “It’s awesome… surreal!”

Visit: BSO.org

The New York Times

Music Review

Seeking Period Precision In Channeling the Masters

Grand Harmonie at the Church of the Epiphany

Adam Boyles, Music Director of the MIT Symphony Orchestra conducted the Grand Harmonie ensemble in NYC.  The New York Times reviewed the concert.

“Mr. Boyles drew some delicate, gauzy colors from the orchestra at the start of Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No. 1… “  READ MORE

The Boston Musical Intelligencer
May 13, 2013

BCMS Delivers Interesting and Offbeat
by Susan Miron

“The Boston Chamber Music Society has been in business for three decades because they are doing a huge amount right. Interesting, offbeat pieces keep turning up on their programs, and the core group of artists and guests remain very high-caliber.”

READ FULL REVIEW

The Boston Globe
May 14, 2013

Unity and rarity mark chamber concert
by Matthew Guerrieri

CAMBRIDGE — Chamber music is often analogized to a counterpoint of views, but Sunday’s Boston Chamber Music Society concert at Sanders Theatre presented a united front, so much so that when, near the beginning of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Op. 57 Piano Quintet, cellist (and BCMS founder) Ronald Thomas broke a string, one half expected the other players to follow suit. In approach and interpretation, the conversation was that of a like-minded gathering.

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Strings
May 9, 2013

Live from Montreal !
by Laurence Vittes

On May 9, as Montreal’s professional hockey Canadiens saw its season end in a one-sided defeat to rivals from Ottawa, two resplendent, overlapping musical events also took place in town: the 18th Montreal Chamber Music Festival and the 2013 edition of the Montreal International Violin Competition.

Before a nearly full house in St. George’s Anglican Church in downtown Montreal, the Chamber Music Festival kicked off its season with a concert that was as many layered as the music.

Making their first festival appearance, the Boston Chamber Music Society (BCMS) played Menotti’s Suite for Two Cello and Piano, Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet and Schubert’s Quintet D. 956.

The concert reflected the close bond between musicians in Montreal and Boston, especially poignant after the recent Boston bombings, and the enduring friendship between BCMS artistic director and violist Marcus Thompson and the festival’s founder and artistic director Denis Brott (they had been students together at Aspen 50 years ago).

Also, it was announced that the festival’s three weeks of concerts will be broadcast to U.S. audiences through American Public Media by Boston’s WGBH, and that the program will travel to Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre for BCMS’s season finale.

Menotti’s engaging, 15-minute Suite, highlighted by a gorgeous “Arioso,” was something special for Brott. It was written in 1973 for performance at the Spoleto Festival in Italy by Gregor Piatigorsky and his young Canadian student and assistant, Denis Brott.

On the music’s 40th anniversary, Brott took over the first chair and was joined by BCMS cellist Ron Thomas and pianist Mihae Lee.

READ FULL REVIEW

The Boston Globe
May 13, 2013

A belated Boston premiere for ‘Gatsby’
by Jeremy Eichler

FULL REVIEW

The Boston Musical Intelligencer
May 13, 2013

Pursuing Firzgerald by Brian Schuth

“In the opera, the emotional extremity is embodied in the orchestral writing, which is kaleidoscopic, almost wild, expressionistic, with romantic swooning, dissonant climaxes, shot through with masterful ventriloquisms of 1920s jazz songs. The songs emerge from radios or from the band at Gatsby’s parties, and Harbison does such an excellent job imitating the period that you’d be forgiven for thinking them quotations.  FULL REVIEW

This interview appeared in the poetry publication, PN Review
Volume 39 Number 5, May – June 2013

Words and Music: A Conversation with Elena Ruehr by Reena Sastri
A graduate of the Julliard School and the University of Michigan, and a faculty member at MIT, Boston-based composer Elena Ruehr has created works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, chorus, wind ensemble, opera, dance and silent film. Rhythmically intricate and melodically graceful, her music has seductive surfaces which belie its complexity. I met with Elena Ruehr in January 2012 to discuss her recent cantata, Averno, based on Louise Glück’s 2006 volume of that name, and to learn more about setting poetry. The conversation took final shape in a subsequent exchange of emails, but grew out of a warm and animated exchange in the composer’s living room last winter.

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