Judith Berkson - voice, keyboards, and electronics
Jeffrey Means, Robert Schulz, Nicholas Tolle - percussion

Program - All works by Judith Berkson
Doppelgänger (Schubert/Berkson)
Castle (Schumann/Berkson)
Harpers (Schubert/Berkson)
Suns (Schubert/Berkson)
Waves (2025) for voice and electronics
Un-Om (2024) for tubular bells, percussion, synthesizer, and voice

Judith Berkson, a composer, singer, and pianist based in Los Angeles and NYC, has been honing
her Liederkreis project since 2016, which features electronically-augmented vocal interpretations
of lieder by such composers as Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, as well as purely electronic pieces engaging noise and feedback-oriented vignettes. Her latest release Liederkreis II (Notice Recordings) finds Judith continuing a more song-oriented approach, as previously explored on her 2010 ECM release Oylam. The pieces contained on Liederkreis II are deeply haunting, timbrally sensuous. Judith is taking her electronically-processed vocals and conforming them to the slowly dripping, contorted melodies of Schubert and Schumann’s lieder, firmly within the lineage of such artists as Klaus Nomi and Kraftwerk. Liederkreis II exists as a commentary of a hypermodern relationship with classical music: both an admiration and a recontextualisation. This is music that is at once both personal and emotional, and formal and mechanical. It is both beautiful and anxious. It is within this contrast that the album retains such an alluring presence.
Described as “remarkable” by The Wall Street Journal and "an artist with iron will” by the New York Times, Judith Berkson is a composer-performer and scholar who works across a broad spectrum of contemporary and traditional idioms. Her acoustic and electronic works have been presented by Kronos Quartet, Blank Forms, Beth Morrison Productions at City Opera, and on NPR, and she has worked with performers and new music ensembles Mivos Quartet, Wet Ink, Laurie Anderson, Yarn/Wire, Experiments in Opera, and Bang on a Can. She has recorded for Nonesuch Records and Pi Recordings and released an album of compositions on ECM Records. Performances have included Forum Stadtpark, Picasso Museum Malaga, Lincoln Center, National Sawdust, BrucknerTage, OstravaDays, and Carnegie Hall.

Jeffrey Means is an American conductor and percussionist with a focus on contemporary music. His wide-ranging career has included engagements across North America and Europe, collaborating with some of today’s leading composers and ensembles. Means is the artistic director of Sound Icon, whose performances have been named among the best of the year multiple times by The Boston Globe. He served as the assistant conductor of Spoleto Festival USA for three years and the Lucerne Festival Academy for two years. In these capacities, he assisted Alan Gilbert, Heinz Holliger, Susanna Mälkki, Matthias Pintscher, John Kennedy, and others. He has conducted at festivals in France, Italy, Switzerland, Argentina, Canada, Finland, and Australia. Ensembles Means has led include the Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, Mimesis Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, The East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, and many others. He is currently a professor of conducting at Berklee College of Music. In addition to his performance activities, Means is an active producer and engineer of fine recordings of all types of classical music.

Drummer/percussionist/timpanist Robert Schulz has long been one of the Boston’s first-call musicians, where he has lived, studied and worked since 1990. A collaborative aesthetic combined with an unusually broad musical vocabulary has led to a career in music that routinely transcends boundaries of musical style, time or place.
He is principal percussionist for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, winner of the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording (Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox), as well as the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Boston Musica Viva and Dinosaur Annex New Music Ensemble. With BMOP/Sound, he has organized and performed the innumerable percussive details for over 80 commercially available recordings. Schulz is also principal timpanist for Odyssey Opera (cowinner of the 2019 Grammy) and Emmanuel Music (a unique collective with a proud tradition of presenting weekly Bach cantatas in a liturgical setting). He performs regularly with the Boston Symphony, Pops and Ballet Orchestras, the Handel & Haydn Society, A Far Cry, Teatro Nuovo, and is a frequent guest with the Boston Chamber Music Society, First Monday Series at NEC and the Boston Celebrity Series. In 2014, Schulz received a Grammy nomination for Best Small Ensemble Performance (Yehudi Wyner’s The Mirror). Concerto performances include the Tan Dun Water Concerto, Lukas Foss’ Percussion Concerto, Eric Moe’s Drumset Concerto and Philip Glass’ Timpani Fantasy, as well as numerous recital appearances with Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man in Paris, Shanghai, Beijing. New York and across America. Schulz’ first teachers were John Rowland and Lynn Harbold, both with the Buffalo Philharmonic. Later, at the University of Buffalo, where he worked for several years with Jan Williams, who commissioned the Foss Percussion Concerto and was its original soloist.

Nicholas Tolle is one of America's premiere cimbalom artists. In 2019 he won 3rd prize in the Budapest Music Center International Cimbalom Competition. He has performed as soloist in Pierre Boulez’ Repons with the composer conducting at the Lucerne Festival in 2009, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with Péter Eötvös in 2012, and with Steven Schick at UC San Diego in 2017. Based in Boston, MA, he plays regularly with such groups as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Emmanuel Music, and Sound Icon, and with his own group, the Ludovico Ensemble. He the co-founder of Lamnth, a violin/cimbalom duo. He has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, New York Philharmonic, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and Ensemble Recherche. He is featured performing Boulez’s Repons in the EuroArts documentary Inheriting the Future of Music: Pierre Boulez and the Lucerne Festival Academy, and in Kurtág's music for cimbalom and voice on soprano Susan Narucki's 2019 album The Edge of Silence, which was nominated for a 2020 Grammy award. His recording of Kurtág’s Seven Songs from The Edge of Silence was named one of the best classical tracks of 2019 by the New York Times.