Upcoming and Recent Performances

Upcoming – 2012-2013

February 25, 2012: Ariel Songs (premiere)

Network for New Music
Barbara Berry, soprano
Susan Nowicki, piano
Community Music School
775 W. Main Street, Trappe, PA

February 26, 2012: Ariel Songs (premiere)

Network for New Music
Barbara Berry, soprano
Susan Nowicki, piano
Independence Seaport Museum
211 S. Columbus Blvd., Philadelphia, PA

March 28, 2012: Piano Variations

Gregory deTurck, pianist
Penn Contemporary Music
“Wail of the Voice”
University of Pennsylvania
Rose Recital Hall
(additional performance TBA)

May 8, 2012: “Every Day is a God” from Holy the Firm

Mary Mackenzie, soprano
Pianist, TBA
Songfusion
Mary Flagler Cary Hall at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 W. 37th Street
New York, NY

April 18, 2013: String Quartet #3

Daedalus Quartet
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
Settlement Music School, Queen Street Branch
Concert will honor composer Richard Wernick with performances of works by his students.
Program includes music by Melinda Wagner, Yinam Leef, and Philip Maneval.

summer, 2013 (exact date, TBA): Sacred Songs and Meditations

21st Century Consort
Folger Consort
soprano, TBA
National Cathedral, Washington, DC
(performance to be followed by recording sessions for eventual CD release)

2011

February 28, 2011: Three Sacred Songs (excerpts)

Mary Mackenzie, soprano; Kathleen Tagg, pianist
SongFusion 2011-2012 Season Preview Concert; 8:00 pm
Church of St. Jean Baptiste, Lexington Ave at 76th Street
New York, NY

May 1, 2011: Two Arms of the Harbor (premiere)

Emmanuel Music; Ryan Turner, conductor
Emmanuel Church Sunday Eucharist, 10:00 AM
15 Newbury Street
Boston, MA

May 27, 2011: Straight Up

Prism Saxophone Quartet
World Café Live; CD release concert
Philadelphia, PA

May 31, 2011: Straight Up

Prism Saxophone Quartet
The Stone; CD release concert
New York, NY

June 8, 2011: Secret Geometry

Jon-Luke Kirton, pianist
Adrian Boult Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire
Birmingham, UK

1 Response to “Upcoming and Recent Performances”

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1 David Bennett Thomas March 23, 2011 at 10:57 am

Hi James,
I enjoyed checking out your website. Lots of interesting reads. We were on some concerts together at some point….I think at 10th Pres? Anyway, hope to see you sometime soon. I really like your work whenever I hear it!
Best,
David

Reply

James Primosch, composer

When honoring him with its Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted that "A rare economy of means and a strain of religious mysticism distinguish the music of James Primosch... Through articulate, transparent textures, he creates a wide range of musical emotion." Andrew Porter stated in The New Yorker that Primosch "scores with a sure, light hand" and critics for the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Dallas Morning News have characterized his music as "impressive", "striking", "grandly romantic", "stunning" and "very approachable".

Primosch’s compositional voice encompasses a broad range of expressive types. His music can be intensely lyrical, as in the song cycle Holy the Firm or dazzlingly angular as in Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound. His affection for jazz is reflected in works like the Piano Quintet, while his work as a church musician informs the many pieces in his catalog based on sacred songs or religious texts.

His music has been performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Lydian, Cavani, Cassatt, Ying, and Miami string quartets, the 21st Century Consort, the New York New Music Ensemble, Network for New Music, Dawn Upshaw, Lisa Saffer, Janice Felty, and Lambert Orkis. Twelve of his compositions have been recorded for Albany, Azica, Bard, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, Innova, and New World labels, with new discs of vocal and choral works planned.

David Patrick Stearns on “Songs for Adam”

If there's anything out there like Primosch's Songs of Adam, I haven't heard it - though the music wears its singularity lightly, with no need to express itself radically. It has a confidence of expression that comes of Primosch's having written a steady stream of song cycles since the late 1990s. Composers are still drawing legitimate inspiration from poets of the increasingly distant past, such as Walt Whitman, but Primosch pushes both himself and thus his listeners onto new ground with Susan Stewart's verse, which are called songs in their printed version because they suggest music, especially in the first poem, in which Adam is stuttering his way into existence.

Both poet and composer share an ability to contemplate how basic elements of existence might feel for the first time, and the duo know how to capture that in their respectively cultivated vocabularies, with an emotional rightness that never becomes too analytical.

In fact, Primosch enters the Korngold zone when describing Adam's intoxication with the word. Though words are set dramatically and in ways that are well written for the voice, the best moments are in the masterly orchestration, which gives an extra percussive spark to moments of discovery and unflinchingly confronts the agony of Adam's expulsion from Eden.

The pale strings capture his disappointment in the real world in an overall dramatic arc that's almost epic, going from the unimaginable (the beauty of Eden) to the unthinkable (the world's first children, Abel and Cain, and the world's first fratricide).
-Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2010

Current Projects:

Working with audio wizard George Blood on editing recordings of "Holy the Firm", "From a Book of Hours", "Four Sacred Songs", and "Dark the Star" for eventual CD release. The performers are Susan Narucki, William Sharp, and the 21st Century Consort, directed by Christopher Kendall.

Two composition projects:
- a set of short piano pieces, commissioned by a consortium of pianists (currently 12) from across the United States.
- a cycle of songs for soprano and orchestra. Susan Stewart, whose poetry I have set in three previous pieces, has written new poems specifically for this project, to be called "A Sibyl".

Secret Geometry – James Primosch's blog