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Michael Gordon’s remarkable and critically acclaimed work for orchestra, Decasia, receives its United Kingdom premiere on October 14 during the Southbank Centre’s Ether Festival.

In Decasia, Gordon transforms the sound of the orchestra into a hazy and blurred sonic experience, as if it were “covered in cobwebs, with instruments that had been sitting for a hundred years, creaky and warped and deteriorated, and the musicians happen to come by, pick them up and play.”

Inspired by images from decaying archival film uncovered by filmmaker Bill Morrison, Gordon’s Decasia is an orchestral masterwork for the 21st century…

DAVID LANG first heard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the San Francisco Opera in 1974, as an undergraduate student and aspiring composer. This was the first opera ticket — standing room — that he had paid for with his own money, and he arrived well prepared, with a copy of the score and a flashlight to study it by.

“It was a really big deal for me,” Mr. Lang, now 55, said recently, sitting on a sofa in his light-flooded SoHo loft while two parakeets called noisily for attention from another room…

David Lang’s newest work, the whisper opera, receives its world premiere on May 30 at the MCA in Chicago by the International Contemporary Ensemble with Tony Arnold as solo soprano.

This one-of-a-kind work is performed with the musicians, singer, and audience enclosed in an intimate, onstage set. Composed for flute, clarinet, percussion, cello, and solo soprano, the music and the environment work together to convey themes of secrets, and the tension between what we hide and what we choose to reveal…

From July 20 through August 22, 2013 Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, NY stages 2 works by David Lang, directed by Francesca Zambello. His Pulitzer Prize-winning choral work, the little match girl passion and a new work, when we were children, commissioned specifically for this performance by Glimmerglass Opera.

August 10 – 13 Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival and the International Contemporary Ensemble (Tony Arnold, soprano) present the New York premiere of David Lang’s the whisper opera for soprano and four instrumentalists, directed by Jim Findlay…

Secrets Found Online, Shared Softly
David Lang’s ‘whisper opera’ Mines Truths From the Web
By WILLIAM ROBIN, August 2, 2013
Opera and technology have long had an uneasy relationship. The one has always required the other — from the Baroque spectacle of 17th-century operas, with their deus-ex-machina gimmickry, to the stagecraft required to mount any contemporary production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

Historically, though, opera tended to avoid confronting the technological head-on…

Material
world premiere
May 11-12
Miller Theatre

A new concert-length work for 2 pianists and 2 percussionists; an immersive environment for a uniquely intimate, multisensory series of four portrait concerts over two nights at Columbia University’s legendary new-music mecca!

Columbia University’s iconic Miller Theatre presents the next installment of their Portrait concerts on May 11 and 12, with a new 90-minute world premiere, called Material, for two pianos and two percussionists, performed by New York City’s Yarn/Wire…