Works & Process at the Guggenheim Announces Holiday Concert in the Rotunda

Sunday, December 18 and Monday, December 19, 2016 at 7:00 pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents the annual Holiday Concert featuring New York composers and a World Premiere Commission by Grawemeyer Award-winning Composer Sebastian Currier. Celebrate the season with the joyous sounds of holiday music in the museum's iconic rotunda. George Steel conducts the Vox Vocal Ensemble in what has become a revered annual tradition.

The Agnes Martin exhibition will be view in the rotunda.

2016 Works & Process Holiday Concert Program:
Music by New York Composers
Sebastian Currier - Blake Fragments (world premiere W&P Commission)
John Corigliano - Christmas at the Cloisters
George Steel - The Three Kings (W&P commission, 2013)

Traditional Holiday Music:
The Holly and the Ivy - trad, arr. Sir H. W. Davies (1869-1941)
Hodie Christus natus est - J. P. Sweelinck (1562-1621)
Puer Natus in Bethlehem - S. Scheidt
Coventry Carol - anon., 16th century
In the Bleak Midwinter - Harold Darke

Carols for All to Sing:
Joy to the World
Hark the Herald Angels Sing
O Come All Ye Faithful
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Once in Royal David's City

Tickets & Venue
Floor Seating: $40, $35 members and Friends of Works & Process
Ramp Standing: $20, $15 members and Friends of Works & Process
Box Office (212) 423-3575, (M-F, 1-5pm) or online at worksandprocess.org
Peter B. Lewis Theater
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York

Heralded as "music with a distinctive voice" by the New York Times and as "lyrical, colorful, firmly rooted in tradition, but absolutely new" by the Washington Post, Sebastian Currier's music has been performed at major venues worldwide by acclaimed artists and orchestras, including Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the Kronos Quartet. He is recently the recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. His music has been enthusiastically embraced by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom he wrote Time Machines, which she premiered with the New York Philharmonic in June 2011 and Aftersong. A critic from the London Times said, "if all his pieces are as emotionally charged and ingenious in their use of rethought tonality as this, give me more." His orchestra piece, Divisions, was recently premiered by the Seattle Symphony, conducted by Ludovic Morlot, and will be performed by the Boston Symphony both in Boston and New York, conducted by Andris Nelsons. His Microsymph, referred to by the composer as a large-scale symphony that has been squeezed into only ten minutes, was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and premiered at Carnegie Hall. It has also been performed by such orchestras as the San Francisco Symphony, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, the BBC Wales Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra, and has been recorded by the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra with Hugh Wolff, conductor. He has received many awards including the Berlin Prize, Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has held residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. He received a DMA from the Juilliard School and from 1999-2007 taught at Columbia University. He is currently Artist in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey.

The American John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and
most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years.
Corigliano's scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, the
Grawemeyer Award, four Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award ("Oscar") and have
been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and
chamber musicians in the world. Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined
imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and
redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much from the post-war European
avant garde as from his American forebears. Perhaps one of the most important symphonists of his era, Corigliano has to date written three symphonies, each a landscape unto itself. Scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles, Corigliano's ambitious, extravagant, and grandly barbarous Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004) was commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin Wind Ensemble, who presented it on their 2008 tour in Europe and gave its New York première in 2005 at Carnegie Hall. Naxos releases its stereo recording of Circus Maximus in January 2009, and has chosen the work as its début recording in its upcoming Blu-Ray format. Symphony No. 2 (2001), a rethinking and expansion of the surreal and virtuosic String Quartet (1995), was introduced by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2000 and earned him the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Symphony No. 1 (1991), commissioned by Meet the Composer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was composer-in-residence, channeled Corigliano's personal grief over the loss of friends to the AIDS crisis into music of immense power, color, drama, and scope: performed worldwide by over 150 orchestras and twice recorded, this symphony earned him the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

George Steel is a NYC based musician who has been working in New York and around the world for 25 years as a conductor, a composer, a producer, a singer, a pianist, a musicologist, and a teacher. He is founder and conductor of two groups, the Vox Vocal Ensemble (1990) and the Gotham City Orchestra (1998). Some of his notable concerts include Stravinsky's orchestral music at the Park Avenue Armory, Bach's B-Minor Mass in New York and at Caramoor, Feldman's Rothko Chapel in a live radio broadcast, "Treasures of the Sarum Rite" with the Trinity Church choir, and an all-John Zorn program in Helsinki with the Avanti! Orchestra. Steel is active as a composer of both concert music and musical theater. In 2016, for his work as a composer/lyricist, Steel was awarded the BMI Jerry Harrington Award "for outstanding creative achievement in musical theater.". His commissioned concert work "The Three Kings" received its premiere in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in 2012. The New York Times described it as "a raucous dance party, complete with percussion outbursts and syncopated brass rhythms."

The Vox Vocal Ensemble, called "superb" by the New York Times, was founded by George Steel in 1992 to perform the music of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Since that time, Vox has become one of the most sought-after vocal ensembles in New York, performing in such varied contexts as an all-Stravinksy festival at the Park Avenue Armory, acclaimed performances of Bach's Mass in B minor in New York City and at Caramoor, and in a Nico Muhly portrait concert at Carnegie Hall.

Works & Process at the Guggenheim
For over 31 years and in over 400 productions, New Yorkers have been able to see, hear, and meet the most acclaimed artists in the world, in an intimate setting unlike any other. Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, has championed new works and offered audiences unprecedented access to generations of leading creators and performers. Each performance takes place in the Guggenheim's intimate Frank Lloyd Wright-designed 285-seat Peter B. Lewis Theater. Described bythe New York Times as "an exceptional opportunity to understand something of the creative process," Works & Process is produced by founder Mary Sharp Cronson. worksandprocess.org.