The Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra plans to have the April 7 New Traditions Diversity Series performed in historic New Harmony at the Atheneum, located at 401 Arthur Street, beginning at 7 p.m.
Members of the Eykamp String Quartet (Jia-Rong Gan, violin; Michael Chu, violin; Mark Hatlestad, viola; & Graham Cullen, cello) will perform works by underrepresented composers, including Hamza El Din (Escalay), Boris Lyatoshinsky (String Quartet No. 4, Op 43), and Missy Mazzoli (You Know Me From Here).
Hamza El Din (July 10, 1929 – May 22, 2006) was an Egyptian Nubian composer, oud player, tar player, and vocalist. He was born in southern Egypt and was an internationally known musician of his native region Nubia, situated on both sides of the Egypt–Sudan border. After musical studies in Cairo, he lived and studied in Italy, Japan, and the United States. El Din collaborated with a wide variety of musical performers, including Sandy Bull, the Kronos Quartet and the Grateful Dead.
El Din began playing oud while studying engineering at the University of Cairo. He also studied at the King Fouad Institute of Middle Eastern Music. Learning of plans to build the Aswan Dam, he quit his engineering job in Cairo and set off to preserve Nubian music before the people were dispersed. He had studied Western music at the Academy of Santa Celia in Rome, expanding his sense of harmony and musical form. After moving to the United States, he taught at various universities and then settled in the Bay Area.
Boris Lyatoshinsky (January 3, 1895 – April 15, 1968) was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, and teacher. Lyatoshynsky started playing piano and violin at 14, he wrote a mazurka, waltz, and quartet for piano. He also attended the Zhytomyr Gymnasium, from where he graduated in 1913. He graduated from Kyiv University in 1918 and from the Kyiv Conservatory in 1919.
Lyatoshynsky wrote his Symphony No.1 (1918) as his graduation composition. It could be suggested that this was the first Symphony composed in the Ukraine. At the age of 25, Lyatoshynsky, professor and lecturer in the Kyiv Music Conservatoire, pioneered the development of Associazia Suchasnoi Musiki (The Society of Contemporary Music). A leading member of the new generation of twentieth-century Ukrainian composers, he was awarded a number of accolades, including the honorary title of People’s Artist of the Ukrainian SSR, and two Stalin State Prizes. Lyatoshynsky wrote a variety of works, including five symphonies, symphonic poems, and several shorter orchestral and vocal works, two operas, chamber music, and a number of works for solo piano. His cycle of seven pieces for the piano Vidobragennia (Reflections, written in 1925) remains one of his most celebrated musical works.
Missy Mazzoli (born October 27, 1980) is a Grammy-nominated American composer and pianist who is a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music. She has received critical acclaim for her chamber, orchestral and operatic work. She received a bachelor’s degree from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music in 2006, and additionally studied at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague.
Mazzoli is the Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York), Shehas been praised for her “apocalyptic imagination” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker). Her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, pianist Emanuel Ax, Opera Philadelphia, Scottish Opera, LA Opera, Cincinnati Opera, New York City Opera, Chicago Fringe Opera, the Detroit Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the Sydney Symphony and many others. In 2018 she made history when she became one of the two first women to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. That year she was also nominated for a Grammy in the category of “Best Classical Composition” for her work Vespers for Violin, recorded by violinist Olivia De Prato.
Admission is free and open to the public.
For more information, call (812) 425-5050, Ext 316.