new music in the kaplan penthouse

12
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE Thursday Evening, October 18, 2012 at 7:30 Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse 3,154th Concert BRUCE ADOLPHE, host GILLES VONSATTEL, piano NICOLAS ALTSTAEDT, cello JUNE HAN, harp BRIDGET KIBBEY, harp IAN DAVID ROSENBAUM, percussion www.ChamberMusicSociety.org David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors

Upload: the-chamber-music-society-of-lincoln-center

Post on 29-Jan-2016

215 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

DESCRIPTION

The CMS New Music series showcases an eclectic mix of current composers and styles in the magical Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse.

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSEThursday Evening, October 18, 2012 at 7:30Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse3,154th Concert

BRUCE ADOLPHE, host

GILLES VONSATTEL, pianoNICOLAS ALTSTAEDT, celloJUNE HAN, harpBRIDGET KIBBEY, harpIAN DAVID ROSENBAUM, percussion

www.ChamberMusicSociety.org

David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors

Page 2: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 10th FloorNew York, NY 10023212-875-5788www.chambermusicsociety.org

This concert is made possible, in part, by a grant from The Florence Gould Foundation.

Page 3: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

BRUCE ADOLPHE, host

GILLES VONSATTEL, pianoNICOLAS ALTSTAEDT, celloJUNE HAN, harpBRIDGET KIBBEY, harpIAN DAVID ROSENBAUM, percussion

Quatre pièces fébriles for Piano and Marimba (1995)I.II.III.IV.VONSATTEL, ROSENBAUM

Romancendres for Cello and Piano (2003)Kondukt I (C.S. - R.S.)I. Aurora (Nachts)II. R(asche)S FlügelschlagenIII. “Der Würgengel der Gegenwart”IV. “heiter bewegt - (Es wehet ein Schatten darin)”Nachwort: Kondukt II (“Der bleiche Engel der Zukunft”) ALTSTAEDT, VONSATTEL

—INTERMISSION—

Freude for Two Harps, the Second Hour of Klang (2005)HAN, KIBBEY

GEORGES APERGHIS

(b. 1945)

HEINZ HOLLIGER (b. 1939)

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

(1928-2007)

NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE

Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices.

This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/livestream, and is being recorded for future broadcast.

Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.

Thursday Evening, October 18, 2012 at 7:30

Page 4: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

notes on the PROGRAMQuatre pièces fébriles for Piano and Marimba

A prolific composer with never-ending inventiveness, Georges Aperghis is building a very personal corpus of works, serious and humorous at the same time, rooted in tradition as well as free of institutional constraints. The Greek composer moved to Paris in 1963 and has lived and worked there ever since. In 1971, after a few instrumental pieces loosely inspired by serial techniques, he composed his first musical play La tragique histoire du nécromancien Hiéronimo et de son miroir. This piece began his exploration of the relationship between music and text. In 1976, with the founding of ATEM (Atelier Théâtre et Musique), he reinvented his approach to composition with a new art-form inspired by everyday life and social issues transposed into an often absurd and poetic world, in which musicians, singers, actors, and multimedia artists meet on

an equal footing. His concert music includes a large series of instrumental and vocal solo pieces (among them is his masterpiece Récitations, 1978), which contain occasional theatrical elements, sometimes purely gestural. In his operas, the text is the unifying and decisive element, and the singing voice is the main method of expression. His recent works include Die Hamletmaschine (2001), an oratorio based on Heiner Muller’s work; Dark Side (2004), a “monodrama” based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia; Avis de tempête (2004), an opera; Wölfli Kantata (2006), a cantata after Adolf Wölfli’s writings; and Happiness Daily (2009), for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and ensemble; all of them challenge the issues of drama, performance, and staging, and they illustrate the freedom with which he plays on classification and genre, in the performing arts as well as the theater. In October 2011, Aperghis received the Mauricio Kagel Prize.

Aperghis writes: “The Pièces fébriles are games of mirrors between the piano and the marimba, resonances games – or games between dry attacks and resonance. Games where you get lost, not knowing who is who – or what is what.”

Georges APERGHISBorn December 23, 1945 in Athens, Greece.

