The 'A Musical Feast' Spring 2013 concert season begins!

The Center for 21st Century Music will be co-sponsoring two events with 'A Musical Feast' for their Spring 2013 concert season at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. 'A Musical Feast' has been putting on high-quality performances and concerts of contemporary music, as well as music from all periods, for many years now at the Burchfield Penney. The press release below offers some great background and information on the first concert, on Sunday, March 10th:

   ‘A Musical Feast’ Sunday March 10 @ 2:00 PM

                                           

Snapshot of a Century of Music

      ‘A Musical Feast’ offers a taste of music spanning the last 100 years

On Sunday, March 10, at 2:00 p.m., the independent, cutting-edge musical group known as ‘A Musical Feast’ offers its winter concert, in its home in the acoustically superior Peter & Elizabeth C. Tower Auditorium of the Burchfield Penny Art Center. Western New York lovers of classical music have come to expect every musical program put on by ‘A Musical Feast’, the chamber music group founded by Charles Haupt, the now retired, longtime concert master of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, to offer something out of the ordinary, an expectation that the group has never failed to fulfill.

The wide-range of represented composers range from Belgian composer Eugène Ysaÿe, whose 1895 romantically elegant Poème élégiaque, will be performed by Eastman School of Music virtuoso violinist Charles Castleman, and Buffalo’s favorite pianist Claudia Hoca, to SUNY at Buffalo distinguished professor David Felder, whose work A Garland (for Bruce) received its premiere just this past September. Also on the program are works by Debussy, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Piazzolla and J.T. Rinker. Charles Castleman and Claudia Hoca will also perform “Minstrels”, a violin and piano version of the 12th and last of the Preludes (Book I) by Claude Debussy. Pianist Claudia Hoca will be joined by UB professor of cello Jonathan Golove in a performance of selections from Stravinsky’s “Suite italienne”, derived from the music for the neo-classical score of his later 1920 ballet Pulcinella. Wildy Zumwalt, professor of saxophone at the Fredonia School of Music will be joined by Diane Hunger, a native of Kiel, Germany, who is currently pursuing her Doctorate at the Eastman School of Music, in a rare concert performance of Hindemith’s 1933 Konzertstück für Zwei Altsaxophone. The late Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla can be justly credited with bringing the attention of the classical music world to the tango, the quintessential dance form of his native land. Saxophonist Wildy Zumwalt, pianist Claudia Hoca, and cellist Jonathan Golove will be joined by Moshe Shulman playing the bandoneón, or Argentine concertina, and instrument essential to a tango ensemble, in Three Dances by Piazzolla, including the irresistible “Oblivion”.

Tom Kolor performs J.T. Rinker's Frigate

Moving up to the present, UB professor of percussion Tom Kolor will perform Frigate by J.T. Rinker. The 2008 piece is written for crotales, a percussion instrument made up of small, tuned brass disks, as well as electronic sounds – the delicate filigree of sound produced is pleasantly surprising.

David Felder, coordinator of composition at the UB Department of Music wrote A Garland (for Bruce) in 2012 as, he says, “a small tribute work for cello and electronic sound with photo images shot by Bruce Jackson. It is dedicated to Bruce Jackson in friendship and with admiration!” Cellist Jonathan Golove will perform the piece honoring Jackson, whose works are currently on view in the “Being There: Bruce Jackson, Photographs 1962-2012” exhibit at the Burchfield Penny Art Center.

The full program for the concert follows: 

                   ‘A Musical Feast’ Sunday March 10 @ 2:00 PM

Frigate  (2008)                                                          J.T. Rinker (1974)

Tom Kolor, percussion

Konzertstück für Zwei Altsaxophone (1933)             Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

I. Lebhaft

II. Mäßig langsam   

III. Lebhaft

Diane Hunger, saxophone, Wildy Zumwalt, saxophone

A Garland (For Bruce) (2012)                                  David Felder (1953)

Jonathan Golove, cello

"Minstrels"                                                                 Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

From Preludes (December 1919/January 1910)

12 Minstrels

Claudia Hoca, piano, Charles Castleman, violin

Poème élégiaque, Op. 12 (1895)                               Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931).

