Evolution Contemporary Music Series

There's a guerrilla in the room. He's tall and thin and his hair is stuffed under a wool cap, and he's scowling around the circle of musicians assembled in a fourth-floor studio at MICA's Brown Center on a late February evening, making forceful gestures. As various players advance knotty improvised solo lines into the ongoing mix of sounds and textures, the guerrilla jabs an index finger at a saxophonist, then at a cellist, and then back, whereupon the players start tossing phrases back and forth. He faces the upright bassist and gives him a "thumbs up" sign, at which the bassist suddenly stops playing...→Read more

Every year, the American Academy in Rome selects a handful of American composers to come study in the Eternal City for a year. The Rome Prize is a big deal in the galaxy of competitions, fellowships, and prizes that help make up the classical-music universe (Samuel Barber won twice)...→Read more

Composer and Evolution Series founder and director Judah Adashi was featured on WYPR's "Maryland Morning," discussing his own music and, in the second half of the interview, the Evolution Series.→Read more

On Tuesday evening at An die Musik, the Evolution Contemporary Music Series goes where few local organizations have dared go before -- contemporary Finland. Works by two very big names on the composer front, Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg, will be performed, along with music by Esa-Pekka Salonen...→Read more

Perhaps no composer is as closely identified with his or her native country as Jean Sibelius is with Finland. He not only defines Finnish culture for many throughout the world, he literally helped define it with a host of renowned pieces based on his country's landscape and myths...→Read more

One week ago, the Evolution Contemporary Music Series presented a program titled Across the Pond, featuring works by Knussen, Harvey, Birtwistle, Adès, and a world premiere by Peabody professor Oscar Bettison. The Evolution Series uses the intimate space of Baltimore’s An Die Musik LIVE!, where instead of cramped seating, rows of pink overstuffed chairs help create the intimate atmosphere of a salon. Evolution Series director Judah Adashi mentioned that English contemporary music, as with its predecessors, characteristically calls for a high degree of quiet introspection, making this venue particularly well suited for this program. To set the mood, Vaughan Williams’s instrospective Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis was quietly piped through onstage speakers prior to the performance...→Read more

Judah Adashi was thinking about music—not unusual, since he teaches at the Peabody Institute. He had noticed a lack of concert series and ensembles devoted to the music of living composers. “People are doing everything under the sun,” he says, “but if you go to a symphony concert probably one of the latest pieces you’ll hear is Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring”—which premiered in 1913...→Read more

Concert halls rarely go more than a week or two without multiple pieces of music from German, Austrian, French, or Russian composers on the bill. Pieces by English composers are fewer and farther between, however, and pieces by English composers more contemporary than early 20th-century eminences like Britten and Vaughan Williams scarcer still...→Read more

Has Baltimore become a haven for new music? It sure looks that way.

"I've always been optimistic about new music here," says Baltimore-born, Peabody-trained composer Judah Adashi, founder of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series.

"I'd definitely say that, with our series, Mobtown Modern, what Marin [Alsop] is doing at the BSO, and the High Zero Festival, we have a vibrant scene going. You might find something like this on every street corner in New York, but given the relative size of our town, there are really dynamic things on almost any given night," Adashi says. →Read more

In the space of about two hours last night, pianist Amy Briggs dove into the daunting field of modern American music -- at one point, nose-first (literally) -- and demonstrated the diverse richness of that repertoire in brilliant fashion. →Read more

Founded and directed by An die Musik's composer-in-residence, Judah Adashi, the Evolution project has added a welcome dose of newness to the local concert scene. This particular venture was rich in unusual experiences. →Read more

Baltimore doesn't have a thriving new music scene, but it got a welcome boost with the arrival last year of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An die Musik, run by composer Judah Adashi. For its season-opening concert Friday night, the series offered a heady and hefty sampling of American piano music from the past 25 years. I caught the first half of the program, which included two particularly impressive achievements. →Read more

Like prophets, some composers don't get heard often enough. British-born Nicholas Maw, a longtime Washington resident and faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory, should be a household name here. This composer of uncompromising seriousness, extraordinary imagination and uncommon expressive weight is hardly ever acknowledged locally. →Read more