September 4, 2001 Contact: Tiffany Kuo

Joel Sachs, Director and Conductor of the New Juilliard Ensemble Leads the First Concert With
Tania León's Hechizos (New York Premiere);
Hans Abrahamsen's Piano Concerto (U.S. Premiere), featuring Pianist Francesco Schlimé;
Jukka Tiensuu's nemo (U.S. Premiere);
And Elliott Sharp's Racing Hearts (U.S. Premiere)

Juilliard's 2001-2002 Season opens with conductor Joel Sachs leading the New Juilliard Ensemble, now in its ninth season, performing a program of works composed within the last decade including Cuban composer Tania León, Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, Finnish composer Jukka Tiensuu, and American composer Elliott Sharp. Pianist Francesco Schlimé is featured in Abrahamsen's Piano Concerto. Three of these works, Abrahamsen's Piano Concerto (1999/2000), Tiensuu's nemo (1997), and Sharp's Racing Hearts (1998), are U.S. Premieres, and León's Hechizos (1994) is a New York Premiere. FREE tickets are required for this concert and are available at the Juilliard Box Office starting September 7. The Box Office is open Monday - Friday, 11 AM - 6 PM, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, (212) 769-7406. The Juilliard Theatre is located at 155 West 65th Street.

Tania León has worked with various prominent figures worldwide: coaching with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa at Tanglewood, advising Kurt Masur on contemporary music for the New York Philharmonic, and collaborating with Robert Wilson on the opera Scourge of Hyacinths - which is based on a radio play by Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka. Hechizos is a Latin American character piece about rhythm. The Spanish word ("charms" or "spells") suggests the whole process by which the rhythms unfold.

Born in Copenhagen, Hans Abrahamsen has been a part of the Group for Alternative Music as a composer and a political activist for new music; the Royal Academy of Music as a teacher; and the Esbjerg Ensemble as its artistic director. The Piano Concerto is dedicated to his wife, pianist Anne Marie Abildskov, who premiered the work with Norway's BIT-20 Ensemble. The Concerto has a strangely fleeting atmosphere, with ideas appearing briefly, and virtuosity suggested rather than showcased.

An alumnus of Juilliard, Jukka Tiensuu has received commissions for IRCAM/Ensemble, InterContemporain, the Goethe Institute, the Helsinki Philharmonic, and many others. His music has been heard on many occasions at New Juilliard Ensemble concerts, as well as the 1998 and 2000 FOCUS! festivals. nemo was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture for the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne of Montreal. It is written for fifteen players and live electronics. The keyboardist and the percussionist play samplers loaded with both instrumental and "nonstrumental" sounds, that occasionally seem to leave the ensemble to wander about for a while.

Born in Cleveland, Elliott Sharp has studied anthropology, physics, ethnomusicology, and electronics, in addition to composition with notable figures, including Roswell Rudd, Charles Keil, Burton Bordy, Elie Yarden, Benjamin Boretz, Morton Feldman, and Lejaren Hiller. Mr. Sharp enjoys bringing his scientific training to his composing, using various mathematical relationships in his compositions. This process leads to a description of his music as "urban ragas". Mr. Sharp writes, "Racing Hearts began life as an algorithmic score; in 1996 with each section defining a specific process for development of interlocked rhythms, harmonic gnarl, and textural density. Each performance would provide a unique manifestation of the internal detail while still retaining its specific identity."

Pianist Francesco Schlimé made his US debut in January 2000 in Ann Arbor's Hill Auditorium (Michigan), where he played with the Russian National Orchestra under maestro Mikhail Pletnev. Since 1994, Mr. Schlimé has appeared in recital as well as soloist with orchestras in Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia, Latvia, Romania, Poland, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Mr. Schlimé was born in 1981 in Luxembourg. With a collection of first prizes (piano, jazz piano, solfege, harmony, analysis, and composition) from the conservatories of Luxembourg, Brussels, and Paris, he was admitted in 1998 to The Juilliard School, where he is currently a member of the class of Jerome Lowenthal in the five-year combined program for bachelor and master of music degrees. Other teachers include Beatrice Rauchs, Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden, Emile Naoumoff, Téofils Bikis, Mikhail Pletnev, Bruce Brubaker, and David Dubal. An advocate of contemporary music, Mr. Schlimé has given performances of compositions by Pierre Boulez and Luca Francesconi in Juilliard's Piano Century series as well as in Juilliard's FOCUS! Festival. He has been a member of the New Juilliard Ensemble since 1999.

Joel Sachs performs a vast range of traditional and contemporary music, as conductor and pianist. As Co-Director of the internationally-acclaimed new music ensemble Contiuum, he has appeared in hundreds of performances in New York, nationally, and internationally. Foreign performances include festivals and concerts in Austria, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, England, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Mongolia, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Switzerland, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Dr. Sachs produces some 35 concerts of recent music in New York City every year. He produces and directs The Juilliard School's annual FOCUS! Festival, is Artistic Director of the annual 18-concert Summergarden festival at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and is a Co-Director of the Sonic Boom festival of contemporary music presented by a consortium of New York City's most prestigious new-music ensembles. An active music historian, Dr. Sachs is on the music history faculty of Juilliard and was the first chairman of its music history department. Currently is writing a biography of the American composer Henry Cowell, and makes frequent appearances on radio as a commentator on recent music.

The New Juilliard Ensemble, directed by Joel Sachs, is in its ninth season. Celebrating the liveliness of today's music, and focusing primarily on repertoire of the last ten years, the Ensemble presents music by composers world-wide writing in the most diverse styles. Although its primary goal is to provide training for performers, the New Juilliard Ensemble also offers opportunities for students of Juilliard's composition program. The Ensemble takes its name from an unofficial student group of the 1960s that specialized in the performance of new music. It is modeled on new-music chamber orchestras such as Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, and the London Sinfonietta, which have cultivated a repertoire for chamber orchestra all too rarely performed in the United States. While bringing together these works to New York, the New Juilliard Ensemble also has produced a new body of music. This season's premieres include new works for chamber orchestra and electronics, and for soprano and chamber orchestra, and compositions by two Juilliard students selected through an audition process. The New Juilliard Ensemble also has had residencies abroad at the International Seminars for Young Composers held near Warsaw by the Polish Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and at the Warsaw Conservatory, performing American music and compositions by students and faculty of that institution. In 1998, the Ensemble presented a concert in Jerusalem celebrating the 50th anniversaries of the State of Israel and the Rubin Academy of Music, part of an international symposium on the teaching of composition at the century's end. Last spring, the Ensemble performed at the Leipzig Conservatory in a festival celebrating the consecration of the school's new concert hall. In July, it participated in the Lincoln Center Summer Festival with a concert of music by Salvatore Sciarrino. This fall, it will present a program of music from Silk Road countries at the University of Maryland, and at Juilliard.