NEW YORK — It’s August in New York City. It’s hot. It’s humid. A certain sector of the population is away at their house in the Hamptons. Nearly all of the summer concert series in the city have come and gone.
That may be one reason why the esoteric offerings at the annual TIME:SPANS festival are so popular. Its ninth edition this year runs a different program nightly Aug. 10-24 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, and — based on past observations — the comfortably air-conditioned hall will be full at most every show.
The festival is named for a composition by Earle Brown (1926-2002) that ties into the fact that it is produced and presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust. The festival’s focus on 21st-century concert music includes performances by Talea Ensemble (which has performed every year since the festival began), Alarm Will Sound, Yarn/Wire, JACK Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ensemble Signal, Bozzini Quartet, violinist Olivia De Prato, and pianists Ning Yu and Cory Smythe. Most are well known in the new-music community here.
Composers represented include the Americans Steve Reich, Katherine Balch, Marcos Balter, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, Claude Baker, and Andrew Norman; Europeans Fausto Romitelli, Jürg Frey, Klaus Lang, and Olga Neuwirth; and others from Asia, South America, Israel, and Canada.
“There’s a hunger for this kind of programming. It’s something that I think has been needed here for a while,” said Adrian Morejon, executive director of Talea Ensemble. “It’s probably the only really successful contemporary festival of this magnitude in the city.”
TIME:SPANS’ artistic director Thomas Fichter, who is also executive director of the Earle Brown Foundation, founded the festival in 2015 and curates the programming. In that first year, the festival was a mini-series within the Crested Butte Music Festival in Colorado. It was an effective way for Fichter to get his feet wet: “That’s how it started, because I had absolutely no experience how to organize a festival in the U.S.”
Fichter moved the festival to New York the following year. He cites several reasons for holding the event during the dog days of summer. One is the monopoly on the New York concert calendar. “The downside is that people might be out of town because August is not a nice month to be in New York,” he said. “The upside is, since I do only one concert per night, it’s not a travel festival anyway, which means it totally serves the New York contemporary-music community.”
As curator, Fichter’s selections are very personal and are based on his years of experience managing the contemporary-music groups Ensemble Modern and Ensemble Musikfabrik in Germany. He habitually books performers based in New York, avoiding the expense of bringing in a large ensemble from across the country or overseas. Though he works mainly with established regional artists, he also invites newer groups like Longleash and small ensembles from abroad.
Fichter said the opening and closing concerts this year shape the two-week festival. On Aug. 10, Ensemble Signal plays music by Steve Reich and Fausto Romitelli. “Romitelli was influenced by heavy-metal music and rock music, and Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite is really a rewrite of a piece by Radiohead,” he said. The ensemble Yarn/Wire, with the trumpet player and composer Peter Evans, perform on the last day of the festival. “That really takes a look at what’s coming from improvisation, and Peter Evans represents that in the festival. So these are like two bookends.”
In the fall of 2023, Fichter was astonished by the performance he heard in Germany of pianist Roger Admiral and the SWR Symphony of the world premiere of the Concerto for Piano, Orchestra and Electronics by American composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi. “I asked Steven if he would write an ensemble version, and I asked Talea if they wanted to perform it, and that’s going to happen.” The work has already created buzz among new-music aficionados in the United States who heard the webcast of the performance.
Takasugi enjoys a long association with Talea. “He’s a great supporter and has been a great colleague and friend of ours for many years,” said Morejon. “A lot of Talea’s success in many parts of Europe came with the touring of Sideshow, which is a theatrical octet with electronics piece that Steven wrote for us.”
Admiral, a pianist based in the UK, will be brought to New York for this performance. “It is a collaborative project and it’s part of what Thomas is trying to create in TIME:SPANS, which is trying to foster global collaborations, bringing big names from various places to perform with big names here,” said Morejon.
Though it is more than a year away, Fichter has already given a great deal of thought to the festival’s 10th season. A weekend of programs featuring Canadian performers and composers will become what Fichter calls “a Canadian cluster of concerts.” There will also be co-commissions with international festivals, including Lucerne, Montreal, and Darmstadt.
“The festival next year is going to be really embedded in an expanding network in a different way than it has been before, and I see that as making transatlantic and trans-American connections,” said Fichter. “That’s my goal.”
