Press
“'How do you heal?': Density512 presents 'Eva and the Angel of Death: A Holocaust Remembrance Opera'”
“After a two-year break in production, Austin’s Density512 is finally ready to present the world premiere of Eva and the Angel of Death: A Holocaust Remembrance Opera. The chamber orchestra collective was ready to stage the work (which is based on the life of Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor) in March of 2020, but for obvious reasons the premiere was put on hold and only recently restarted. In the intervening time, Density512 produced a documentary film about the production of the opera and, according to musical director Jacob Schnitzer, gained an even deeper understanding of the subject matter.”
A New Music Party Mix for the End of the Decade
Composer and conductor Nicholas Perry Clark made a pre-performance playlist for a Density512 collective house concert. And it's a 30-minute musical snapshot of the 2010s
“Perhaps too distracted by political hearings and debates, the 2020’s have snuck up on us. Still, it’s worth taking the time to take stock of what’s happened within contemporary music in this decade. This is the decade that saw the Pulitzer Prize in music go to hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar for his album “Damn.” In the coming decade we may see the prize handed to a ska or deep house artist. At the end of the 2020’s, composers like Anna Clyne and Caroline Shaw will have been integrated into the canon. Anything can happen, and so it should be if our artistic medium hopes to move forward…”
Fast Forward Austin Does Compute
New-music champions science the shit out of its upcoming concert with The Difference Engine
“… for aural adventure and sonic stimulation, Fast Forward Austin is tough to beat. The compositions play with rhythm, tempo, instrumentation, sound, silence, and more in ways that bend the ear and blow the mind. And you can count on them being performed by top-flight champions of new music: line upon line percussion, Austin New Music Co-op, the Aeolus String Quartet, the Bel Cuore Sax Quartet, Convergence, Invoke, Density512, and Peter Stopschinski. Fast Forward Austin co-founder Steven Snowden says that he and co-founders Ian Dicke and Robert Honstein '‘believe there is something powerful about experiencing music that exists on the fringes, that challenges your ear and makes you question what music is or could be.”
Fsbx Fstvl: Ragnar Kjartansson’s S.S. Hangover
“The successive sextets of brass players — trombone, two flugelhorns, two French horns, and a tuba — were recruited from Austin’s contemporary chamber orchestra collective Density512. Dressed in white for the warm April weather, they were joined by the Hangover captain, who steered the Nordic craft and repeatedly dropped and weighed anchor. The music wafting across the lagoon to the relaxed crowd lolling around the museum’s amphitheater was a soothing drone that moved into soft swells and subdued, minimal flourishes that winked and hinted at fragments of narrative. A thousand stories, hanging in the very air. The elegiac micro-melody throbbed in slowest motion, like sonic honey seeping across the atmosphere.”
A new opera reconsiders the myth of Orpheus
The tragic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice has been celebrated by musicians in many a musical form.
But what about Orpheus’s affair with fellow argonaut, Caläis? It’s a little-know episode in Greek mythology and one upon which Australian composer Evan Lawson builds his opera “Orpheus.” The three-character hour-long chamber opera features a libretto devised by Lawson who combined text from the libretti of Gluck’s 18th-century Orfeo ed Euridice by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi; Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo by Alessandro Striggio, and words by Phemocles and William Shakespeare… Lawson will be in Austin to conduct the production.
