Portland Tribune: Bang on a man: A night at the symphony like no other
Andy Akiho, the Oregon Symphony's composer-in-residence, plays 'Sculptures: Concert for Orchestra and Video' in response to Jun Kaneko’s art
Bashing away on a giant head is one way to get butts in seats at any American symphony, as the appetite for another night of Mahler in tuxedoes wanes. The Oregon Symphony is working hard to make its concerts more edgy, more postmodern and even a little more diverse.
A member of the Oregon Symphony’s Creative Alliance, Andy Akiho is the Oregon Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence. The Nov. 4-6 show at first glance looks like a night of old chestnuts such as Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” and Dvořák’s “Othello Overture,” but it also contains Akiho’s “Sculptures: Concert for Orchestra and Video.”
I Care If You Listen: Andy Akiho Wrings New Sounds out of Colossal Sculptures
A massive bronze head, with loops jutting out from every crevice of its face, sits amongst the orchestra at The Holland Performing Arts Center, in Omaha, Neb. Though it may not look like it at first glance, the glimmering sculpture, created by Jun Kaneko, is another instrument waiting to be played, a cavernous object that holds within it a psychedelic spectrum of sound.
Composer and percussionist Andy Akiho has spent the better part of a year playing this head and other works by Kaneko, getting to know their pitches and textures. His piece Sculptures, which premiered at the Holland on March 17 and 18, reacts to and implements Kaneko’s art in nine evocative movements that seesaw between orchestra, video, and live sculpture playing. It was commissioned as part of the Omaha Symphony’s annual gala, which honored Kaneko and his wife Ree with the Dick and Mary Holland Leadership Award.
KIOS-FM: The Omaha Symphony & Andy Akiho Celebrate Jun Kaneko With World Premier Performance
There’s a very special interdisciplinary collaboration between two time Grammy and Pulitzer-prize nominated composer Andy Akiho and internationally renowned local artist Jun Kaneko, who was honored with the 2021 International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Each movement of Akiho's new work is inspired by a particular type of Kaneko's sculptures. The musical piece is structured as movements for full symphony orchestra with interludes, during which Akiho will be playing Kaneko's multi-ton sculptures on-stage and on video. Akiho has been in residence multiple times over the past year in Omaha discovering the pitches for the sculptures and repurposing them as instruments. This will truly be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience this work with the sculptures on-stage as performed by Akiho.
The Strad: Andy Akiho: Oculus
Strings and percussion unite in a striking tree-inspired project
Now based between Portland, Oregon, and New York, composer and percussionist Andy Akiho had an unusual first-study instrument at college: the steel pan. It shows: there’s a sense of rhythmic and melodic drive that gives his music an immediately identifiable character, assured and accessible, but uncompromisingly complex, too, certainly in its restless metric modulations, shifting emphases and almost cartoonish exuberance, like a mix of PhD-level maths and grinning frat-boy humour.
They’re all qualities deeply embedded in this inspiring and brilliantly entertaining new disc of Akiho’s music, with a theme of wood and natural growth running through it. His LigNEouS Suite gets its arboreal name from the material predominantly employed in its unusual instrumentation of marimba and string quartet, with Akiho expanding his rich sound palette even further with scratchy string tones, snap pizzicatos and clattering, headless marimba mallets. It’s a joyfully extrovert piece, full of pulsing rhythms and big build-ups, but also subtle and cannily judged in its organic development of ideas. Though Ian Rosenbaum’s marimba is quite forwardly placed, the Dover Quartet gives a blisteringly intense performance, so crisp and precise that it sounds almost machine-made, with wheezing, bandoneón-like chords in the slower second movement and gradually unfolding quasi-Expressionist melodies in the fourth. It’s a startlingly accomplished, fiercely committed account.
The Arts Desk: Dragonflies, harmoniums and folded paper
Two discs of music by American contemporary composer Andy Akiho have caught my ear in recent months. Born in 1979, his biography states that “he spent most of his 20s playing steel pan by ear in Trinidad and began composing at 28,” the physicality and theatricality involved in playing steel pans an essential element of Akiho’s music. Have a look at “Pillar IV” from the vast percussion piece Seven Pillars on YouTube; watching three members of Brooklyn’s Sandbox Percussion in action (look out for the wine bottles) is absorbing.
The Strad: Andie, Andy and Andy present a work for violin, trumpet and steel pan
n an instrumentation not seen every day, violinist Andie Tanning, trumpeter Andy Kozar and percussionist Andy Akiho perform ‘the rAy’s end’.
Akiho composed the work in 2008 for the trio, dubbed ‘The Andes’ because of the first name shared by its members - indeed, the title of this work, ’the rAy’s end,’ can be rearranged to spell out ’three Andys’.
’Although we did not start playing music together until well after we met, we soon realised the potential for the unique combination of timbres between our instruments,’ said Akiho. ’It was an inspiring challenge to combine these sounds together, because all three instruments encompass a similar range of pitches.While each instrument is extremely unique as a solo sound, the combined timbres create an amazing homogenous texture.
The Oregonian: Portland composer Andy Akiho’s ‘Seven Pillars’ blends sound and light into a percussion extravaganza
Created by Portlanders past and present, Chamber Music Northwest’s “Seven Pillars” is more than a concert. Composer Andy Akiho’s 11-movement extravaganza for Sandbox Percussion quartet also integrates stage director Michael McQuilken’s colorful lighting effects and stage design that add up to a multicolored dance of light and sound.
The New York Times: 5 Things to Do This Weekend
The pandemic gave the composer Andy Akiho some extra time to complete “Seven Pillars,” an evening-length work for the virtuosos in Sandbox Percussion. He collaborated with the quartet intimately over that extended period, before releasing a recording of the opus last year.
The New York Times: One Composer, Four Players, ‘Seven Pillars’
Andy Akiho’s 11-part, 80-minute new work for percussion quartet is a lush, brooding celebration of noise.
The industrial stretch of south Brooklyn where Sandbox Percussion makes its home was nearly silent on a cool, clear Sunday afternoon at the end of September. Not so inside, where the Sandbox quartet had put in earplugs to rehearse Andy Akiho’s clangorous “Seven Pillars,” a lush, brooding celebration of noise.
Akiho, 42, an increasingly in-demand composer who rose as a steel pan virtuoso, sat watching, with a surfer’s laid-back demeanor but intently focused. He isn’t part of the group, but over the years has grown so close with its members, and has spent so much time in their studio, that he installed an espresso machine to fuel his work marathons there.