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“Ensemble Pi takes on tough subjects ranging from America’s relationship with guns to Black Lives Matter. This concert tackles reparations...”

by Rick Perdian, from Seen & Heard International

“We never in our wildest dreams imagined that this concert would happen two days after the election of Donald Trump,” explained pianist Idith Meshulam prior to Ensemble Pi‘s thirteenth annual Concert for Peace on November 10, 2016.

The 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut struck the musicians of So Percussion deeply. In response, the quartet’s members — Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting — together with the director Ain Gordon and the choreographer Emily Johnson, a longtime collaborator, vowed to create a program that would investigate America’s relationship to guns. As they developed the idea, they mined their own childhood memories, took lessons at a shooting range, ordered rifle parts on the web and joined in a hunt.

For the past ten years, adventurous indie classical chamber group Ensemble Pi have played an annual “peace concert,” featuring socially relevant compositions from across the years as well as most of the classical music spectrum. This year’s sold-out multimedia performance Saturday night in the comfortable downstairs auditorium at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street explored music and writing on themes of captivity and imprisonment.

Even by avant garde standards, chamber group Ensemble Pi stand out not only for the adventurousness of their commissions and their repertoire, but also for their fearlessly political stance.

Laura Kaminsky is a New York composer who has accomplished a great deal in a short time. She is artistic director of Symphony Space and teaches at SUNY Purchase Conservatory. She is the recipient of numerous awards and has organized many concerts. Her music is aggressive and dissonant sometimes. The piano trio Vukovar is a 14-minute work in eight continuous “events” inspired by a trip she took with a chamber group to a bombed-out location in Croatia where they had to play with gloves, since there was no heat, and the audience showed many physical signs of past and present distress and discomfort.

Ensemble π performed to a full house at the Cell on Saturday night, presenting new and rarely heard music in collaboration with the Great Small Works theater company.

The evening was one of the most extraordinary and profoundly-moving musical performance events I have ever experienced. The concert was conceived and presented with an intelligence and compassion which intensified the independent merits and beauties of the (seven?) works scheduled.

It’s always a good sign when a challenging ensemble sells out the room; it’s even better when the program is important on more than just a musical level. Such was the case last night at the Cell Theatre in Chelsea where Ensemble Pi put on their annual peace concert. It was fun, and entertaining…and politically charged. The theme, What Must Be Said turned out to be a Gunter Grass quote, read in its entirety in the original German, the gist being that Israel ought to be subject to the same nuclear inspections as Iran. To which should be added, every nation possessing weapons, or power plants, of mass destruction let’s not forget what happened on 3/11.

Every piece of music on this compelling tribute to a loving father and husband, who also happened to be a musical explorer par excellence (he founded the Electronic Music Studio), compels one to trot out the term sui generis. Each of the six pieces, none more than 16 minutes long, engages its audience with a unique musical slant.

Artists have long created art as a means of political protest with works like Picasso’s “Guernica”? now a tribute to victims of war. Composers have a less direct means of rebellion than the more literal expression of painters, photographers and playwrights. But even if there had not been descriptions in the program, the new music performed at the Great Hall at Cooper Union on Saturday evening during a concert commemorating the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq clearly evoked conflict and anguish.

Classical Traditions Kept and Upended — Ensemble-Pi

Ensemble Π plays a 'notorious' Cowell

A Birthday Party Livened, by Interconnecting Arrays

Honoring One Known for Romanticism

Programme: Robert Helps – “The Last Romantic” Great Hall of Cooper Union