ARTISTS AND GUESTS
Lynn Bechtold- violinist, composer, co-founder
Noted for her ‘virtuosity and technical expertise’ in All About Jazz, called 'unapologetically dominating' in San Diego Story, and labeled ‘up-and-coming’ by Time Out, violinist/composer Lynn Bechtold has appeared in recital throughout North America and Europe, and has premiered solo/chamber works by composers such as Carter Burwell, Gloria Coates, John Harbison, Alvin Lucier, and Morton Subotnick. She is a member of groups including Miolina, Nine Live, Quartet Metadata, SEM, and Zentripetal, and her performances have been broadcast on various TV and radio, including ‘30 Rock,’ ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,’ CBC, NPR, and NHK. An active performer of all genres of music, she has appeared at venues including Carnegie Hall, Joe’s Pub, Jordan Hall, Lincoln Center, (le) Poisson Rouge, and Madison Square Garden, with artists such as Willie Colon, Escort, Sir Simon Rattle, Donna Summer, Paul Taylor Dance, and Pablo Ziegler. She holds degrees from Tufts University, New England Conservatory, and Mannes College-The New School for Music, where she studied with noted violinist Felix Galimir. Her electroacoustic compositions have been performed on festivals such as Circuit Bridges, Composers Concordance Festival, Electro-Music, Music With A View, and NWEAMO, and in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, Paris, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, DC. She is on the faculties of the Dwight School, Greenwich House Music School, and the Town School in Manhattan.
Loire Cotler, Rhythm Vocalist
“Peerless artistry” — The Jerusalem Post
Loire Cotler is a critically acclaimed Jazz Rhythm Vocalist whose life is defined by the healing power of music and a mission to show the world rhythmic power of the voice. Bridging Medieval to Be-bop; World Music to Avant-Pop, Loire is renowned for her blazing South Indian drum language solos called Konnakol, while echoing vocal traditions inspired from a distant past, such as Jewish niggun, Middle Eastern taksim and The Great American Songbook reimagined. Loire maintains an international touring schedule and has been a featured soloist with American Composers Orchestra, National Chinese Orchestra and Long Beach Opera performing the music of composers JacobTV, Edward Bilous, Robert Miller, Milica Paranosic, Glen Velez and Hans Zimmer. Loire is currently collaborating with “ta ki
Ta Trio” featuring Glen Velez (4-time Grammy winner) and Chitravina maestro Shri N. Ravikiran (2017 Sangita Kalanidhi Award). Loire regularly performs with Glen Velez Handance Ensemble and is currently in the studio recording her debut record with the multiple Grammy winning iconic artists of TRIO GLOBO Howard Levy, Eugene Friesen, Glen Velez, to be released in 2018. Loire is a passionate educator
and Certified Music Therapist presenting masterclasses at The Juilliard School and conservatories worldwide. For more info, please visit: www.rhythmvocalist.com
Jennifer DeVore- cellist
Jennifer DeVore earned her BA in art history at Harvard before earning her Masters degree from the New England Conservatory. Hailed as “superb” by the New York Times, she has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and London’s Barbican Center. A review of her violin/cello duo’s recent debut album “Zentripetal” mentions her “suave phrasing, impeccable intonation and effortless control.” DeVore has worked closely with composers John Cage, John Zorn, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Ornette Coleman, and has played in the Bang-On-A-Can Marathon and on WNYC’s New Sounds. Her newest string quartet project, SEVEN)SUNS, is breaking new ground in both classical and metal/hardcore worlds. The group recently recorded with legendary hardcore band The Dillinger Escape Plan and released their first album “For The Hearts Still Beating” last year. Other groups she has played with include the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jose Limon Dance Company, FLUX Quartet and Sweet Plantain Quartet. Her diverse interests have led to recordings and performances with artists such as Il Divo, Alicia Keyes, DJ Spooky, Josh Groban, Suzanne Vega, Jay-Z, Pink Martini, Laura Branigan, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra as well as many bands in New York. DeVore is a member of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra and teaches at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn.
Mona El-Naggar is a reporter and senior video producer at The New York Times. She evolved into a filmmaker after more than a decade covering the Middle East. She documented the breakdown of the social contract between the leadership and people that led to the great unraveling – the Arab Spring. She quickly realized that Identity was the core driver of complex, chaotic events. So she began to focus on youth, women and religious extremism.
Mona spent a year reporting a project called Generation Faithful, a series of stories, videos and blog posts that went deep into the lives of young people in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
She worked in nearly every country in the Middle East. She was chased by stone throwing children at the funeral for the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. She was confronted by the secret police in Libya. She reported from Gaza and spent time with Houthi rebels in Yemen. She was harassed, pilloried in the press and had her loyalty questioned for practicing journalism in her home country, Egypt.