Claudia Hoca, piano, Charles Castleman, violin

                                               --Intermission--

"Suite italienne" (from Pulcinella, 1932)                   Igor  Stravinsky (1882- 1971)

Claudia Hoca, piano, Jonathan Golove, cello  

Three Dances                                                            Astor Piazolla (1921 – 1992)

Invierno Porteño

La Muerte del Àngel

Oblivion

Wildy Zumwalt saxophone,  Claudia Hoca piano,

Jonathan Golove cello, Moshe Shulman, bandoneon

David Taylor on the cover of
"Trombone" magazine

The second 'A Musical Feast' concert of the Spring 2013 season, on Friday, April 12th, at 8:00 p.m., will feature long-time friend of the Center David Taylor, a veteran and explosive New York trombonist with over four decades logged into performances, recordings, and tours. This concert will feature original compositions by David Taylor, as well as a piece by recently graduated UB composer John Bacon. The evening will also feature David Taylor's arrangement of Franz Schubert's Der Doppelgänger, arranged for bass trombone. The concert will conclude with Karlheinz Stockhausen's Signs of the Zodiac. The program follows:

                  ‘A Musical Feast’ Friday April 12 @ 8:00 PM                             

Song and Dance                                                           David Taylor (1944)

1. song

2. dance  

David Taylor, bass trombone, Michael McNeill, piano

Waves at Matsushima (2011)                                        John Bacon

Rin Ozaki, marimba  

Der Doppelgänger                                 Franz Schubert (1797-1828)/Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)  

David Taylor, bass trombone                                                 arranged by David Taylor (1944)  

                                                      --Intermission--

Tierkreis (Signs of the Zodiac) (1975)                           Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)

 Rin Ozaki, marimba    CAPRICORN

Dave Taylor, bass trombone   GEMINI

John Bacon, drums, percussion, vibes   AQUARIUS

Michael McNeill, piano   ARIES

Jonathan Golove, cello   LEO

Both concerts will be in the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College. Look forward to seeing you there!         

'A Musical Feast' Spring 2013 season

Burchfield Penney Art Center

Peter & Elizabeth C. Tower Auditorium      

Buffalo State College         

1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222

716-878-6011

burchfld@buffalostate.edu

Tickets: $20; Burchfield Penny members/students: $10.

Phone: 716-878-6011.

Information: www.amusicalfeast.com, or: www.BurchfieldPenny.org

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Ensemble Court-Circuit visits the Center in March!

We at the Center for 21st Century Music are looking forward to a visit from acclaimed French contemporary music group Ensemble Court-Circuit next month, on Tuesday, March 19th, and Wednesday, March 20th, when they will visit us to present a concert of works by contemporary composers, as well as offer a master class to UB graduate composers where they will workshop and record their compositions. 

Ensemble Court-Circuit

Ensemble Court-Circuit was originally founded by Philippe Hurel and Pierre-André Valade in 1991, following an encounter with Barbara and Luigi Polla, one of the founders of the Analix Galery in Geneva, Switzerland.

They have been invited to give concerts at major international festivals and musical institutions around the globe, including IRCAM, Opéra, Radio-France and Cité de la Musique (Paris), Musica (Strasbourg), Aix en Provence Festival, 38e Rugissants (Grenoble), Manca (Nice), GMEM (Marseille), Whynote (Dijon), Warsaw Autumn, Ultrashall and Maerzmuzik (Berlin), Ultima (Oslo), Traiettorie (Parma), Roma Europa, Music Factory (Bergen), Gaïda (Vilnius), NYYD (Tallin), Alicante, Wien Modern, Darmstadt, and MNM (Montréal).

Ensemble Court-Circuit has also been involved in many interdisciplinary projects, including several Paris Opera ballet premieres (Le Songe de Médée, A. Preljocaj/M. Lanza - Le Souffle du temps, A. Lagraa/G. Grisey), and several ciné-concert performances (Paris qui dort, R. Clair/Y. Maresz and Metropolis, F. Lang/M. Matal). In 2011-2012, Court-Circuit began a collaboration with the Bouffes du Nord Theater (Paris) in order to perform a series of chamber operas, most recently The second woman, with music by F. Verrières and stage direction by Guillaume Vincent, inspired by the film Opening Night by John Cassavetes.

Court-Circuit also has an extensive discography, and has recorded works by Tristan Murail, Philippe Leroux, Thierry Blondeau, Gérard Grisey, Daniel D'Adamo, Philippe Hurel, Joshua Fineberg, Roger Reynolds, and Jean-Luc Hervé.