Composed in 1995.Premiered in 1996 in Paris by marimbist Françoise Rivalland and pianist Vincent Leterme.

Duration: 17 minutes

Page 5: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

Romancendres for Cello and Piano

Heinz Holliger’s compositions explore the limits of sound and language. His music is often preceded by an intensive study of artists’ or poets’ lives and lyrical texts, and he has always been fascinated by artists living on the edge of society or approaching the end of their lives. For example, in his Scardanelli Cycle (1975-85), he turned the last poems of Friedrich Hölderlin into a 2.5-hour cycle for different instrumentations. For this work, the composer was awarded the Premio Abbiati of the Biennale di Venezia in 1995. For the stage, he wrote the opera Schneewittchen (Snow White), which was premiered at the Zurich Opera in 1998. The composer adapted the text from the work of Robert Walser in which, in contrast to Grimm’s fairytale, the shadows of the characters meet after the actual story. The ECM recording of Schneewittchen won a Grammy Award in 2002. His concert pieces also often refer to biographies or literary works: Concerto: Hommage à Louis Soutter for violin and orchestra (1993-95, revised 2002) portrays the life of the Swiss painter. Holliger has been composer-in-residence for the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the International

Music Festival in Lucerne. In addition to composing, Holliger performs worldwide as an oboist. Composers such as Hans Werner Henze, Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Witold Lutoslawski, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio have written compositions for him. He has also championed forgotten works by 18th-century composers such as Jan Dismas Zelenka and Ludwig August Lebrun. In April 2003 the Cité de la Musique in Paris dedicated a week to Holliger as a composer, conductor, and oboist.

The following is taken from the preface to the Romancendres score, which was written by Andreas Krause and translated into English by Lindsay Chalmers-Gerbracht:

In 1853, Robert Schumann composed five romances for violoncello and piano. He heard some or maybe all of the pieces played by the cellist Christian Reimers and Clara Schumann in Bonn on November 13, 1853 and an alternate version for violin performed by Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann in Hanover on January 29, 1854. These romances however never appeared in print: Clara Schumann destroyed the still unpublished manuscript in 1893, 40 years after the work’s composition.

Romancendres is an allusion to this work which has been ‘turned to ashes’: the title is a combination of the French words ‘romances’ and ‘cendres.’ The music itself has been developed out of a number of allusions, incorporating for example, the initials of Clara and Robert Schumann C and S [German: Es

Heinz HOLLIGERBorn May 21, 1939 in Langenthal, Switzerland.

Composed in 2003.Premiered on September 7, 2003 at the Lucerne Festival by cellist Thomas Demenga and pianist Thomas Larcher.

Duration: 20 minutes

Page 6: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

Freude for Two Harps, the Second Hour of Klang

Karlheinz Stockhausen composed 375 individually performable works. From 1977 to 2003 he composed the cycle of operas Licht (Light), The Seven Days of the Week, which comprises about 29 hours of music. After Licht, he intended to compose the hours of the day, the minutes, and the seconds. He began the cycle Klang (Sound), The 24 Hours of the Day, and by the time of his death in December 2007, he had composed the First Hour Himmelfahrt (Ascension) to the Twenty-First Hour Paradies (Paradise). At nearly all world premieres and in innumerable performances and recordings of his works worldwide,

Stockhausen personally conducted, performed in, or directed the performance as sound projectionist. In a spherical auditorium conceived by the composer, most of his works composed until 1970 were performed at the Expo ’70 world fair in Osaka, Japan, for five hours daily for 183 days by 20 instrumentalists and singers, thereby reaching an audience of over a million listeners. In the course of his career, he has explored many methods of composing, including serial music, point music, electronic music, variable music, space music, statistical music, and aleatoric music, and all of his music has a spiritual element. He was appointed Professor for Composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne in 1971. Since 1991, his publisher, the Stockhausen-Verlag, has published the Stockhausen Complete CD Edition, which comprises 150 compact discs. In addition to his musical compositions, he published 10 volumes of Texte zur Musik (Texts on Music), a series of booklets

Karlheinz STOCKHAUSENBorn August 22, 1928 in Mödrath, Germany.Died December 5, 2007 in Kürten, Germany.

Composed in 2005.

