Samuel DeCaprio announced as cello soloist on Juilliard School's 2020 Focus Festival

The New Juilliard Ensemble (NJE), led by founder and director Joel Sachs and now in its 27th season, celebrates the diversity of today’s music, focusing primarily on repertory of the last decade and presenting international composers who write in the most varied styles. In the 2019-20 season, Sachs and the ensemble will present premieres in three free concerts and open Juilliard’s 36th annual Focus festival, Trailblazers: Pioneering Women Composers of the 20th Century.

Juilliard’s 2020 Focus festival, Trailblazers: Pioneering Women Composers of the 20th Century, takes place from Friday, January 24 to Friday, January 31, 2020. The festival, co-curated by Odaline de la Martinez and Sachs, commemorates the women’s suffrage centennial and celebrates groundbreaking female composers who chose composition as a profession. There will be special tributes to Sofia Gubaidulina, Thea Musgrave, Betsy Jolas, and Jacqueline Fontyn, four women born in the 1920s and ’30s who are still actively composing.

To close the festival, Anne Manson conducts the Juilliard Orchestra on Friday, January 31, 2020, at 7:30pm in Alice Tully Hall. The program features Betsy Jolas’ A Little Summer Suite (2015, New York premiere); Grażyna Bacewicz’s Cello Concerto No. 2 (1963) with Juilliard cellist Samuel DeCaprio; Ethel Smyth’s On the Cliffs of Cornwall, (Prelude to Act II of The Wreckers) (1904); Thea Musgrave’s Rainbow (1990); and Sofia Gubaidulina’s The Rider on the White Horse (2002, New York premiere) (organ soloist to be announced).

For more information: https://www.juilliard.edu/news/139621/juilliard-announces-its-contemporary-music-performances-2019-20-featuring-new-juilliard