Tickets
General Ticket: $25
Join us in celebrating the return of the much-loved Reflections in Music series with Turning Points, a program in which each work represents a pivotal moment — personal, artistic, or historical — that changed the course of music and of the composer who created it. Bruce Wolosoff, artistic director, pianist, and composer, is joined by esteemed musicians, composers, and performers Narek Arutyunian (clarinet), Deborah Buck (violin), and Clarice Jensen (cello and electronics) to weave together works spanning three centuries, each marking a distinct turning point.
The performance opens with the Liturgie de Cristal from Olivier Messiaen’s masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time, a work composed while he was being held in a Nazi prison camp during World War II. Messiaen explored new approaches to musical time, to tonal organization, and extensively used bird song in his music. This theme of transformation continues with Ferruccio Busoni's Elegy No. 1, After the Crisis, a solo piano work written during a period of artistic change. The composer disavowed all of his earlier work after composing the Elegies.
Contemporary voices speak through Clarice Jensen's new work for cello and electronics, exploring the intersection of classical music and technology. Bruce Wolosoff's blues for the new millennium, commissioned by the Smithsonian to mark the transition into the 21st century, bridges classical and blues idioms. The Washington Post noted that it "really does sound like a turning point" — and, indeed, it marked a shift in Wolosoff's compositional approach, introducing blues elements that would become part of his musical language.
Bach's Gavotte from the E Major Partita serves as a historical cornerstone in the development of solo violin repertoire. The program returns to Messiaen with Abîme des Oiseaux, the profound solo clarinet movement from Quartet for the End of Time, before concluding with Ástor Piazzolla's Spring movement from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires — a work that reimagines Vivaldi's baroque masterpiece through the lens of nuevo tango, a turning point in the fusion of low and high art. We are reminded in this work that the change of seasons is always a point of transition in our lives.
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Reflections is a 501(c)3 nonprofit which hopes to bring the appreciation of classical music to new audiences and to spark new ways of thinking about and engaging with the classical music experience to those who are already music lovers. For more information visit reflectionsinmusic.org.
NAREK ARUTYUNIAN
Clarinet
Photo by Keith Saunders
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Clarinetist Narek Arutyunian is an artist who ”reaches passionate depths with seemingly effortless technical prowess and beguiling sensitivity” (The Washington Post). As a soloist, his performances include Copland’s Clarinet Concerto with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Alice Tully Hall; Artie Shaw’s Concerto for Clarinet with the Boston Pops; Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 with Oregon’s Newport Symphony, and others with the Rockford Symphony Orchestra in Illinois and New York’s St. Thomas Orchestra. Appearances also include those with Prague Radio Symphony, the Kaliningrad Philharmonic, the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, and the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra. He has recorded Weber’s Concertino for Clarinet with the New Russia State Symphony Orchestra.
As first-prize winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Narek was presented at debut recitals at Merkin Hall in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He has also performed at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York; Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; and for the Washington Center for the Performing Arts, Lied Center of Kansas, Buffalo Chamber Music Society, Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota, Fla., Weis Center for the Performing Arts, and Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. In recent seasons he has performed as soloist with the Riverside Symphony at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and the Bard Festival Orchestra at Fisher Center, and in recital at the Harvard Club, Ithaca College, and Evergreen Museum and Library in Baltimore. This season, Narek will perform as soloist with the Edmonton Symphony in Canada and in recital at Brownville Concert Series in Nebraska.
Narek has performed extensively in Australia, Asia, and Europe, including at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Palazzo del Principe in Genoa. He has appeared at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, Juilliard’s ChamberFest, the New York Festival of Song, Bard Music Festival, Bridgehampton Music Festival, Krzyżowa-Music festival in Poland, and Germany’s Usedomer Musikfestival. He has also performed as both a clarinetist and klezmer soloist for the Fiddler on the Roof in a Yiddish off-Broadway production. In addition, Narek recently performed and spoke at the State House in Boston for the 104th Anniversary Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide.
Narek was born in Armenia, and his family moved to Moscow when he was three. As a teenager, he won first prizes in the International Young Musicians Competition in Prague and the Musical Youth of the Planet Competition in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory as a student of Evgeny Petrov, received a bachelor’s degree from the Juilliard School, where he worked with Charles Neidich, and then earned a master’s degree with Neidich at the Manhattan School of Music on a Leon Russianoff Memorial Scholarship.
DEBORAH BUCK
Violin
Photo by Matt Dine
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Praised by The Strad for her “surpassing degree of imagination and vibrant sound,” violinist Deborah Buck has built a rich and varied musical career as a chamber musician — including 17 years with the celebrated Lark Quartet — as well as a concertmaster, pedagogue, soloist, recording artist, and artistic director.