Duration: 40 minutes

for Eb]. Rhythms have been developed from Robert and Clara Schumann’s dates of death and that of Johannes Brahms, and partially also from text passages, including the one below. The final motif quotes the notes made up from Schumann’s place of death, EnDEniCH [German: H for B] as ‘enden – ich’ [‘to end – I’].

Johannes Brahms wrote to his biographer Heuberger in 1893: “It is a pity that the great masters did not destroy more of their weaker attempts! Of course, the

publishing and collecting mania which only came about during the fifties had at that time barely begun. Schumann left behind all manner of works which were in no way worthy of publication. Pieces from the early and late periods. Only a few weeks ago, Mrs. Schumann burned a volume of cello pieces by Schumann as she was afraid that these would be printed after her death. For this she has my greatest respect.”

© 2007 SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz - Germany

Page 7: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

with sketches and explanations about his compositions, and a Text-CD-Edition with lectures and interviews.

Stockhausen wrote in February 2006: “The first part of my new cycle Klang (Sound), The 24 Hours of the Day, was a commission of ArtAche Milano, an institution of the Duomo di Milano with its artistic director Don Luigi Garbini. I named it Klang – Erste Stunde: Himmelfahrt (Sound – First Hour: Ascension) because it had its world premiere on May 5th, 2005 for Ascension Day. The score is written for organ, soprano, and tenor.

“After this premiere, Don Luigi asked for the premiere of Klang – Second Hour in relation to the festival of Pentecost. I accepted it happily and immediately had the inner audition and vision of a work for two harps. During the composition I was imagining the two Dutch harpist-girls Marianne and Esther, both 21 years old, who live and perform together as real idealists. One of them is the niece of the flutist Kathinka Pasveer for whom I wrote so many works.

“As a first title I chose Pentecost and decided to let the two harpists also

sing – in alternation or sometimes together – the essential text of Pentecost Veni Creator Spiritus, while plucking, picking, caressing, stroking, pinching, rubbing, striping, striking, pinking, jubilating. In accordance with the 24 lines of this hymn I have composed 24 musical moments like the 24 hours of the Day, so that the Second Hour of Klang is a full day within one hour of the day.

“During the composition I changed the title to Freude (Joy). My basic feeling was freude (joy). I imagined always the premiere at the Duomo di Milano, the enthusiasm of the two girls, their playing, singing. The score certainly preserves this fantastic joy in my mind and soul during the many months of composing this work. There is something unique about the adventure to combine two harps which are normally tuned in diatonic scales and to synthesize them into one large chromatic harp.

“Now I have understood why I have sent a design of a Greek harping angel to Don Luigi to remind him of the divine role of this instrument. Pentecost unites what has been separated. My work Freude too.”

Turn for text and translation to Veni Creator Spiritus

Page 8: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

Veni, Creator Spiritus,mentes tuorum visita,imple superna gratiaquae tu creasti pectora.Qui diceris Paraclitus,altissimi donum Dei,fons vivus, ignis, caritas,et spiritalis unctio.Tu, septiformis munere,digitus paternae dexterae,Tu rite promissum Patris,sermone ditans guttura.Accende lumen sensibus:infunde amorem cordibus:infirma nostri corporisvirtute firmans perpeti.Hostem repellas longius,pacemque dones protinus:ductore sic te praeviovitemus omne noxium.Per te sciamus da Patrem,noscamus atque Filium;Teque utriusque Spiritumcredamus omni tempore.

Come, Holy Spirit, Creator blest,and in our souls take up Thy rest;come with Thy grace and heavenly aidto fill the hearts which Thou hast made.O comforter, to Thee we cry,O heavenly gift of God Most High,O fount of life and fire of love,and sweet anointing from above.Thou in Thy sevenfold gifts are known;Thou, finger of God’s hand we own;Thou, promise of the Father, ThouWho dost the tongue with power imbue.Kindle our sense from above,and make our hearts o’erflow with love;with patience firm and virtue highthe weakness of our flesh supply.Far from us drive the foe we dread,and grant us Thy peace instead;so shall we not, with Thee for guide,turn from the path of life aside.Oh, may Thy grace on us bestowthe Father and the Son to know;and Thee, through endless times confessed,of both the eternal Spirit blest.

