“Their songs…are tightly crafted pop gems with timeless melodies, great harmonies, and subject matter that more often than not circles around the craziness of love, all delivered with an immediate ...

Founded by choreographer Gideon Obarzanek in 1995, the award-laden Australian dance company Chunky Move is famed for its beautiful, ambitious work with new media. Obarzanek’s final piece for the ensemble, ...

“North Carolinian singer-composer Ari Picker has Nick Drake speaking to him in one ear and Handel whispering in the other. His Anti- Records debut is spellbinding in its musical ambition, ...

The outstanding Argentinean pianist Ingrid Fliter has captivated American audiences since making her stateside debut with the Atlanta Symphony five years ago. Her first concert for Duke Performances features a ...

Musicians: Bonnie Thron, cello Fred Jacobowitz, clarinet John Noel, piano Program: Mendelssohn: Variations concertantes, Op. 17 (for cello & piano) Alberto Ginastera: Pampeana No. 2, Op. 21, Rhapsody for Cello & Piano Britten: Cello ...

Rock, country, jazz, the blues, experimental music — guitar genius Bill Frisell has done it all. After three decades of working with everyone from Pat Metheny to Brian Eno, Frisell ...

Musicians: Fred Raimi, cello Eric Pritchard, violin Jane Hawkins, piano Program: Francis Poulenc: Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 143 Gabriel Fauré: Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 120 Cecile ...

The South American classical renaissance made waves in the States when LA Philharmonic maestro Gustavo Dudamel conducted Venezuela’s foremost choral society, Schola Cantorum, last year. Now these 45 divine voices ...

“A Glenn Gould for the 21st century” (LA Times), the Italian-born Formenti performs his delicate, otherworldly cycle of interlocked piano pieces based on the work of György Kurtág, the Hungarian modernist ...

The “Duke of Bachata” kicks off our 2011/2012 season at Motorco Music Hall, a gorgeous new nightclub near the Durham Athletic Park that is equally suited to dancing — which ...

An interior decorator by day, Freddie Ross becomes Big Freedia by night. Either way, with her booming voice and magnetic presence, she utterly transforms any space she inhabits. Big Freedia ...

In this gathering of jazz headliners, three star bandleaders assemble to support Jeff “Tain” Watts, the legendary sideman and Grammy-winning drummer who shines even brighter when cast as lead. Surrounding ...

For more than 40 years, the Ciompi Quartet has been Duke’s steadfast resident chamber ensemble, interpreting both ageless repertory and bracing new music with colloquial warmth and musicality. They return ...

For more than 40 years, the Ciompi Quartet has been Duke’s steadfast resident chamber ensemble, interpreting both ageless repertory and bracing new music with colloquial warmth and musicality. They return ...

Founded in 1965, the Ciompi has been Duke’s resident chamber ensemble for more than four decades, turning out bracing performances of new and classical programs with “genuine warmth” and “effortless…coordination” ...

In this special lunchtime series of performances, the Ciompi explores the connections between Haydn and Shostakovich. Each event lasts approximately 50 minutes and features quartets by both composers. All concerts ...

A Rare Solo Appearance. Mandolinist Chris Thile is best known for the mainstream success of his audacious bluegrass combo Nickel Creek, and made waves all over again with his newest ...

In each of these free lunchtime events, 50 minutes of the most essential music is accompanied by a brief introduction by a Quartet member. This season, the Ciompi addresses canonical ...

Indian classical music is defined by great familial dynasties. Two of its most formidable lines converge in Page Auditorium for an unforgettable evening of intricately melodious music for tabla and ...

In this special lunchtime series of performances, the Ciompi explores the connections between Haydn and Shostakovich. Each event lasts approximately 50 minutes and features quartets by both composers. All concerts begin ...

Founded in Italy by the dazzlingly epicurean Andrea Marcon in 1997, the Venice Baroque Orchestra is now recognized as the world’s most adventurous and dramatic period instrument ensemble, known for ...

Our 2011/2012 classical season begins with a scintillating collaboration between two of the most acclaimed ensembles in the nation. The Orion is prized for its command of the classical repertory ...

In its flagship series, Eccentric Soul, the Numero Group of Chicago illuminates neglected soul gems through archival recordings and curated performances. This spectacular review reprises a storied tradition from the ...

Triangulating Barcelona (where he lives), Buenos Aires (where he’s from), and New York (where he now performs just one week a year), Klein’s compositions “hum with the lustrous elegance of ...

