Sarah Bob, whose New Gallery Concert Series performs Oct. 14 at Longy: “Our audience never knows what it’s going to get, but there’s a trust.” Ling Wen Tsai photograph
“It’s the most traditional thing we’ve done in three years,” says Sarah Bob about Begin Here, the upcoming New Gallery Concert Series program Oct. 14 at Longy. “We’ve done things virtually, or where people were walking around looking at the artwork. In a weird way, making videos in the pandemic was more obvious. We became partners with Longy in 2019, but this is us still figuring out the space.”
NewGal programs are always collaborative, polymath. This performance centers around songstress Singer Mali, who composed two of the works on the program, and mixed media artist April Clay. Bob will perform on piano, including a solo work by Michael Fiday. The Sheffield Chamber Players join in, and the concert also features multiple works by Ukrainian composers.
“I love the idea of confronting problems, and creating a better balance,” Bob says. “Each one of us has this connection we can tap into. Our audience never knows what it’s going to get, but there’s a trust. They know it will be filled with high quality and compassionate people—voices that matter.”
The New Gallery Concert Series performs Begin Here on Oct. 14 at Longy’s Pickman Hall.
Chamber Music Events, Oct. 13–16
Guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan continues with part 4 the New Lullaby commissioning series (including work by Stefanie Lubkowski this time) in the Uphams Corner BPL branch (10.13, 5:30 p.m.). Blue Heron continues its broad survey Ockeghem@600 Oct. 15 at First Church Cambridge. Gardner Sundays continue 10.16 with pianist Christopher Taylor, part 3 of a Beethoven/Liszt transcription cycle (symphonies 6 and 7). Terezin Music Foundation Gala on the 16th includes pianist Jonathan Biss, Arneis Quartet and Coro Allegro. Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra give a Ukrainian benefit concert in West Newton on the 16th.
Additionally, Collage New Music opens its 50th anniversary season at Killian Hall Oct. 16 with multiple commissions, including Harbison and Read Thomas.
NOTED: The Gardner Museum Sunday series delivered a full house for Carlos Simon’s Requiem for the Enslaved on Oct. 9. The work—set for the quartet Hub New Music, rapper and librettist Marco Pavé, trumpeter MK Zulu, tape loop and Simon on piano—loosely follows a requiem mass form. The text recalls horrid events from 1838, when Georgetown University sold 272 children, men and women to raise money.
Simon—now on faculty at Georgetown—has created a masterpiece of remembrance. The work is profound, and touching, but not entirely mournful. Much of it sounds like the professed jubilance of a New Orleans street funeral. It was thrilling to hear live, in its premiere (the recording has been out since spring).
Of the many musical takeaways, here’s one: the instrumentation of Hub New Music—clarinets, flute, cello, violin—creates unforgettable sonic pairings. HMN tours most of the year, but performs again locally on the Ashmont Hill Chamber Music series in February.