Paul Schoenfield’s runaway classical hit, Café Music for piano trio, sets the tone for this celebration of summer. Combining ingredients of classical music, jazz, klezmer and whimsy, Café Music is irresistible and full of energy—caffeine-fueled music at its most entertaining. Claude Bolling’s classical/jazz musings in the Suite for Cello and Jazz Trio (double bass and percussion) offer up interpolations of boogie-woogie and ragtime with Baroque underpinnings, not to mention sizzling panache. Gershwin, who “made an honest woman of jazz,” is represented with his Three Preludes for Piano. Close Encounters continues its commissioning program with the unveiling of a new work by Tamar Muskal for tabla drums, cello and rap artist, featuring Avirodh Sharma, who has performed at Lincoln Center, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, the Joyce, Harlem Stage, and Joe’s Pub. Of Muskal’s music, the Chicago Tribune has written: “The ripples and shimmers that filled Muskal’s post-minimalist score were as evanescent as swirling, digitized visuals—dissolving into one another with kaleidoscopic beauty…high-tech music theater at its most inventive and fascinating.”
Michael Chertock, piano; Xiao-Dong Wang, violin; Avirodh Sharma, tabla; Artie Dixson, percussion; James Cammack, double bass; Yehuda Hanani, cello
Tickets available for online purchase up to 2 hours prior to show time and by calling the number listed right up until the show. Box office opens at 12:00 pm.