“Written in 2021 for viola and orchestra and featuring violist Masumi Per Rostad, Montgomery’s piece was the concert’s highlight, heard in its local premiere. She is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s…
“Divided, by Jessie Montgomery, is the other Sphinx commission for the album, with Tommy Mesa providing a stirring performance of the solo cello part. Montgomery draws the main motive out of the…
Songs of Our Times includes two of Sphinx Virtuosi’s commissions. Composer Jessie Montgomery describes Divided as a response to “the sense of helplessness that people seem to feel amidst a…
“Rising-star composer Montgomery, who was involved in last year’s 75th anniversary Music Academy festival and who is currently the Mead composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony, managed the feat of supplying…
“The commission was followed by Jessie Montgomery’s “Five Freedom Songs,” an orchestral song cycle built on the stirring texts of five traditional Black spirituals, each of them in different ways…
“For the Sunday afternoon audience, the widely admired composer and educator Jessie Montgomery previewed her 2021 “Freedom Songs,” a collection of lesser-known traditional Black spirituals adapted for voice, percussion and…
“Montgomery’s ‘Banner,’ from 2014, ingeniously casts a string quartet as the individual “soloist” both vigorously supported by and at times vigorously challenged by the collective in the form of the…
“The evening began with Montgomery’s Strum, an all-strings affair, with plucked and strummed violins producing stunning layers of rhythmic and harmonic ostinati. Having grown up on New York’s Lower East…
“The dance theme of the evening got off to a lively start with Strum, a folk music inspired work by New York composer Jessie Montgomery, its title coming from the…
”Montgomery’s neatly constructed single-movement work opens with a hopeful rising and falling five-note melody, which hovers around the fifth of the scale before resting on a turn-like figure. The work…
“With the brand-new Contemporary American Composers (CSO Resound), his last album with the CSO in his official capacity, [Riccardo Muti] gives his critics a decisive shove. This remarkable album opens…
“The sounds of new and old within the orchestra are kept under careful watch, although at times they form an uneasy alliance, which is probably the point: It’s precisely that…
“‘Ambitious’ seems too light an adjective to describe their work, which injects “Treemonisha” with a timeless universality and adds complex themes of self-hate, Black identity and intergenerational trauma… Jessie Montgomery…
“The same stirring chorale writing and piquant instrumental pairings from last year’s “Hymn for Everyone” abound here. That may not be a coincidence. “Transfigure to Grace” adapts material from Montgomery’s…
“On April 22 and 23 violist Masumi Per Rostad and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra gave the West Coast premiere of a viola concerto that composer Jessie Montgomery wrote for…
“‘There’s something about recalling childhood memories that I find is a fun place to write music from because it’s like a good exercise in tapping into your creative memories and…
“When Jessie recently passed through Sacramento, where I live, we decided to film this conversation in my living room. We talked about our journeys through these past complicated years, trying…
“Jessie Montgomery grew up surrounded by jazz and activism. A Juilliard-trained violinist, she gravitated towards composition in her 20s, and later learned to associate her own Black identity with her…
“Inspired by patterns in nature, from fractals to the routes of migratory birds, “Rounds” takes the form of nesting Rondos interrupted by a big virtuoso cadenza. Perhaps also inspired by…
“Jessie Montgomery is enjoying the kind of moment in the spotlight that every rising composer dreams of. The 40-year-old Brooklyn native began a three-year stint last fall as composer-in-residence with…
