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At Dusk:Backyard Concert Series
Outdoor Live Concerts
TWO NIGHTS TWO LOCATIONS:
Saturday, August 27th, 7:00PM
2105 Roselawn Ave W, St. Paul​
"At Dusk" is an in-person, outdoor lawn concert series including 4 all new works for chamber ensemble.
Works by composers Jiyoung Chung, Jessie Montgomery, Jonathan Posthuma, Christos Rafalides, plus Botswanan composer Laone Thekiso's new arrangement of "Dancing Wind".
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This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota, through a Arts Grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board.
FREE admission, with suggested donation of a concert ticket price of $15. Guests may use chairs and blankets to save a spot.
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*Events may be cancelled due to inclement weather, but eventually will have recordings of the works available with permission. Weather updates will be on this event page.​
Composer Bio
Jiyoun Chung is a pianist composer, originally from South Korea. Since she moved to the USA in 2008, her pieces have been performed at festivals and concerts in Americas, Europe, and Asia.
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Outstanding musicians and groups including Ensemble Dal Niente, Invoke, Aguascalientes Symphony Orchestra, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Columbia Chamber Choir, Locrian Chamber Players, New Opera West, Northside Brass Quintet, Bucheon Philharmonic Orchestra Chorus, Catchfire Collective, Irene Novi, Jonathan Levin, April Kim, Mark Anderson, Ji Hee Kim, and many others have commissioned or performed Chung's pieces. And her piano works have been published by The F.J.H. Music Company Inc.
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Chung currently teaches composition and music theory at Central Washington University. Before she joined CWU, she has taught at Illinois Wesleyan University, served as a CITS teaching fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and taught music theory and musicianship at Illinois State University as a graduate teaching assistant.
Chung received her B.M. in Composition from Hanyang University, and M.M. in Composition and Piano Performance from Illinois State University, and her D.M.A. in composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
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Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—for The Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation, which was presented in its UK premiere at the BBC Proms on 7 August 2021.
Summer 2021 brought a varied slate of premiere performances, including Five Freedom Songs, a song cycle conceived with and written for Soprano Julia Bullock, for Sun Valley and Grand Teton Music Festivals, San Francisco and Kansas City Symphonies, Boston and New Haven Symphony Orchestras, and the Virginia Arts Festival (7 August); a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape Festival and Pam Tanowitz Dance, I was waiting for the echo of a better day (8 July); and Passacaglia, a flute quartet for The National Flute Association’s 49th annual convention (13 August).
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Since 1999, Jessie has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players and has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.
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A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Jessie holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is Professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Jonathan Posthuma (b. 1989) is a freelance composer in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His musical style seeks to combine lyricism, evocative imagery, and intense emotional contrasts, yet maintains clarity in form and function at their deepest levels.
He recently received his Masters in Music Composition from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he studied with Stephen Dembski and Laura Schwendinger. His orchestral work, Fili di Perle received 3rd Prize in the Karol Szymanowski International Composers Competition in Katowice, Poland and was premiered in March 2016. As part of his degree requirement, Jonathan composed and recorded, The God of Material Things, a song cycle for narrator, soloist, chorus, and orchestra, which sets the poetry of David Schelhaas, professor emeritus of Dordt University, where Jonathan studied composition privately with Luke Dahn while completing his Bachelors in Music Education.
Other recent large ensemble works include An Isthmus Aubade, dedicated to Scott Teeple and the UW-Madison Wind Ensemble and premiered in April 2015 and Concerto Grosso No. 1 for strings, percussion, and piano, commissioned and premiered by the Madison Area Youth Orchestra and Clocks in Motion in June 2015. In August 2017, he participated in the International Workshop of Orchestral
Composition at the Federal University of Paraná, where the scherzo from his Chamber Symphony “Beams of Heaven” was premiered by the student orchestra. Among his other awards are 2011 BMI Student Composer Award for Five Studies for Piano: Two Pencils and a Hymnbook and an award for sound design from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for his incidental music for The Glass Menagerie.
