TMC Chamber Music

Tanglewood Music Center performs a free concert of chamber music by classical and contemporary composers from Eleanor Alberga to Lingbo Ma. Liann KANG (TMC 2025) Emille STRAUSS Capriccio, Op. 85 EISLER Hollywood Liederbuch CAPLET Les prières Lingbo MA (TMC 2024) New work, world premiere, commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center BARBER Dover Beach Eleanor ALBERGA String Quartet No. 2 Get tickets » Eleanor Alberga is a highly-regarded mainstream British composer with commissions from the BBC Proms and The Royal Opera, Covent Garden. With a substantial output ranging from solo instrumental works to full-scale symphonic works and opera, her music is performed all over the world. She was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2021 for Services to British Music. In April this year, Eleanor's Piano Concerto was given its World Premiere in Liverpool to a flourish of positive reviews, with the performance streamed on Medici TV and BBC Radio 3. The work was commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in conjunction with the Leeds International Piano Competition, and premiered by the competition's most recent winner Alim Beisembayev with the orchestra's Musical Director Domingo Hindoyan conducting. Born 1949 in Kingston, Jamaica, Eleanor decided at the age of five to be a concert pianist. Five years later, she was composing works for the piano. In 1968 she won the biennial Royal Schools of Music Scholarship for the West Indies, which she took up in 1970 at the Royal Academy of Music in London studying piano and singing. At different times over the course of her early career, Eleanor was a member of the African dance company Fontomfrom, and played guitar and sang with the Jamaican Folk Singers. She was part of the duo Double Exposure with her husband the violinist Thomas Bowes, and more recently they together founded and nurtured the Arcadia Festival, an original music festival in the English countryside where they live. In 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. Other recent commissions and premieres for large forces have included her Symphony No.1 "Strata" - just released on the Resonus label in a premiere recording by the BBC Symphony Orchestra - her Trumpet Concerto "Invocation", written for Pacho Flores and the London Schools Symphony Orchestra, and Rise up, O Sun!, a setting of William Blake's poem for full orchestra and chorus, commissioned to open the 2023 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral. Eleanor with Domingo Hindoyan, Alim Beisembayev and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra at the premiere of her Piano Concerto, April 2024. Lingbo Ma is a Chinese-born, US-based composer and pianist whose work has been performed in the USA, China, and Europe. She strives for unique ways of reaching the ultimate simplicity and clarity while unfolding diverse narratives in her music. She has worked with Attacca Quartet, librettists Hannah McDermott and John de los Santos, Seattle's Lowbrow Opera Collective, and has received commissions from Boston's Collage New Music, New York's National Sawdust, Dutch National Opera, Cantilena Choir, saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky, Tanglewood Music Center, among others. In addition to composing, Lingbo enjoys arranging music of all genres and performs frequently as a collaborative pianist. Lingbo obtained her Master of Music from the Juilliard School, and is now a doctoral candidate at New England Conservatory. Her composition mentors are Kati Agócs, Robert Beaser, and Michael Gandolfi.