“With ‘Silence,’ an evening series of ‘experimental music under the oaks’ this month, the 36-year-old composer, conductor and curator Christopher Rountree will musically activate [Los Angeles County’s Descanso Gardens’] fragrant open spaces along with the series’ co-artistic director, violinist and Girlschool founder Anna Bulbrook,” writes Catherine Womack in Thursday’s (9/5) Los Angeles Times. “As the director of Wild Up, the flexible and virtuosic L.A.-based new music collective he founded in 2010, he has regularly commissioned and premiered art, music and opera…. Rountree [originally planned] to become a band director…. But … when he was 20, his father committed suicide…. ‘Before he died, my dad left me a note. Among other things, it said, “You should be a conductor.” … I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, and my life changed in that moment.’ Through his trombone teacher, Rountree found his first conducting teacher, Joana Carneiro … and worked with [the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s] then-music director Esa-Pekka Salonen…. ‘This is a “Wild” thing,’ he says of his ensemble. ‘It is a thing that in its wildness is vulnerable and is allowed be frayed and already bleeding, already broken. The “Up” means choosing joy making, hope and optimism.’ ”
Posted September 6, 2019
