Saturday, November 10, 2018

Other Minds Launches 25th Anniversary Season

The 25th anniversary season of Other Minds (OM), whose dedication to shining a light on contemporary and experimental music continues to thrive as vigorously as it did when Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian launched this endeavor, gets under way at the beginning of next month. The program will be the first of two duo piano recitals that will precede the beginning of OM Festival 24 in March. The pianists for this recital will be Gloria Cheng and Terry Riley.

Terry Riley at a performance in Tokyo on November 8, 2017 (photograph by Takahiro Kyono, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

All of the compositions on the program will be by Riley. The one duo performance will be the Bay Area premiere of “Cheng Tiger Growl Roar,” which Riley completed earlier this year explicitly for performance with Cheng. Cheng will give solo performances of some of Riley’s earliest work, two pieces composed between 1958 and 1959, both of which reflect his early interest in atonality and the rhetoric of the Second Viennese School. The remainder of the program will then reflect music more familiar to those acquainted with recordings of Riley’s music. Cheng will play “The Walrus in Memoriam,” composed in 1991 and revised in 1993, and the seventh book in Riley’s The Heaven Ladder series, consisting of five compositions. Following the intermission Riley will give performances of two of his other solo works, “Simply M…” and “Requiem for Wally;” and the program will then conclude with “Cheng Tiger Growl Roar.”

This recital will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 5. The venue will be the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA). Specifically, the performance will be held in the YBCA Forum, which is on the west side of Third Street between Howard Street and Mission Street (directly across from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). All tickets are being sold for $45. Tickets may be purchased in advance through an event page on the YBCA Web site.

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