New Juilliard Ensemble

The New Juilliard Ensemble, led by founding director Joel Sachs, celebrates the liveliness of today’s music, focusing primarily on repertory of the last decade. Now in its 16th season, NJE presents music by a variety of international composers writing in the most diverse styles. Its members are current students at Juilliard, who are admitted to the ensemble by audition. The Ensemble returned again to MoMA's Summergarden festival and has been featured at the Lincoln Center Festival. In January 2008 at Juilliard's FOCUS! festival celebrating Elliott Carter's 100th year, NJE members performed with members of the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble, conducted by Pierre Boulez. The combined ensembles performed again at last summer's Lucerne Festival in Switzerland.

The Ensemble takes its name from an unofficial student group of the 1960s that specialized in the performance of new music. It is modeled on new-music chamber orchestras common in Europe, such as Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, and the London Sinfonietta, which have cultivated a repertory for chamber orchestra that is all too rarely performed in the United States. The New Juilliard Ensemble brings many of these works to New York, presents American compositions for similar ensembles, and has commissioned many pieces from composers around the world. Although its primary goal is to train performers, the Ensemble offers opportunities for students in Juilliard’s composition program through an annual audition from which one or two composers are selected to write for the group.

The New Juilliard Ensemble has made its mark through tour performances. Abroad, it has been ensemble-in-residence at the International Seminars for Young Composers, held near Warsaw by the Polish Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and at the Moscow Conservatory, where it performed American music and compositions by students and faculty of that institution. In 1998 the Ensemble presented a concert in Jerusalem as part of an international symposium on the teaching composition at the century’s end, which also celebrated the 50th anniversaries of the State of Israel and of the Rubin Academy of Music. In May 2001 it gave two concerts at the Leipzig Conservatory in a festival marking the consecration of the school’s new concert hall. November 2002 found the Ensemble in Dijon, France, at Festival Why Note. In October 2004 a group of New Juilliard Ensemble players and their counterparts from the Manson Ensemble of London’s Royal Academy of Music joined to perform works by three composition students from each school. The concerts took place in New York and London, and all works were recorded for the Royal Academy’s CD label. A Japanese tour is planned for 2009. 

The New Juilliard Ensemble also performs in this country outside Juilliard’s academic program. It presented music from the South Caucasus as part of the dedication festivities for the new arts center at the University of Maryland, and gave the world premiere of Hearing Solutions, a concerto for cello and chamber ensemble by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky (Uzbekistan), the first recipient of the Siemens Corporation’s Artist-in-Residence award, in New Jersey. The New Juilliard Ensemble’s recording of Virko Baley’s Violin Concerto, with violinist Tom Chiu, can be found on the TNC label (www.TNCmusic.net). A CD of compositions by students at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and Juilliard, recorded jointly by members of the Academy’s Manson Ensemble and the New Juilliard Ensemble, with conductors Simon Bainbridge and Joel Sachs, has been issued by the Academy.