Seamlessly fusing disparate elements such as New Orleans jazz, dusty Americana, lush chamber-pop, and Eastern European folk, the captivating sextet Dark Dark Dark is a rising force on the national ...

Our special bonus concert surveys two towering monuments of Western art. First, Duke’s own Ciompi Quartet performs Beethoven’s magisterial String Quartet Op. 132. After intermission, Chamber Arts Society Director George ...

The Borromeo String Quartet is one of the most dynamic ensembles working today, “playing with lean clarity and eloquence” (Cleveland Plain Dealer): according to the Boston Globe they’re “simply the ...

A native of rural Georgia who now lives outside of Asheville, NC, the phenomenal Lizz Wright grew up in a household where gospel music reigned supreme. While she turned out ...

Last season, Durham’s own Carolina Chocolate Drops blew the roof off Reynolds Theater. After winning a “Best Traditional Folk” Grammy for their album Genuine Negro Jig, they take a victory ...

“Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys make sweet Cajun music together: music steeped in the French heritage of southwestern Louisiana and driven by accordion and fiddle. It’s sweetly melodic, danceable ...

Fierce technique and untrammeled vision have made the Malian fingerpicker Bassekou Kouyaté’s name inseparable from the ngoni, an ancient West African lute that produces a fleet and percussive music similar ...

André Watts was born just after the second world war to an American father and a Hungarian mother, the latter of whom famously used stories of Liszt’s work ethic to ...

“Imagine the intersection of free jazz and Southern music at large; now, take that idea and flesh it out for an 8- to 11-piece band, bristling with plump orchestrations and ...

“Bregović is both the catalyst and ringmaster for a musical spectacle unlike anything else on North American stages.” (San Francisco Chronicle) A flamboyant pan-Balkan bandleader and composer mounts a colossal ...

Cherished for its expressive, freewheeling animation of even the most traditional repertory, the passionate St. Lawrence String Quartet returns to Duke Performances for a third consecutive season. This year’s program ...

“Their music—swapping instruments and vocals, trading knowing looks and helpless giggles—was swept up in a natural enthusiasm, radiating love—for music, yes, but more so for each other.” —Memphis Flyer “There’s something ...

The author of a 2010 autobiography from Duke University Press visits the acoustically ideal Nelson Music Room for an intimate solo concert. Randy Weston was praised by the eminent critic ...

“This power trio is a throwback to ’90s college rock—great guitar hooks, fuzzy riffs, and easy-to-remember choruses.” —Spin Magazine

The European troubadour Alexi Murdoch, “a kindred spirit to the intricate folk of Nick Drake” (NPR), studied with Reynolds Price at Duke before moving to Los Angeles and catching the ...

Dave Longstreth’s genre-melting indie rock ensemble bears the torch for a new kind of all-devouring eclecticism: from sunny ’60s harmony-rock and deconstructed afropop to murder ballads, electronica, and chamber music, ...

A chamber music supergroup, Opus One brings together four of the most renowned musicians of our time, veterans of ensembles like Tashi, the Beaux Arts Trio, and the Orion and ...

Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Stuart came to Nashville when he was just 14 to join Lester Flatt’s band. Four decades later, he’s a legend—knowing master of every convention in the ...

Working without a conductor, the twelve Grammy-nominated singers of Stile Antico arrange their voices in delicate, watchful harmonies, “set[ting] new standards for Renaissance polyphonic singing” (Independent (UK)). Amidst the gothic ...

Since their foundation in 1994, the Pacifica has won nearly every top award in chamber music, including the Naumburg. Their reputation for “luscious, edge-of-your-seat music-making” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) was confirmed in ...

Hamelin is a titanically gifted, boundary-testing performer whose breathtaking live appearances have made him “one of the most adventurous and certainly the most courageous pianists of recent times” (International Piano ...

Clear the haze surrounding the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty and you get a luminous Americana closer to Appalachia than Haight-Ashbury. Here, new-style folk band Ollabelle—co-founded by Amy ...

In this two-night world premiere commissioned by Duke Performances, an “angelic,” NC-born country-folk heavyweight (Spin) and a classical pianist of “mathematical exactitude” and “passion” (Washington Post) unite in a new ...

“The fact is,” says the Guardian (UK), “they are peerless”: formed at Budapest in 1975, the Takács is now widely recognized as one of the premiere string quartets of our ...

