New Century Chamber Orchestra with Margaret Batjer (events » live music) Wednesday, November 14, 2007 - 7:30 PM 4 RSVPs The Grammy-nominated New Century Chamber Orchestra is pleased to announce the next program in its 2007-08 season. The program, with performances in San Rafael, Berkeley, Palo Alto, and San Francisco, features a 17-member conductorless string orchestra with guest concertmaster Margaret Batjer.

Currently the concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and faculty member of the Thornton Music School at U.S.C., Margaret Batjer has selected a program that traces the arc of 122 years of Baroque music. In addition to such master composers as J.S. Bach and Handel, she includes the obscure but prolific contemporary of Vivaldi, Francesco Geminiani, and the virtuosic son of J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach. C.P.E. Bach’s strikingly different style provides a smooth bridge from the late Baroque to the cusp between periods, the Rococo, and brilliantly leads into Haydn’s early treasure, the Symphony No. 8, Le Soir.

PROGRAM:

F. Geminiani: Concerto Grosso No. 1 in D major
Handel: Concerto Grosso in A major, Op. 6, No. 11
J. S. Bach: Brandenberg Concerto No. 4 in G major, BWV 1049
C. P. E. Bach: String Symphonie in E major
Haydn: Symphony No. 8, Le Soir

WHEN AND WHERE:

San Rafael – Wednesday, November 14 at 7:30pm
Osher Marin JCC, 200 North San Pedro Road
Underwritten through the generosity of Morton B. Blatt and Peter G. Holmstrom

Berkeley – Thursday, November 15 at 8pm
St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Avenue

Palo Alto – Friday, November 16 at 8pm
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Avenue

San Francisco – Saturday, November 17 at 8pm
Florence Gould Theater, Palace of the Legion of Honor

TICKETS:
Individual and season tickets are on sale now at acteva.com/booking.cfm and 415.357.1111 or through City Box at www.cityboxoffice.com/default.asp and 415.392.4400. 3-concert orchestra subscriptions are $114/$75. Single ticket prices for the orchestra series are $42/$28 (a small service charge applies for single tickets). Half-price tickets are available for students. For more information, call the NCCO at 415.357.1111 or visit the website at www.ncco.org.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1992, looks for fresh, exciting new ways to present classical music in the San Francisco Bay Area by combining performances of extraordinary quality with innovative programming. The guest concertmaster chooses the programs and guides the artistic vision, but the seventeen members of the orchestra perform without a conductor. Musical decisions are made collaboratively, resulting in an enhanced level of commitment on the part of the musicians to concerts of remarkable precision, passion and power.

As part of its dedication to the future of music and to the community, the NCCO provides violin lessons to underserved students in Marin City and San Rafael’s Canal District, as well as intimate classroom performances by string quartets to students in Bay Area elementary schools.

The orchestra has released four compact discs, one of which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1997.

About Margaret Batjer

Margaret Batjer made her first solo appearance at age fifteen with the Chicago Symphony in Menotti's Violin Concerto. Since then, she has been re-engaged by the Chicago Symphony and has appeared with a succession of major orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Seattle Symphony, the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the San Jose Symphony under the direction of George Cleve and the Dallas Symphony conducted by Gunther Herbig.

Margaret Batjer graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music as a student of Ivan Galamian and David Cerone. Throughout her career, she has won numerous prizes including the G.B. Dealey Awards in Dallas. Equally respected as a chamber musician, Ms. Batjer has performed regularly at the Marlboro Music Festival and on tours with "Music from Marlboro." She has appeared at the Minnesota Orchestra Sommerfest, Vancouver Chamber Music Festival, the Naples and Cremona Festivals in Italy. At the invitation of Maurizio Pollini, she performed with the Quartetto Accardo and Maestro Pollini, at the Salzburg Festival in 1995 and 1999, and on the Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” series in 2001.

