Sospeso’s fifth anniversary concert presents the extreme edge of contemporary music in an entirely new way.

A countdown of ten works, played without pause, is articulated through projected film, live video, and lights on the dark arena of the stage. 

Disparate works—from the near silence of Helmut Lachenmann’s Pressure to the searing intensity of György Ligeti—are forced into a provocative dialogue. Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s starkly beautiful setting of Alain Robbe-Grillet confronts Joshua Cody and Paul Bozymowski’s extravagant new short film with live music, a meditation on the events of 9/11, filmed in four languages with an international cast of twenty actors. Boundaries between works and genres disappear as music melts into theatre, as live performance dissolves into film, in a choreography of light and darkness designed by Jeff Sugg (The Wooster Group).

Newly composed works by Sospeso composers Joshua Cody and Kirk Noreen bind the program together in a continuous drama, and provide a musical commentary on a body of music—a retrospective of Sospeso’s first five years—that reflects everything from minimalism to opera, noise to African percussion, electronica to flamenco, Tibetan chant to free improvisation, hardcore to the television sitcom.