Since turning to filmmaking she has won acclaim for her work. She was a Pulitzer finalist for her film on a young Egyptian man who transformed from a body builder into an ISIS killer. She was part of a team that produced an Emmy-nominated piece on a victim who escaped an ISIS massacre. She directed Ladies First, a documentary that offers a penetrating look at the life of women in Saudi Arabia as they vote and run in an election for the first time. Her latest work, The Story of Esraa, explores years of social and political turmoil in Egypt through the intimate story of one woman’s quest for independence.
Mona studied political economy at Georgetown University and received a masters in news and documentary from New York University
Sharon Harms, Soprano
Praised as "superb", "luscious-toned", "extraordinarily precise and expressive", and "dramatically committed and not averse to risk" by The New York Times, young American soprano Sharon Harms is known for fearless performances and passionate interpretations of works new and old.
Ms. Harms has premiered the music of some of today's preeminent and up-and-coming composers in venues around the world with leading contemporary classical music ensembles. She has been a fellow with the Tanglewood Music Center and is on the faculty for the Wellesley Composer's Conference and Chamber Workshops. She was most recently a guest professor of voice at East Carolina University in Fall, 2017.
Recording projects include Gabriela Ortiz' Latin Grammy-nominated Aroma Foliado with Southwest Chamber Ensemble, Louis Karchin's To the Sun and Stars with Da Capo Chamber Players, Of Love of You with Robert Osborne and pianist Todd Crow, Jesse Jones’ Ephemera with guitarist Ken Meyer and Ensemble Recherche, and Charles Wuorninen’s It Happens Like This.
Recent highlights include the premiere of John Eaton's The End of It with Eighth Blackbird and the Pacifica Quartet, Mendelssohn's Elijah with baritone Nathan Gunn and the Notre Dame Sacred Music program, Sharon's Carnegie Hall debut in Charles Wuorinen's cantata It Happens Like This with the MET Chamber Ensemble under James Levine, Jonathan Dawe's Cracked Orlando with the Juilliard School's Center for Innovation of the Arts, and Matthew Ricketts’ Unset with the Talea Ensemble.
Paula Matthusen - composer
Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, and the 2014 - 2015 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.
Milica Paranosic - composer, co-founder
Milica Paranosic is a Serbian-born composer. Her music was described as “Amazing...astonishing,” (The New York Times), “Like liquor-filled pralines,” (Morgenpost), and “A painter, musical Jackson Pollack,” (SEAMUS).
Her work was supported, commissioned and presented by organizations such as LMCC, NYSCA, New Dramatists, Whitney Museum of America Art, HERE Arts Center, American Composers Orchestra, LVMH Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton, Vision IntoArt, Buglisi Dance Theater, Symphony Space, Zankel Hall/Carnegie, Alice Tully Hall/Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, BAM café, Bohemian National Hall among others. Intercontinental highlights include BEMUS (Serbia), EtnaFest (Italy) and UFBA (Brazil).
Milica’s works range from one-woman multimedia shows, theatrical soccer chants, sound installations to operatic and symphonic works.
Film scoring credits include the award-winning Das Fräulein and Cure: The Life of Another, and more recently, Killing Anabella, an independent animated short.
Milica earned her Master’s Degree in composition from The Juilliard School, where she is a current music faculty. She is also the Music Director of Gallery MC, an advisory board member at Composers Now and Miolina, and founder of the Harlem-based non-profit for music and multimedia, Paracademia Center, Inc.
Mioi Takeda- violinist
Since she settled in NYC, Japanese violinist Mioi Takeda earned her reputation as a soloist, chamber musician and as a seasoned new music specialist. She serves as a director of violin duo Miolina, the group recently joined the member of New Music USA Impact Fund Cohort.
She has performed with new music groups such as North/South Consonance, SEM Ensemble, Composers Concordance, American Symphony. She also performed with the Orchestra of St. Luke”s Stamford Symphony, The Japan Philharmonic.
Kathleen Supové, Pianist
“What Ms. Supové is really exploding is the piano recital as we have known it, a mission more radical and arguably more needed.” Anthony Tommasini, NY Times
In May, 2012, Supové received the John Cage Award from ASCAP for “the artistry and passion with which she performs, commissions, records, and champions the music of our time.”
Kathleen Supové is one of America’s most acclaimed and versatile contemporary music pianists, known for continually redefining what a pianist/keyboardist/performance artist is, in today’s world. Ms. Supové annually presents a series of solo concerts entitled THE EXPLODING PIANO. In this series, she has performed and premiered works by a list of established and emerging composers that’s a Who’s Who of contemporary music for piano. The Exploding Piano is a multimedia experience using electronics, theatrical elements, vocal rants, staging, and collaboration with artists from other disciplines. Through her composer collaborations, she has become an integral part of creating a repertory of piano pieces for the modern world. She has performed with a laptop orchestra (Sideband), robots (Lemur), and XReality (media artist Karina Hisayasa).
