NEWS |
photo by Laura Cobb
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The incredible pianist Robert Fleitz has spent the past year learning Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field, my 2-hour work for solo piano drawing from the Iliad, my love of baseball, and coming of age away from home in NY. Watch his first performance online above.
On June 1, 2019 at Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the LA Phil and Jacaranda presented the world premiere of Gravity & Grace, my new work for organ and two-retuned pianos on the 11pm set of the LA Phil's Noon-to-Midnight.
The LA Weekly wrote about the premiere:
"The world premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s Gravity & Grace might have been the most gorgeous work of the day, and it was an exhilarating finale. The piece sounded at first like a simple but catchy 1960s-style garage-rock song, which was suffused with rich, vibrant sheets of organ from Joanne Pearce Martin mixed with sugary pop melodies from pianists Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay. The circus-y music continued to evolve slowly even as it seemed to repeat into a dub-like psychedelia. When the instrumentation subsided so that the focus was on the cotton-candy swirl of keyboards, Gravity & Grace morphed into one of the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory. Then the piece picked up again with a sprightly beat and increasingly intense flurries of organ and piano before closing forcefully. It was transcendent moments like this that rewarded the steadfast listeners who had been rushing around the hall for 12 hours and rummaging in the dark in search of such precious, lost treasures."
The LA Weekly wrote about the premiere:
"The world premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s Gravity & Grace might have been the most gorgeous work of the day, and it was an exhilarating finale. The piece sounded at first like a simple but catchy 1960s-style garage-rock song, which was suffused with rich, vibrant sheets of organ from Joanne Pearce Martin mixed with sugary pop melodies from pianists Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay. The circus-y music continued to evolve slowly even as it seemed to repeat into a dub-like psychedelia. When the instrumentation subsided so that the focus was on the cotton-candy swirl of keyboards, Gravity & Grace morphed into one of the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory. Then the piece picked up again with a sprightly beat and increasingly intense flurries of organ and piano before closing forcefully. It was transcendent moments like this that rewarded the steadfast listeners who had been rushing around the hall for 12 hours and rummaging in the dark in search of such precious, lost treasures."
For the past five years, I have been writing and developing Stranger Love, an epic and ecstatic multimedia opera on love, the seasons, and the expansion of the universe. The first act of Stranger Love was presented in a concert performance by Contemporaneous on the PROTOTYPE Festival in January, 2018, and the creative team is currently working on the full production. Watch the trailer for Stranger Love just below, and read more about the project here.