Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Launches First “Session”

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) announces its inaugural SESSION, an innovative new classical music experience designed to explore classical music’s cutting-edge sounds and challenge traditional concert-going expectations, in collaboration with Four Larks and curated by LACO Creative Advisor Andrew Norman on Thursday, May 24, 2018, 9 pm (doors open at 8:30 pm), at Angel City Brewery’s Beer Hall in Downtown LA’s Arts District. The eclectic program performed by LACO musicians and others is a provocative blend of past and present, with Norman’s arrangement of Dufay’s Nuper Rosarum Flores, composed for the consecration of Florence’s famed Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in 1436; Entr’acte by New York-based composer, vocalist, violinist and producer Caroline Shaw, who cites the music of Franz Joseph Haydn as her inspiration for the work; and Nina C. Young’s Momento Mori, a meditation on life and the perception of time, with musical material drawn from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Also featured are Sky Macklay’s adrenaline-infused Many Many Cadences, composed for Spektrail Quartet and featured on the group’s Grammy-nominated album Serious Business, and Norman’s string trio The Companion Guide to Rome, which is expanded to 12 strings.  Each movement of the work, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music, is a character study of a particular Roman church informed by the proportions of the buildings, the qualities of the surfaces, the patterns in their floors, the artwork on their walls and the lives and legends of the saints whose names they bear.