Our workshops with visiting ensembles are often a great way for composers to work on and perfect long-term projects, as UB graduate composer Matt Sargent is doing, “Court-Circuit is reading several fragments of a forthcoming work for a quartet of flute, cello, piano, and percussion. The piece will be presented in full at this year's June in Buffalo festival, and is being composed as a commission for the Vigil Ensemble (which includes Ensemble Signal members Bill Solomon, percussion and Kelli Kathman, flute), who will perform it in Fall of 2013.

“This music is a bit of a departure from my standard compositional methods, and in this way, my submission for Court-Circuit is a short series of etudes to expand the resources of my compositional toolbox in approaching the piece as a whole. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to workshop these ideas with such an outstanding ensemble: such engagement in the middle stages of a compositional process is a very rare gift and I am quite excited to hear out and incorporate the results of these exploratory etudes into the larger piece, which will be revealed in June.”

On the other hand, graduate composer Clint Haycraft will hear his piece for the first time at the workshop, “With the working title of Postcard From Hell, this microtonal etude for violin, cello, and computer is a meditation on what it means when humans emulate machines. The players will be guided in various ways by in-ear monitors, and the primary goal of this experiment is to find the best method possible for making extended just intonation more quickly and easily realizable. Hopefully, the work will also shed some poetic light onto humankind's seemingly indispensible, yet lackluster relationship with the computer.”

Stay tuned for many more upcoming events this March at the Center!

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Music in Buffalo's Historic Places series kicks off at the Darwin Martin House!

The Center for 21st Century Music are excited to announce a new series, Music in Buffalo’s Historic Places. Our first concert will be on March 9th, at 6:30 p.m., at the Greatbatch Pavillion at the Darwin Martin House, and will be presented in partnership with the Martin House Restoration Corporation and the University at Buffalo. The series will celebrate the many historic places around the city of Buffalo through a combination of tours, lectures, presentations, and live concerts by some of today’s top musicians and ensembles. The opening concert will feature UB faculty member performing the works of Beethoven, Ives, and Dvorák, and will feature guest violinist Jesse Mills.

Darwin Martin House

The concert at the Darwin Martin House will be the first in the Music in Buffalo’s Historic Places series, and will be followed by a second concert on the opening weekend of the June in Buffalo Performance Institute, on Thursday, May 30, at 6:30 p.m., when the JACK Quartet will offer a concert of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 1, at One M&T Plaza. One M&T Plaza is a special historical building and office tower in downtown Buffalo which was designed and built in 1966 by Minoru Yamasaki, who was the architect for the World Trade Center in New York City.

Information on the Darwin Martin House concert follows, courtesy of the Darwin Martin House, more can be found here. 

Inside the Darwin Martin House

"Curated by pianist and UB Assistant Professor of Music, Eric Huebner, the concert will feature the music of Ludwig van Beethoven—a composer who held a special influence on the life and career of Frank Lloyd Wright—alongside works by Charles Ives and Antonín Dvorák, which were written around the time when Wright was creating the first of his many architectural masterpieces.

"Grammy-nominated violinist Jesse Mills joins Heubner in Beethoven’s 'Kreutzer' Sonata and the Sonata no. 4 by Ives.  For the second half of the program, Mills joins UB faculty members Jonathan Golove (cello) and Véronique Mathieu (violin), as well as guest violist Virginia Barron, for Dvorák’s beloved 'American' Quartet.

"Concert attendees will have an opportunity to take a mini-tour of the Martin House from 6:30 - 7:15 p.m.  The program will commence at 7:30 p.m., followed by a reception." 

Music in Buffalo's Historic Places, opening concert

Greatbatch Pavillion, Darwin Martin House

March 9th, 6:30 p.m.

Cost: $15 for Martin House Associates; $20 for the general public. 

Seating is limited and reservations required.

Make your reservation online or by calling (716) 856-3858.

https://tickets.darwinmartinhouse.org/public/

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Orchestral Composer and UB Alumn Alejandro Rutty to visit the Center in March!

We at the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music are looking forward to having composer and UB alumn Alejandro Rutty visit the Center next month. On Wednesday, March 6th, Rutty will be coming to the University at Buffalo from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he is currently an Associate Professor, and offering a presentation on his music as part of our visiting lecture series.

