s e q u i t u r




		Cellos Add Wordless But Lyrical Voices by Allan Kozinn, New York Times 03/04/2008 Stylistic Wanderings and Flirtations With Multimedia And Jazz by Allan Kozinn, New York Times 04/18/2007 Earthy Cuban Sounds, Rendered With An Urban Complexity by Allan Kozinn, New York Times 01/10/2007 A Menu Of Familiar Signposts And A One-Woman Opera by Anne Midgette, New York Times 04/02/2005 American Piano of the 1940s by Jack Sullivan, American Record Guide 01/01/2005 Sequitur-Concertos BBC Music Magazine 04/01/2004 Sequitur-Concertos by Ian Quinn, American Record Guide 01/31/2004 Sequitur-Concertos by Ken Smith, Gramaphone Magazine 01/01/2004 Sequitur-Concertos by Steve Smith, Time Out New York 11/20/2003 Eclecticism and Humor in Works by Lewis Spratlan by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times 11/14/2003 Meditations on Power, Old and Freshly by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times 05/22/2003 Sequitur's new-music cabarets offer contemporary classics with theatrical flair by Brian WIse, Time Out New York 05/15/2003 Music In Review: Sequitur by Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times 05/24/2002 A High-Energy Romp Through The Raucous 1940's by Anne Midgette, New York Times 10/27/2001 Seasons of Squawks on the Crows' Calendar by Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times 03/01/2001 Two Flutists Explore the 20th-Century Repertory by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times 10/28/2000 Concert Connects New With Newer by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times 04/28/2000 Poetry as the Setting for Meditations on a Child's Death by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times 11/16/1999 The Sound of the City by Robert Hilferty, The Village Voice 01/26/1999 Music: Classical and New by Rose Martelli, newyork.citysearch.com 01/18/1999 New Songs Spring Forth In a Lively Mixture by Paul Griffiths, The New York Times 01/13/1999 A Cozy Cabaret Of Comical Sultriness by Justin Davidson, New York Newsday 01/12/1999 Sequitur: George Crumb Concert by Kenneth Goldsmith, New York Press 11/18/1998 Clash Of The Titans: Two Legendary Composers are Feted by Ken Smith, Time Out New York 10/22/1998 Sequitur: Kaye Playhouse Concert by Mark W. Greenfest, The New Music Connoisseur 05/18/1997 New Works Teeming With Fauna by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times 02/22/1997

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	A Cozy Cabaret Of Comical Sultriness by Justin Davidson, New York Newsday 01/12/1999 As concert titles go, "Songs of Sex and Solitude" covers virtually every lyric ever set to music - though not, actually, Hanns Eisler's "Solidarity Song," the robust Communist anthem that had the audience singing along toward the end of the evening of high-art cabaret at The Knitting Factory on Sunday. There was something brilliantly devious about sneaking Eisler's implacably political songs, all of them on texts by Bertolt Brecht, into an evening nominally devoted to private desires. Whether Harold Meltzer, the artistic director of the 2-year old contemporary music group Sequitur, was making the point that the personal is political or that social yearnings can be as intense as sexual desires, the concert was a potent cocktail of sultriness and socialism. The Knitting Factory, one of those shoebox spaces in lower Manhattan that relies on dim lighting to transform raw dinginess into industrial chic, was a perfect stand-in for a Weimar cabaret. The music had to compete with saxophones from the upstairs lounge, with traffic through the big metal doors and murmured doings at the bar, but the trade-off was a hip, informal setting for new music that was mostly jaded, arch and often wryly comic. There was "Life Story," in which the British composer Thomas Adès sets Tennessee Williams' chronicle of pillow talk during a one-night stand to music that curls and stings like cigarette smoke. (Some people will know this piece as the title number from the first all-Adès CD, but this performance, sung with theatrical panache by Dora Ohrenstein, was, unbelievably, the U.S. premiere.) Then there was Eleanor Sandresky's "My Goddess," a hilariously neurotic monologue by a woman who forces herself to utter a certain vulgarism as a form of therapy and approaches it by means of alliteration - "can't," "cunning," "Curaçao," "Kuwait." Richard Adams scored the most "Saturday Night Live" points with "An Affair Under Oath," his quasi-operatic setting of the grand passion of Monica Lewinsky, as quoted in the Starr report. "If no one saw us - and no one did - then nothing happened," begins the piece, a paroxysm of references that will (hopefully) be dim by this time next year: ties, T-shirts, "Leaves of Grass." Adams' glancing politics acted as a doorway into the passionately unsubtle music of Eisler, the German composer who was reviled first by Nazi Germany, then by McCarthyite America and finally embraced by East Germany, for which he wrote the national anthem. The baritone Richard Lalli did a first-rate job delivering these powerful and ferocious songs, which now, shorn of the cause they propagandized for, can be heard both as art and as artifacts of a dead ideal. Sequitur is a fine fledgling ensemble, and to understand how valuable it is, one would not only have to attend tonight's concert, but to spend some time frequenting the earnest and usually deadly all-contemporary-music concerts that speckle the city. A small corps of students and hobbyists rove from one to the other of these, disconsolately tending the flame of new music and trying to fill enough seats to keep intimate theaters from seeming as vast and chill as stadiums. Sequitur had no such problems, and though The Knitting Factory is tiny, it was packed, warm and very much alive.

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