Present Music Concludes its Season with ‘Honest Music’

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Photo by Zoe Prinds-Flash

Nadia Sirota

Nadia Sirota

For their final concert of the season, “Honest Music,” Present Music will do something a bit different. OK, they’ve always been a bit different, but this is unusual in their context: Present Music asked a guest curator to program the concert. Violist Nadia Sirota, whose recording group yMusic has collaborated with Paul Simon and Ben Folds. She’ll conduct three of the works, play a solo on one, “and she’ll be talking a fair amount throughout the concert,” according to Present Music’s co-artistic director, Eric Segnitz. Incidently, none of the works included in “Honest Music” were written by Sirota.

"This program is made up of works I can feel in my gut,” she explains. “All of the pieces on this concert have both drawn me in immediately, and, on further examination, proven themselves to be beautifully constructed. This concert is simply music that I love. As a curator, sometimes you are given an opportunity to share music that brings you joy, and this concert is simply that: music I cannot wait to share with others. What a treat!”

Sirota chose work by five living composers for “Honest Music.” She shares her thoughts on each one.

Nico Muhly

I have chosen two relatively early works by Nico Muhly, one of my longest-running and closest collaborators, that demonstrate his fast-moving brain and ability to conjure deep emotions. Nico and I met as undergraduates at Juilliard, and developed into artists together, so there’s a bit of his musical DNA that has imprinted on me as a performer, and vice-versa. Musical collaborations are the best, and the reason I am in the business! 

Steve Reich

I love Steve Reich to the end of the Earth! This piece, Duet, is a bit of an outlier in his output. The harmonic language feels very familiar and a bit ahead of its time (this was composed in 1993). I have always wanted to program this piece as an opener, what a beautiful and fresh start for a program!

Gabriella Smith

Gabriella is the youngest composer on this program (she was born in 1991), but absolutely holds her own. Her music is joyful, rhythmic, inventive, and exquisitely structured. Imaginary Pancake and Tessellatum are brilliant examples of her instantly recognizable style. 

Marcos Balter

Marcos has a way of taking familiar instruments and combining them in such as way as to create wholly new sounds. And what sounds! I am always blown away by his colors, and he adds a moment of repose to an otherwise racing and manic program.

Andrew Norman

I first heard this piece, Gran Turismo, as a fellow at Tanglewood in the mid-2000s, and just loved its relentless energy, virtuosity and wit. Music has the ability to bring people together in joy, and this piece absolutely does that. Hopefully, it will send everyone off with a smile on their face.

Segnitz says he chose her to program “Honest Music” because “she is my idea of a really committed musician—her approach to her instrument and to composers, as well as being a really devoted advocate for contemporary music in our culture, building bridges to the types of music that speak to people now. She's actually a well-known curator, having won a Peabody award for her engaging NYC radio show, and also serving in this capacity for the New York Philharmonic and now the Juilliard School. During the pandemic, she hosted an online show called ‘Living Music,’ which kept a lot of us going during that dark period. She’s a very effective communicator.”

How does she describe “Honest Music”? “I just think of this repertoire as the living edge of classical music. Of course, there are dozens of styles and fads contained in this new music bucket, and I’ll leave the categorization of all of them up to music historians of the future, but for me, this is all music that earnestly, honestly moves me, hence the title of the concert (which is also the title of one of Nico Muhly’s compositions).

8 p.m., May 9 at Milwaukee Art Museum. For tickets, visit https://www.presentmusic.org/