Ms. Batjer has held the position of Concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra since 1998, where she regularly leads the orchestra from the concertmaster chair. In 2001, she performed the Beethoven “Triple” Concerto with Jeffrey Kahane, Yo-Yo Ma and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. She has also performed the complete Beethoven and Brahms Sonatas for Violin and Piano with Jeffrey Kahane at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles.

In 2005, she joined the faculty of the Thornton Music School at USC. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband, Joel McNeely, and two children, Joshua and Claire.

REWIND - Featuring Orchestra, DJ, and Installation Art! (events » live music) Saturday, January 19, 2008 - 8:00 PM 25 RSVPs The New Century Chamber Orchestra is pleased to announce its performance of REWIND. Paul Haas and Anne Akiko Meyers join the orchestra on January 19, 2008 in San Francisco for a concert that connects 400 years of music history with newly commissioned works by modern composers Joshua Penman and Judd Greenstein and DJ Mason Bates. The event will also feature installation art designed by Berkeley-based visual artist Reuben Margolin, the winner of the NCCO’s REWIND Installation Art Competition.

Check out the trailer for REWIND! www.youtube.com/nccosf.

January 19, 2008 at 8pm
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
701 Mission Street (at 3rd), San Francisco

REWIND
New Century Chamber Orchestra
Paul Haas, conductor
Anne Akiko Meyers, violin
Raushan Akhmedyarova, violin
Mason Bates, DJ

It’s time to bring classical music into the 21st century. The New Century Chamber Orchestra and Paul Haas, artistic director of the production company Sympho, present REWIND, a visceral, unconventional concert that appeals to your eyes and ears. REWIND features installation art and lighting, masterworks of the past, and newly commissioned acoustic and electronic pieces linking it all together for a seamless musical experience. Digital sampling enables the composers and musicians to include the audience in the sonic landscape. Even the way the audience views this concert is unusual – the orchestra plays in the center of the room, with audience members surrounding them.

The Program
Schnittke: Concerto Grosso for 2 Violins, Harpsichord, and Strings
Raskatov: 5 Minuten aus dem Leben WAM
James MacMillan: As Others See Us (T. S. Eliot)
Stravinsky: Suite from Pulcinella
Villa-Lobos: Bachianas brasileiras No. 4
Stravinsky: Suite for Small Orchestra No. 2
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht
Mozart: Divertimento K. 136
Corelli (arr Greenstein): Concerto Grosso in C minor, Op. 6, No. 3
Biagio Marini: Passacaglio
Purcell: A Bird’s Prelude from A Faerie Queen

To order tickets, please visit www.ybca.org/tickets/reserve.aspx or call 415.978.ARTS (2787).
$50 General Admission. Student tickets ($25) available the day of the event if the show is not sold out.
For more information, call the NCCO at 415.357.1111 or visit the website at www.ncco.org

REWIND is generously sponsored, in part, by the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and Grants for the Arts.

THE PLAYERS

New Century Chamber Orchestra

The New Century Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1992, looks for fresh, exciting new ways to present classical music in the San Francisco Bay Area by combining performances of extraordinary quality with innovative programming. For NCCO subscription concerts, the Music Director or guest concertmaster chooses the programs and guides the artistic vision, but the seventeen members of the orchestra perform without a conductor. Musical decisions are made collaboratively, resulting in an enhanced level of commitment on the part of the musicians to concerts of remarkable precision, passion and power. In 2002, Sir Simon Rattle was the first conductor to lead the orchestra in a full-length concert, a celebration of the NCCO’s 10th Anniversary performed in conjunction with Marin Academy. The January 2008 REWIND performance, led by Paul Haas, will be the second time an entire concert has been led by a conductor.

The NCCO education program provides violin lessons to underserved students in Marin City and San Rafael’s Canal District, as well as intimate classroom performances by string quartets to students in Bay Area elementary schools.

The orchestra has released four compact discs, one of which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1997.

