An evening of celebrated interpretations by multi-instrumentalist and composer Erik Hall, presented as a solo performance + spatial audio installation. Erik Hall's 2020 re-imagining of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is as adventurous as it is reverent, supplanting the original instrumentation for Hall's own keyboards, guitars, and synthesizers. It won the Libera Award for Best Classical Record, and Pitchfork described it as "shrewd, prismatic, organic... a minimalist standard freshly thrilling to revisit." In conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of the piece's NYC premiere—as well as Reich's 90th birthday—Hall returns to the iconic work for his National Sawdust debut, leveraging the room's immersive Meyer Sound audio system to present his one-man multi-tracked rendition in a transportive new light. Hear the prepared pianos, Hammond organ, electric guitars, and analog synths of Hall's Michigan home studio in kaleidoscopic surround sound, while he executes a grouping of the instruments live on stage—a distilled, in-person exhibition of the recording's soundscape.
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Hall opens the program with an equally beloved monument of Dutch minimalism, Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato. Over four years, two studio albums, and concert performances of myriad iterations, Hall's journey with the piece has been well documented and praised by Bandcamp Daily, The Wire, and The New York Times. Unique to this occasion, Hall activates the house sound system to draw on his 2026 chamber orchestra recording alongside NYC’s GRAMMY-nominated Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion, with subtly-treated instrumental elements weaving in and out of the sonic fabric.
This program is co-presented by Metropolis Ensemble.
ABOUT ERIK HALL
Erik Hall is a musician and composer in Michigan. He is best known for his multi-instrumental recordings and live performances of contemporary classical works, which have been featured by The Wire, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, WNYC New Sounds, and The New York Times. His 2020 re-creation of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians won the Libera Award for Best Classical Record, and his 2023 interpretation of Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato followed with a nomination in the same category. Erik has composed or arranged music for Chicago’s Grammy-winning Third Coast Percussion, NYC’s Grammy-nominated Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion, and for feature films. He has recorded and toured with NOMO, Wild Belle, His Name Is Alive, In Tall Buildings, and Lean Year, appearing at Lollapalooza, Coachella, Pitchfork Music Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, CONAN, and The Tonight Show.
ABOUT METROPOLIS ENSEMBLE
Metropolis is a nonprofit producing organization for new music and the artists who make it. Founded in New York City in 2006 by conductor, producer, and organist Andrew Cyr, Metropolis develops, records, and launches ambitious new-music projects in collaboration with composers, performers, and presenters — building the conditions that allow bold musical ideas to move from imagination to reality. Known for championing a new generation of composers and performers, its work spans orchestral premieres, studio recordings, interdisciplinary collaborations, and site-specific events in New York and beyond.
Over two decades, Metropolis has commissioned and produced work that would not otherwise exist: a decade-long opera incubated at its Lower East Side studio before its acclaimed PROTOTYPE Festival premiere and recognition among The New York Times' Best Classical Performances of 2025; Sarah Kirkland Snider's orchestral album Forward into Light (Nonesuch/New Amsterdam), a 2026 OPUS KLASSIK finalist in the New Classic/Neoclassic category; Tyondai Braxton's Telekinesis, also an OPUS KLASSIK nominee; Simeon ten Holt's Canto Os8nato reimagined for fi]y musicians with Erik Hall and Sandbox Percussion (Western Vinyl); Roscoe Mitchell's genre-merging Metropolis Trilogy; the international touring production of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia by Him Sophy and filmmaker Rithy Panh; and Ricardo Romaneiro's Liquidverse, staged inside an 87-foot immersive dome. Metropolis productions have earned three GRAMMY recognitions and reached stages from the Hollywood Bowl and Lincoln Center to the Kennedy Center and NBC's Tonight Show.
Metropolis works with no fixed instrumentation or house sound. Each project begins with one question to an artist: what have you not yet been able to make? From there, Metropolis assembles the collaborators, time, space, and resources sustained creation requires. Its long term partnership with pianist-composer Timo Andres — spanning more than twenty years, multiple commissions, two Nonesuch albums, and a GRAMMY-nominated recording — reflects the kind of enduring artistic relationship at the center of this work.
Metropolis's public programs also reach a civic scale. A five-year collaboration with Brooklyn Botanic Garden includes the past three editions of Sols8ce — paired sunrise and sunset performances that draw thousands each year — while its annual Biophony street festival brings new music to tens of thousands of New Yorkers. Metropolis operates from Rivington on the Lower East Side, a creative laboratory and public venue where more than one hundred projects have taken shape alongside the artists who make them.