DuoFest: LA’s Most Fearless Fusions
Jul 8-jul 15
Introducing DuoFest! For the first time, Boston Court reimagines its summer music series as a weeklong festival, featuring collaborations from some of LA’s most exciting contemporary performers. Each evening will feature two or more artists, performing separately and together, showcasing new or rarely performed work. DuoFest celebrates collaboration in unexpected and adventurous ways, like only Boston Court can.
Night 6: L.A. Tarot
Thursday, July 13 @ 8pm
Panic Duo: Pasha Tseitlin, violin & Nic Gerpe, piano
Aronson || Valitutto: Justine Aronson, soprano & Richard Valitutto, piano
The evening features excerpts from Veronika Krausas’ Hopscotch Tarot (text by The Twentieth Century Wayplaywright Tom Jacobson) that Angelenos will recognize from Industry’s spectacular “limousine opera,” Hopscotch. In addition, Panic Duo will present works by Los Angeles composers including the world premiere of a new piece by Juhi Bansal. Additionally, Aronson || Valitutto will perform Kennen schon nicht mehr, new settings of Rilke texts by composer Nicholas Deyoe.
Program
- Veronia Krausas – Hopscotch Tarot (Excerpts)
These pieces will be accompanied by projections of the original Tarot art by Renee Reynolds. - Kamala Sankaram – The Far Shore
- John Harbison – Mirabai Songs
- Vera Ivanova – Fantasy Toccata
- Juhi Bansal – Whip the Devil (World Premiere)
- Anne LeBaron – Fissure
- Nicholas Deyoe – kennen schon nicht mehr
- Isaac Schankler – Pheromone B
L.A. Tarot is presented by Boston Court and Synchromy. Synchromy is a composer-directed presenter of engaging new music events shaped and influenced by our home city of Los Angeles. We connect our audiences with living performing artists, creating a greater appreciation and understanding of the many kinds of communities in which we all live. We strive to expand awareness and civic discourse in our community through the common experience of new music performance.
Panic Duo is a Los-Angeles based ensemble dedicated to the performance of music of our time. Featuring violinist Pasha Tseitlin and pianist Nic Gerpe, the Duo’s performances of contemporary music have been described as “exciting”, “virtuosic”, and “irresistible”. Engaging audiences into unfamiliar music through a combination of dialogue and uncompromising musicality, Panic Duo has brought a variety of repertoire to audiences since 2009
Unique in their facility with works from different styles and periods – classical and contemporary, jazz, modernist, world-music inspired – Panic Duo’s performances feature surprising juxtapositions of works. On the cutting edge of new music, their repertoire includes pieces by John Adams, John Corigliano, Nico Muhly, and Jennifer Higdon, and they have collaborated with composers such as Gernot Wolfgang, Anne LeBaron, Stephen Cohn, Isaac Schankler and Juhi Bansal, commissioning, premiering, and recording new works.
Recent performance highlights include a featured concert on the People Inside Electronics series, including the World Premiere of Anne LeBaron’s Fissure, for violin, piano and electronics, which was commissioned by the Duo. The Duo also gave a concert of World Premieres of works for violin and piano by the composers’ collective Improvisatory Minds, a group dedicated to chamber music written by jazz musicians and consisting of Gernot Wolfgang, Michael Patterson, Ed Neumeister and Bevan Manson. The Duo has performed on the Los Angeles-based new music concert series Tuesdays at Monk Space, and have been featured on the Sundays Live series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Panic Duo also recently performed the opening concert of the 2013 Paderewski Festival in Paso Robles, to great acclaim. They “wowed the audience… the Festival opened with thunderous applause” (Scott Brennan, Paso Robles Daily News), and “played with great bravado, passion and skill” (Krysta Close, USC Polish Music Center).
Richard Valitutto is an emphatic and dedicated performer of compositions for the piano that span the instrument’s entire existence. Described by the Los Angeles Times as a “vivid soloist,” “quietly dazzling,” and “vigorously virtuosic,” he is a piano soloist, chamber musician, vocal accompanist, and composing/improvising creative whose soloistic charisma and flexible collaborative artistry have made him one of the most sought after pianists of his generation for his tenacity in bringing dynamic life to scores old and new in the spirit of integrated collaboration and informed understanding.
Hailed by The New York Times as possessing “a deep reservoir of expressive devices” and by the Los Angeles Times as “dramatically and gratifyingly juic[y],” soprano Justine Aronson employs artistic and technical versatility to create engaging performances. Her repertoire spans the traditional and the contemporary, and her performances adventurously embrace the unexpected: crossing a busy street, riding in the back of a limousine, scaling a bank of escalators at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and dodging celebrity supernumeraries at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.
