Meet the Artists
The New Juilliard Ensemble, led by founding director Joel Sachs and now in its 26th season, presents music by a variety of international composers who write in the most diverse styles. The ensemble appears regularly at MoMA’s Summergarden and has been a featured ensemble four times at the Lincoln Center Festival. It has given world premieres of some 100 compositions and U.S. premieres of many others. Concerts in the 2017-18 season included music by John Woolrich, Gerald Barry, Raminta Šerkšnytė, Akira Nishimura, Mauricio Kagel, Giya Kancheli, Shuci Wang, Liu Sola, Sunbin Kim, Kolbeinn Bjarnason, Alejandro Cardona, and Jonathan Dawe. In 2014, the New Juilliard Ensemble collaborated with Carnegie Hall on UBUNTU: Music and Arts of South Africa. A highlight of the 2013-14 season was a collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Bicentennial Celebration with the U.S. premieres of works by Magnus Lindberg and Judith Weir. In 2012, NJE collaborated with Carnegie Hall on Voices From Latin America; in 2011, with Carnegie Hall’s Japan/NYC festival; and in 2009, with Carnegie Hall’s Ancient Paths, Modern Voices festival. The New Juilliard Ensemble performs in Juilliard’s Focus festival; recent Focus festivals have included: China Today: A Festival of Chinese Composition (2018); Our Southern Neighbors: The Music of Latin America (2017); Milton Babbitt’s World: A Centennial Celebration (2016); and Nippon Gendai Ongaku: Japanese Music Since 1945 (2015). It will open the 2019 Focus festival, On the Air!, a celebration of the decades-long commissioning projects of European and Canadian broadcasters.
Joel Sachs, founder and director of the New Juilliard Ensemble, performs a vast range of traditional and contemporary music as conductor and pianist. As co-director of the internationally acclaimed new music ensemble Continuum, he has appeared in hundreds of performances in New York, nationally, and throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has also conducted orchestras and ensembles in Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, El Salvador, Germany, Iceland, Mexico, Switzerland, and Ukraine, and has held new music residencies in Berlin, Shanghai, London, Salzburg, Curitiba (Brazil), Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (U.K.), Helsinki, and the Banff Centre (Canadian Rockies). One of the most active presenters of new music in New York, Sachs founded the New Juilliard Ensemble in 1993. He produces and directs Juilliard’s annual Focus! festival, and has been artistic director of Juilliard’s concerts at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) since 1993. A member of Juilliard's music history faculty, Sachs wrote the first full biography of the American composer Henry Cowell, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Sachs often appears on radio as a commentator on recent music and has been a regular delegate to numerous international music conferences. A graduate of Harvard, Sachs received his PhD from Columbia University. In 2011, he was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard for his work in support of new music, and he received the National Gloria Artis Medal of the Polish Government for his service to Polish music. In 2002, he was given Columbia University’s Alice M. Ditson Award for his service to American music.
Violinist Stella Chen, a native of Palo Alto, California, has performed with the London and Lausanne Chamber Orchestras, Welsh National Symphony Orchestra, Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, and Boston Youth Symphony, among others. The recipient of Harvard’s Robert Levin Award to “an extraordinarily gifted undergraduate musician,” she won the top prize at the Tibor Varga competition (Switzerland) and was the youngest to win the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists. Chen has presented recitals at venues including the Kennedy Center, and the Greene Space at WQXR. She graduated from the joint Harvard/New England Conservatory Program; at Harvard she majored in psychology. Chen is now a C.V. Starr doctoral fellow at Juilliard, studying with Li Lin, Donald Weilerstein, and Catherine Cho; former teachers include Itzhak Perlman and Miriam Fried.
Regina De Vera, currently in her final year of training in Juilliard’s Drama Division, was the first Filipino to be admitted to the school’s MFA program. She completed her undergraduate degree in theater arts at the Ateneo de Manila University, where she was honored with the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts. After graduation, she joined the Tanghalang Pilipino Actors’ Company, the resident theater company of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), where she was a resident actress. In 2013, she won the PHILSTAGE Award for the Performing Arts for Outstanding Female Lead in praise of her work as Portia in a Filipino adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. She has collaborated with Filipino composer Josefino Chino Toledo in various stages of her journey, first when she was in college, and again when she joined the CCP. www.reginadevera.com
Alvin Zhu, a Young Steinway Artist, is active as a recitalist, orchestral soloist, chamber musician, and a recording artist on Steinway’s self-playing Spirio piano. He has performed in prestigious venues across four continents including Alice Tully Hall, the Sydney Opera House, the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, and the Beijing Concert Hall. His recent performances include a 15-city China tour. He judged the 2018 Franz Liszt International Piano Competition for Young Pianists in Changsha. Born in Pittsburgh, Zhu earned his BM and MM degrees in Juilliard’s accelerated five-year program, then spent a year in the Yale School of Music’s Artist Diploma program before returning to Juilliard as a C.V. Starr doctoral fellow, studying with Yoheved Kaplinsky and Julian Martin. He took a leave of absence for 2017-18 as a Fulbright scholar in China, also earning the title of “foreign expert scholar” at the Central Conservatory of Music. Zhu is now completing his DMA dissertation, the first biography of his famed grandfather Zhu Gong Yi, whose work shaped modern piano pedagogy in China before and after the Cultural Revolution.# # #
Program Listing:
Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 7:30pm, Peter Jay Sharp Theater
New Juilliard Ensemble
Joel Sachs, conductor
Stella Chen, violin
Alvin Zhu, piano
Regina De Vera, narrator
Sunbin KIM (Korea/U.S.) Four Studies on Darkness–After Mark Rothko (2018, commissioned by NJE; world premiere)
Josefino Chino TOLEDO (Philippines) Agos (2017, world premiere)
Akira NISHIMURA (Japan) Mirror of Stars (2010, first performance outside Japan)
Virko BALEY (Ukraine/U.S.) Violin Concerto No. 1, “Quasi una Fantasia” (1987)
Tickets for New Juilliard Ensemble concerts are free and available beginning September 20 at juilliard.edu/calendar. |
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