Rutty has recently released his first CD on Navona Records, The Conscious Sleepwalker. The album's title piece, The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops, for orchestra, has received enthusiastic reviews, and has been called "a terrific curtain-raiser" (Boston Globe) and "amusing... an immediate test of the ensemble's mettle" (New York Times). We look forward to hearing about his recent CD and several of his other projects during his visit.

Here is an interview with Dr. Tom Moore, where Rutty talks about his recent concerto for saxophone quartet and orchestra, A Future of Tango, also on The Conscious Sleepwalker, as well as several of his other recent pieces.

More background on Alejandro Rutty can be gleaned from his biography below:

Alejandro Rutty

“Alejandro Rutty’s compositional output includes orchestral, chamber and mixed-media music, arrangements of Argentine traditional music, and innovative outreach musical projects.

“A unique feature of Rutty’s music is its affection for textures suggested by modern recording processing techniques, and the use of Tango - a genre he performs as a pianist-and other South American genres as part of the music’s surface.

“Rutty’s compositions and arrangements have been played by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina, National Symphony Orchestra of Brazil, Porto Alegre Symphony Orchestra, New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, Linköping Symphony Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet, and the Cassatt String Quartet among other groups. Rutty’s music has been published by Effiny Music, SCI/European American Music, and Ricordi Sudamericana.

“Recordings of his music have been released by Capstone Records, Arizona University Recordings, and ERM Media. The Conscious Sleepwalker (an All-Rutty CD, Navona Records) including A Future of Tango and other orchestral pieces was released in March 2012.

“Founder and Artistic Director of the Hey, Mozart! Project, Alejandro Rutty is currently Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.” 

Check out the excellent live video below of Rutty's Simultaneous Worlds, for flute and percussion, performed by the Due East Duo:

Link to this post here.

Charles Wuorinen to receive SUNY Honorary Doctorate at June in Buffalo 2013!

Our Spring 2013 season here at the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music is off to a rollicking start – Tim Fain’s acclaimed multimedia work Portals was a huge success here at UB last week, and is enjoying very positive reviews. Our friend Daniel J. Kushner wrote a terrific review in the Buffalo News, which you can read here.

We have some exciting news to report: June in Buffalo 2013 Faculty Composer Charles Wuorinen will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the State University of New York! The award ceremony will occur prior to the 75th birthday concert on June 4th, where Wuorinen will conduct the Slee Sinfonietta in a performance of It Happens Like This, his humorous and dramatic cantata on seven poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate.

Charles Wuorinen has been a long-time friend of the Center for many years now, and is one of our most frequent faculty composers at the June in Buffalo Festival. For the uninitiated, a few excerpts from his bio shines light on his inspiring history:

Charles Wuorinen with his cat Lepton

“In 1970, Wuorinen became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize (for the electronic work Time's Encomium). The Pulitzer and the MacArthur Fellowship are just two among many awards, fellowships and other honors to have come his way.

“Wuorinen has written more than 260 compositions to date. His newest works include Time Regained, a fantasy for piano and orchestra based on early music (Matteo da Perugia to Orlando Gibbons) for Peter Serkin, James Levine and the MET Opera Orchestra, Theologoumenon, an orchestral tone poem commissioned for James Levine's 60th birthday, Eighth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Metagong for two pianos and two percussion. He has recently completed an opera on Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain with libretto by Proulx for the Teatro Real in Madrid. Wuorinen's previous opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1997-2001), based on the novel of Salman Rushdie, was premiered by the New York City Opera in fall 2004.

“His works have been recorded on nearly a dozen labels including several releases on Naxos, Albany Records (Charles Wuorinen Series), John Zorn's Tzadik label, and a CD of piano works performed by Alan Feinberg on the German label Col Legno.

“Wuorinen's works are published exclusively by C.F. Peters Corporation. He is the author of Simple Composition, used by composition students throughout the world.”

Read his full biography at our brand new webpage: Slee Sinfonietta Artist Bios, which includes full biographies and pictures of all of the composers, performers, and staff that make up the Slee Sinfonietta, as well as friends and other guests of the Center.

Below is a terrific video containing excerpts of Wuorinen’s It Happens Like This, performed by Ensemble SIGNAL and conducted by Brad Lubman, and featuring commentary by Wuorinen himself:

Link to this post here.