Wet Ink Ensemble Celebrates Double Album Release And 20th Anniversary Celebration
Wet Ink members: Ian Antonio, Erin Lesser, Sam Pluta, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels, and Josh Modney.
The "sublimely exploratory” (The Chicago Reader) Wet Ink Ensemble launches its 20th anniversary season on Saturday, September 15 at 8pm at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music’s Mary Flagler Cary Hall in New York City.
The concert celebrates two album releases—Wet Ink: 20, an album featuring the 28 musicians of the Wet Ink Large Ensemble released on Carrier Records on September 15, and Josh Modney: Engage, Wet Ink Executive Director Josh Modney's 3-disc debut solo violin album released on New Focus Recordings on August 3, described as “one of the most intriguing programs of the year” by The New York Times.
The evening includes works by longtime Wet Ink collaborators Rick Burkhardt and Sky Macklay, performed by Wet Ink's core septet of composer-performers, alongside works by Wet Ink members such as Eric Wubbels’ the children of fire come looking for fire for violin and piano and the world premiere of Kate Soper’s new solo work The Fragments of Parmenides with Soper herself on piano and vocals. The concert also features the premiere of Josh Modney's Engage Quintet, a new collaboration that recontextualizes Modney's Violin Solos from the Engage album in an ensemble setting with renowned creative musicians Cory Smythe (piano), Charmaine Lee (voice), Sam Pluta (electronics) and Ian Antonio (percussion).
For 20 years, the Wet Ink Ensemble has been programming and presenting concerts of adventurous new music at the highest level in New York City and around the world. Wet Ink has collaborated with a broad range of renowned artists, from Evan Parker to George Lewis to Peter Ablinger, and is equally committed to promoting the works of young and underrepresented composers, from today’s most promising emerging voices to the next generation of artists. Wet Ink is co-directed by a core septet of world class composers, improvisers, and interpreters that collaborate in band-like fashion, writing, improvising, preparing, and touring pieces together over long stretches of time. These directors are Erin Lesser (flutes), Alex Mincek (saxophone), Ian Antonio (percussion), Eric Wubbels (piano), Josh Modney (violin), Kate Soper (voice), and Sam Pluta (electronics).
The Wet Ink Large Ensemble is a group of extraordinary New York City musicians that come together to play the world's most exciting and innovative music. The Wet Ink Large Ensemble’s far-ranging experience includes a critically acclaimed portrait concert of Anthony Braxton, lauded as “dense, wild, yet artfully controlled” (The New York Times), a run of outdoor performances of Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung (the first ever fully-staged opera production in Times Square), a retrospective of the work of the AACM composers at The Kitchen in 2008, and the release of Alex Mincek’s Torrent (Sound American), selected as one of the Best Albums of 2017 by The New York Times and The Nation.
Wet Ink’s seven co-directors are passionate educators, and the ensemble has been engaged in residencies at the Walden School, Duke University, Amherst College, Northern Illinois University, UC San Diego, Sacramento State University, UC Davis, Hannover Musik Hochschule (Germany), the Royal Academy of Music (UK), Smith College, and at the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (Miller Theater, NYC), among others. Wet Ink also regularly performs in Europe, including recent concert highlights at the Con Voce festival (Lucerne, Switzerland), the Sinus Ton festival (Magdeburg, Germany), and Café OTO (London, UK). Learn more online.