“Technically resourceful, musically insightful, cohesive, full of character and always interesting” (NY Times), the Emerson may be the most accomplished string quartet in the world. They bring their bracing virtuosity ...

In each of these free lunchtime events, 50 minutes of the most essential music is accompanied by a brief introduction by a Quartet member. This season, the Ciompi addresses canonical ...

In this world premiere, two of the most original musical minds of the past hundred years—Steve Reich and David Harrington—come together for a once-in-a-lifetime performance made possible by Duke Performances’ ...

Since his debut in 1950s Hungary, the “revelatory” Schiff has climbed to the very summit of modern classical music, carving out a luminous five-decade career in which his “uncanny combination ...

With “a potent blend of intensity, authority, and abandon” (Vanity Fair), the world’s leading contemporary music ensemble turns out full-throttle performances as refined as they are exhilarating. Here they team ...

In this world premiere event, America’s most “audacious, rule-breaking jazz trio” (Billboard) unveils its take on the most notorious work in the history of music. Stravinsky’s modernist bombshell draped ancient ...

Each year this all-star, 8-man co-op of the world’s most gifted musicians—bandleaders all—picks the music of one of modern jazz’s great composers, re-sets it for the collective, then makes a ...

GUEST ARTIST: Valentin Lanzrein, baritone Founded in 1965, the Ciompi has been Duke’s resident chamber ensemble for more than four decades, turing out bracing performances of new and classical programs ...

Two standard-bearers of American music celebrate a combined century at the front edge of their craft. In the five decades since McCoury got his start with Bill Monroe, the titanically ...

IN 1953: The visionary dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham partnered with John Cage to form the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Black Mountain, North Carolina. IN 2009: Merce passed away ...

“One of the most adventurous artists working today” (Time Out NY), Lemon is a classically-trained dancer, acclaimed choreographer, and “mesmeriz[ing]” conceptual artist (NY Times) whose seamless mixed-media performances draw on ...

For half a century, Shorter’s been “jazz’s greatest living composer” (NY Times) and one of “the most original thinkers in music” (NPR)—he played with Blakey and Miles, then broke from ...

“A one-man repository” of Crescent City music (Paste), Toussaint is “the legend of New Orleans R&B” (All Music Guide) and a jazz-blues dynamo, who turns even traditional hymns into swinging, ...

“Bracing, effortlessly virtuosic, and utterly joyous” (NY Times), Denk has collaborated with Joshua Bell and, like that other sensation, plays with a kind of refined abandon, “adept and exhilarated” (Washington ...

GUEST ARTISTS: John Brown, bass; Thomas Kraines, cello Founded in 1965, the Ciompi has been Duke’s resident chamber ensemble for more than four decades, turing out bracing performances of new ...

Hampson is an internationally-renowned opera lead and recitalist, artist in residence with the New York Philharmonic and one of the most respected soloists of his era. Born in Indiana and ...

This floorboard-rattling double bill features two of the sharpest Louisiana bands working. Watson cut his teeth on the countrified chansons françaises of east Texas and Lafayette, LA—”aggressive and gifted” (NY ...

Author of The Old, Weird America: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice, among many others. Marcus is the towering figure ...

“An intrepid explorer and immaculate pianist” (Gramophone), the Brazilian-born Cohen met Ursuleasa at the 2001 Chopin Competition, in Warsaw, where he was a judge and the 23-year-old Romanian blew him ...

White’s art-country songs filter found objects—howling men, motor homes—through the Pentecostal sermons he heard growing up in north Florida. A “combination of philosopher and raconteur, country boy and intellectual” (NY ...

In a special two-evening engagement, the “consistently brilliant” Trio Solisti (NY Times) makes its Duke debut as “the most exciting piano trio in America” (The New Yorker), having now displaced the ...

Now among the preeminent quartets in the world, the St. Lawrence has cultivated a global following for its “visceral and passionate” performances that are nevertheless “rooted in a ferocious attention ...

Made with a cello, guitar, and electronic swirls floating between harmony and dissonance, The Books’ handcrafted musical assemblages combine experimental chamber music and acoustic pop with fragmentary voices from junkshop ...

In each of these free lunchtime events, 50 minutes of the most essential music is accompanied by a brief introduction by a Quartet member. This season, the Ciompi addresses canonical works ...

Since 1904 Ireland’s National Theatre has shouldered the burden of staging the people’s art in the land of Beckett, Synge, and Yeats, the modernist poet-prophet who founded it. The Abbey’s ...

