Aron and Fazio play Currier with Oberlin Sinfonietta and Tim Weiss

Sebastian Currier, a Grawemeyer Award-winning composer, has included the guitar in several of his musical outings. In addition to the current piece, Currier wrote a solo piece (Assertions/Reflections, 1988) and a duo for guitar and viola (Pulse, 2002), and included the guitar as an ensemble instrument in Artificial Memory (2015). This work, Broken Consort (1996),  treats as equal partners the ensemble's six members: violin, cello, flute, oboe and two classical guitars. It was written originally for, and premiered by the Cygnus Ensemble, a New York-based group featuring guitarists Oren Fader and William Anderson. This was its first performance at Oberlin. Senior guitar major, Stephen Fazio, and I covered the guitar parts, and were joined by flutist Lily Zishu Xie, oboist William Welter, violinist Jerry Xiong and cellist Hannah Kim. Oberlin's resident genius, and director of the Conservatory's famous Contemporary Music Ensemble, Tim Weiss, directed. In addition to the Currier, the program featured works by Lutoslawski, Zohn-Muldoon, Ran and Shepherd. 

Broken Consort is a single-movement work which references the common Elizabethan ensemble format of two different sized recorders, two different sized viols, a lute and a cittern (and sometimes a bandora). It is tightly constructed and highly virtuosic, putting all the ensemble's members to the test. The performance went beautifully. Below are a few shots of the ensemble; the full program follows.