Live classical music returns to Tippet Rise!
December 9, 2021
As the shortest day of the year approaches, we delight in this time of hushed winter light and the Montana landscape cast in snow. We also take pleasure in thoughts of summer, perhaps especially this coming summer because it means the return of live music and world premieres to the art center! 2022 will also bring the addition of four new sculptures to the Tippet Rise collection. Please read on for details.
A Season of Live Music Making
Our seventh concert season, from August 26 through September 25, will present more than fifteen performances on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, including three world premieres of Tippet Rise commissions. Complete program details will be announced on the Tippet Rise website and through our e-newsletter in early 2022. Concert tickets, priced at $10, free to those 21 and under, will again be available through a randomized drawing; registration for the drawing will open on the Tippet Rise website in the spring. If you don’t already subscribe to our e-newsletter please do! It’s the easiest way to track the latest ticketing information and other news from Tippet Rise.
Hiking and Biking at Tippet Rise
Season Seven at Tippet Rise will also see guests hiking and cycling from sculpture to sculpture across the art center’s rolling landscape. Tippet Rise will be open for these self-guided adventures on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays beginning June 10. Hiking and biking at the art center remain free for everyone. Prior registration, available on the Tippet Rise website in spring 2022, is required for all visitors.
Details on 2022’s Concerts
The seventh concert season will feature four world premieres, three of them Tippet Rise commissions. Composer Reena Esmail’s 2022 Tippet Rise Commission for Solo Cello will be performed by Arlen Hlusko. Bojan Louis’s 2021 Tippet Rise Commission for Violin, Scordatura: Dólii, will be performed by Johnny Gandelsman. Fred Hersch’s Tippet Rise Commission for Piano will be performed by Pedja Mužijević. Mužijević will also perform the world premiere of excerpts from Gregory Spears’ Seven Days. This year Tippet Rise is also celebrating a GRAMMY nomination for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for John Luther Adams’s 2019 Tippet Rise commission, Lines Made By Walking (String Quartet No. 5), performed by the JACK Quartet.
The season will showcase a number of musicians making their Tippet Rise debuts. They include: Moscow-born pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, who first made waves in the classical music world as the 2010 Chopin Competition First Prize winner; Hungarian pianist Zoltán Fejérvári, who won first prize at the 2017 Concours musical international de Montréal; one of today’s most revered American recitalists, pianist Richard Goode; Auckland violinist and recipient of a 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Geneva Lewis; flutist Alex Sopp, who has toured and recorded with songwriters including Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and St. Vincent, among others; and the Aizuri Quartet, recipients of the Grand Prize and the CAG Management Prize at the 2018 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition and whose debut album received a GRAMMY nomination.
Returning to perform at Tippet Rise this year will be Sandbox Percussion, a leading proponent of contemporary percussion chamber music, whose performance of Andy Akiho’s work Seven Pillars is nominated for a 2022 GRAMMY Award. Tippet Rise executive produced and co-presented the digital world premiere of this bold, genre-defying work, which is also nominated in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category. The season will also see the return of Avery Fisher Career Grant winner, violinist Jennifer Frautschi; GRAMMY-winning cellist Arlen Hlusko; flutist Brandon Patrick George, one of America’s leading flute soloists and chamber musicians, and a member of the 2021 GRAMMY -nominated Imani Winds; pianist Pedja Mužijević, who is also artistic advisor to Tippet Rise and artistic administrator of the Baryshnikov Arts Center; Canada’s Gryphon Trio, winner of three Juno Awards for Classical Album of the Year; and the internationally acclaimed Calidore String Quartet, who is currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program.
Four New Sculptures at Tippet Rise
In July, Patrick Dougherty will return to the art center to reimagine his work, Daydreams. While the interior of the reproduction schoolhouse will remain the same, Dougherty will remake the outdoor installation of branches into a new and extraordinary tangle of sticks. Another new site-specific work that our guests will experience this summer is Folds by Ensamble Studio: 16 concrete seats, inspired by and cast from draped canvas, will be installed across the art center’s rolling landscape. We are also honored to announce that Ai Weiwei’s Iron Tree and Mark di Suvero’s Whale’s Cry will join the Tippet Rise collection. Iron Tree will be installed on a rise; from a distance, it will blend, as a tree, into the landscape. Mark’s Whale’s Cry features a dynamic steel sculpture with a kinetic element, like his Beethoven’s Quartet and Proverb, which we are also grateful to have in place at Tippet Rise.
A Message from Our Co-Founders
“As we’ve all learned over the last few years, reality has its charms. Actually being there is even better than Zoom or YouTube,” say Tippet Rise co-founders Peter and Cathy Halstead. “And there’s something about being together at a concert that adds a conspiratorial shiver to the music. It’s as if Beethoven is actually in the room. We plan to be surprised (if that’s feasible) by whatever Patrick Dougherty decides to add to his already mysterious and absorbing Daydreams, and by new pieces by Ensamble Studio, Mark di Suvero, and Ai Weiwei that will somehow make the sky even bigger. Please come this summer and prepare to be bewitched and bewildered by wilderness, by hearing Schubert’s Viennese drawing room music (for instance) in the great outdoors. We look forward to seeing you all!”