About Talea

The Talea Ensemble’s mission is to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life with vibrant performances that remain in the audience’s imagination long after a concert. 

 

Recipients of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Talea has brought to life at least 80 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008, including bold and inventive productions combining music and other genres such as theater and visual art. Highlights from Talea’s most recent performance seasons have included world premieres by Wang Lu, Tyshawn Sorey, Sarah Hennies, Natacha Diels, Anthony Cheung, Agata Zubel, Mark Applebaum, Sanae Ishida, and more, as well as numerous US and New York premieres. 

 

Engagements include performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Warsaw Autumn Festival, Wien Modern, Vancouver New Music, Time of Music Finland, TIME:SPANS, NY Philharmonic Artist Spotlight Series, and many more. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the Kairos, Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels, and been broadcast on ORF (Austria), HRF (Germany), and WQXR’s Q2. 

 

Talea assumes an ongoing role in supporting a new generation of composers, and has undertaken residencies in music departments around the country. Since 2020, Talea has targeted support to early career composers through the growing Talea Access Project, which includes a commissioning program and a composer recording workshop.