Curtis Stewart has received special mention from JazzTimes, and Downbeat Magazines, "Holding his audiences spellbound” with his  “warm, clear sound…sparkling rhythmic energy,” “soulful improvisation” and “prodigious technique.”  He has made chamber music appearances at Zankel Hall, and the Newport Jazz Festival, and has performed as a soloist with the National Repertory Orchestra, in Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall. STRAD Magazine called Curtis “a gem of string player, among the excellent musicians…whose impressive work contributed to many of the night's high points…his swinging flights were among the most memorable.”  
Curtis’ has played with Wyclef Jean, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Heath, and performance installations at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art with Jason Moran, Henry Threadgill, among others. 

Composer David Biedenbender’s music has been described as “simply beautiful” [twincities.com] and is noted for its “rhythmic intensity” [NewMusicBox] and “stirring harmonies” [Boston Classical Review]. “Modern, venturesome, and inexorable…The excitement, intensity, and freshness that characterizes Biedenbender’s music hung in the [air] long after the last note was played” [Examiner.com]. David has written music for the concert stage as well as for dance and multimedia collaborations, and his work is often influenced by his diverse musical experiences in rock and jazz bands as an electric bassist, in wind, jazz, and New Orleans-style brass bands as a euphonium, bass trombone, and tuba player, and by his study of Indian Carnatic Music. His present creative interests include working with everyone from classically trained musicians to improvisers, acoustic chamber music to large ensembles, and interactive electronic interfaces to live brain data. He has had the privilege of collaborating with and being commissioned by many talented performers and ensembles, including Alarm Will Sound, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Stenhammar String Quartet, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, U.S. Navy Band, Philharmonie Baden-Baden (Germany), VocalEssence, and Eastman Wind Ensemble, among many others. 

He is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at Michigan State University. He holds degrees in composition from the University of Michigan and Central Michigan University, and has also studied at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Aspen Music Festival, and in Mysore, India where he studied carnatic music. For more information, visit: www.davidbiedenbender.com.

Praised in the New York Times for “buoyant pulse and appealing energy,” and “thoughtfully conceived” programming, New Vintage Baroque explores characters and themes, using narration to weave together verses, arias, and instrumental pieces. Their performances fuse together new commissions with music of the Baroque, asking audiences to examine their relationship with both the past and the present. Their current season focuses on the theme of vice. What is it about bad behavior that we find so enticing? It is a season that will tickle the senses, touching on topics such as love, sex, coffee, intoxication, and even the Bible.
 
New Vintage Baroque was founded by Lindsay McIntosh (baroque oboe) and Francis Liu (baroque violin). Narrated by composer and monologist Doug Balliett (“The Brother’s Balliett, radio station WQXR), their shows unite young graduates of the Juilliard Historical Performance program with top singers from around Boston and New York.

In addition to their main performances, New Vintage also engages in collaborations and pop-up concerts throughout the year. Highlights from last season include a tour of Lake Tahoe, CA, a collaboration with On Site Opera at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, and family concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stay tuned for more information regarding upcoming shows! 


The music of composer Nina C. Young (b.1984) is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her experience in the electronic music studio informs her acoustic work, which takes as its given not melody and harmony, but sound itself, continuously metamorphosing from one state to another. Her musical voice draws from elements of the classical canon, modernism, spectralism, American experimentalism, minimalism, electronic music, and popular idioms. Her projects, ranging from concert pieces to interactive installations, strive to create unique sonic environments that can be appreciated by a wide variety of audiences while challenging stylistic boundaries, auditory perception, and notions of temporality. 

Young’s works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil’s Next on Grand, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Aizuri Quartet, Either/Or, the JACK Quartet, wild Up, and Yarn/Wire. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Young has also received a Koussevitzky Commission, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival's Jacob Druckman Prize, and honors from BMI, IAWM, and ASCAP/SEAMUS. 

IN 2019 Carnegie Hall commissioned "Out of whose womb came the ice" with the American Composers Orchestra: for baritone, orchestra, electronics, and generative video, commenting on the ill-fated Ernest Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-17.  Other recent projects include "Tread softly" that opened the NY Philharmonic’s Project 19, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh from the Philadelphia Orchestra, and "The Glow that Illuminates, The Glare that Obscures" for the American Brass Quintet alongside an immersive audio-visual installation version commissioned by EMPAC showcasing their wavefield synthesis audio system.

A graduate of McGill University and MIT, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor of Composition as USC’s Thornton School of Music.  She serves as Co-Artistic Director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé.  Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.

ninacyoung.com

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Grand Harmonie promotes period-instrument artistry in the United States through inventive, compelling performances of Classical and Romantic repertoire and educational outreach to listeners of all ages and backgrounds.

electro-art-dream-pop with repressed classical influences

A Far Cry stands at the forefront of an exciting new generation in classical music. According to the New York Times, the GRAMMY nominated self-conducted orchestra “brims with personality or, better, personalities, many and varied.” A Far Cry was founded in 2007 by a tightly-knit collective of 17 young professional musicians — the Criers — and since the beginning has fostered those personalities, developing an innovative structure of rotating leadership both on stage and behind the scenes. By expanding the boundaries of orchestral repertoire and experimenting with the ways music is prepared, performed, and experienced, A Far Cry has been embraced throughout the world with hundreds of performances coast to coast and across the globe, and hundreds of thousands of online views of live streaming concerts and YouTube archives. "Dreams and Prayers” and “Law of Mosaics”, the first albums from A Far Cry's in-house label, Crier Records, have collectively garnered a GRAMMY nomination and critical acclaim from the New Yorker’s Alex Ross. The Criers are proud to call Boston home, and maintain strong roots in the city, rehearsing at their storefront music center in Jamaica Plain and fulfilling the role of Chamber Orchestra in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Collaborating with local students through an educational partnership with the New England Conservatory, A Far Cry aims to pass on the spirit of collaboratively-empowered music to the next generation.

A Far Cry is following