UUSINTA ENSEMBLE’S ACCLAIMED PERFORMANCE AT THE MATA FESTIVAL 2014 IN NEW YORK

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.