shade by David Lang ft. Contemporaneous & Mammoth Trio
from David Lang:
'shade' was a joint commission from the Storioni Trio in Holland and the New York City Ballet, for a piece for piano trio and string orchestra. I imagined the piano trio as a solid object in the foreground and imagined how a light on the object in front of us would pass its shadow onto the strings behind. Everything that happens in the orchestra is a detail that is projected upon them from out of the music that is first played by the piano trio. The piano trio initiates all the music, and the orchestra lives in its shade. The ballet was choreographed by Pontus Lidberg.
'wed' was originally part of a larger piece I wrote for the Kronos Quartet, in memory of a friend who died. My friend married her partner in her hospital bed, and although she was about to die, weddings are fundamentally optimistic, so I tried to write a piece that would oscillate between consonance and dissonance, that might create an equilibrium between tragedy and hope. Years later, the Adelaide Festival in Australia commissioned me to turn it into a piece for string orchestra.
Credits
MAMMOTH TRIO
Elly Toyoda โ violin
Ashley Bathgate โ cello
Lisa Moore โ piano
CONTEMPORANEOUS
Conductor โ David Bloom
Violins โ Kate Dreyfuss, Josh Henderson, Lauren Cauley, Maya Bennardo, Pauline Kim Harris, Conrad Harris, Anna Luce, Adriana Mateo, Audrey Hayes, Yumi Oshima, Sabrina Tabby, Finn Shanahan, Sarah Goldfeather, Melissa Tong, Gregory Tompkins, Daniel Constant, Gabe Smith, Ally Jenkins
Violas โ Sarah Haines, Hannah Levinson, Isabel Hagen, Brianne Lugo, Greg Luce, Harry Inglis Cellos โ Amanda Gookin, JY Lee, Helen Newby, Gabriel Cabezas, Meaghan Burke, Iva Casian-Lakos
Basses โ Pat Swoboda, Tristan Kasten-Krause, Eleonore Oppenheim, Greg Chudzik
Mammoth Trio recorded by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12, New Haven CT, July 2021
Strings recorded by Nick Lloyd and Isaiah Abolin at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York NY, July 2021
Edited and mixed by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12, New Haven CT, October 2021
Thanks to the commissioners of these works โ the Storioni Trio and Festival, Concertgebouw de Doelen, New York City Ballet, the Adelaide Festival, the American Conservatory Theater, Kronos Quartet
David Lang's music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.
License
All rights reserved.
Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. At the same time, Lang is deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.