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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > December > 17
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Golden Hornet Project premieres new symphonies, including one by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood
Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopschinski — perhaps Austin’s busiest musicians and certainly some of the most prolific artists of any discipline in town — will premiere the sixth symphonies together on Feb. 6.
The duo’s Golden Hornet Project will premiere Reynolds’ ‘The Difference Engine’ and Stopschinski’s ‘Rough Night with Happy Ending.’ And Reynolds and Stopschinski will also present the Texas premiere of Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral work ‘Popcorn Superhet Receiver.’ Greenwood is the lead guitarist and keyboardist of Radiohead — and also the composer-in-residence at the BBC.
Greenwood composed his symphony for the 2007 film, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ but it was declared ineligible for an Academy Award nomination under a rule that prohibited “scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music.”
‘Golden Hornet Project Presents Symphony VI’
8 and 10:30 p.m. Feb. 6
AustinVentures StudioTheater, Ballet Austin, 501 W. Third St. Tix: $10-$60, www,goldenhornet.org
Here’s portions of the official release:
Inspired by the life and work of 19th century inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage, Reynolds’ composed ‘The Difference Engine,’ a triple concerto for violin, cello, and piano with string orchestra.
Stopschinski’s ‘Rough Night with Happy Ending’ for violins, violas, cellos, basses, percussion, harp, and piano, features Austin’s premier harpist Elaine Barber. “This symphony is a musical depiction of a long hard night with a pleasant morning sunrise,” explained Stopschinski. “ The main musical thread that ties all of the movements together is the concept of Digital Delay or Echo. Stopschinski has split the violins sections from their usual positions to 9 on the left side and 9 on the right side to enhance the echoing effects in the room.
“We are beyond excited to bring Greenwood’s piece to Texas,” noted John Riedie, executive director of Golden Hornet Project. “His avant-garde orchestral work is the perfect complement to Reynolds and Stopschinski’s world premieres: Symphony VI.”
All three compositions are string oriented, so this version of the Golden Hornet Project Symphony Orchestra will consist of 32 of Austin’s top string players, along with the musical directors on piano, electronics and effects.
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Review: Noriko Ambe: Artist Books, Linear-Action Cutting Project’
There’s a kind of irreverence to Noriko Ambe’s cut paper artworks now on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery. Slicing up artists’ catalogs - no matter that the end result makes for delicate art objects - bears an impiousness, however impish, that can’t be ignored.
Cy Twombly, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons and Hiroshi Sugimoto are among the all-male roster of superstar artists that Ambe chose, selecting a catalog or monograph by each. She then embarked on her labor-intensive process, delicately altering each page of each book with a series of cuts so that every volume is transformed into a kind of elaborate excavated version of its original form.
As critic Lilly Wei outlines in an essay that accompanies this exhibit, the Tokyo-born New York-based Ambe intended for her actions to be a collaboration of a sorts with each artist. Ambe studied each volume intensely, we’re told, to work `with them through the assimilation of their art, without the need to be personal.’
Yes, there is a certain collaborative reverence here on Ambe’s part as well as a certain cool detachment. But Ambe’s subtractions also ironically add up - however unintentionally - to a delicate riff on 20 art-world heavyweights.
In`Dot on Dots and Layers: Roy Lichtenstein,’ the seminal Pop artist gets his Ben-Day dotted cartoon-like images punctured even more by Ambe’s drilled holes. Ambe adds more sprawl to Twombly’s random sprawling scrawls with random incisions of her own.
The pages of Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’ are mined to the core as if to reach some ultimate source behind the work of the enigmatic German artist. And with ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever: Damien Hirst,’ the British prankster known for sticking a dead shark in a vitrine of formaldehyde, will find his monograph volume chopped and stuffed into a short grey filing cabinet.
The current exhibit is curated by New York-based collector Glenn Fuhrman. (Fuhrman is the co-founder of MSD Capital, Michael Dell’s investment fund. Fuhrman’s FLAG Art Foundation in New York presents exhibits of contemporary art and co-produced the catalog to the current show which will go on exhibit there in 2010.)
Ambe certainly performs a collaboration with her honored roster. But in a brilliant stroke, she slices into something deeper as well.
‘Noriko Ambe: Artist Books, Linear-Action Cutting Project’
11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Dec. 31, Lora Reynolds Gallery, 360 Nueces St. www.lorareynolds.com
Image: Noriko Ambe, ‘Diamond Dust Shoes: Andy Warhol, 2009.’ Courtesy Lora Reynolds Gallery.
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Vortex nets $15,000 NEA grant
The National Endowment for the Arts is beginning to make its list of FY 2010 grant recipients.
Long-time Austin indie theater Vortex Repertory Company has been awarded $15,000 in from the NEA’s Access to Artistic Excellence grant program for ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ an original musical by Vortex founder Bonnie Cullum and theater artist Content Love Knowles.
The grant will fund a new production of the all-ages musical that was first performed at the Vortex in 2005. Dance, music and storytelling weave together Cullum’s and Knowles’ feminist adaptation of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale.
