Susie Ibarra Album Release Concert

NationalSawdust+ presents Susie Ibarra's Parallels and Confluence: Bugang and Pasig Rivers

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On the heels of her 2025 Pulitzer Prize in music, singular Filipinx-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist Susie Ibarra returns to NS+ with a program featuring U.S. and New York premieres as well as tales of collecting sound over time in remote, rustic corners of the world. Her recent work will be brought to life by dynamic mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran; longtime collaborators violist Daniel Doña, pianist Alex Peh, and the Arneis Quartet (violinists Heather Braun and Rose Drucker, violist Daniel Doña, and cellist Agnes Kim); and the composer herself on percussion. Biochemist and climate scientist Daniel Ibarra rounds out an evening rooted in nature and climate – enduring preoccupations of the artist that will be explored in this NS+ For Nature event, hosted by NS+ curator Elena Park.

The program will include Parallels and Confluence: Bugang and Pasig Rivers, scored for piano quintet, a love song for two Filipino rivers—one, the most pristine, and the other, the most polluted, but both of great ecological, cultural, and historical importance. The piece incorporates river sounds captured with sound engineer-field recordist Jake Landau, as well as elements of bird songs endemic to the region. On kulintang, the composer will join Doña for Laktawan at Tumalon (Skip and Jump), a piece that recalls the feeling and lightness felt by the young Ibarra, moving from stone to stone across streams in the river systems of Houston bayous. Moran and Doña will perform “Pasig River,” a kundiman from her new song cycles, CHAN: Sonnets and Devotions in the Wilderness, commissioned and premiered this year in Berlin by MaerzMusik Berliner Festspiele and produced with her fellowship in music and sound with the DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. These works are included in a trilogy of new compositions, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Sky Islands, to be released on September 12, with celebrations in Berlin, Manila, and New York City.

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