Bearthoven premiers New Works by Katherine Balch and Sarah Hennies & opening the evening will be the premiere of a new duo featuring vocalist Luisa Muhr and guitarist Wendy Eisenberg.

Bearthoven New Music by Katherine Balch and Sarah Hennies
Bearthoven [ \ʼbDr-toh-vǝn\ ] is a piano trio creating a new repertoire for a familiar instrumentation by commissioning works from leading young composers. Karl Larson (piano), Pat Swoboda (bass), and Matt Evans (percussion) have combined their individual voices and diverse musical backgrounds to create a versatile trio focused on frequent and innovative commissioning of up-and-coming composers. Bearthoven is rapidly building a diverse repertoire by challenging composers to apply their own voice to an instrumentation that, while common amongst jazz and pop idioms, is currently foreign in the contemporary classical world.

The commission of Katherine Balch’s Trio has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

Luisa Muhr/Wendy Eisenberg Duo
Luisa Muhr is an interdisciplinary performer, director, and theater-maker originally from Vienna, Austria. As a performer she works as a theater and movement artist, vocalist, and improviser. Luisa is the creator and curator of New York’s leading interdisciplinary womxn artists series, Women Between Arts, at The New School’s Mannes School of Music and the co-founder/artistic director of the performing arts company FENGARI Works.

Wendy Eisenberg is an improvising guitarist. Her debut record as a solo improviser, “Its Shape Is Your Touch,” and her trio album, “The Machinic Unconscious,” with Ches Smith and Trevor Dunn, were both released in 2018, on VDSQ and Tzadik respectively. She has also released an album of songs for voice and guitar, entitled Time Machine. She has written and performed in numerous projects, including the critically acclaimed band Birthing Hips, described by NPR as “brainy, noisy punk based in sonic adventure, technical mastery, and rejection of the status quo.” She leads a trio, Editrix, which explores similar parameters.