Highlights of recent performances and exciting projects include recitals with pianists Orli Shaham and Orion Weiss. Buck’s summer concerts have taken her from the Telluride Chamber Music Festival, Washington Friends of Music Summer Festival, and Music off the Hook Arts Music Festival in Colorado and to the Four Seasons of Music at Sands Point on Long Island. Other notable honors include having received two commissions written for her: John Harbison’s DeBut for solo violin and Fantasia on Beethoven’s Spring Sonata for violin and piano by Bruce Adolphe.
For 17 years, from 2002 to 2019, Buck was a member of the critically acclaimed Lark Quartet. The quartet was especially recognized for its extensive commissioning and boundary-pushing programming. It was one of the first quartets to offer programs featuring string quartet plus percussion, clarinet, voice, or piano, and recorded works by American composers such as John Harbison, Jennifer Higdon, Aaron J. Kernis, Daniel Bernard Romain (DBR), and Paul Moravec; many of which are included in their extensive discography found on the Endeavor, Koch, Arabesque, and Bridge Record labels. Buck has also recorded for the motion picture and television industry, including featured violin solos in the re-mastered silent film classic The Scarlet Letter (for Turner Classic Movies). Her national television debut came by way of a featured guest spot on the Family Channel’s It Takes Two, hosted by Dick Clark.
Buck made her Lincoln Center concerto debut in 1997 with the Little Orchestra Society of New York. As a recitalist, she has performed at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago for WFMT; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; and over the airways via Sundays Live on Los Angeles’s KKGO. Buck served as the tenured concertmaster of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 2008 to 2013, concertmaster of the Los Angeles Opera Guild and St. Matthew’s Chamber Orchestra, and has just recently led the Phoenix, West Virginia, and Youngstown Symphony orchestras as Guest Concertmaster. In 2022, Music Director Michael Stern appointed Buck as Concertmaster of Orchestra Lumos (formerly Stamford Symphony).
Since 2014, Buck has held the positions of Head of Strings and Chamber Music and Assistant Professor of Violin at SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music. This year, she created a new student-run public chamber music series called Out & About! that culminated in two days of student chamber music group performances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Buck has served as Co-Executive Director and concert series curator of the Kinhaven Music School in Weston, Vermont since 2011.A native of Los Angeles, Deborah Buck spent her primary years studying with Michael and Irina Tseitlin. She was a recipient of both a Starling scholarship and a Martin Kaltman Foundation scholarship while earning her bachelor of music degree at the Juilliard School, where she was a student of Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki. Buck also holds a master of music degree from the University of Southern California, where she studied with Robert Lipsett and was awarded the Jascha Heifetz Violin Scholarship. Her many awards also include a Los Angeles Philharmonic Corwin Foundation Grant, a Leni Fe Bland Career Grant, and a win in the National Contemporary Record Society Competition. Learn more at deborahbuck.net.
CLARICE JENSEN
Cello & Electronics
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Clarice Jensen is a composer and cellist based in Brooklyn who graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s from the Juilliard School. As a solo artist, Clarice has developed a distinctive compositional approach, improvising and layering her cello through shifting loops and a chain of electronic effects to open out and explore a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Pulsing, visceral, and full of color, her work is deeply immersive, marked by a wonderful sense of restraint and an almost hallucinatory clarity. Meditative yet with a sculptural sharpness and rigor that sets it apart from the swathe of New Age/D.I.Y. droners, her music has been forged with a very elegant and precise vision.
Her work has been described by Self-Titled magazine as “heavily processed, incredibly powerful neo-classical pieces that seem to come straight from another astral plane” and by the Boomkat duo as “languorously void-touching ideas, scaling and sustaining a sublime tension,” while Bandcamp remarked upon “a kaleidoscope of pulsing movement rich in acoustic beating and charged with other psychoacoustic effects, constantly shifting in density and viscous timbre.”
Jensen’s striking debut album, For This From That Will Be Filled, was released in April 2018 on the Berlin-based label Miasmah and followed in September 2019 with the Drone Studies EP, a cassette release via Geographic North. She signed to FatCat’s 130701 imprint (Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hauschka, Dustin O’Halloran, etc.) in late summer 2019, and her sophomore album, The experience of repetition as death, was released in April 2020. Naming it among the top 50 albums of 2020, NPR remarked, "This collection of requiems for a dying mother ranks among the great ambient albums of the 21st century." Her latest album, Esthesis, was released in October 2022.
Jensen recently scored three feature films: Amber Sealey's No Man of God, which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival; Takeshi Fukunaga's Ainu Mosir, which premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, and Fernanda Valadez's Sundance Film Festival award-winner, Sin Señas Particulares (Identifying Features), for which Jensen was nominated for a 2021 Ariel Award for Best Original Music by the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences.
A versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with a host of stellar artists including Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter, Björk, Stars of the Lid, Dustin O’Halloran, Nico Muhly, Taylor Swift, Michael Stipe, the National, and many others. In her role as the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), she has helped bring to life some of the most revered works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, and more.
BRUCE WOLOSOFF
Piano
Photo by Jaime Lopez