Performance Calendar
There Came a Flood - suite from a chamber opera
Loop38, Ensemble-in-Residence, Lone Star College-CyFair, 4th Annual Contemporary Music Festival, April 14, 2023, 7PM. As part of its residency, Loop38 is performing faculty works at 7PM, as well as a reading session for student composers earlier in day (3.30-5PM).
Prophecy-Psalm-Dance
Thomas Frey (clarinet) and Yan Shen (piano)
Weary Pilgrim - two movements from a string quartet
Joanna Becker and Miranda Hollingsworth (violins), Nina Knight (viola), Bing Wei (cello)
Texas New Music Ensemble Composer Spotlight, November 10, 2022, 7.30PM
How Come That Blood? - seven variants and a canonic rhapsody on a local ballad (piano solo)
Yan Shen, Shigeru Kawai Concert Series, Houston, February 1, 2022, 7 PM
Hadley McCarroll, Old First Recital Series, San Francisco, March 13, 2022, 4 PM
Yan Shen, Texas New Music Ensemble at Archway Gallery, March 31, 2022, 7.30 PM
This World Is Not My Home (cello solo)
Daniel Saenz
Twilight in Pines (flute solo)
Izumi Miyahara
Lone Star College-CyFair, 3rd Annual Contemporary Music Fest, May 7, 2022, 7.30 PM
F E A T U R E D R E V I E W S
“Three works were given their first performances [by the London Sinfonietta]. By far the most individual was Herrington's Symphonia, which put aural memories of the composer's Texas childhood through the mincer.” (The London Times)
"What does one get from crossbreeding Darmstadt master classes with childhood exposure to hymns of the American South and formal training at the Royal Academy of Music, London? Apparently something as attractively individual as B.P. Herrington's 'That Blood's Too Red.' This short piece is modern but not at all academic-sounding, and it combines dissonance and rhythmic complexity with episodes of quasi-tonal and rhythmically stable tranquility in such a way that the music never becomes gratuitously abrasive or boringly accessible." (InstantEncore.com)
"The moments of clarity in this powerful antiphonal work for winds perfectly balance out the purposeful disarray and sporadic gestures to invoke the "verses from the thicket." - American Prize jury on "Verses from the Thicket" for wind ensemble
" . . . an intriguing blend of common man expression and formal acuity." (New York Sun)
"a rough-edged polyphonic exploration of the forms of religious music, perhaps a latter-day rural Texan equivalent of Charles Ives' New England hymnodies, though with a sceptical distance." (H. E. Elsom in ConcertoNet.com)
" . . . evoked the sounds and summer heat of the composer's Texan childhood. (Ian Hewitt in the London Telegraph)
"This was indeed homage to Berio – from another voice, clear and individual." - Kenneth Carter (Classical Source) on "In Returning and Rest" at the Berio OMAGGIO Concert