"Far more than “a multicultural journey”; it entered into the heart of humankind, exploring connective artistic tissues while teasing out and celebrating the differences...This was music-making at its best: joyful abandonment without a trace of inhibition... " – CUE Magazine
Photo by GMD.
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ABOUT DAVID KRAKAUER
"David Krakauer is such an overwhelmingly expressive clarinetist who moves so seamlessly between different genres that for a minute you’d almost think that there’s no appreciable difference between jazz, klezmer and formal classical music." – The Wall Street Journal Only a select few artists have the ability to convey their message to the back row, to galvanize an audience with a visceral power that connects on a universal level. David Krakauer is such an artist. Widely considered one of the greatest clarinetists on the planet with his own unique sound and approach, he has been praised internationally as a key innovator in modern klezmer as well as a major voice in classical music. In 2015 he received a Grammy nomination as soloist with the conductorless chamber orchestra "A Far Cry". His wide array of projects, solo appearances, and multi-genre collaborations includes groups, composers and individual artists such as Ancestral Groove, the WDR Big Band, Abraham Inc. (co-led with Fred Wesley and Socalled), the Emerson Quartet, Marin Alsop, Wlad Mathulets, Leonard Slatkin (Orchestre de Lyon), Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Quatuor Debussy, Mathew Rosenblum, JoAnn Falletta, the Borderland Foundation, Geroge Tsontakis, Anakronic Electro Orkestra, Quatuor Habanera, and Kathleen Tagg (pianist and co-creator of Breath & Hammer). |
Krakauer’s discography contains some of the most important clarinet recordings of recent decades. Among them are The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (Osvaldo Golijov and the Kronos Quartet/Nonesuch), which received the Diapason D’Or in France, The Twelve Tribes (Label Bleu) which was designated album of the year in the jazz category for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, and Paul Moravec’s Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Tempest Fantasy (Naxos). He has also recorded with violinist Itzhak Perlman/The Klezmatics (Angel) and Dawn Upshaw/Osvaldo Golijov (Deutsche Grammophon). Other notable releases include his 2015 album Checkpoint with his band Ancestral Groove (Label Bleu), Paul Moravec’s Clarinet Concerto with The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP Sound), Klezmer NY (Tzadik), Tweet Tweet and Together We Stand with Abraham Inc. (Label Bleu) and (upcoming) Breath & Hammer on his own label, Table Pounding Records. His unique sound can be heard in Danny Elfman’s score for the Ang Lee film Taking Woodstock and throughout Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson.
Krakauer is thrilled to be further expanding his creative boundaries by co-composing a number of works with Kathleen Tagg including a fantasy for concert band and a clarinet concerto for the Santa Rosa Symphony with conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong to be premiered in 2021. Also, the score for Minyan by filmmaker Eric Steel (which Krakauer & Tagg not only co-wrote but also performed and produced), is their first feature film project, which premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.
As an esteemed educator, David Krakauer is on the clarinet and chamber music faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, the Mannes College of Music (New School), The Bard Conservatory and NYU. www.davidkrakauer.com
Krakauer is thrilled to be further expanding his creative boundaries by co-composing a number of works with Kathleen Tagg including a fantasy for concert band and a clarinet concerto for the Santa Rosa Symphony with conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong to be premiered in 2021. Also, the score for Minyan by filmmaker Eric Steel (which Krakauer & Tagg not only co-wrote but also performed and produced), is their first feature film project, which premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.
As an esteemed educator, David Krakauer is on the clarinet and chamber music faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, the Mannes College of Music (New School), The Bard Conservatory and NYU. www.davidkrakauer.com
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ABOUT KATHLEEN TAGG
"...this is a superbly turned out artist, a performer broaching scant detour between conception and delivery, and a musician of such grand endowment and unsparing discipline...with which she honored her natural gift and therefore the music she plays and the public she plays to… " – New York Concert Review, Carnegie Hall Debut Recital Kathleen Tagg is a South African pianist, composer and producer based in New York since 2001. A 2014 South African Music Awards nominee for best classical album, she has performed on four continents with a host of leading musicians, and the breadth of her collaborations defines her multifaceted career. In the past decade, Tagg’s work has focused on identity, ideas of connection and sound exploration. She created her own unique language at the piano, made up of techniques she developed and experimented with to expand the piano into a full electro-acoustic orchestra. |
Photo by Svetlana Eckhoff.
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She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the 92nd St Y and Symphony Space in New York, but is equally at home in non-conventional spaces and theatrical settings. Her performances and numerous recordings range from classical to world music, musical theater to her own music mixing improvisation with fully realized scores. She holds the Helen Cohn Award as outstanding doctoral graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, and degrees from Mannes College and the University of Cape Town. Tagg has performed throughout North America, Europe, Southern Africa, China and India and her recordings have been featured in film and television. Recent recordings include songs of Jake Heggie with soprano Regina Zona (NAXOS, 2014) and Where Worlds Collide (Table Pounding Records, 2016) with South African jazz pianist Andre Petersen. Her latest recording, Breath & Hammer with clarinetist David Krakauer, will be released in May 2020.
As a composer, she has received commissions to write for the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and the Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy and arrange work for the New Century Chamber Orchestra and Vienna Jewish Culture Fest. She co-compose and produced her first film score with Krakauer for Eric Steel’s feature film Minyan, which premiered in February 2020 at the Berlin Biennale. Her musical, Erika’s Wall, co-written with Sophie Jaff, received a developmental production by The Music Theater Company of Chicago. She was a 2014-2015 fellow of the Dramatist Guild of America and a 2017 Con Ed Exploring the Metropolis Composer in Residence.
For the past six years, she has toured on four continents with David Krakauer in acoustic and electric configurations. In 2017, she and Krakauer created Keepers of the Flame, an evening-length theatrical music event for Poland’s Borderlands Foundations’ annual Misterium Mostu festival (Mystery of the Bridge). In 2019 they created a concert-length immersive concert experience with video designer Jesse Gilbert for the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, with Kathleen acting as dramaturg, co-creator and producer.
Tagg has produced all of her own albums– from classical and classical-crossover albums to her 2016 album Where Worlds Collide with South African jazz pianist Andre Petersen. On the new Breath & Hammer album with Krakauer, she has created an album out of tens of thousands of samples of her and Krakauer’s playing: what Krakauer refers to as “a medieval tapestry the size of an apartment, made up of fingernail sized samples.”
Following her two decades of work with singers, she created and curated concerts celebrating new work by living composers in California at SongFest at Colburn from 2014-2016. She also produced countless events, including a series of benefit concerts for the ACLU featuring luminaries such as Abraham Inc, Marc Ribot and members of the Silk Road Ensemble. www.kathleentagg.com
"It is Tagg, the ever consummate professional that emerges as the real star of the show. Her artistic integrity and musical reliability remain undimmed throughout as she coaxes an ever-changing kaleidoscope of colour from the piano where languidly sensuous moments intertwine with flashes of tempestuous fire and eloquently spaced silences. Grippingly executed martellato passages, offset against arpeggio flourishes and chord punctuations display Tagg’s complete mastery of the flamenco idiom. "
– CUE Magazine