Katie Hyun Appointed Concertmaster of Trinity Wall Street’s NOVUS NY
NOVUS NY, the resident contemporary music orchestra of “expert and versatile musicians” (New Yorker) at Trinity Wall Street, welcomes violinist Katie Hyun as its new concertmaster this week. She replaces Owen Dalby, who resigned the position shortly after becoming the newest member of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. A founding member of the award-winning Amphion String Quartet (ASQ), as well as founder and Artistic Director of the Quodlibet Ensemble chamber orchestra, the versatile Hyun is already a regular on the NOVUS NY roster, and has also played baroque violin with the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, the Sebastians, and New York Baroque Incorporated. She takes over the concertmaster position on April 21, and soon thereafter, on April 25, retires from the ASQ, which was founded at Yale in 2009. Hyun has appeared as a soloist with the Houston Symphony, the Dallas Chamber Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Columbia Festival Orchestra, as well as with the Busan Sinfonietta and Incheon Philharmonic in South Korea. With the ASQ she has performed in Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and at the Caramoor Music Festival, among many others. The quartet joined the roster of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two program in the fall of 2013, and its debut album was honored as one of the New York Times’ “Best of 2015.” Hyun is a graduate of the Curtis Institute, the Yale School of Music, and SUNY Stony Brook, and her teachers have included Ani Kavafian, Aaron Rosand, Pamela Frank, and the Emerson Quartet’s Philip Setzer.
Established by Julian Wachner in his inaugural season as Trinity Wall Street’s Director of Music and the Arts in 2011, NOVUS NY has since been an indispensable ingredient in the wide-ranging programming that makes Trinity’s Music & the Arts program “a mini Lincoln Center for classical music downtown” (New Yorker). As the resident orchestra for the Concerts at One Third Thursdays series, NOVUS NY anchors four large-scale concerts this spring in the “Revolutionaries” festival, celebrating Alberto Ginastera’s centennial. In March they performed Ginastera’s Cantata para América mágica, scored for solo soprano and a monumental 53 percussion instruments, along with Stravinsky’s ballet Les Noces. The New York Times review, marveling at the forces marshaled for the Ginastera, noted that “this is a sonic landscape as sensitive as it is muscular, and both those qualities were present in the vibrant performance led by Mr. Wachner, featuring players from the Trinity ensemble Novus NY.”
Repertoire for the eclectic ensemble’s remaining concerts in the series demonstrates a stylistic range stretching well beyond the “contemporary orchestra” label. Included are Ginastera’s Cantata Bomarzo, his First Cello Concerto with soloist Matt Haimovitz, Fauré’s Requiem with baritone soloist Christopher Dylan Herbert, and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony. Collaborating in various configurations on the Fauré and Beethoven are The Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Trinity’s new semiprofessional choir, Downtown Voices; The Trinity Youth Chorus; and progressive Norwegian string ensemble 1B1, all under Wachner’s direction.
Ginastera was also the vehicle when NOVUS NY, Wachner, and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street made their spectacular Carnegie Hall debut last season, presenting his monumental Turbae ad passionem gregorianam. The program included the Fourth Symphony of Charles Ives, about which New York Classical Review raved: “The musical results could not have been truer to Ives’ values and aesthetic.”
It was in the midst of an ambitious four-month “Celebrating Britten” series in 2013 that the same publication raved: “NOVUS NY … was a perfect fit for the repertoire. … The flexible musicians met every challenge with an impressive combination of discipline and imagination.” Earlier this season that flexibility was on display during Trinity’s annual Twelfth Night Festival, subtitled “Time’s Arrow,” in which the ensemble presented four premieres. Marking the first of six 21st-century takes on the traditional Mass to be yielded by “Mass Reimaginings,” Trinity’s long-term commissioning project designed to enrich both the concert and liturgical choral literature, Wachner led NOVUS NY and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street in the world premiere performance of Astrophysical Mass by Daniel Felsenfeld. The orchestra also anchored the New York premiere of the national anthems, an important new Trinity co-commission from Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang; the U.S. premiere of Tarik O’Regan’s A Letter of Rights, a cantata commissioned to mark this year’s historic 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta; and a program of works by Gerald Busby, styled “the last living Bohemian in Chelsea” (New Yorker), honoring his 80th birthday and featuring the world premiere of his harpsichord concerto with soloist Avi Stein, Trinity’s Associate Organist and Chorus Master.
NOVUS NY’s profile has increasingly been rising in the musical community at large as well. In January the orchestra participated in two new-music milestones in the field of opera. Wachner led them in Opera America’s New Opera Showcase, with excerpts of works by Hannah Lash, Stewart Copeland, Sheila Silver, and Bright Sheng, and then in the fully-staged world premiere production of Angel’s Bone, a new work of opera-theater from Du Yun and Royce Vavrek. Directed by Michael McQuilken and produced in partnership with HERE and Beth Morrison Projects, the opera debuted in eight performances at the 2016 Prototype Festival. This marked the second time Wachner and the orchestra had collaborated with Beth Morrison Projects, after previous appearances in Washington, DC, and at New York’s River to River Festival performing Paola Prestini’s Oceanic Verses. On recording, NOVUS NY can be heard on Elena Ruehr’s 2012 release, Averno, on the Avie label, as well as the 2014 Naxos digital release of a three-volume collection of compositions by Julian Wachner.
Click here to see Wachner conduct NOVUS NY in a “Concerts at One” performance of John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony at Trinity Wall Street.
Trinity Wall Street
One of the oldest, largest, and most vibrant of all Episcopal parishes, Trinity Wall Street is located in the heart of Manhattan’s Financial District, where it has created a dynamic home for music; as the New York Times acknowledges: “Trinity’s music is indispensable and unmissable.” Serving as director of Trinity’s Music and the Arts Program – as well as principal conductor of The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, the period-instrument Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and contemporary-music ensemble-in-residence NOVUS NY – Julian Wachner also oversees all liturgical, professional, and community music and arts programming at Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel. The New Yorker has described Trinity Wall Street’s cultural offerings as representing “a mini Lincoln Center for downtown Manhattan.” The music at Trinity ranges from large-scale oratorios to chamber music, and from intimate a cappella singing to jazz improvisation. Many concerts at Trinity Wall Street are professionally filmed and webcast live at www.trinitywallstreet.org/videos.
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Trinity Wall Street
NOVUS NY: Upcoming performances
All performances are free, and take place at Trinity Church, Broadway at Wall Street, NYC.
Thursday, April 21, 1pm
Concerts at One: Revolutionaries, Ginastera Centenary, Third Thursdays with NOVUS NY
Alberto Ginastera: Cantata Bomarzo, Op. 32
Gabriel Fauré: Requiem (1893 version)
NOVUS NY; The Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Christopher Dylan Herbert, baritone / Julian Wachner
Sunday, May 15, 5pm
Revolutionaries, Ginastera Centenary
Alberto Ginastera: Cello Concerto No. 1, Op. 36 (with Matt Haimovitz, cello)
Ludwig van Beethoven: Missa Solemnis
The Choir of Trinity Wall Street; Downtown Voices; NOVUS NY / Julian Wachner
Friday, May 20, 7pm
Revolutionaries, Ginastera Centenary
Alberto Ginastera: Psalm 150
Ludwig Van Beethoven: Symphony No. 9
The Choir of Trinity Wall Street; The Trinity Youth Chorus; Downtown Voices; NOVUS NY; 1B1 / Julian Wachner
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© 21C Media Group, April 2016