Founded in 1965, the Ciompi has been Duke’s resident chamber ensemble for more than four decades, turing out bracing performances of new and classical programs with “genuine warmth” and “effortless…coordination” ...

A “boundless and deeply important young star” (LA Weekly), Iyer sits at the head of a new table of jazz titans, calling on a grab bag of sources—foreign and domestic, ...

The “most incendiary” experimental theater company of the past half-century (NY Times), Mabou Mines is an institution of the American avant-garde; for 40 years they’ve staged brave new plays and ...

A “refined intellectual musician” (NY Times), the Viennese Fellner began as one of Alfred Brendel’s most accomplished students and is now “among the foremost keyboard virtuosi of the day” (Observer ...

In a high-mountain warble “that can be described only as miraculous” (NY Times), Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Will Oldham—sings austerely beautiful songs about abandoned meadows and carnal love, charging loss with fragile ...

America’s most “inventive, dazzling pianist” (NY Daily News), Mehldau’s made a career of showing how apparently disparate genres connect—jazz, classical, and most recently a textured, feedback-washed variety of indie-pop. Von ...

“Wily, omnivorous bluegrass titans” (Village Voice), the Punch Brothers blaze while Grammy-winning mandolin genius Chris Thile, formerly of Nickel Creek, leads gospel and high-lonesome harmonies. They play Carnegie Hall in ...

Note: This Double Bill Starts at 6:30 pm. “…a revelation, music that we all need more of: equal parts sweetness and brutality, equal parts country charm and rock swagger. There’s ...

The Lion of Zimbabwe was a second-class subject of the British Empire when he began routing traditional Shona music through Otis Redding and the ‘Stones, making razor-sharp pop about rural ...

2009 Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album “…austere and elegant… an exceptionally appealing blend of folk and jazz.” –Wall Street Journal “McGarry’s sense of musical authenticity is beautifully blended ...

The Zimbabwean Chipaumire updates a vocabulary from ritual dance to beat out pulsing, physical evocations of struggle: she crouches then explodes, turning muscularity into stark grace. In two performances the ...

“Phil Moore is one of the most deeply touching songwriters. He is creating completely new landscapes with his music. ‘Northern Lights’ is the absolute best song I’ve heard in two ...

The world-renowned Kuerti’s iconic recordings of Beethoven glow with a “bright power” and “slow-burning intensity” (Boston Globe).  Here the “marvelously fluid” and “interpretively expansive” master (Philadelphia Inquirer) turns to Beethoven ...

In 2005 the “superlative” Blechacz (BBC Music) ran the table at the Chopin International Piano Competition, a triumph that earned the Polish prodigy comparisons to the great players of the ...

“Ms. Crain is a promising young storyteller with fealty to ragged, country-driven indie-pop and an alluring dark streak.” –New York Times “Her voice is gorgeously odd — all fulsome, shape-shifting ...

A native of São Paulo, Souza is a three-time Grammy-nominee whose voice is almost inhumanly pure, “trac[ing] a landscape of emotions that knows no boundaries” (Entertainment Weekly). Returning to Duke ...

Founded in 1989, the Berlin-based Artemis Quartet is now among the most accomplished ensembles in the world — “original, atmospheric and intense” (Telegraph UK).  Having played to great acclaim in ...

“Stunning North Carolina hip-hop group makes grand, thumping tracks from sliced-up soul and shards of R&B. It’s like every song should be released on 45.” –Rolling Stone “Kooley High combines ...

William Byrd: Fantasia a 6 No. 2 in G Minor for 6 Viols Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: String Quartet “A Sad Paven for these Distracted Tymes” Frank Bridge: String Sextet ...

Featuring the Ngqoko Cultural Group. This “mesmerizing” adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (Guardian UK) turns the ageless language of Greek tragedy toward a particularly modern object — South Africa’s Truth and ...

“The Kingsbury Manx’s latest… is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music compiled this year.” –Independent Weekly on 2009 release Ascenseur Ouvert! “Ascenseur Ouvert! is beautiful, graceful stuff that ...

Moran’s a jazz trailblazer whose longstanding relationship with Duke ratcheted up last year, when he performed the Duke-commissioned IN MY MIND: Monk @ Town Hall, 1959 at New York’s Town ...

