Both the opening work for the Wednesday, July 24, evening program and the composer who wrote it have a special connection to the Festival.
Lightenings, by Elizabeth Ogonek, was commissioned by the Festival in 2016, and on July 28 of that year, it was given its world premiere in St. Francis Auditorium in the New Mexico Museum of Art—the same wonderfully intimate spot where Wednesday’s concertgoers can experience a special encore performance of the work!
Before receiving her 2016 commission, Ogonek played an important part in establishing one of the Festival’s most treasured initiatives: the annual Young Composers String Quartet Project, which offers a commission and various forms of mentoring to promising up-and-coming composers. Ogonek was one of the three inaugural participants in 2013, when the Festival launched the program, and since then she’s become one of today’s leading and most intriguing composers.
Just two years after serving as a Young Composer, Ogonek began a three-year term as the Mead Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She’s also been in residence at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara and, with longtime Festival collaborators the FLUX Quartet, at Kanagawa Kenmin Hall in Japan. Her music has been commissioned or performed by the world’s leading ensembles, including the Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, London, and San Francisco symphony orchestras and the Los Angeles, Oslo, and Royal philharmonic orchestras, among many others.
Lightenings is an irresistible, roughly 15-minute high-energy (even in its quiet parts) work for piano, violin, clarinet, and percussion. Its primary inspiration—as well as its name—comes from the first part of a set of poems called Squarings by the late Nobel Prize–winning poet Seamus Heaney. Ogonek creates an exciting range of moods and sonorities while exploring what she’s referred to as “the musical tradition of variation form.”
Join us on Wednesday evening when pianist Ran Dank, violinist Daniel Phillips, clarinetist Todd Levy, and percussionist Gregory Zuber play Lightenings on a program that also includes 19th- and 20th-century masterpieces by Brahms and Ravel. Get your tickets to this can’t-miss performance now!
