Next Month at the Hirshhorn: New (and New-ish) Music

“The 20th Century Consort probably needs to consider changing its name to something like the 21^st Century Consort,” wrote Joan Reinthaler in 2004 in the Washington Post. With a single exception, the works on the program in question had been composed after 1999. “The 20^th Century Consort, too current for its name,” she concluded.

Resident contemporary music ensemble at the Hirshhorn, the consort took Reinthaler’s advice. However, the works to be performed on Dec. 6 and 7 in the museum’s Ring Auditorium are split 50-50: three from the 20^th century and three from the 21^st.

Coincidentally, the concerts will open with Charles Wuorinen’s “Fifty Fifty.” Around four minutes long, the piece — an audience waker-upper — was written in honor of composer Oliver Knussen’s 50^th birthday in 2002. The rechristened 21^st Century Consort, founded in 1975, had the ensemble’s own 50^th birthday in mind, no doubt.

“Fifty Fifty” is one of three works that will ring out from “two nine-foot Steinways wrangled by pianists Lisa Emenheiser and Lura Johnson,” said Christopher Kendall, founding artistic director. Former head of the University of Maryland School of Music and the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, Kendall also co-founded Folger Consort (which won’t touch a piece until it’s at least 300 years old).

More new and new-ish music to be four-handed by Emenheiser and Johnson: “Two Piano Suite,” a jazz-inflected 1986 piece by Jamaican-born Eleanor Alberga, who lives and works in the U.K.; and “Hallelujah Junction,” an ultra-precisely synchronized 1996 piece — named for a truck stop on the California-Nevada border — by John Adams, composer of the operas “Nixon in China” and “Doctor Atomic.”

George Crumb’s seven-section “A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979,” a spacey take on early 14^th-century Nativity frescoes by Giotto (at times, the piano’s strings are muted, plucked and strummed) will be “tag-teamed” by the consort’s fearless and formidable Steinway Artists. Written as a Christmas present for Lambert Orkis, who was appointed the National Symphony Orchestra’s pianist by Mstislav Rostropovich, “Little Suite” is one of the program’s centerpieces, according to Kendall.

Another centerpiece: “Winter-Spring” and “Fall-Winter,” the first and last movements of the string quartet “Infinite Season.” Described by Kendall as “ineffably beautiful,” the work, partly inspired by Korean traditional music, was composed in 2017-18 by Juri Seo, a Princeton professor he called “the consort’s sort-of composer-in-residence this season.”

The four string players — violinists Xiaoxuan Shi and Joel Fuller, violist Daniel Foster and cellist Rachel Young, all NSO members — will also perform an arrangement of Arvo Pärt’s four-voice setting of the Latin prayer “Da Pacem Domine” (“Give peace, Lord”), which the Estonian composer, who turned 90 in September, began writing two days after the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004.

The Hirshhorn is located at Independence Avenue and 7^th Street NW. There will be a 4 p.m. talk prior to the 5 p.m. performance on Saturday, Dec. 6, and another following the 2 p.m. performance on Sunday, Dec. 7. Admission is free, but advance registration at hirshhorn.si.edu is recommended.

Later this month, on Saturday, Dec. 20, at 5 p.m., the 21^st Century Consort will perform “The Passion of Scrooge,” Jon Deak’s setting of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” for solo baritone and chamber ensemble, which the consort premiered in 1997. Also that evening, eight vocalists will sing Victorian-era English carols and post-Civil War American carols, “along with contemporary English and American counterparts.”

The consort’s 50^th anniversary season also includes concerts on Feb. 21 and on April 18 and 19, 2026.

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