Modern classical music series with a Parisian flair at Ringling Museum

Through most of its first eight seasons, ensembleNEWSRQ has put a focus on contemporary American classical music, providing opportunities for Sarasota area musicians and special guests to introduce audiences to music and composers they don’t normally get to hear.

For its eighth season finale, the group known as enSRQ is taking on a French flair with an ambitious series of four distinct programs for The Ringling’s Art of Performance series.

“Parisian Refraction” ties into the performance series’ season-long Francophone focus and features music by composers whose work grew out of experiences in Paris, were commissioned by arts groups in the City of Light or who grew up there.

“Paris has been such a huge influence in contemporary music,” said percussionist George Nickson, citing such composers as Debussey, Ravel, Satie and Les Six, a group of six early 20th-century composers.

“It has continued through to the present day,” he said. “Paris has its own modernist bent through art. It always has the role of the provocateur, very rebellious in a way and we wanted to draw on Paris and how Paris has changed composers.”

Nickson co-founded enSRQ with his wife, violinist Samantha Bennett, while both were playing with the Sarasota Orchestra. They have since moved to Dallas where he is principal percussion for the Dallas Symphony and she plays for the Dallas Opera Orchestra, but they continue to lead the Sarasota-based program.

Bennett said as soon as Elizabeth Doud, curator of performance for the museum, mentioned the idea, “we knew we wanted to do a festival-style event, with a few performances in a short period of time with a number of guest artists.”

The series will run May 9-11 with four different concerts. The first and last will feature multiple pieces performed by a resident ensemble chamber orchestra, including many of the Sarasota area musicians who have become fixtures of the group’s concerts. The other two concerts will be more intimate programs. Nickson and Bennett recently presented the same programs in Dallas with a different ensemble of musicians.

Much of the programming ties into the major influence of composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, a one-time music director of the New York Philharmonic.

“He is the de facto musical king of Paris,” Nickson said. Boulez started the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, known as IRCAM, a center for musical research that brought composers together, and Ensemble Intercomtemporain, a major symphony orchestra in Paris that only plays works of new composers and what Nickson calls “super adventurous projects. They are incubators for all these things and the nucleus around which musical life revolves in Paris.”

Two of the composers featured in the series, Unsuk Chin and Kaija Saariaho, worked with both institutions and wrote pieces for Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Nickson and Bennett said they are trying to explore the sound of contemporary European music and how it is distinct from what their audiences have come to hear in American compositions in past programs.

Here’s a look at the four concerts.

Programme 1, 7:30 p.m. May 9

The opening concert will feature two pieces by Unsuk Chin – “Acoustic Wordplay” and “Double Concerto for Piano and Percussion.” Chin is a South Korea-born composer who studied with composer György Ligeti in Hamburg and now lives in Berlin. In between will be Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s “Graal Theatre,” a concerto for violin and orchestra.

Programme 2, 7:30 p.m. May 10

Pianist Conor Hanick, who has performed in past enSRQ programs, will play Hans Otte’s “Das Buch Der Klange” (Book of Sounds). “It’s routinely considered one of the most beautiful piano pieces of the 20th century,” Nickson said. “It’s an unbelievably deep, meditative exploration of beauty. It’s something people wouldn’t expect from a concert of other contemporary music because there is absolute tonality.” Hanick also will perform in the first and fourth concerts.

Arts Newsletter: Sign up to receive the latest news on the Sarasota area arts scene every Monday

Theater, music, art, dance and more: 40+ Arts events in May in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties

Programme 3, 2 p.m. May 11

Samantha Bennett will join soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon for György Kurtag’s “Kafka Fragments,” inspired by the composer’s meetings with art psychologist Marienne Stein, to whom he dedicated the composition. “These are unbelievable masterpieces and takes a specific person to perform and we’re happy to have Lucy with us,” Nickson said. Kurtag also was a student of Ligeti in Budapest.

Programme 4, 7:30 p.m. May 11

The final concert features the chamber orchestra performing “Klang Hour Two – Freude,” part of a cycle of compositions that Karlheinz Stockhausen created to capture the sounds of 24 hours in a day. He died in 2007 with three of the hours unfinished. It will be paired with Boulez’s “Sur Incises,” which had its premiere in 1998. It is a two-movement work for three pianos, three harps and three percussion.

‘Parisian Refraction’

Tickets are $30-$40 (with discounts for museum members). Performances are in the Historic Asolo Theater, 5401 Bay Shore Rd., Sarasota. 941-360-7399; ringling.org/event/enemblenewsrq

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Musicians take on a Parisian flair for Ringling Museum concerts