Paul Haas

According to The New York Times, Paul Haas “is surely on the brink of a noteworthy career.” His conducting engagements have included performances with the San Antonio Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, among others, as well as festival appearances. Recently, Paul conducted the National Symphony Orchestra with Itzhak Perlman as soloist. In addition to his orchestral engagements, Paul Haas is the founder and artistic director of Sympho, a groundbreaking concert production company. Sympho’s first concert, REWIND, is a revolutionary visual and sonic experience that has been lauded by critics. “REWIND Refits the Classical Experience for a New Century,” blared The New York Times headline for the premiere June 8, 2006.

Mr. Haas is a graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, where he studied conducting as a Bruno Walter Fellow with Otto-Werner Mueller.

Anne Akiko Meyers

Anne Akiko Meyers’ dynamic and compelling music making has catapulted her to the top of her generation. At the age of 11, she was featured, twice, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. At 15, she joined the Young Concert Artists roster. At 23, she was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, the only artist to be the sole recipient of this annual award. Today she performs around the globe as a featured soloist with the most recognized names in classical music and has performed for dignitaries including the Emperor and Empress of Japan.

Additional information on Anne Akiko Meyers may be found on her website at www.AnneAkikoMeyers.com.

Joshua Penman

Joshua Penman enjoys simultaneous careers as a concert composer, film composer, ambient artist, record producer, consciousness researcher, and teacher. He has worked with the American Composers Orchestra, Gamelan Galak-Tika, SONYC, and the Cedar Rapids Symphony, as well as trance star Kenji Williams and kirtan artist Govindas; he has received commissions from the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Prism Saxophone Quartet, Arraymusic, the Foundation for Universal Sacred Music, and the New York Youth Symphony. Recent projects include the score for the art film Caravan of Light, an ambient remix for santur virtuoso Alan Kushan, and a commission for early-music vocal ensemble Lionheart. He is finishing a DMA in composition at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Judd Greenstein

Judd Greenstein received degrees from Williams College and the Yale School of Music, studying with Martin Bresnick, David Kechley, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Ezra Laderman. Mr. Greenstein has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music, and was chosen as an Emerging Composer in last season's ZOOM: Composers Close Up series at Merkin Hall. Recent awards and commissions include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a First Music Commission from the New York Youth Symphony, and a Morton Gould Young Composer Award from the ASCAP Foundation. Mr. Greenstein is the co-Artistic Director of NOW Ensemble and is in his second year of studies for a PhD in Composition at Princeton University.

Mason Bates

DJ and electronica artist MASONIC (Mason Bates) has appeared at an enormous variety of spaces, from clubs to classical concert halls, from San Francisco to Berlin to Rome. His unique blend of downtempo hip-hop, trip-hop, and French house, often performed with jazz and classical musicians, has been heard in clubs and lounges such as Temple, 111 Minna, Sugar, Skylark, Sip, Mint, and Fuse, as well as in art spaces such as the SFMOMA and the Berkeley Art Museum. A composer of symphonic music who often includes live electronica in his orchestral music, Mason Bates has become known as a unique artist who moves fluidly between those two worlds — performing on electronic drumpad and laptop, for example, with The National Symphony Orchesta in his Liquid Interface at Carnegie Hall. Now living in the Bay Area, Mason Bates studies at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies with Edmund Campion. For more info, visit www.MasonicElectronica.com.

Reuben Margolin

Berkeley artist Reuben Heyday Margolin’s wave installations are a series of monumental mechanical mobiles inspired by water that combine the logic of mathematics with the sensuousness of nature. He has completed six of these suspended installations that undulate in different patterns. They have been made of wood, aluminum, and copper, and are driven by overhead structures containing electric motors, cams, levers, hundreds of pulleys, and thousands of feet of aircraft cable. Their motion is produced by layering the effects of simple mechanical components. People’s delight in the dynamic (but quiet) overhead structures as well as the vitality and beauty of the suspended wave has been immensely gratifying. He has shown kinetic art at the Exploratorium, Chabot Space and Science Center, the Emeryville Art Show, and currently has an installation at the Aquarium of the Pacific, in Long Beach. For more information, visit www.reubenmargolin.com.