News

To close out a spectacular season, Electric Earth invites you to the season finale at First Church in Jaffrey Center.

Electric Earth Concerts’ final 2013 concert mixes romantic chamber music of Mendelssohn and Strauss with the sophisticated sound of a jazz-latin duo. “The contrast” according to Laura Gilbert, co-Artistic Director, “is meant to heighten the impact of each piece on the program, and to remind the audience of the universal qualities of interplay and intimacy that are at the heart of great chamber music, whatever the style or era. Plus we think it makes a really fun and festive finale to our season.” [Read more…] about Season Finale: Latin Jazz, Strauss, Mendelssohn, featuring a host of wonderful musicians – and you!

Blazing young star Jennifer Cano will be performing with her husband and collaborator Christopher Cano on September 21 at 7:30 in Peterborough. The two will present works by Korngold, Poulenc, Schubert, Britten, Vaughan-Wiliams, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and others.

“Effortlessly likable, but in both her voice and her manner there is also character, individuality, a taste for risk, an honesty and assurance so impressive that you want to call it bravery.” – The New York Times

A 2012 Richard Tucker Career Grant and Opera Index Winner and 2011 Sara Tucker Study Grant Recipient, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano joined The Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at The Metropolitan Opera in 2008 and made her Met debut in 2009-2010. As First Prize winner of the 2009 Young Concert Artist International Auditions, she was awarded the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival and Princeton University Prizes and has given stunning recital debuts at Merkin Hall and the Kennedy Center, and in Boston, Philadelphia, Houston and Chicago.

from the Boston Globe, August 22

By David Weininger

“Henry David Thoreau was a great musician,” wrote Charles Ives in “Essays Before a Sonata,” his ruminative preface to his “Concord” Sonata. That was so, Ives held, not because of whatever facility Thoreau possessed in conventional music making, but because “he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’ The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude.”

Oddly for such a dazzling musician of the written word, musical works inspired by Thoreau are rare. The most famous is the fourth movement of the “Concord,” the last of its evocations of New England transcendentalists. [Read more…] about Electric Earth presents Thoreau-inspired concert

July 10 at Ahavas Achim in Keene: eminent composer Joan Tower presided over a stunning concert by the Horszowski Trio, which included a performance of her 2004 work “For Daniel”.

from the Boston Musical Intelligencer

Jaffrey Centre Meeting House

The ambitious, two-year-old Electric Earth Concerts presents an intriguing chamber program of two works this Saturday evening, June 15^th at 7:30 pm at First Church in Jaffrey NH: Russian violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s string trio arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and American composer Stephen Hartke’s King of the Sun: Tableaux for piano and strings. The transcribed Bach features Horszowski Trio violinist Jesse Mills and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan joined by violist Jonathan Bagg, Electric Earth Concerts co-artistic director (and Duke professor). For the Hartke this threesome will be augmented by Horszowski Trio pianist Rieko Aizawa.

Bagg describes Sitkovetsky’s recasting of Bach’s “infinitely imaginative counterpoint” as a “vivid three-voice chamber music setting that has delighted audiences since it was published in the mid-’80s.” Even more vivid to some ears is “King of the Sun,” which is, as Bagg notes, “both whimsical and serious … derived from diverse inspirations, including an anonymous medieval canon and the painter Joan Miro.” [Read more…] about Monadnock Region Resounds with Chamber Music

[from the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript]    By Dave Anderson    Wednesday, June 12, 2013

From a masterpiece by J.S. Bach to an American roots music string band to a concert built entirely around the words and influences of Henry David Thoreau, Electric Earth Concerts is offering a summer series that can best be described as eclectic.

“Fine musicianship crosses all boundaries,” said Artistic Director Jonathan Bagg in a phone interview last week. “We’re more than just traditional classical music. We want to bring in other genres. We’re also trying to bring in the other arts. Building a concert around a poet or a writer, like Thoreau, gives an opportunity for audiences to think differently.”

Even many familiar classical works are being done in a unique way. The summer season opens Saturday with a performance of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” at the First Church in Jaffrey at 7:30 p.m. But this won’t be the traditional version for a single pianist. [read the full article on the Ledger-Transcript web site]