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Travel Guide to Nicaragua (2022) 70'

for solo cello and 24 voice choir

solo cello, SATB

Carnegie Hall, Penn Live Arts

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Travel Guide to Nicaragua is premiered by The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser

[IMAGE] Travel Guide to Nicaragua

On November 16 in Philadelphia at Congregation Rudolph Shalom and November 17 at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser (Donald Nally, conductor) premiere Michael Gordon’s new work Travel Guide to Nicaragua. Commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, Travel Guide to Nicaragua is written for The Crossing and cellist Maya Beiser, with projections by Laurie Olinder and lighting by Eric Southern…

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House Music premiere featured in NY Times

When a Critic Hosts the Premiere
[link to article]

Zachary Woolfe
February 14, 2020

“Please silence your cellphones.”

There are few phrases I hear more often in my life as a music critic. But it was strange — like a child playing dress-up — to speak the sentence myself, and in the incongruous setting of my own living room on a rainy evening earlier this week…

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Travel Guide to Nicaragua for 24 voices and cello

The New York Times (November 18, 2022):
A Composer Reconstructs Painful Family Stories


…melodies played with virtuosity by Beiser served as Gordon’s own response to his family’s stories, bridging those complicated and often painful chronicles with arcing and achingly emotional replies.

Tablet Magazine (December 2022)
A Jewish Family Mystery at Carnegie Hall


In this moving and intricate piece, music becomes a powerful medium that can not only fill in the gaps left by the inadequacies of language but also expressively mirror them…

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Biography

Michael Gordon’s music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of  The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, “the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.”

Over the past 30 years, Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio…

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