Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi 67
29 June, 2024

Sala Pegasus, Piazza Bovio

Presented by the Mahler & LeWitt Studios and the American Academy in Rome,
in partnership with the Carla Fendi Foundation

The Mahler & LeWitt Studios and the American Academy in Rome presented a concert dedicated to the work of internationally-performed composer Baldwin Giang.

Giang won the Samuel Barber Rome Prize, becoming a fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 2023-2024, and participated in a Mahler & LeWitt Studios residency in 2024. As a composer, Barberregularly collaborated with Giancarlo Menotti, founder of the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi, and was also his long-term partner.

Making their Spoleto debuts, the adventurously expert Ensemble Garage (Germany) along with artists from Taiwan, Vietnam, Netherlands, and Italy, will give a concert devoted to work by Giang. It is conducted by rising star Elias Peter Brown. The centerpiece of the program is the world premiere of a major multimedia work, cast in multiple movements each accompanied by a film set in an urban environment which has shaped the composer’s personal background. The ten person mixed ensemble includes pipa (a traditional Chinese lute) and western instruments. Scenes from the Post-Diaspora explores post-globalization identity, hybridity, and ideas of belonging. The program also includes the Italian premieres of Giang’s songs after sufjan, an homage to the singer-songwriter and composer Sufjan Stevens, and my axe, my gun…my wayward son, written to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam war memorial in Washington D.C.

Read Giang’s extensive program notes here.

Ensemble Garage:
Laura Faoro, flutes
Carlos Cordeiro, clarinets
Yun-han Su, pipa
Malgorzata Walentynowicz, keyboard Yuka Ohta, percussion
Rada Ocharova, violin
Jacob Schafer, violin
Emlyn Stam, viola
James Morley, cello
Elias Peter Brown, conductor

