The Kickstarter

Our Kickstarter campaign has launched! We are raising money to record our first ever studio CD!
Here is the link to give: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1845491240/the-con-vivo-cd
Notice that we have a wide array of thank-you gifts. We thank you from our hearts for your support!

The deadline is June 15 at midnight. If we don’t raise $7,500, the minimum needed to record this set of music, we will not get any of the money.

None of these pieces have been professionally recorded.

Here is a brief description of the music:
John Altieri’s Love.Give.Remember Con Vivo’s first commission, scored for “Prokofiev Quintet”- oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass, this work was written in the wake of the 2008 Pakistani earthquake and is inspired by traditional and Bollywood music of India and Pakistan.
Lembit Beecher’s Small Suite. Premiered at a Con Vivo concert in 2012, Lembit’s Baroque-dance-suite-inspired work is scored for viola, clarinet, bassoon, and double bass, with each movement descending in ensemble size, ending with a solo viola “Loure.”
Judd Greenstein’s Summer Dances. Written while a student at Yale, Judd’s piece for clarinet, viola and bass takes the idea of a dance to three very different places, from a bubbling creek in the Catskills, to shimmering heat over city asphalt, and finally to a crazy dream of klezmer madness.
Dan Lippel’s and Martin Moretto’s two pieces for guitar duo: Dark Eyes (Lippel) and Golden Eyed (Moretto). Dan and Martin premiered these lovely, tango-inspired tunes, at Con Vivo’s inaugural Mercado Park season last summer.
Mazz Swift’s Molten, a song she wrote for her solo MazzMuse project, but arranged for string trio to a great response at our 2011 Gala.

Con Vivo has embodied its name- “with life”- for six years. Our mission is to bring chamber music to places and audiences where it hasn’t been before. Please help us record this music we love by young composers we have strong ties to. A CD will help spread our music and our mission beyond our live audience to reach all sorts of new people. It will also help us raise funds to keep our free concerts going, reaching new audiences right here in Jersey City.

Our concert on June 15 at the Barrow Mansion will be a wrap party for this campaign. Be ready for some surprise performances! As with all Con Vivo concerts, that 8PM show is free and open to all.

Thank you so much for sustaining us! We hope you enjoy the music. Please spread the word.

Yours in music,
Amelia Ames, founder and co-artistic director, Con Vivo Music

Mercado Park: Mangobot

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We’re kicking off our 2013 Mercado Park summer series next week! The amazing percussionists Joe Bergen, Jude Traxler, and Mike Perdue will be performing under the name Mangobot. It’s sure be a wonderful show with awesome music.

Tuesday May 7, 6-8pm
Mercado Park (intersection of Newark Ave and Jersey Ave)
Jersey City, NJ
FREE!

Many thanks to Jersey City’s Historic Downtown Special Improvement District for their support. Mango image from Flickr user dihlie….., robot image from Flickr user Sebastianlund.

Concert at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church

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Last week Con Vivo performed our Romance Languages concert at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church (photo above). We had a great time performing music by composers Colla, Ginastera, Respighi, and Schumann. Many thanks to everyone who came!

We’re presenting the 2013 Composition Competition winner, Greg Steinke’s Native American Notes, in concert on June 15. You won’t want to miss it!

Plus, there’s big news we’ll be announcing soon…

Con Vivo at Mercado Park: the 2013 Season

Thanks to the Historic Downtown Special Improvement District for hosting us!
Mercado Park is at the intersection of Jersey and Newark Streets in downtown Jersey City.
All shows are free and will take place from 6:00-8:00PM. In case of rain, the artists will play indoors at Two Boots Pizza, 133 Newark Ave.

May 7 – Mangobot percussion group (Joe Bergen, Jude Traxler, Mike Perdue)
June 4 – New Thread Sax Quartet
July 9 – German Gonzalez Trio (German Gonzales, guitar; Jon di Fiore, drums; Daniel Duke, upright bass)
Aug 6 – Daniel Lippel and Martin Moretto, Latin American jazz guitar duo
Sept 3 – Jody Redhage and Sara Caswell, cello/violin duo

Announcing the Winners of our Composition Competition

Dear Friends,

We had so many wonderful submissions to our 2012 Composition Competition “String Trio + 1,” it was very difficult to pick just one winner. That being said, all of the judges felt very strongly about the winner.

Greg Steinke‘s work Native American Notes is actually for String Quartet (technically string trio + 1!) but is such an original, fresh and appealing treatment of the ensemble, it really stands out in the genre. We are so excited to play Greg’s piece on our two June concerts: June 15 at the Barrow Mansion in downtown JC and June 23 at the Park Avenue Christian Church in Manhattan. Two fantastic pieces tied for Second Place: A Fitful Sleep for string trio + clarinet by Ted Goldman, of Rochester, NY; and Abaculi Quartet for string trio + piano, by Alberto Colla of Valle San Bartolomeo, Italy. Also of note is a work we gave Honorable Mention to: the Three Madrigals for strings and clarinet by Alon Nechushtan of… Jersey City, NJ! We will perform Ted’s and Alon’s works on an upcoming performance, date TBD. We will play Alberto’s work on our April 21 concert “Romance Languages” at St. Paul’s Church in Jersey City.

We do the competition every few years, because it is a lot of work to process all the entries, choose winners, and include the music on our programs. I’m happy to announce two “Firsts” for this year’s competition: It’s the first time we are able to offer a monetary prize to our first prize winner, of $500. It’s also the first time we are endeavoring to perform all the top pieces. We liked so many of the entries, we have asked many of the composers if we can hold onto the scores for possible inclusion on future programs, so stay tuned…

Also stay tuned for our upcoming crowd-funding campaign to produce our first-ever studio recording! At every Con Vivo concert, I am asked if we have a CD for sale. We record almost every performance, so we have compiled some live recordings into a couple of disks that can give our friends near and far an idea of who we are and what we do. However, it is time we get in the studio and make real, polished documents of the music that has figured centrally in Con Vivo’s programs these last five and a half years. This CD will include music that is unavailable anywhere else, composed by John Altieri, Lembit Beecher, Judd Greenstein, Dan Lippel, and Mazz Swift. Start saving your pennies, as we will be kicking this off within the next month… and I promise some FABULOUS thank-you gifts!

Thanks, as always, for your continued support of excellent and adventurous chamber music in Jersey City and beyond!

Amelia Ames
artistic director and violist, Con Vivo Music

New Website

Con Vivo is in the process of updating our website. We hope you like the new look!