ONLINE: Present Music

media release: Online tickets: $10, $20, and $35

Or call / email the box office: (414) 271-0711 | tickets@presentmusic.org

Milwaukee's favorite new music pianist returns for a virtual Present Music piano recital next Friday, April 16!

"I think there may be a kind of sadness pervading this program -- certainly in the Mendelssohn Songs Without Words. Braxton's Composition No. 1 is a work (especially thinking about the hundreds of world-bending compositions that have come after!) of new and wondrous possibility, but I hear a kind of glacial blues in its slow harmonic rhythm.

There are achingly beautiful moments in Nicole Mitchell's "Interdimensional Interplay", though this piece strikes me as the most playfully mercurial and transcendentally joyous of the bunch – perhaps because its video component is built around a brilliant flute performance by the composer herself.

Threaded through are bits of a solo project I've been working on during the pandemic -- a set of strange, bulbous, billowing, (maybe sculptural?) improvisations on the Jerome Kern / Otto Harbach song "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes", a song about desire, (self-) deception, and tragedy." - Cory Smythe