NO HAY BANDA & Steven Takasugi — Il Teatro Rosso
Founded in 2016 by three Montreal-based musicians Daniel Áñez, Noam Bierstone, and Geneviève Liboiron, NO HAY BANDA has evolved into a fixture within the Canadian modern composition scene—as both an adventurous ensemble andcurious-minded concert presenter/ producer.
NO HAY BANDA's debut recorded outing, I had a dream about this place landed on Peter Margasak's Best Contemporary Classical of 2022 list for Bandcamp Daily, garnered a JUNO Award nomination and received favourable coverage from other outlets including A Closer Listen, Musicworks, Vital Weekly, and Textura.
Yet, where I had a dream explored four extended pieces each from a different composer, on Il Teatro Rosso the group offers something more focused: a single work by award-winning Los Angeles native Steven Takasugi. Developed over three years, and commissioned through Ernst Von Siemens Musikstiftung, Takasugi's Il Teatro Rosso offers an imaginative extension to the reality-bending theatrics pioneered by Mauricio Kagel and even calls to mind the ensemble's namesake, the surreal cabaret scene in Mulholland Drive by the late David Lynch.
Il Teatro Rosso premieres 7:30PM Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at the Théâtre Plaza in Montréal and is slated to make further international appearances later this year.
It's fertile terrain that Takasugi has been harvesting for some time, such as in the work Sideshow, of which NO HAY BANDA presented the Canadian premiere. Prefacing a 2019 lecture, Takasugi remarks: "The mixed-media work, especially those that bring together recorded samples of acoustic instruments with their live counterparts, offers the composer a unique opportunity to reflect on today’s ambiguous, uncertain, paradoxical, and contradictory world. Predictive faculties are thwarted; assumptions are tested: in short, a house of mirrors, whose reflections and actualities become confused and exchanged. It is an art of misdirection, sleight of hand, ventriloquism, imposters, and role reversal."
Takasugi and the ensemble have also enlisted film director Huei Lin, who has worked with the likes of Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Bang On A Can, and L'Opéra de Montréal, and sound director Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, a three-time SOCAN Award winning composer, and winner of the 2019 Prix d’Europe.
Deploying devices such as strategic lip-synching, false spatialization and deliberate perceptual misdirection, much like his statement above the piece smears of the boundary between live and recorded aspects, the real and the virtual, and even truth and falsity, such that the performers becomes observers and the audience the observed.
Even without its concert presentation, Takasugi's music is perplexing and psychedelic—an eccentric mongrel of Noah Creshevsky’s hyperrealism and Helmut Lachenmann's instrumental musique concrète. There's an urgency that propels it forward, often on account of its dense, detail-rich flows, yet this urgency remains in more spacious passages such as the beginning of the work's third section, "Life On An Incline or Clean Geometry." Takasugi has a brilliant colouristic imagination that informs the acoustic and electronic elements in equal measure. It's also the binding agent between those two dimensions—the one that allows him to produce his stunning trompe l'oreille effects. His considerable sonic vocabulary is arguably what gives the music its chimeric emotional quality and its capacity to embody contradiction. Takasugi easily weaves giddy head rushes of granular giggles into strange, menacing snarls, without prompting questions about cohesion. Instead these smooth collisions serve to pry his liminal conceptual spaces open further.
Steven Takasugi was born in Los Angeles in 1960 and received his doctoral in music composition at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently an Associate of the Harvard University Music Department. He is a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2016 Riemen and Bakatel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the recipient of awards including a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, four Ernst von Siemens Foundation Commissions, and a Japan Foundation Artist Residency in Tokyo. He received four invitations to MacDowell including both the Hargraves-Newcomb and Olmsted Fellowships, the Aaron Copland Bogliasco Fellowship in Music, as well as residency fellowships at Yaddo, Brush Creek, VCCA, Civitella Ranieri, and Bogliasco. His work has been performed extensively worldwide. Takasugi is also a renowned teacher of composition associated with masterclasses in New York City, Singapore, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv, Darmstadt, Bludenz, Dublin, Melbourne, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, Harvard University, California Institute for the Arts, and the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo.
NO HAY BANDA is a Montreal-based non-profit organization committed to the production, performance, and promotion of music rooted in exploratory and avant-garde practices. NO HAY BANDA organizes a series of concerts throughout the year in Montreal, aiming to provide a space for artists working on the fringes of established genres to realize projects that would not take place otherwise. The organization also represents a flexible ensemble of musicians that performs special projects and newly-commissioned works developed through close collaborative relationships with a variety of composers and artists. Furthermore, NO HAY BANDA records and produces albums that are released on the in-house record label, No Hay Discos, which they established in 2021.
Their 2024-2025 artistic season represents NO HAY BANDA’s ninth year of existence. They have produced over 60 events since their founding , and have been invited to perform at festivals including Everyseeker (Halifax), FIMAV (Victoriaville), Music on Main’s Modulus Festival (Vancouver), Suoni Per Il Popolo and Lux Magna (Montreal), Ottawa Chamberfest, Open Ears (Kitchener), Québec Musiques Parallèles, and Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Their concerts and albums have been featured and have received rave reviews in numerous publications including La Presse, CBC/Radio-Canada, Vancouver Sun, Musicworks, Bandcamp, A Closer Listen, Exclaim! and The Wire.
Their events feature an eclectic variety of performing artists and guest composers. Highlights include the Canadian premiere of Vinko Globokar’s Laboratorium in 2016, a monographic program presenting the imaginative and playful universe of Russian composer Elena Rykova in 2017, and XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! by Jennifer Walshe in 2020, a multimedia music theatre piece derived from the tradition of 18th century marionette operas. In August 2023, they invited the Ensamble de Cámara de la Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (ECOEIN) from Bolivia to Canada and in 2024 they commissioned and premiered Three Unisons for Four Voices, a 70-minute work by Sarah Davachi.
They have also commissioned or worked closely with composers such as Mauricio Pauly, Sabrina Schroeder, Catherine Lamb, Pierluigi Billone, Andrea Young, Anthony Tan, Émilie Girard-Charest, Zihua Tan, Ida Toninato, and Navid Navab, and successfully presented renowned guest artists such as Eve Egoyan, Gayle Young, Carmina Escobar, Nadah El Shazly, Vahram Sargsyan, Susanna Hood, Gabriel Dharmoo, White Boy Scream, and Pamela Z, and more.