Los Lobos makes smoking-hot rock in the borderlands of blues, R&B, and Tejano. Here the wolves of East L.A. look back, trading electrics for guitarones in an all-acoustic set of ...

“You can judge most pop albums by one crucial measure: Do you find yourself humming the songs afterward? In the case of You Can Go Anywhere, Do Anything, the debut ...

King and Moran are new-style formalists, injecting classic structures with vernacular energy. Here the two visionaries collaborate for an evening of ravishing dance. The first piece is King’s brawny, sinuous ...

“Powerful,” “striking,” and “razor-sharp” (Chicago Tribune), Antares is configured to match the arrangement of Olivier Messiaen’s visionary “Quartet for the End of Time,” which was written in a Nazi camp, ...

“…among the most brightly lit and best-arranged of Sugarfix’s long tenure as a Chapel Hill songwriter…in his own outlandish way—Sugarfix…nails it.” —Independent Weekly on 2009 release Summer Tempests

Conducted by the musicians themselves, the 20-piece Orpheus is an experiment in radical democracy that is also among the finest orchestras on earth, turning out collaborative art that joins visceral ...

In each of these free lunchtime events, 50 minutes of the most essential chamber music in history will be accompanied by a short introduction, giving insight into the shape and ...

With an eclectic, imaginative repertory intended to mirror the polychrome diversity of their native borough, Brooklyn Rider—who travel with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble—have made it their mission to cross ...

The fact that the “always impressive” Peter Serkin plays with “surgical precision and infinite subtlety” (NY Times) is hardly a surprise, considering that he distills three generations of world-class musicianship.  ...

In a world premiere made possible by Kronos’ ongoing collaboration with Duke Performances, the modern era’s most adventurous quartet turns its fierce creativity toward a new, Duke-commissioned work by Grammy-winner ...

Sounds of the South Megafaun & Fight the Big Bull feat. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver & Sharon Van Etten The members of Megafaun moved from Wisconsin to Raleigh with ...

The Orion combine searing emotion with a “stunning” focus on detail (Washington Post).  They find a fit complement in Peter Serkin, who plays with “surgical precision and infinite subtlety” (New ...

Rosanne Cash’s father picked cotton and listened to gospel in Dyess, Arkansas before becoming the Man in Black. He’s now the subject of a powerful collaboration, as the Grammy-winning Rosanne ...

In each of these free lunchtime events, 50 minutes of the most essential music is accompanied by a brief introduction by a Quartet member. This season, the Ciompi addresses canonical works ...

In each of these free lunchtime events, 50 minutes of the most essential chamber music in history will be accompanied by a short introduction, giving insight into the shape and ...

Along with the Orpheus (1/30), the 20-piece ASMF shares billing as one of the two most accomplished orchestras in the world, renowned for a “finely incisive” technique (Gramophone) that combines “grace ...

Born in Spray, NC, Poole was a one-time millhand who cut capers and downed booze while fighting his way to recording fame in the Depression-era South. Since the 1960s, Wainwright’s ...

Born and raised in San Juan, sax phenom Zenon has won Guggenheim and MacArthur grants for linking classic jazz with the pulsing syncopations of Afro-Caribbean and Latin American folk — ...

Additional Events: First Course Concert No. 4 Thursday, April 29, 2010 • 6 pm Duke Gardens Composers Robert Ward and Chiayu Hsu discuss their premieres. Beethoven: Quartet in B-flat Major, ...

Founded in Durham, the Chocolate Drops link with two centuries of black string music in the NC Piedmont, but their highwire live shows are as likely to rework contemporary R&B ...

Mahanthappa’s shimmering sax runs and textured compositions have put him on the front edge of modern jazz. On alto sax, tabla, and guitar, he and his Indo-Pak Coalition turn out ...

The ferociously talented Wu Han (piano) joins one half of the Emerson String Quartet — violinist Philip Setzer and cellist David Finckel — to form an ideal piano trio, one ...

Coltrane is a bandleader and sax force who bears the weight of heritage — his father is the N.C.-born John; his mother is Alice, the piano star and organist from ...

“Intricate, melodic, and vivid: the sound of North Carolina’s Annuals is the epitome of sunny indie-pop. The band’s thoughtful harmonies, anthemic orchestration and percussion, and bright electronics have earned them ...

Co-sponsored by Duke Performances and the Nasher Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition BIG SHOTS: ANDY WARHOL POLAROIDS, on view through February 21, 2010 at the Nasher Museum. Dean ...