PUTNEY — On Thursday, June 15, at 8 p.m., the Big Barn opens early for Yellow Barn's faculty percussionist Eduardo Leandro in a special pre-season performance of traditional, theatrical, and improvisational music for solo percussion. Saxophonist Travis Laplante will join Leandro for the final piece on the program.
“This program consists of three pairs of pieces that represent three different stages of the performer's involvement with percussion music. The first pair is the more standard marimba repertoire, and it includes an early piece from 1975, and a recent piece written for me by James Wood, based on star charts and bird songs,” Leandro said in a news release.
“The second pair of pieces involve theater, either in the form of gestures or voice. The third and last pair is improvised music - one reacting to fixed audio media, a prerecorded track, and the other to visual media in the form of a video, followed and interpreted by Travis Laplante and myself.”
Brazilian-born Leandro's solo performances have been a mainstay of Yellow Barn's summer season for almost a decade. In addition to being a long-standing member of the Yellow Barn faculty, Leandro is the artistic director of the Contemporary Chamber Players, which is the new music ensemble at Stony Brook University in New York, where he is on the percussion faculty.
Leandro has performed with many ensembles, including the Steve Reich Ensemble, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Leandro is a member of the percussion duo Contexto, an ensemble which was in residence at the Centre International de Percussion in Geneva.
He won the New Music Contest in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the second prize in the Eldorado Competition in São Paulo, Brazil. He has conducted new music ensembles in Brazil, France, Switzerland, South Korea, and the U.S.
Patrons can reserve their tickets for this concert by calling the Box Office at 802-387-6637, by emailing info@yellowbarn.org, or by visiting www.yellowbarn.org.