22 for ’22: Composers and performers to watch this year. How Carlos Simon, Kamala Sankaram, The Living Earth Show and 19 more artists are changing the classical landscape
Excerpt from article by Michael Andor Bradeur
published in The Washington Post.
It’s a new year, which means another new class of composers and performers worth keeping an ear on for 2022. This sophomore class is a mix of happy discoveries and several dozen enthusiastic nominations from last year’s inaugural list of“21 for ’21” artists, which included such breakthrough creators as Randall Goosby, Angélica Negrón and Christopher Cerrone. This year’s selection represents a diverse variety of composers, performers and artists hitting their stride with work that resonates with the right now.
THE LIVING EARTH SHOW
The duo of percussionist Andy Meyerson, 35, and guitarist Travis Andrews, 37, can expand into large-scale works (see Raven Chacon’s “Tremble Staves”) or compress into intimate studies of sound (see “Music for Hard Times,” their set of lockdown-inspired “calming strategies” with composer Danny Clay). This year, their in-house Earthy Records label will premiere works written for TLES by Clay, Zachary James Watkins, Sarah Hennies and Samuel Adams — whose “Lyra” (with choreographer Vanessa Thiessen and filmmaker Ben Tarquin) arrives in February. “No other new music group out there is doing projects of the scale and ambition they are,” says nominator (and 21 for ’21 alum) Timo Andres. “They might be my generation’s Kronos Quartet.” thelivingearthshow.com.
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