San Francisco-based Baroque ensemble Musica Pacifica, described by the press as “some of the finest baroque musicians in America” (American Record Guide) and “among the best in the world” (Alte Musik Aktuell), unveils their newest recorded and live touring project, Dancing in the Isles, which highlights Baroque and traditional music from England, Scotland, and Ireland. This recording features the illustrious talents of sought-after early music players Judith Linsenberg, recorder and whistle; Elizabeth Blumenstock and Robert Mealy, baroque violins; David Morris, baroque ‘cello, and viola da gamba; Charles Sherman, harpsichord; Charles Weaver, theorbo and baroque guitar; and Peter Maund, percussion.

A merry detour for a group whose previous recordings have focused on Baroque giants such as Bach, Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Telemann, the music on this CD reflects the variety of crosscurrents that made the musical culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Britain such a rich and diverse one. At that time, a vivid range of musical styles included Scots and Irish tunes which appealed to the sophisticated London audiences as an emblem of their native culture; centuries-old Irish and Scottish culture was being preserved in the rural villages of the rugged hinterlands, where Celtic languages are spoken to this day. With compositions by James Oswald, Matthew Locke, Nicola Matteis, Francesco Veracini, and Henry Purcell, Dancing in the Isles also includes English country dances arranged by Musica Pacifica as well as traditional Scots and Irish tunes arranged by core ensemble member Elizabeth Blumenstock.

The eighth album by Musica Pacifica as well as the first to be released on the Solimar label, Dancing in the Isles was recorded in Mountain View, CA; and is available for purchase at www.musicapacifica.org, www.amazon.com, www.magnatune.com, and on iTunes.

Musica Pacifica has, since its founding in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1990, garnered a widespread reputation as one of America’s premier baroque ensembles by bringing together virtuosic musicianship with imaginative programming and a spirited performing style. Called “the crème de la crème of the West Coast early music scene” by Alte Musik Aktuell (Regensburg, Germany), these highly accomplished musicians are masters of their repertoire who regularly perform with Philharmonia Baroque, American Bach Soloists, and other prominent early music ensembles in the U.S. and around the world. Musica Pacifica has been featured at the Berkeley Early Music Festival three times, and has appeared on many of the most prestigious concert series in the U.S. and abroad, including Music Before 1800 and the Frick Collection (NY), Tage Alter Musik (Regensburg), the Getty Museum (LA), the Cleveland Art Museum, the Pittsburgh Renaissance and Baroque Society, the Seattle Early Music Guild, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Cambridge Early Music Society (MA), among many others. Its seven prior recordings have been lauded in the classical music press. The Telemann CD was described by Early Music America Magazine as “superbly elegant…exemplifying the finest in historical performance today;” this disc went on to win the 2003 Chamber Music America/WQXR Record Award. The Mancini recording was cited in 2000 as a “Noteworthy Disc” at the International Antonio Vivaldi Awards for Italian Early Music in Venice. Their “Fire” CD was a featured recording on Minnesota Public Radio, who reported “If you’re looking for a dynamic Baroque recording featuring virtuoso performers at the top of their game, this is it.” Online, Musica Pacifica may be heard on radio station 1.fm, and on Last.fm; and seen on youtube.com/MusicaPacificaSF.

Violinist Sharan Leventhal

Music/Words, an interdisciplinary series founded and curated by NYC-based pianist Inna Faliks, continues its third season with several live and radio appearances:

Tune in to WFMT.com to hear great music alongside accomplished and brilliant poets reading from their work. Schedule is as follows:

April 13, 3 pm – Schostakovich Quintet with New Millenium Orchestra members, Inna Faliks and Jasmine Lin + Jesse Ball, poet

April 20, 3 pm – Matt Hagle, music of Brahms, Chopin and Debussy, + Regan Good, poet

April 27, 3 pm – Inna Faliks, music of Gubaidulina, Liszt and Chopin, + Sandra Beasley poet

On Friday, April 29, at 6pm, a Live Music/Words performance will take place at New York’s Cornelia Street Café featuring Faliks at the piano along with violinist Sharan Leventhal and readings by Susan Miller and LB Thompson, poets. The varied program will include Schubert’s Sonata in a minor opus 143, Concert Piece (1959) by Seymour Shifrin (1926-1979), and Ravel’s Sonata for violin and piano. The Cornelia Street Café is located at 29 Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village, NYC. Tickets are $20 and are available by calling 212-989-9319.

