Perspectives Ensemble Presents Cellist Wendy Sutter: The Six Bach Solo Cello Suites Livestreamed from Judson Memorial Church, New York City

• Free
• Performing Arts

Perspectives Ensemble, in cooperation with the Judson Memorial Church, presents The Six Bach Solo Cello Suites performed by Wendy Sutter, cellist, on Sunday, August 23, 2020. Suites 1-3 will be performed at 3pm EDT and Suites 4-6 will be performed at 6pm EDT. Honed over a lifetime of close engagement with these iconic works, Ms. Sutter’s intensely personal interpretations will be streamed from the serenely beautiful Meeting Room of Judson Memorial Church. The concerts will also feature guest commentaries by Don Byron, Tim Page, George Stauffer, and Kira Thurman. To register for the free performances, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/js-bach-the-six-bach-cello-suites-performed-by-wendy-sutter-part-i-tickets-115522355475 for Suites 1-3 and www.eventbrite.com/e/js-bach-the-six-solo-cello-suites-performed-by-wendy-sutter-part-ii-tickets-115528499853 for Suites 4-6. Video engineering by Ross Karre; audio engineering by Ryan Streber, Oktaven Audio. Livestream performances made possible by the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Foundation in celebration of the life of Danièle Doctorow.  

About the Artists

Heralded as “one of the great leading cellists of the classical stage” by the Wall Street Journal, Wendy Sutter has proven herself as one of the foremost and diverse soloists of her generation. Having performed widely on five continents, she has been acclaimed by critics in all major publications including The New York Times, Strad Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Ms. Sutter has appeared frequently as concerto soloist with such orchestras as The Dallas, Seattle, Colorado, Tucson, Shanghai Symphonies, The Hong Kong and Brussels Philharmonics and The Royal Residentie Orchestra of the Hague. As soloist, she has performed under many esteemed conductors, including Jaap Van Zweden, Marin Alsop, Gerard Schwarz and Tan Dun. Ms. Sutter appears regularly at festivals including Marlboro, Mostly Mozart, Spoleto, Ravinia, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. In addition, she has played numerous solo recitals at venues such as The Barbican, Carnegie Hall, Bargemusic, and Lincoln Center.  Philip Glass’s solo cello suite “Songs and Poems,” written exclusively for Sutter by Glass in 2007, won great acclaim from audiences and critics world-wide, was voted best new CD of the year by listeners of National Public Radio, and became the second-best selling download in 2008 in the classical division on iTunes. In 1994 Ms. Sutter was invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to give the world premiere of “A Suite of Dances,” an on-stage duet for Ms. Sutter playing Bach solo suites for cello, accompanying Mikhail Baryshnikov. This piece was choreographed especially for these two artists by the legendary Jerome Robbins. 

Commentary Cameos:

Don Byron is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. Rooted in jazz, Byron’s music is stylistically eclectic, covering a range of styles from klezmer music and German lieder, to Raymond Scott’s “cartoon-jazz,” hard rock/metal, and rap. He has also composed for silent film, served as the Director of Jazz for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and scored for television.  

Tim Page won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997 for his writings about music in the Washington Post. Since 2008, he has been a Professor of Music and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

George Stauffer is Dean Emeritus of the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Music History at Rutgers University. A Guggenheim, Fulbright, and ACLS scholar, Stauffer has published eight books on music of the Baroque Era and the life and works of J.S. Bach and is a contributor to The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

Kira Thurman is an assistant professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, she is finishing a book on the history of Black musicians in Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (forthcoming, Cornell University Press), and recently published an essay on Marian Anderson in The New Yorker.

About Perspectives Ensemble  

Perspectives Ensemble was founded by its Artistic Director Sato Moughalian in 1993 as the resident ensemble for the series Perspectives in Music and Art at Columbia University. Under Moughalian’s leadership, the ensemble continues to create musical events, recordings, and writings that explore and contextualize the works of composers and visual artists. The group’s recordings–which can be heard on all major music platforms, as well as in live performances captured on YouTube-offer interpretations and viewpoints informed by the cultural and historical influences prevailing upon artists, and often bridge and integrate the musical, visual, and literary arts.. The group holds an Artist-in-Residence position at the Foundation for Iberian Music at the CUNY Graduate Center. The New York Times called the ensemble’s performance of El Amor Brujo “stunning. Perspectives Ensemble worked [without a conductor], yet gave a performance that was remarkably polished, fastidiously balanced and full of electricity.” New York Times reviews include “first-rate performances by accomplished musicians,” “a superb recital by the Perspectives Ensemble.” 

Perspectives Ensemble has been presented in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, the 92nd Street Y, Lincoln Center, the Rubin Museum, the Morgan Library, and has recorded for Sony Classics, Newport Classics, Innova, American Modern Recordings, Naxos and New World Records, among others. It was a resident ensemble for the Young People’s Chorus of NY’s Transient Glory commissioning program and for the Miller Theatre’s groundbreaking Pocket Concerto Project, and has performed in the Composer Portraits and Bach series there. Recordings include Sonnets to Orpheus by Richard Danielpour (Sony), Recollections by Karl Husa (New World), and Charles Tomlinson Griffes: Goddess of the Moon (Newport), of which The New York Times wrote: “The performances by the Perspectives Ensemble, an outstanding aggregation based in New York, are first-rate, with particularly fine playing by the flutist Sato Moughalian.” Perspectives Ensemble has released two recordings on the Naxos label. Madrigal included chamber ensemble works of Xavier Montsalvatge with soloists Timothy Fain, violin, Wendy Sutter, cello, Sasha Cooke, mezzo, Sato Moughalian, flute, and Blair McMillen, piano. American Record Guide reported, “Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and a dozen members of the Perspectives Ensemble perform [Cinco Invocaciones al Crucificado] with searing emotion.” The Ensemble’s second Naxos recording, Music of Manuel de Falla, featuring flamenco cantaora, Esperanza Fernandez. Opera News praised the recording: “The playing is magnificent.”

Perspectives Ensemble’s Artistic Directorand flutist Sato Moughalian travels widely as a chamber musician. In New York City, she serves as principal flutist of Gotham Chamber Opera and American Modern Ensemble, has appeared as guest flutist with Imani Winds, Orquestra Sinfonico do Estado São Paulo, and has made more than thirty chamber music recordings. In 2019, Stanford University Press published her book, Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian, a biography of her grandfather, who founded the art of Armenian ceramics in Jerusalem in 1919. The book was longlisted for the 2019 PEN America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Biography Award and was a finalist in the Association of American Publishers PROSE Awards for Biography & Autobiography. Ms. Moughalian was awarded the 2013 Ramon Llull Prize for Creative Arts. 

About Judson Memorial Church

For decades, our building has served as a home for experimental, boundary-pushing art. In a city bursting with budding artists, the ever-growing scarcity of open, inviting space is especially disheartening. So Judson continues to pursue our nurturing artistic mission: We offer a haven for creative bursts that may evaporate in a puff of smoke, may send sparks flying, and may explode our comfortable complacency. And we cherish every one of these moments as sacred.

The results are continually astonishing. Artists walk back out of our doors having incubated startling new trajectories in dance, theater, music, and visual arts. Along the way, they irreversibly transform us, our practice, and our commitment to a vibrant future of shared, embodied experience.

Put simply, we don’t know how to be a church without artists continually troubling our assumptions and nudging us in new directions.