Two New Music Festivals to Enliven New York Stages

Two contemporary music festivals – one built largely around stars of the burgeoning downtown and Brooklyn scenes, and one examining unusual corners of the composition world – will keep New York concert stages animated in May and June.

The starrier of them, the Tribeca New Music Festival, sets up shop at the Cell on May 14, with “Film to Stage,” a program overseen by Douglas J. Cuomo (who composed the theme music for “Sex and the City”), devoted mostly to works originally composed for film, by Carter Burwell, John Corigliano, Frank London, Rob Schwimmer, Bora Yoon, Huang Ruo and Mr. Cuomo himself.  Vicky Chow, the pianist in the Bang on a Can All Stars, will play a solo recital that includes the premiere of Florent Ghys’s “Poor Margie” and works by the Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, Ryan Francis, Steve Reich and Christopher Cerrone (May 15).

Mr. Cerrone oversees a program of his own, with his own music sharing a bill with works by Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman and Eric Shanfield, in performances by the soprano Mellissa Hughes, the percussionist Matt Evans, the violinist and singer Sarah Goldfeather, and the pianist Karl Larson (May 17). And two of the festival’s most alluring programs are recitals by string players who also compose. The violists Martha Mooke and Jessica Meyer will share a program of their own works (May 16), and the violinists Mary Rowell and Tracy Silverman will play their own music as well as scores by John Adams, Richard Einhorn, Howard Hersh, Nico Muhly and Terry Riley (May 18).

The Mise-en Music Festival, presented by the New York-based ensemble mis-en in a partnership with another New York group, the Momenta Quartet, and the Ensemble Paramirabo, from Canada, is part concert series, part master class and part contest.

The ensemble began its programming by asking composers to submit scores. All told, the players looked at 862 works by 702 composers from 65 countries. Works by 30 of the composers will be heard during the festival, which opens with a concert of music by living Korean composers at the Korean Cultural Service (June 19). The Ensemble Paramirabo will give the United States premieres of works by four Canadian composers (Maxime McKinley, Patrick Giguere, Michel Gonneville and Philippe Leroux) as well as the rock star turned classical composer Frank Zappa at the Americas Society (June 20).

The Momenta Quartet’s afternoon program at the Taipei Cultural Center will include works by two composers born in Taiwan, Fang-Wei and Annie Hui-Hsin; that evening, the festival will present works by the Danish composer Bent Sorensen at Scandinavia House (June 21). And all three ensembles will join forces for the festival’s finale, a six-hour marathon at the Tenri Cultural Institute (June 22).

Besides concerts, the festival offers workshops on improvisation, Korean traditional instruments, and ways of getting new sounds from orchestral instruments. The workshops are all at the Cell.