DownEast New Music presents “Timbral Play”
In a program celebrating timbral variety and the joy of playing chamber music, DownEast New Music presents music for soprano, cello, double bass, and piano.
Bringing early 20th century classics by Stravinsky and Ives into conversation with music written as recently as 2025, this program explores the kaleidoscopic spectrum of colors and sounds possible with just a few instruments. Whether it’s the lyricism of Stravinsky looking back at the Baroque era, Ives recontextualizing familiar New England hymns, or Katherine Balch discovering new blended textures, each piece on this program shows a different facet of music making, allowing the audience to discover a rich world full of surprising and compelling sounds.
Program:
- Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984): The Pleasure at Being the Cause
- Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971): Suite Italienne
- Katherine Balch (b. 1991): Phrases
- Tomás Gueglio (b. 1980): Murmelnszenen
- György Kurtág (b. 1926): selections from Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs
- Sam Suggs (b. 1990): Giant Hummingbirds
- Charles Ives (1874 – 1954): Selections from 114 Songs
Artists:
Nina Guo, soprano | Clare Monfredo, cello | Edward Kass, double bass | Conrad Winslow, piano
Clare Monfredo is a cellist originally from Seal Harbor, Maine, currently living in Brooklyn, New York where she completed a Doctorate of Musical Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center and is the recipient of the Graduate Center Fellowship. She has performed as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral leader all over the world, collaborating with a diverse array of notable artists, from Patricia Kopatchinskaja to Jon Batiste, to groups such as Ensemble Intercontemporain and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Monfredo holds a bachelor of arts in English from Yale University where she graduated with distinction and was a multiple-time winner of the Yale Friends of Music competition. She holds a masters of music degree from the Shepherd School at Rice University as a recipient of the Graduate Arts Award from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation where she studied with Norman Fischer, and studied with cellist Peter Bruns at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig, Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship. Monfredo’s other significant mentors include David Gebor, Julia Lichten, and Natasha Brofsky. She has appeared at Chamber Music Northwest, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, Lucerne Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, Cello Akademie Rutesheim, Kurt Weill Fest, and Music Academy of the West. She was awarded the Karl Zeise Memorial Prize by the Tanglewood Music Center, the Gebor Rejto Prize from Music Academy of the West, and the Chamber Music Prize from the Fontainebleau Conservatoire Américain.
Praised as a “master of his instrument” (Fanfare), bassist Edward Kass performs internationally as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral musician, specializing in contemporary performance. A graduate of the San Jose Unified Public School system, Kass is noted for his “phenomenal musicianship” (Which Sinfonia) and “terrific precision” (The Arts Fuse). A frequent performer with groups including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Sound Icon, recent appearances include Lucerne Festival, Tanglewood, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, and Elbphilharmonie Visions. Dedicated to the creation of new music, Kass has premiered dozens of new works, including commissions by Katherine Balch, Sarah Gibson, Unsuk Chin, and more.
Sought after as an artistic leader and pedagogue, Kass served as a Contemporary Leader (2021-2026) for Lucerne Festival, a role combining performance with artistic curation, creation of new works, and pedagogy. In addition to teaching at the Lucerne Festival Academy, he has been in residence at Stanford University, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, UC Santa Barbara, University of Georgia, and more. With pianist and music therapist Renate Rohlfing, Kass co-created “Tell Your Story,” a community-based, creative engagement project for Spoleto Festival USA to create sonic memoirs preserving the oral history of the greater Charleston area. He is a co-founder and Co-Artistic Director of DownEast New Music.
Conrad Winslow is a composer and pianist whose musical forms are fiercely committed to legibility and broad expressive bandwidth, often combining precipitous edges with graceful shifting syntax, “…provoking questions of how arrangement shapes meaning” (Popmatters). Raised in Homer, Alaska, he first learned to make a world from scratch by watching his parents build a log cabin home in the woods. His music “remains tautly controlled and coherent, but bursts with variety both harmonic and gestural” (Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia…).
Winslow’s instrumental music has been commissioned by Alarm Will Sound, Carnegie Hall, the Albany Symphony, and the American Composers Orchestra. He has worked closely with Rufus Wainwright, collaborated with choreographers Justin Peck, Zack Winokur, auteur/choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, and viola da gambist Liam Byrne, and his music has been recorded for Cedille Records and innova Records. He holds a Master’s Degree in composition from the Juilliard School, where he studied with John Corigliano, and degrees from NYU and Rollins College. He is also the co-founder of Wild Shore New Music, a new music series based in Southcentral Alaska.
Soprano Nina Guo is interested in the sounds of recent and ongoing times, and her performance practice includes interpreting notated music, improvising, and collaborating on interdisciplinary projects.
An in-demand concert soloist, she has made appearances with the London Sinfonietta, ICTUS, Contrechamps, Ensemble Modern, Decoder, and others. She recently made her Boston Symphony Hall debut, performing Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures (Ligeti). She specializes in experimental opera, working with groups such as Neuköllner Oper, Guerilla Opera, ECCE, and Opera Lab Berlin.
Her upcoming projects include releasing a new recording of Morton Feldman’s Three Voices and performing the music of experimental composers Robert Ashley and Jennifer Walshe. She will also premiere a new production of Sciarrino’s Perseo e Andromenda, singing the role of Andromeda.
Guo hosts, writes, and performs a live radio show, “The Entertainment”, on Cashmere Radio (Berlin), a comedy variety show presenting experimental and contemporary music.