Building on the success of its first two iterations, New York City’s Momenta Quartet, praised by The New York Times for its “diligence, curiosity, and excellence,” announces its Momenta Festival III, October 1 – 4, 2017. For the first time this year all festival performances will be free of charge.
The festival comprises four distinctively themed concerts at four unique Manhattan venues, each one curated by a different member of the ensemble: violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron, founding violist Stephanie Griffin, cellist Michael Haas, and violinist Alex Shiozaki. With music by seventeen composers, and performances by eight guest artists, the festival reflects the ensemble’s celebration of contemporary music along with its abiding love for the classical canon.

Forces of Creation, curated by violist Alex Shiozaki, presents the physical, psychological, geological, and mythological forms of creation and destruction. The physical universe is represented by Hiroya Miura’s quartetSingularity, written for the Momenta Quartet in 2012. Taking its inspiration from the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang, Singularity carries the listener through the almost-vacuum of space, capturing the chaos of the fossil radiation through harmonic and metric dissonances, as well as ghostly motives that echo throughout the ensemble. From the theoretical cosmos we descend into the psychological night of Per Nørgård’s String Quartet No. 8, “Night Descending Like Smoke.” It paints the destructive side of man through its five movements: the yearnful “Prologue – Eulogy”; the brutish and militaristic “Man -Animal”; the unfaltering “Voyage”; the anxious and titular “Night Descending”; and the “Epilogue – Elegy”. Through the use of microtones, the quartet explores the transformation of man in the face of an unstoppable force. In a return to the physical world, João Pedro Oliveira’s Magma depicts the creation and transformation of volcanic lava from liquid to rock. Exploring all the timbral colors available to the violin, Magma continues to boil underneath even as the surface solidifies.
African mythology is the source of Darius Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, and his chosen musical idiom is jazz – at least, his version of it. The ballet portrays the creation of the world by African gods, bringing to life trees, animals, and mankind, and ending with a couple on stage to represent desire and procreation. In addition to the 17-instrument orchestral ballet, Milhaud created a version for piano quintet. For this performance, Momenta will be joined by pianist Nana Shi (right), Mr. Shiozaki’s longtime duo partner and his wife.
PROGRAM
Hiroya Miura: Singularity (2012, rev. 2017) world premiere of revised version
Per Nørgård: String Quartet No. 8 “Night Descending Like Smoke” (1995-97)
João Pedro Oliveira: Magma, for violin and electronics (2014)
Darius Milhaud: La création du monde, op. 81b for piano quintet (1923) (with Shi)