Nico Muhly

( Samantha West / Ad Lib Communications )

NICO MUHLY

One composer under 30 stands out among his generation. Nico Muhly has long stopped emerging and has fully emerged. His work knows no boundaries. English Renaissance choral music is a passion from his days as a schoolboy chorister growing up in Vermont. Philip Glass employs him. He's worked on Björk and Rufus Wainwright albums. The score for the recent film "The Reader" is his. The New Yorker magazine has already given him a full profile.

But although a regular in New York's new music circles, Muhly has had little exposure in Los Angeles, unless you count his arrangements for Antony and the Johnsons when the band appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Walt Disney Concert Hall last fall. So leave it to Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale to help begin filling in the Muhly gap.

On Feb. 22 in Disney, the chorus will offer the West Coast premiere of Muhly's "Expecting the Main Things From You." These settings of three poems by Walt Whitman are for chorus, string quartet, percussion and organ. At one point, the chorus sings a kind of Morse code inspired by the composer's experiences watching satellites pass over the Vermont woods.

--Mark Swed

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