Tribeca New Music welcomes back the Orange Road Quartet for our season-opening concert, Best in Score 2026 - an evening bringing together some of today's most compelling established and emerging compositional voices.
At the heart of the program are the 2026 First Prize winners of TNM's Young Composer Competition, Luca Pasquini and Will Stackpole. Fostering the next generation of composers runs throughout the evening: acclaimed composer, teacher, and mentor Christopher Cerrone is represented by his riveting quartet Can't and Won't, alongside the world premiere of Common Swift by his student Sandro Tsikoridze.
Rounding out the program are Reena Esmail's haunting Zeher and Peni Candra Rini's life-affirming Hujan - works that draw upon Indian and Indonesian musical traditions in a concert spanning generations, cultures, and distinctly individual musical voices.
Christopher Cerrone - Can't and Won't
Music suspended between repose and disruption. Delicate, swirling harmonics and songlike fragments are repeatedly confronted by explosive rhythmic interruptions - a search for moments of composure within a chaotic world.
Reena Esmail - Zeher
Zeher means "poison" in Hindi. Written during a severe illness that left Esmail struggling to speak and breathe, the piece moves between the darkness of raag Todi and the more centered melancholy of Bhimpalas, gradually transforming affliction into healing.
Luca Pasquini - in a past life
2026 TNM Young Composer Competition First Prize (undergrad division)
Ghosts, memory, superstition - and perhaps an ancestor. Pasquini reaches back to music by the Baroque composer Bernardo Pasquini, creating a dialogue in which one violin becomes the "human" and another its musical ghost, haunting music of the past from the perspective of the present.
INTERMISSION
Sandro Tsikoridze - Common Swift - World Premiere
A new work by emerging composer Sandro Tsikoridze, receiving its world premiere with the Orange Road Quartet.
Will Stackpole - Here Without Trying - World Premiere
2026 TNM Young Composer Competition First Prize (graduate division)
A meditation on meditation itself. Stackpole explores the wandering mind - distraction, recognition, and the repeated return to stillness - discovering that perhaps the most meaningful moment isn't perfect quiet, but the journey back to it.
Peni Candra Rini - Hujan
Hujan ("Rain") emerges after drought. The final movement of Rini's Segara Gunung ("Ocean-Mountain") evokes the scent of rain striking dry earth and the renewal that follows - a celebration of nature's capacity for restoration and new life.
ORANGE ROAD QUARTET
Lauren Conroy and Miguel Calleja, violins
Dudley Raine IV, viola
Jordan Bartow, Cello
CONCERT INFORMATION
Friday, September 25, 2026 @ 7:30pm
DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 West 37th Street, New York City
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Presented