The Juilliard School’s annual Focus! Festival, set this year for January 25 to February 1, will spotlight British music since World War II. Under Founding Director and Festival Director Joel Sachs, there will be six free concerts featuring the New Juilliard Ensemble and Juilliard Orchestra, as well as chamber ensembles and solo musicians. Sachs will moderate a preconcert panel discussion on January 29, with choral conductor David Wordsworth and composers Michael Zev Gordon, Deirdre Gribbin, and Errollyn Walle. The opening concert with the New Juilliard Ensemble will include Jonathan Harvey’s Sringāra Chaconne, Helen Grime’s Clarinet Concerto, and Colin Matthews’s No Man’s Land. Other concerts—all at Alice Tully Hall or Paul Hall—will feature Kandinsky Variations for two pianos, by the late Richard Rodney Bennett; Brian Ferneyhough’s Cassandra’s Dream Song for solo flute; Michael Tippett’s “Ritual Dances” from his opera The Midsummer Marriage; and Mark Anthony Turnage’s Ceres. Mark Wigglesworth will conduct the final February 1 concert by the Juilliard Orchestra, which will include a performance of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem commemorating the composer’s centenary.
Posted January 17, 2013
