The Composers Concordance is presenting the first concert of its 20th Anniversary Season on Friday November 14, 2003 at Christ & St. Stephen's Church, 120 W. 69th St.,
8:00 PM

Acclaimed new music oboist, Jacqueline LeClair will deliver a solo oboe work, Memo 8 by recognized American composer Bernard Rands. In this work Rands explores the expressive possibilities of the oboe through a virtuosic setting.

Composers Concordance features as our two Meet the Composer participants the young American composers Susan Harding and Aaron Friedman. Susan Harding has gathered the dynamic percussion quartet "Loop 243" for her piece, Maresia. She will be using marimba, vibraphone, xylophone and orchestra bells in a mesmerizing collection of sounds. Aaron Friedman's In Like Flynn, for clarinet, cello and piano tosses melodic elements between the instruments in a playful, mercurial fashion.

We will feature the flute and guitar duo Ririko Okada, flute and Patrick Durek, guitar in two pieces: a standard of the guitar literature, Leo Kraft's Partita #5, a challenging and whimsical work, and a new premiere for this duo written by Joseph Pehrson, Flautando which integrates the guitar technique "rasgueado" into a hip fabric.

We are also bridging the international scene by presenting works by two young Russian composers living in Moscow, Dimitri Capyrin and Marina Shmotova. Capyrin is well known in Moscow circles and his Chanson D'Automne for solo clarinet is a nice sampling of his informed and forceful style. Shmotova, who is the director of her own new music series in Moscow, brings a poetic sensibility to Christ & St. Stephen's church with her Ballads of the Black Sea for two antiphonal flutes and bell. This work invokes a meditative mysticism welcome in the heart of Manhattan.

Tickets are $15, $10 students and seniors. TDF vouchers accepted.