The Brooklyn Rail

The Talea Ensemble, one of the most exacting and serious new music ensembles in New York, has been bouncing around from venue to venue since pianist-composer Anthony Cheung and percussionist Alex Lipowski founded the group in 2007. That’s not unusual. Bands of every genre rehearse in rented halls and studios and perform in borrowed bars and churches. Unless you have money, odds are you can’t afford to have your own place to practice and perform.

But Talea found a way to do just that. Last year, the nineteen-piece ensemble became the primary tenant of St. Bartholomew Hall at the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew (SLSM) in Clinton Hill. Now, they have, as Clinton Hill native Biggie Smalls once said, big plans.

Talea looms large in the psyches of new music minded New Yorkers despite the fact that they don’t perform here as often as many of their peers. Their enduring relevance may owe something to their solid relationship with TIME:SPANS. That festival annually marks the end of the new music scene’s summer recess and the beginning of the fall concert season, and Talea has been a fixture since its establishment in 2015, when the only other group on the bill was JACK Quartet. But they’ve largely preferred to keep an eye on developments in European classical music. They’ve spent a lot of time in Europe, playing at festivals like Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, and Time of Music Finland. And since European classical music, broadly speaking, seems to still be preoccupied with complexity—while many stateside composers are still coming to terms with the influence of minimalism—Talea has earned a reputation for bringing difficult works to New York, inoculating audiences with healthy doses of both confusion and awe.

The pandemic halted touring and made Talea reconsider their relationship to New York. They realized that they had been on the road almost more than performing here. “It’s fun to travel around the world and meet other musicians and composers in other places and do these programs elsewhere and go to the European festivals,” Talea bassoonist and Executive Director Adrian Morejon told the Rail. “But a bunch of us were like, hey, why aren’t we doing more here? Why not have a strong home base?”

So they started the search. To be sure, there were precedents for a small ensemble long-term leasing its own rehearsal space: Ensemble Mise-En was in Bushwick and Greenpoint before they moved to Harlem last year; Sō Percussion has a studio in the Navy Yard; International Contemporary Ensemble’s studio is an eleven-minute walk from Talea’s new home in Clinton Hill. But these spaces are either tiny or aren’t used for performances. Would it be possible to find a real hall that could accommodate a sizable audience?

Luckily, love was in the air. In 2024, Wilden Dannenberg, a French hornist who has played with Talea, was music director at SLSM (he still is). He was engaged to Stephanie Liu, a violinist and Talea’s director of development and marketing. When Talea got word that Bartholomew’s primary tenant, GALLIM, was on their way out, they pounced. In the fall of that year, the ensemble tried out the space to see how it felt and sounded. Large ensemble works by Luigi Nono, Chaya Czernowin, Claudia Jane Scroccaro, and Marcos Balter were the guinea pigs. The verdict: a little wet, a little resonant. Morejon said it took some getting used to, especially when you’re playing “thorny contemporary music that needs a lot of clarity.” But once you acclimate, you notice a “rounded” quality to the sound that swaddles the listener. The deal was too good to pass up: affordable price, existing relationships between personnel, and right off the C train—convenient for their Manhattan audience to get to Brooklyn. In January 2025, they signed a renewable multiyear lease and became the primary tenant of the hall. The same month this year, in the same church, Liu and Dannenberg were married.

Talea has to move much of its audience from Manhattan, but it also wants to build its audience. To do that, and to attract more members of the immediate Brooklyn community who may not be new music aficionados, Morejon said they may host open rehearsals, workshops, and sound installations. And they will sublease the space to other ensembles who may not have the biggest budget. Morejon wouldn’t disclose how much Talea pays in rent or how much they plan to charge other groups, but Leonard Bopp, conductor of the young-but-mighty BlackBox Ensemble, told the Rail, “It’s definitely helpful for ensembles like ours to have access to a fantastic hall in a great location at affordable rates.” They also have to tweak their repertoire. As Morejon explained:

In the past, Talea has been quite associated with seeing what’s going on in Europe in the new music scene and bringing it to New York. And we want to continue championing that repertoire. However, I think there has been a move in the past several years to create a conversation about what’s going on everywhere in the world, both here at home and in other parts of the world—maybe not just Western European countries.

The effort to broaden their repertoire solidified in 2024, when Talea established its Ambassadors program, which has since commissioned composers like Sanae Ishida from Japan (In Pursuit of True Happiness, 2024). Next, the ensemble is planning to go to Brazil. They’re also trying to support the work of younger composers through their Early Career Composer Commissioning Program, which has already delivered world premieres like Ni Zheng’s Chimeric Chamber (2024). Above all, Morejon said, contemporary music ensembles have a responsibility to ask, “How do we find the voices that aren’t being heard?” When they do find these voices, they work under a new strategy: “Present first here and then take it abroad.” Talea is becoming an importer-exporter.

Whatever changes Talea makes to its touring, venue, or repertoire, what is not likely to change is the surgically refined quality of its concerts. In this first season playing in their new home, they have been making their way through, among newer works, Luciano Berio’s Sequenza series, fourteen pieces for solo instruments (one of them for female voice) that call for extended techniques and feats of endurance. In December, flutist Laura Cocks—whose dexterity and finesse on their instrument is unmatched in this scene—played a breathy and extraverted “Sequenza I,” while violist Hannah Levinson played an intense “Sequenza VI.”

In February, for “Sequenza III,” the audience heard distant muttering from the back of the hall before they saw soprano Lucy Shelton creep down the aisle toward the stage, book in hand. She whispered, hummed, and blubbered like a deranged poet, and begged the muse to give her words before finally collapsing into a chair, having either found them or resigned herself to the fact that they wouldn’t ever come. The drama was like watching a play with no clear story but infinite meaning. Preceding Shelton was Morejon himself, whose performance of “Sequenza XII” kept me on the edge of my seat but also exhausted me. The longest of the Sequenzas, clocking in at around eighteen minutes, the piece demands circular breathing (in through the nose while playing the instrument) almost the whole time, up until the last few minutes. Morejon’s lungs impressed me, but what stuck were his crescendi and diminuendi, perfectly gradual and lyrical. “Sequenza IX,” played by clarinetist Rane Moore, highlighted the acoustics of the hall in detail. When some of her notes lingered in the air, she listened to their slight resonance and started the next phrase on their heels—a duet with the prior phrase’s ghost.

Talea’s acquisition of St. Bartholomew Hall presents the opportunity to be a prolific incubator and disseminator of new music. As the ensemble approaches their twentieth anniversary, they’re staying true to their name: “Talea,” Morejon reminded me, is the rhythmic pattern (also known as isorhythm) that repeats in French polyphony, and reflects the ensemble’s “technical precision and the exploration of intricate musical patterns.” But talea is also where we get the word “tally,” to count up or to keep score. Talea is an ensemble of record, insofar as they guide and ride the tide of the latest innovations in composition, they keep an account of the history of music while it’s happening. Talea has a lot of other meanings, too. One of them comes from agriculture: a small branch that one plants in the soil to grow a tree.