Season Closer: Three World Premieres
A season built around new music ends the only way it should, with music that has never been heard.
The three winners of Nova Linea Musica's national Score Call, directed by composer Clarice Assad, hear their works brought to life by the Nova Linea Musica Piano Trio: Rabia Brooke, violin; Ashly Ryoo, cello; and Tamila Salimdjanova, piano. The Score Call will draw submissions from composers across the country, read and selected by Assad, and it exists for a simple reason: a score that never gets played is not finished. Funding the call is one thing. Putting the pieces on a stage, in front of an audience, played by musicians who have lived with them, is the part that matters.
Every piece on the program is being performed for the first time. There are no recordings to consult, no reference performances, no received wisdom about tempo or color or how any of it is supposed to sound. The players have only the page and the composer. The audience arrives with nothing to compare it to.
That is a rarer experience than it sounds. Most concertgoing is an act of return: hearing again, hearing differently, measuring one performance against the last. This evening offers the opposite, three composers presenting work the world has not met yet, and a room of people meeting it at the same moment the music does.