Recent projects include THE DEBUSSY EFFECT, on New Focus Recordings. For more info, visit www.supove.com or follow on Facebook (Exploding Piano).
photo ana raquel
“Undisputed master of Frame Drums”— The New York Times Glen Velez is a 4-time Grammy Award winning acclaimed soloist and founding father of the modern frame drum movement. Velez is the first percussionist to gain international recognition as a solo artist and composer using frame drums. In 2014 Glen was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society “Hall of Fame.” For over four decades, Velez has brought a new genre of drumming and composition to the contemporary music scene by creating his own performance style, inspired by years of studying frame drumming techniques from various cultures. Velez’s virtuosic combinations of hand movements, finger techniques, along with his original compositional and teaching style called Handance Method, which incorporates stepping, drum language and Central Asian Overtone singing (split-tone singing), has undoubtedly opened new possibilities for musicians around the globe, resulting in a shift in modern percussion. Glen is regarded as a legendary figure among musicians and audiences world-wide. Even the iconic 20th century composer John Cage was inspired to compose a piece especially for him — Composed Improvisation for One- Sided Drum with or without Jingles — after hearing a performance of Glen’s composition Doctrine of Signature. After many years performing and recording with the Steve Reich (1977-93) Ensemble and the Paul Winter Consort, Velez maintains an international touring schedule presenting his original music as a soloist and with various ensembles, including TRIO GLOBO with Grammy winners Howard Levy and Eugene Friesen, ta ki Ta Trio with Chitravina N. Ravikiran (2017 Sangita Kalanidhi Award) and World-Jazz Rhythm Vocalist Loire Cotler, Medieval Mantra (Nina Stern, Loire Cotler), Coleman Barks The Rumi Concert, as well as his own Handance Ensemble. Glen teaches at The Juilliard School and Mannes College of Music. For more info, please visit: www.glenvelez.com
ALEKSANDRA VREBALOV has written more than 70 works ranging from concert music, to opera, dance (Rambert Dance UK, Dusan Tynek Dance Theater, Take Dance, Scottish National Ballet, Augsburg Theater), to sound installations in collaboration with architect Ronit Eisenbach. Her most recent works have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Kronos Quartet, Belgrade Philharmonic, and Limon Dance. Vrebalov, a fellow of MacDowell Colony, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, Djerassi, The Hermitage, and Tanglewood, is the recipient of The Harvard Fromm Commission, The American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship, and two Golden Badges from her homeland: one for Vrebalov's opera Mileva and its contribution to Serbian opera, and the other for a lifelong contribution to Serbian culture. Vrebalov's works have been recorded for Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, New Amsterdam, Innova, Centaur Records, Orange Mountain Music, and VMM. Her two works for Kronos Quartet Beyond Zero: 1914 – 1918 and The Sea Ranch Songs are available as DVDs with films by Bill Morrison and Andrew Lyndon. Vrebalov's work this season centers on Asian music - two new pieces involve shakuhachi and ancient Chinese instruments, premiered by New York's shakuhachi Master James Nyoraku Schlefer, and The Forbidden City Orchestra in Beijing, respectively.
Vrebalov lives in New York City.
Ann Warren, composer
I take the clangs of NYC construction, sporadic beep beep of horns, whirring of some type of unidentified machine that never seems to stop, then mix in some occasional cabbie shouting expletives, the bass thump thump thump from a car passing in the night, the bar or stadium cheers for a Yankees home run and..., and am surrounded by music! I try to keep the music great, the story interesting, the visuals stimulating, and the movement fresh - and of course, then wind them into a spectacular melange.
I’m grateful to be a part of Ladies First. Thank you Milica for so so many things.
Merde! For more information, visit www.AnnWarren.net
Keve Wilson, Oboist, co-founder
Keve Wilson- oboist
Hailed by the New York Times for her “magnificently sweet tone,” oboist Keve Wilson released her solo album Pure Imagination on Composers Concordance Records/NAXOS. A past winner of Concert Artists Guild and solo oboist with the Grammy nominated Absolute Ensemble, Keve has performed in Amsterdam, Argentina, Austria, Dubai, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Mexico, Panama, New Zealand, and South Korea. A two-time recipient of the Clifford-Levy Creativity Grant, Keve traveled to Makuleke Village in South Africa where she participated in learning and teaching folk songs of the region. Keve enjoyed two years as the oboist in the Tony Award winning Broadway musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. She inspires visiting high school band and orchestra students from around the country with her original show Believe NYC---from the Band Room to Broadway. From Hyde Park, NY, Keve graduated from the Eastman School of Music. She studied oboe with Richard Killmer, piano with Judith Handman and dance with Elizabeth Clark. She lives in Audubon circle with her husband and two Portuguese water dogs.