​Jonathan is an active member of the Twin Cities choral community and has sung with VocalEssence Chorus, Kantorei, and impulse (MPLS). Several of his choral works have received premieres by these ensembles, including two composed for VocalEssence as part of their ReMix program, designed for emerging composers of choral music, which were premiered at the ACDA National Festival in March 2017 and at Minnesota’s ACDA Festival in November 2017. Recently, he was selected as a participant for the inaugural Mostly Modern Festival, where selections from Paul Klee: Painted Songs, an ongoing collection of chamber works inspired by the visual art of Paul Klee were premiered in addition to a performance of two movements from his Chamber Symphony with the American Modern Orchestra. Jonathan also works in the Development office of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Laone Thekiso is a composer from Botswana. He studied composition at Williams College, where he worked with David Kechley and Ileana Perez Velazquez. Laone has spent the last several years in Botswana exploring,
teaching, and writing music for the Zimbabwean marimba band, an ensemble sees as under-represented with lots of potential for growth. He has toured in the US over the years with several marimba bands from the Maru-a Pula School, where he currently teaches and directs the marimba program.
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Laone currently writes and plays piano for the Grow to Black Collective, a Botswana-based jazz group he founded in 2019.
Christos was born and raised in Greece, where he completed his studies in classical percussion. After receiving a scholarship from Berklee College of Music, he moved to Boston, attaining a BA in Jazz Vibraphone Performance and later moved to New York, where he graduated from Manhattan School of Music earning his MA in Jazz Vibraphone Performance.
Christos found his personal voice when he established 'Manhattan Vibes’, a band that has appeared at numerous New York's cutting edge venues including the Blue Note, the Jazz Standard, Smoke Jazz Club and Dizzy's Club Coca Cola. Highlights of his career include performances with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis, a US tour with the Charles Mingus ‘Epitaph' Band featuring bassist Christian McBride and conductor Gunther Schuller, a recording with the Harmony Ensemble of NY of Henry Mancini’s 'Peter Gunn' featuring Lew Soloff, Ronnie Cuber and Victor Lewis, recordings with vocalist Chaka Khan and a duo performance at Carnegie Hall with pianist Sergio Salvatore.
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His collaboration with Greece’s legendary composer Mimis Plessas led to the release of two projects both based on Plessas’ music: the album ‘ΗχÏŽ/Echo: the music of Mimis Plessas’ featuring Evi Siamanda on vocals; and the duo recording ‘We Two’ featuring Mimis Plessas on piano and Christos on vibraphone.
In ‘Point Two’ Christos teams up with bassist Petros Klampanis who he met five years ago in NYC. Point Two is a unique blend of their influences of Middle Eastern, Greek and Latin elements and they include original compositions, standards, and folk songs.
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In addition to ‘Point Two’ in 2014 Christos' collaboration with the ‘Chronos Ensemble’ featuring one of Greece’s legendary singer-songwriter Dimitra Galani led to the release of the album ‘Chronos Project”.
Christos’ new works include:
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‘Silver Lining’ - a piano/vibraphone duo project with acclaimed pianist Giovanni Mirabassi, released in May 2022
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‘Sonic Convergence’ - a duo with bassist Petros Klampanis meeting a string quartet, performing music by renowned composer and educator Christos Hatzis, presented at the Athens Epidaurus Festival, 2022
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/S O L O/ - a unique project combining acoustic vibraphone with electronics, featuring Pearl’s MalletStation
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‘Home’, a collaborative project that was recorded during Covid lockdown, featuring guests from around the globe, coming out in 2023
For several years, Christos had been a guest faculty member at the 'Zeltsman Marimba Festival' which took place every summer in different parts of the world. He also has an Artist Residency at the 'Music Village' in Greece.
His original works for mallets are published from Emarel Music and are being played in concerts around the world.
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Christos is endorsed by Ludwig-Musser Vibraphones, Pearl MalletStation and is playing his signature Vic Firth M37 mallets.
He makes his home in New York City.