Program:

Lukas Ligeti: Incandescence - premiere
Steve Reich: Sextet
Aurél Holló: 39 – The Manichaean’s Dream / beFORe JOHN3
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György Ligeti: Touches bloquées – Etudes I, No. 3 (arranged by Eighth Blackbird)
György Ligeti: En Suspens – Etudes II, No. 11
György Ligeti: Fanfares – Etudes I, No. 4 – excerpt (arranged by Eighth Blackbird)
Timo Andres: Checkered Shade
Ned McGowan: Garden of Iniquitous Creatures

A quintet with an additional percussionist, the group was formed to accommodate the instrumentation of a classic piece of 20th-century modernism, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The Chicago-based Eighth Blackbird burst into the American musical scene in 1998, when they won the Concert Artists Guild Competition.

The ensemble, which works in close collaboration with such other art forms as dance, theatre, production design and puppetry, has commissioned and premiered over a hundred new works, including compositions by David Lang, Steven Mackey and Missy Mazzoli. Their production of Double Sextet, which Steve Reich wrote for the group, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

It is fair to say Eighth Blackbird have written musical history for the past two decades – as have Amadinda –, and they will continue writing it at the festival.