Stockhausen quote and translation reprinted with permission of the Stockhausen Foundation. The score and CD of FREUDE can be ordered directly at

www.stockhausen-verlag.com.

Page 9: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt won the Borletti Buitoni Trust Fellowship and the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award 2010, as part of which he performed Schumann’s Cello Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel at the Lucerne Festival. Last year Gidon Kremer chose him as his successor as artistic director of the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival. An artist of the Chamber Music Society and a former member of CMS Two, he is a BBC New Generation Artist, which enables him to perform with all BBC orchestras, as well as at the UK’s most prestigious festivals and concert halls. Highlights of past and upcoming seasons include concerts with the Tonhalle Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, Kremerata Baltica, the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, the Munich, Zurich, and Stuttgart chamber orchestras, the Czech Philharmonic, the Melbourne and New Zealand symphony orchestras, the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Berlin, Stuttgart, and Helsinki as well as the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra under the batons of Sir Neville Marriner, Neeme Järvi, Sir Roger Norrington, Vladimir Fedosseev, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and David Zinman. His two most recent recordings of the Haydn concertos with the Potsdamer Kammerakademie and concertos by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Gulda were highly acclaimed worldwide. Born into a family of German and French descent, Mr. Altstaedt was one of Boris Pergamenschikow’s last students in Berlin, where he has continued his studies with Eberhard Feltz. He plays a cello by Nicolas Lupot (Paris, 1821) loaned to him by the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben.

June Han has been hailed as a “true and tasteful harpist... with exceptionally varied phrasing and a surprising yet innate sense of timing.” (Concert Review Magazine) She is a member of Sequitur Ensemble, Ensemble 21, and Manhattan Sinfonietta, and has performed with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Speculum Musicae, Music from Japan, and Jupiter Chamber Players. She has collaborated with Orchestre de Paris, Kirov Opera Orchestra, Mariinsky Orchestra, and New York City Opera, and frequently appears with the New York Philharmonic. Her summer music festival appearances in the US include Aspen and Tanglewood. In recent summers, she was a guest artist at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and the OK Mozart Festival. She has been a featured soloist with the Young Artists Orchestra in Aspen, Durham-Oshawa Symphony Orchestra in Canada, and the OK Mozart Festival. She has recorded for various labels and has premiered works by composers including Charles Wuorinen, Samuel Adler, Lei Liang, and her mother Young Ja Lee. Dr. Han holds a Premier Prix for harp and chamber music from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris, master’s and artist diploma degrees from Yale School of Music, and a doctoral degree from The Juilliard School. She currently serves on the faculties of Columbia and Yale Universities, Juilliard’s Pre-College Division, and Bowdoin International Music Festival.

Lauded for her artistry and ability to captivate audiences, harpist Bridget Kibbey “makes it seem as thought her

meet tonight’s ARTISTS

Page 10: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

instrument had been waiting all its life to explode with the gorgeous colors and energetic figures she was getting from it.” (New York Times) She won the Classical Recording Foundation’s 2012 Young Artist Award, Concert Artist Guild’s 2007 International Competition, and Astral Artist Auditions, and received an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Her debut album, Love is Come Again, was named one of 2007’s Top Ten Releases by Time Out New York. This season marks the release of her newest album, Music Box, a celebration of solo harp works that celebrate the rich cultural fabric that makes up the United States, with Dawn Upshaw as special guest. This season’s other highlights include the world premiere recording of a new work by Kaija Saariaho in Rothko’s Chapel. She joins the International Contemporary Ensemble in solo and chamber works at the Mostly Mozart Festival and Cité de la Musique in Paris. She will perform concertos with the Brazilian State Orchestra in Porto Alegre, the Pensacola Symphony, and the Atlantic Coastal Orchestra. A former member of Chamber Music Society Two, Ms. Kibbey is a graduate of The Juilliard School, where she studied with Nancy Allen. She is on the harp faculties of Bard Conservatory, New York University, and the Juilliard Pre-College program.

