Uusinta Ensemble to perform at the ECLAT festival

​Uusinta Ensemble and conductor József Hárs will be performing at ECLAT, one of the most important festivals of contemporary music in Central Europe. The ensemble will give the German premiere of Oscar Bianchi’s Partendo (co-commissioned by the ensemble), as well as Peak for piano trio and elecronics by Sami Klemola and Vanishing Point for amplified piano by Ville Raasakka. Bianchi’s Partendo is commissioned together by Uusinta Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain’in (CH) and Studio for New Music (RU) and the solo part will be performed by countertenor Daniel Gloger from the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.

Dear friends,

Uusinta Ensemble enjoyed a fantastic start to the year by opening its spring season with a performance focusing on body action at the open music concert programme in Graz, Austria on January 11. Invited by Ute Pinter the ensemble performed among others Michael Maierhof’s Plastikquartet 2.

Soon after Graz, January 30, Uusinta made an appearance at the Kaustinen Chamber Music Week with a concert focusing on the Finnish composer and professor at the Sibelius Academy, Veli-Matti Puumala, and premiering his latest work Nachklang.

The spring season was rounded off with a concert at the Musica Nova Festival in Helsinki curated by Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen. Uusinta musicians had the pleasure to perform with the pianist Nicolas Hodges under the direction of composer and this-time-conductor Magnus Lindberg. With each composer present at the rehearsals and the concert, the musicians enjoyed a rich exchange of thoughts. This concert did not lack of a world premiere and this time Uusinta performed Village Party by Finnish composer Riikka Talvitie composed for the oboe and a string quartet. The piece was written for oboist Anna-Kaisa Pippuri (reviewed by the Financial Times as “fearless”) and included a tap dance solo by her.
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Read the Financial Times review of the Musica Nova concert here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ad86d9ce-b113-11e4-831b-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3RcY2AGmE

Steve Smith of the The New York Times wrote a highly favourable review of Uusinta Ensemble’s concert at the MATA festival 2014 in New York. Some quotes:

    …Just how accomplished and imaginative the Uusinta players are became evident in the evening’s first        offering…

    …Emil Holmstrom, the pianist, played with ample gravity and dignity.

    …Lauri Sallinen, a brilliant clarinetist, keened and warbled unaccompanied, his tone at times splitting            into unlikely chords.

     …It seemed impossible that the finale, Hikari Kiyama’s “Joruri Death Metal,” could live up to its promised       collision of modern complexity, Japanese dramatic tradition and the flamboyant violence of death metal.       That it did so — brilliantly, in fact — was partly because of an absence of overt mimicry of those sources,           replaced with a clamor of toys, noisemakers, digital samples and kinetic bustle; and also thanks to the          playful ease and anything-goes attitude demonstrated by Uusinta, conducted with athletic brio by Joszef       Hars.

Music at the Anthology’s (MATA) mission is to present, support, and commission the music of early career composers, regardless of their stylistic views or aesthetic inclinations. Founded by Philip Glass, Eleonor Sandresky, and Lisa Bielawa in 1996 as a way to address the lack of presentation opportunities for unaffiliated composers, MATA has since developed into the world’s most sought-after performance opportunity for young and emerging composers.

MATA’s festivals and events are critically acclaimed and broadly respected: The New Yorker has hailed MATA as “the most exciting showcase for outstanding young composers from around the world.” The New York Times has called it “nondogmatic, even antidogmatic;” The Wall Street Journal said that it “tells us a lot about how composers are thinking now.” Composers that have been presented by MATA early in their careers include future Rome, Alpert, Takemitsu, Siemens, and Pulitzer Prize-winners, Guggenheim Fellows, and MacArthur “Geniuses.” In 2010 MATA was awarded ASCAP’s prestigious Aaron Copland award in recognition of its work.