Present Music’s “Around 30″ Saturday, March 3 at 7:30pm Turner Hall Ballroom

Present Music, Milwaukee’s new music ensemble, will provide the stage for 30 of the brightest, most inventive young composers, musicians, dancers, designers, videographers, and visual artists from Milwaukee and around the country. Turner Hall Ballroom will be transformed into a cutting-edge art gallery featuring conceptual garments and life-sized puppets by Shannon Lee Molter, fashion designs by Miranda Levy and visual art works by numerous artists including Susan Luther. Be the first to see world premieres by Amanda Schoofs of UWM and by Christal Wagner and Simon Eichinger of Danceworks.

Present Music will perform works by the hottest young composers including Sean Friar’s Little Green Pop, Paola Prestini’s Spell, Jacob Cooper’s Untitled, Patrick Burke’s All Together Now, Anna Clyne’s Rapture, and Missy Mazzoli’s Magic with Everyday Objects, “a very appealing bit of post-Radiohead post-Romanticism (complete with bursts of guitar fuzz and feedback), spiked judiciously with some seriously ballsy “wrong” notes. It was beautiful. I wish I’d written it.” -Darcy James Argue, composer

More info & tickets at their website:

http://www.presentmusic.org/concerts/around-30.aspx

Pianist Michael Mizrahi embarked on a commissioning project last year, resulting in an evening length concert of new music for the piano. Now he’s in the second phase of the project– a studio recording of the new works, to be released on New Amsterdam Records in the spring. I’m happy to say that I composed “Unravel” for Michael, which is only my second solo piano work in 10 years.