Tanglewood Music Center chamber music

Tanglewood Music Center will perform a free evening of chamber music by contemporary and classical composers.

SCHUBERT Lebensstürme, D. 947
BEACH Pastorale
Reena ESMAIL The Light Is the Same
Caio DE AZEVEDO (TMC 2025) New work
Marcos BALTER (TMC 2005) Code-switching
FINE Fantasia for string trio
GIBSON (TMC 2018) The Boys Are There
BEETHOVEN Octet in E-flat, Op. 103

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Reena Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. She also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.

divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral work. She has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, BRUITS by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider. Many of her choral works are published by Oxford University Press.

Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. She has been in residence with Tanglewood Music Center (co-Curator – 2023) and Spoleto Festival (Chamber Music Composer-in-Residence – 2024) inShe also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.

Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM’05) and the Yale School of Music (MM’11, MMA’14, DMA’18). Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India.

Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.

Esmail was Composer-in-Residence for Street Symphony (2016-18) and is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.

Caio de Azevedo is a Brazilian composer based in Munich, Germany. His music has been described as “original and versatile” by Diapason Magazine, a “striking mental sculpture, interwoven with emotions and certainties” by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and “suffused with colour” by Classical Magazine, embracing aesthetic plurality, he combines a deep sense of storytelling with continuous reinvention.

His extensive catalogue of works ranges from lieder and children’s chamber opera to ballets and concertos. Notable among his compositions is Marionnette, a bagatelle-concertante for viola and chamber orchestra, which won him 1st Prize at the Concours de Genève in 2024, performed at Victoria Hall in Switzerland, and in the same year, he was awarded the Concerto Prize as an Emerging Talent by the prestigious Brazilian classical magazine Concerto.

Other significant works include Macbeth, a three-act ballet for orchestra with choreography by Steffen Fuchs, performed by the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie; Glas, a children’s chamber opera premiered at Deutsche Oper am Rhein (Düsseldorf) directed by Friederike Karig; his first string quartet, performed by the Mivos String Quartet and Golgatha, a work for soprano and ensemble commissioned by the independent opera ensemble NovoFlot in Berlin.

His works have been performed in Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, Hungary, England and Italy by ensembles such as the International Contemporary Ensemble, ensemble recherche, Oktopus Ensemble, Quarteto Radamés Gnattali, among others.

Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) composes music at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.

Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Recent performances include those at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall, ArtLab at Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Teatro Amazonas, Sala São Paulo, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theater, Villa Medici, Teatro de Madrid, Bâtiment de Forces Motrices de Genève, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival.

Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick. He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University.