“Nadia Sirota likes to lead from the middle. She plays the viola, the throaty in-between instrument that often gets lost in the orchestral hubbub,” writes Justin Davidson at last Friday’s (7/7) Vulture.com. “On Q2 Music’s Meet the Composer [podcast] … she deploys fresh music to … ‘create rabid classical-music fans,’ [she says]…. At 34, Sirota is part of the new Establishment, a tight-knit generation of composers and performers [that] includes Paola Prestini, the founding artistic director of National Sawdust; Judd Greenstein and William Brittelle, who run New Amsterdam Records,” and composers Andrew Norman, Caroline Shaw, and Nico Muhly. “Her mission takes her along three intertwined paths. The first is yMusic [ensemble], which spent almost 18 months on the road with the singer-songwriter Ben Folds … and recently joined Paul Simon at the Eaux Claires Festival … Her second outlet is Meet the Composer…. Finally, Sirota has her career as a soloist. In August, she puts out an elaborately multimedia solo CD called Tessellatum, with music by the Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy. And for the past several years, she’s been touring with the concerto that Muhly composed for her, a ravishingly moody work that weaves the viola through a quietly glittering orchestral tapestry.”
Posted July 14, 2017
