INTRODUCING COMPOSER AND PIANIST ALLA COHEN
An Evening Of
THE MUSIC OF ALLA COHEN
Thursday, February 12 at 7:30 p.m.
Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at The Boston Center for the Arts
Wimberly Theatre
Tickets on Sale Friday, November 7 at Noon
“The relentless intensity of Alla Cohen's music, its characteristic texture and powerful urgency, reveal a composer whose music emerges from the deepest sourses of passion and engagement. Her expressive dynamic is matched by her technical mastery and by her high-minded aesthetic. There is no compromise here. This is music that simply must be.” --Yehudi Wyner
Alla Elana Cohen is a distinguished composer, pianist, music theorist and teacher who came to the United States from Russia in 1989. She is a sought-after faculty member of both New England Conservatory of Music and Berklee College of Music and composes and performs powerful contemporary concert music.
Thursday, February 12, 2009 will mark Alla Cohen’s first ticketed American public concert at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for The Arts’ Virginia Wimberly Theatre, located at 527 Tremont Street, in Boston’s chic and artsy South End. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets at $24.50 [orchestra] ,$18.50 [balcony] and $15.00 for students [balcony] will go on sale on Friday, November 7 at noon at the Box Office at the Calderwood Pavilion [527 Tremont Street, Boston], at the Box Office at the Boston University Theatre [264 Huntington Avenue], on line at www.BostonTheatreScene.com and by phone by calling 617-933-8600. For more information, call 617-933-8600.
Performing with pianist Alla Cohen on February 12th will be cellist Sebastian Baverstam, violinist Laura Keller, violinist Marissa Licata, violinist Ethan Wood and violist Laura Krentzman. Several other musicians will also perform; they will be announced soon.
Cohen’s new CD, entitled Dedications, contains two of her string quartets as well as compositions for cello and piano, for violin and piano, for solo cello and for trio, featuring violin, cello and piano. The CD was just released this fall. A second CD, Jupiter Duo, recorded in Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory is also under way, and will be released later in 2009. This recording will contain pieces for cello and piano and piano solo as well. The Music of Alla Cohen concert on February 12 will reflect both CDs but will also be highlighted by new material, which has not yet been released. Audio samples of her work can be heard at www.allacohen.com. Dedications is available for purchase through Ms. Cohen’s website and the CD will also be available at the February 12 concert.
As a composer, she works in all genres of orchestral, chamber and operatic music and has an extensive repertoire and catalogue of music. Her unique compositions have been performed with much success both in Russia and in the United States. In Soviet Russia, Cohen was a prize winner of the National Young Composers' Competition and also a participant at the National Young Composers Festivals. In the United States, she has further been recognized by ASCAP, having been annually awarded ASCAPLUS Awards during all her years of membership; she has in addition received a number of commissions from The Music Teachers National Association.
http://web.me.com/sueauclair/The_Music_of_Alla_Cohen/Calderwood_Concert.html
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1 comment:
Hi Arnaldo, your post about Alla is great, and it should be a really exciting concert. I'd like to post here what I wrote about her after hearing a rehearsal. Thanks, J. Bachour
Beethoven, Boulanger, or both?
-Joseph A. Bachour
February 1, 2009
A composer on the level of Mozart or Beethoven. A master teacher that gives birth to a new school of great composers. These two are one, and they both reside in Boston.
After hearing rehearsals for Alla Cohen’s upcoming concert at the Wimberly Theater at the BCA in the South End on February 12, I see that Boston has a great composer in its midst who has the potential to change the future of music. After studying composition with Alla Cohen, and watching her other composition students, I know that a new, great school of music is forming out of Boston, and it too will change the future of music.
“There is no compromise here. This is music that simply must be,” says Yehudi Wyner, another great Boston composer, about Alla Cohen’s music on her event poster, and he is right. This is music that comes from a complete musical master, and is itself complete. The power of Cohen’s music is at one and the same time intense and sublime. It is immensely engaging, very energetic and generously shares its deeply connected passion with the listener. It has qualities not recently seen in classical music. It is unique.
This is music that moves us again, and this is where music is today. In the great arch of classical music that stretches from the middle ages, this is the next segment. We see now, though, that the great arch is more like a sine curve, because it goes up again with Alla Cohen. As things dipped in the last century, Shostakovich died, experiments were tried, and searchings and systems plied a way toward obscurity. With Cohen, we see that we have passed the trough. The wave begins to gain again.
Coming from the Moscow Conservatory at a time when it was at its peak, Alla Cohen began to teach in Boston. The Moscow Conservatory was at that time the acropolis of music, and produced some of the greatest musical talents in history. Alla Cohen is one of those. She is a remarkable artist, musician and performer. One must really know and work with Alla, to realize that the level of her musical abilities is such that America has not often known. What is also remarkable is her ability to impart that talent to her composition students. The achievements of her composition students, young and old, are great enough to be considered a successful musical career. There is being created a great new school of composition from her studio here in Boston.
How sorry those people seem who squabbled over Beethoven’s affairs before and after his death. How strange that Mozart’s body was laid in a pauper’s grave. It seemed that great music was a natural part of the world, and that great composers and teachers would keep coming and giving. Would that the world treated its great musicians as the treasure they are. Grateful are we that they did keep coming, if even intermittently, and lucky are we to have a very talented and giving one right here in Boston.
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