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Judith Berkson presents new music for piano and voice exploring microtonal tuning.
Mezzo soprano, pianist and composer Judith Berkson uses voices along with analog and digital keyboards to create pieces that cross the boundaries of classical, electronic and experimental music.
From the age of five she studied classical piano. As a teenager she was drawn to the experimental composers, "the avant-gardists and the people working with extended technique. I liked the challenge of that" but also worked at singing art songs from Schubert to Schoenberg.
Singing and playing in jazz and experimental bands through the late 1990s, she curtailed much of this activity in the early 21st century to concentrate primarily on solo performance, looking anew at the possibilities for voice with keyboard accompaniment, and has come up with an approach entirely her own, and one which can encompass the full range of her musical interests.
Her solo album "Oylam", released on ECM Records, reflects a variety of musical directions and was described as "Standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences, a beautiful Satie-like piece to open and close the record. I can't get enough of it." (New York Times). Her debut album "Lu-Lu" was released by Peacock Records in 2008.
In 2012 she completed "The Vienna Rite," a chamber opera based on the friendship between composer Franz Schubert and the Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer. The opera was presented by Roulette in 2012 with costumes and set design by Audrey Robinson. She is currently working on a new chamber opera for Experiments In Opera's Story Binge Festival in April 2015 at Roulette.
She has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, City Opera, and has performed works by Chaya Czernowin, Joe Maneri, Rick Burkhardt, Gerard Pape, Julia Werntz, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and Milton Babbitt. She has collaborated on Yiddish folk music with Theodore Bikel and has presented solo works at the Picasso Museum Malaga, Le Poisson Rouge, Roulette and the Concertgebouw. She has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, Six Points, Meet the Composer and New Music USA.
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LocationSpectrum NYC (View)
121 Ludlow St
Manhattan, NY 10002
United States
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