Finally, May 1st, 3pm brings the Chicago live premiere of Music/Words to Pianoforte Chicago – with Mark Levine, poet extraordinaire, and Inna Faliks at the piano.

Music/Words celebrates links between poetry and music by presenting collaborations between exciting solo performers and acclaimed contemporary poets in the form of a live recital/reading. Inna Faliks created the series in order to foster a chance for poets and musicians to work together and inspire each other, as well as to allow different audiences to come together for these musical-literary events. New published and unpublished works are read alongside performances of music old and new and connected by content, intuition, and inspiration. According to Faliks, “I pair performers together based on their personalities and styles, and encourage them to choose the poems and music in varied ways that are strongly and intuitively connected.” Music/Words will be featured in regular live broadcasts throughout the month of April 2011 on WFMT Radio in Chicago.

Violinist Sharan Leventhal has toured four continents as a soloist, chamber musician and teacher. A champion of new music, she has received grants from the NEA, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording, the Fromm and Koussevitzky foundations, and has premiered well over 100 compositions. Leventhal has appeared as a soloist with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, the Toledo, Milwaukee, Topeka, and Gulf Coast symphonies, among others. She is a member of the Gramercy Trio, which released a compact disc of music for strings and piano by Scott Wheeler on Newport Classic, Ltd. In addition, she was co-founder of the duo Marimolin, which can be heard on the GM and Catalyst labels, and recently completed recording with the Kepler Quartet the second disc of Ben Johnston’s string quartets for New World. She teaches at the Boston Conservatory and Brandeis University, and has served on the faculties of the Interlochen Arts Camp, the Hong Kong-based Asian Youth Orchestra, Michigan State University and the Berklee College of Music. Leventhal is founder and director of Play On, Inc., a non-profit supporting chamber music programs for children.

Susan L. Miller has published poetry in Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Calyx, Commonweal, Meridian, and Sewanee Theological Review, and has poems forthcoming in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality. She has twice won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for poetry. She teaches Poetry and Expository Writing as a Russell Teaching Fellow at Rutgers University, where she also helps coordinate and curate an LGBT reading series and a reading series of religious writing. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

L.B. Thompson received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University. She is a recipient of a 2010 award for emerging writers from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. The Center for Book Arts printed her chapbook, Tendered Notes: Poems of Love and Money as winner of their competition in 2003. She also received an award for emerging women writers from the Rona Jaffe Foundation in 2002. Her poetry has been published in journals including Fence, Pool, Lyric, The Women’s Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Southampton Review. Her essay “Torpor: A Meditation on Literary Hibernation” appeared in Prairie Schooner. L.B. teaches English and works as a free-lance copyeditor in New York City and on the North Fork of Long Island.

Called “A delight to hear” and “riveting” by Phil Greenfield of the Baltimore Sun, Inna Faliks played her debut with the Chicago Symphony at age 15, and performs regularly at major venues in US and abroad. A winner of many international competitions including the 2005 International Pro Musicis Award, Ms. Faliks has recently performed at Carnegie Hall, Paris’s Salle Cortot, The Metropolitan Museum, Bargemusic, a recital tour of Russia, and in multiple TV and radio broadcasts worldwide. Her CD, Sound of Verse, has been enthusiastically reviewed this year by Gramophone, American Record Guide and other press. Recent festival appearances include Verbier, Taos, and Brevard. A champion of both contemporary and classical music, Ms. Faliks performed the NY and LA premieres of “13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg” – variations by contemporary composers on Bach’s Aria. Her former teachers include Ann Schein, Gil Kalish, Leon Fleisher and Boris Petrushansky.