Just 25 years of age, percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum has developed a musical breadth far beyond his years. He made his Kennedy Center debut in 2009 and later that year garnered a special prize created for him at the Salzburg International Marimba Competition. As a chamber musician, he has performed with the acclaimed So Percussion group and has appeared at the Norfolk, Yellow Barn,

and Chamber Music Northwest Festivals as well as with the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. This season, Mr. Rosenbaum joins the Chamber Music Society Two program as only the second percussionist in the program’s history. Other highlights include a return to the Kennedy Center with Andy Akiho’s genre-bending group Foundry, a rare performance of Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Etoile, and shows with pianist Vicky Chow and violinist Ariana Kim. Mr. Rosenbaum is a founding member of Le Train Bleu, Novus NY, and Sandbox percussion. He has recorded for Bridge, Cantaloupe, Innova, and Naxos and recently joined the faculty of the Peabody Institute’s preparatory program. Mr. Rosenbaum performs with Vic Firth sticks and mallets.

Swiss-born American pianist Gilles Vonsattel is an artist of uncommon breadth with repertoire that ranges from J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue to the complete works of Xenakis. Recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and winner of the Naumburg and Geneva competitions, he recently made his Boston Symphony, Tanglewood, and San Francisco Symphony debuts, while performing recitals and chamber music at the Tonhalle Zürich, Ravinia, Wigmore Hall, the Gilmore festival, and the Munich Gasteig. Deeply committed to the performance of contemporary works, he has premiered numerous works both in the United States and Europe and worked closely with notable composers such as Ned Rorem, Jörg Widmann, Nico Muhly, and Heinz Holliger. Upcoming engagements include performances with the Staatskapelle Halle and solo debuts at Wigmore Hall and at the Lucerne Festival. A former member of Chamber Music Society Two, he is an artist of

Page 11: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the 2012-13 season. His 2011 recording for the Honens/Naxos label of music by Debussy, Honegger, Holliger, and Ravel was named one of Timeout New York’s classical albums of the year. He received his bachelor’s degree in

political science and economics from Columbia University and his master’s degree from The Juilliard School, where he worked with Jerome Lowenthal. Mr. Vonsattel is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Composer Bruce Adolphe has written music for many renowned musicians and ensembles, including Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Sylvia McNair, the Brentano String Quartet, the Beaux Arts Trio, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. His opera Let Freedom Sing: The Story of Marian Anderson, with a libretto by Carolivia Herron, was premiered in 2009 by the Washington National Opera, which performed it again in March 2011. His Self Comes to Mind, written with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, premiered at the American Museum of Natural History in 2009, featuring Yo-Yo Ma. Of Art and Onions: Homage to Bronzino, which he composed for the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was premiered in 2010 at the Met Museum and received its European premiere at the Teatro Goldoni in Florence. His Reach Out, Raise Hope, Change Society for chorus and chamber ensemble—a work about civil rights and social justice commissioned for the 90th anniversary of the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work—premiered in November 2011. A new music festival in Colorado, Off the Hook, invited Bruce Adolphe to be composer-in-residence for its

inaugural season in 2012 and has invited him to return in that position for 2013. Mr. Adolphe’s Coyote Scatters the Stars (a musical tale of order and chaos) will be featured on 12/12/12 at the opening ceremony of MoMath in New York, the only museum of mathematics in the US. In addition to composing, he holds several positions concurrently: founder and director of the Meet the Music! family concert series and resident lecturer at The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; keyboard quiz-master on public radio’s weekly Piano Puzzler on Performance Today; and founder and creative director of The Learning Maestros. The author of three books on music, Mr. Adolphe has taught at Yale, The Juilliard School, and New York University, and was recently appointed composer-in-residence and adviser in music research at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. His book The Mind’s Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination will be published in an expanded and revised second edition by Oxford University Press in 2013. This season, Mr. Adolphe celebrates 20 years at The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Page 12: New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse

join us for this season’s neW musiC ConCertsNEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSEThursday, January 31, 7:30 PMWorks by Tower, MacMillan, and Adés

GESUALDO REFLECTIONSThursday, April 4, 7:30 PMA special program juxtaposing selections of Carlo Gesualdo with contemporary responses in the ethereal setting of the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church.

NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSEThursday, April 18, 7:30 PMWorks by Dean and Kernis