Baldwin Giang (b. 1992, Philadelphia) is a composer, pianist, and multimedia creator. He is the winner of the Samuel Barber Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for 2023-2024 and he participated in the Mahler & LeWitt Studios residency program in Spoleto in 2024. He was recently named as a composer-in-residence for the Louisville Orchestra beginning in 2024. His work aims to empower communities of audiences and performers by creating concert experiences that are opportunities for collective wonder and judgment. Described as “taut and cohesive…challenging and rewarding” (Cacophony), Baldwin’s music has been performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Symphony Center in Chicago, and the Smithsonian Museum (DC). He has received commissions from the National Sawdust Ensemble, Metropolis Ensemble, New York Youth Symphony, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Grossman Ensemble, Playground Ensemble, Loadbang, Fondation Maurice Ravel, Extended Music Collective, Robert Black Foundation, Music in Bloom, and Music from Copland House. Additional collaborators have included the New Jersey Symphony, Albany Symphony, Ensemble Intercontemporain, International Contemporary Ensemble, Riot Ensemble, New European Ensemble, Ensemble Garage, orkest de ereprijs, Arditti Quartet, JACK quartet, Spektral Quartet, Longleash, Ekmeles, Sandbox Percussion, Blackbox Ensemble, Rage Thormbones, Quince, and Verdant Vibes. The international and domestic festivals that have presented his work include: IRCAM’s Manifeste (France), Ecole d’arts Americains de Fontainebleau (France), Concours International de Piano d’Orléans (France), Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Netherlands), 24th Annual Young Composers’ Meeting (Netherlands), Ostrava Days (Czech Republic), Klexos (Spain), Festival Contrasti (Italy), Aspen Music Festival, Princeton’s Edward T. Cone Institute, Yale in Norfolk’s New Music Workshop, CULTIVATE, June in Buffalo, and New Music on the Point. Baldwin has been awarded ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer and Leo Kaplan Awards, Fondation Maurice Ravel’s Prix Ravel, Musica Prospettiva Competition’s First Prize, Gaudeamus Award nomination, and Fulbright Arts Fellowship (Taiwan). Baldwin is a graduate of Yale University, earning a B.A. with Honors in both Music and Political Science, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, earning a M.A. as a Regents Fellow. He is currently a PhD candidate and Division of Humanities Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Ensemble Garage The Ensemble Garage was founded in 2009 by composer Brigitta Muntendorf. Its members are on a quest for answers on artistic, social and aesthetic issues that define our time. In doing so, the Ensemble is exploring methods and means to create fields (ways, spheres, realms?) of expression through contemporary composition. Since its foundation the ensemble yields innovative artistic impulses, shifting the focus on the reflection of the (post)-internet-society with its digital-medial manifestations, shaping the development in new music towards trans-medial, theatrical and performative forms of production. An important part of the ensemble’s work is the collaboration and exchange with other artists, particularly composers of the younger generation. Therefore Ensemble Garage has organized and curated numerous exchange-concerts with young composers from Germany, Poland, the USA, Finland, Turkey and France, among others. Further more, the ensemble regularly collaborates with guest curators and artists from various fields such as video (e.g. Warped Type) and dance (e.g. Mouvoir / Stephanie Thiersch). In doing so it implements the “Community of Practice” – an artistic work method in which members of diverse artistic domains collaboratively explore their respective practice, which may result into a concrete artistic work. Since fall 2019 the Ensemble Garage hosts its own concert series entitled Acts ‘n Sounds several times per year, presenting diverse programmatic concepts with varying topics at different venues in Cologne. It also partners with the concert series FRAU MUSICA NOVA, developing trans-medial concerts, which transgress boundaries of club-culture, experimental music theatre and performance, especially supporting the artistic work of women. As invited guest, the ensemble regularly performs at renowned festivals in Germany and abroad, such as Acht Bru cken Festival Cologne, Eclat Stuttgart, Ruhrtriennale, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Kunstfestpiele Herrenhausen, SPOR Festival Aarhus (Denmark), GAIDA Festival Vilnius (Lithuania) and Mixtur Barcelona (Spain), among others. The Ensemble Garage is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Elias Peter Brown works as a conductor, composer, improviser, and curator, seeking to create meaningful spaces for listening in and out of the concert hall. He has been named a Salonen Fellow for 2023/24, where he will be personally mentored by Esa-Pekka Salonen and serve as assistant conductor at the San Francisco Symphony, while also working as assistant conductor with the Colburn Conservatory Orchestra in the Nagaunee Conducting Program. He was previously assistant conductor of the Korean National Symphony Orchestra in Seoul during the 2022/23 season, a role he assumed after winning First Prize as well as the Orchestra Prize at the Korean International Conducting Competition. He is currently supported as a Stipendiat of the Conducting Forum of the Germany Music Council and is the recipient of a Solti Foundation US Career Assistance Award. Brown has recently worked with Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, Symphonieorkest Vlaanderen, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Gyeonggi Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Magdeburgische Philharmonie, Kammerakademie Potsdam, Kammerorchester Basel, North Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Teplice, Ensemble MusikFabrik, Zafraan Ensemble, Ensemble New Babylon, Spectra Ensemble, and Divertimento Ensemble, and previously served as a teaching artist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He has participated in masterclasses with David Zinman, Johannes Schlaefli, Kristiina Poska, Mark Stringer, Marin Alsop, Robert Treviño, and Larry Rachleff, and was chosen as a participant for Das Kritisches Orchester in 2022. His primary teachers have been Sian Edwards, Harry Curtis, and Daniel Boico. Outside of his conducting role, he has been mentored as a music curator through the Sounds Now program at Onassis Stegi, and his work as composer has been performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Krama Festival in Athens, and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. He is based in Berlin and holds degrees from Yale University and Royal Academy of Music, where his master’s thesis, ‘Spacing, Placing, Making Kin: Towards a Musical Curatorship,’ drew extensively on literature from the field of curatorial studies to theorize and define pedagogical, discursive, and dialogical modes of concert curation. Other recent work has included CAVE, a site-specific performance in the Brunel Museum based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, named official selection of the Prague Quadrennial 2019; and less than a grain of dust, a program of music spanning 800 years commissioned as a musical response to the ground-breaking ‘Lumia’ exhibition of Thomas Wilfred’s Light Art for the Yale University Art Gallery.

American Academy in Rome The American Academy in Rome supports innovative artists, writers, and scholars living and working together in a dynamic international community. Each spring, the Academy awards the Rome Prize and Italian Fellowship to a select group of artists and scholars, after an application and juried process that begins in the previous fall. The winners are invited to Rome to pursue their work in an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and artistic freedom and interdisciplinary exchange. The encounter with Rome represents now, as it has done since 1894, something unique: a chance for artists and scholars to spend significant time working in one of the oldest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The richness of Rome’s artistic and cultural legacy and its power to stimulate creative thinking served as the initial impetus for the Academy’s founding. Today, this tradition lives on, transformed by the dynamism of the Academy’s constantly evolving community. In addition to Rome Prize and Italian Fellows, the community includes invited Residents, Visiting Artists and Scholars, as well as participants in AAR’s academic Summer Programs. aarome.org

Carla Fendi Foundation The Carla Fendi Foundation promotes and creates artistic events, restorations, scientific and social projects. Since forming in 2007, the Foundation has collaborated with Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi becoming its Main Partner in 2012. Among its projects in Spoleto, the Foundation organises the annual Premio Carla Fendi, which was awarded to Carol LeWitt and Marina Mahler in 2021 for their services to culture in Spoleto. The funds from the prize are supporting a series of residencies and artistic projects at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios. fondazionecarlafendi.it

The Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi was founded by the opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958 and was one of the first multi-disciplinary arts festivals of its type. It quickly garnered international recognition for developing and promoting avant-garde art. It takes place in June and July each year and makes use of the numerous exhibition and performances venues boasted by the town of Spoleto – including the Teatro Romano, two opera houses, and several churches. The director of the festival is Monique Veaute. festivaldispoleto.com