In past seasons, Music/Words has featured collaborations between acclaimed poets such as Jesse Ball, Deborah Landau and Mark Levine, and musicians such as Wendy Warner, Leon Livshin and Angelina Gadeliya, at performance spaces such as Le Poisson Rouge and Cornelia Street Café. WFMT Radio in Chicago featured Music/Words in regular live broadcasts throughout the month of April 2010.

For the last installment of North River Music’s 25th anniversary season, Greenwich House Music School (GHMS) is pleased to present an evening with pioneer of electronic music and multimedia performance, Morton Subotnick, on Friday, April 8 at 6pm. The event will take place at Renee Weiler Concert Hall, Greenwich House Music School, 46 Barrow Street (between Bedford St. & 7th Ave. S), NYC. Tickets are $15 General Admission/$10 Students/Seniors and are payable at the door from 5:30 p.m. For more information, call (212) 242-4770.

The synthesizer legend will retrace the development of his 1967 classic album, Silver Apples of the Moon, which the Library of Congress inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2009. The lecture-demonstration will serve as an appendix to Subotnick’s appearance at Lincoln Center’s Unsound Festival New York on April 7, during which the composer will revisit this landmark composition with visual accompaniment from Berlin-based video artist Lillevan. The GHMS talk will be followed by a short solo performance by Subotnick.

Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon was the first electronic work composed especially for an LP recording (commissioned by Nonesuch Records). It is also one of the first compositions entirely created for a modular analogue synthesizer, the Buchla Electronic Music Box (commissioned by Subotnick and Ramon Sender). In 2009, the Library of Congress selected Silver Apples of the Moon as one of the 25 new additions to the National Recording Registry, a collection now comprising 300 music, spoken word, and audio documentary recordings deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. “One of the unique features of Buchla’s instrument,” writes the Library of Congress, “was its use of the electronic sequencer, a device capable of creating repeating, rhythmic sequences of musical notes or timbres. Subotnick uses the sequencer extensively and effectively in the creation of many repeated figures in the recording, creating a canonical statement for this pioneering technology.”

With Silver Apples of the Moon, Subotnick created a new musical genre that anticipated today’s home stereo system – twentieth century chamber music that people could experience with headsets within their own four walls. He then proceeded to re-conceptualize his vision for the stage, turning to multimedia performance and reincorporating improvisation into the process. For the Lincoln Center performance, Subotnick will “deconstruct” Silver Apples, and A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur, his first and last electronic recordings, to spontaneously reconstruct them in a live performance, using the latest Buchla synthesizer and a laptop with Ableton Live software. At GHMC, the composer will explain the vision behind the work, how it was created, and how it can be performed nowadays.

Founded by Frank Wigglesworth in 1985, GHMS’s North River Music is one of New York City’s first concert series devoted to new and experimental music. The concert will be followed by a reception.

Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. The work which brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon [1966-7], was commissioned by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium – a conscious acknowledgment that the home stereo system constituted a present-day form of chamber music. He is also pioneering works to offer musical creative tools to young children. He is the author of a series of CDROMS for children, a children’s website [www.creatingmusic.com] and developing a program for classroom and after school programs that will soon become available internationally. He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.

Founded by Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch in 1902, Greenwich House is a nonprofit settlement house which offers cultural and educational programs, social and health services and opportunities for civic involvement to New Yorkers of all ages and backgrounds – from any neighborhood. Greenwich House Music School, located in the historical West Village, provides a wide range of concerts and recitals as well as instructional classes and outreach in NYC’s public schools. With a faculty of about 50 instructors, its has 520 students ranging in ages from 3 years old to seniors — from beginner to advanced — in classes and private lessons, in piano, voice, violin and viola, cello, clarinet, flute, guitar, five-string banjo, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, harp and the Chinese qin, a seven-string plucked instrument.

Funding for North River Music is provided, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.