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 Russell Steinberg Ensemble performing original chamber music with 11 superb musicians featuring the premiere of Steinberg's WALL CYCLE for soprano, oboe, and strings and piano quartet MULHOLLAND FANTASIES.
Thursday May 14 at 8pm, Thayer Hall, Colburn School of Music
Tickets $25
This is the first concert of my music that I have produced since the Covid pandemic. I am joined by 11 superb professional musicians to perform two large chamber works and several premieres. The featured work is my new song cycle for soprano, oboe, and strings based on 7 short stunning poems by Lia Purpura titled Wall Cycle. The poetry is almost like haiku. It begins enigmatically just talking about walls separating, comforting, alienating, etc. We're not sure where it’s going. Then the last poem reveals the poet has been thinking about a memorial wall she saw in Poland that was erected from tombstones that the Nazis had dug up and turned into sidewalks, an ultimate humiliation and erasure of memory. After the war, rabbis went on a painstaking search to uncover these particular slabs in sidewalks and transmute them into a memorial wall outside the synagogue.
The other large work on the program is Mulholland Fantasies, a piano quartet in five movements that I recently revised. The piece is an interior journey inspired by Mulholland Drive and the way it divides through the city of Los Angeles. The first 3 movements form a set. The last measures of the first movement repeat as the beginning of the second movement. The last measures of the second movement repeat as the beginning of the the third movement. The fourth slow movement features a high expressive cello solo. The finale is an exuberant piece reflecting my love for the lyricism in Schubert's chamber music.
Pianist Yevgheniy Milyavskiy will premiere Haftorah I and II, short pieces based on familiar Jewish tropes. Haftorah I presents the tropes in a virtuoso toccata of emotions—joyful, playful, even righteously disputatious. Haftorah II goes a bit deeper. It evokes the mystery and deeper feeling "inside" the tropes. I slow them way down into a moody, hypnotic meditation.
PROGRAM
American Suite
Piano- Russell Steinberg
Wall Cycle—World Premiere
poetry of Lia Purpura
Soprano- Jessica Schneiderman
Oboe- Kathryn Pisaro
Violins- Niv Ashkenazi, Alisa Luera
Viola- Ivaan Richards
Cello- Stephen Green
Bass- Stephen Pfeifer
Mulholland Fantasies
Piano- Yevgheniy Milyavskiy
Violin- Limor Toren Immerman
Viola- Nick Yee
Cello- Garik Terzian
Haftorah I and II
Piano- Yevgheniy Milyavskiy
Presenter / Producer: Russell Steinberg
Listed Categories
Music > Recitals - Instrumental
Music > Chamber Music
Music > Contemporary Classical / New Music
Event Phone: 818-903-2022
Venue
Thayer Hall
Colburn School of Music
200 S Grand Ave.
Los Angeles CA 90012
Regions:
LA - Central / Downtown
Performance Dates: 5/14/2026
Performance Times
Ticket Information:
www.russellsteinberg.com
or
rustberg@russellsteinberg.com
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