Event Details
Without a doubt, the 28th Annual MATA Festival is the liveliest and most interesting musical event happening in NYC on Memorial Day weekend, May 21 - 23. Ever since the Festival was co-founded by Philip Glass in the 1990s, it has been the prime opportunity for concertgoers to hear “Tomorrow’s Music Today.”
This year’s programs are fascinating and provocative – tap-dancing to music by Morton Feldman and Steve Reich, anyone? – and the performers are top-notch, including violinists Miranda Cuckson, Conrad Harris, and Leah Asher, pianists Marilyn Nonken and Taka Kigawa, BlackBox Ensemble, Unnameable Strings, and tap/pointe dance company The Bang Group, among others. Plus, there’s a six-hour experimental “rave” on May 20! All in all, the MATA Festival is not to be missed.
Like the rugmakers he so admired, Feldman eschewed formal systems, preferring to work intuitively. Strings take center stage in this program of extended-duration works. Unnameable Strings perform an eponymous piece by ensemble members Ana Luisa Diaz de Cossio and Jennifer Gersten, scored for four violins, viola, three cellos, and bass. Zosha Warpeha performs Basalt on the Hardanger d’Amore, a modern Norwegian instrument with five bowed and five sympathetic strings, joined by co-composer Tristan Kasten-Krause on contrabass. Composer/cellist Laura Raquel Cetilia performs her Layers Turn Liquid with fellow cellist Julie Kim, plus Marilyn Nonken and Taka Kigawa on pianos. Nonken and Kigawa join violinist Conrad Harris for the evening’s final piece, Bunita Marcus’s mesmerizing Two Pianos and Violin.