The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra finish off June in Buffalo 2013!

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

We’re excited about the final concert of June in Buffalo 2013 with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, which will conclude the festival on Sunday, June 9th, at 2:30 p.m. in Slee Hall at the University at Buffalo. This year’s festival has been especially inspiring, not only because of the great mix of faculty and participant composers, but also because of the inauguaration of the June in Buffalo Performance Institute, which helped finish off the festival with concerts on both Friday and Saturday. Music journalist Daniel J. Kushner recently published an insightful and enthusiastic review of Friday night’s concert under the title “Eclectic Performance Institute is a fine fit for June”, which can be found in the Buffalo News. We've also received some great recent press from Jan Jezioro, who has published a nice write-up on the BPO at June in Buffalo at the Artvoice, which includes a fantastic quote by Alex Ross, “Having appeared in Spring for Music [at Carnegie Hall], the Buffalo Philharmonic will return home for June in Buffalo, which this year presents a particularly fascinating lineup of resident composers as well as a new, contemporary-oriented Performance Institute under the direction of Eric Huebner.” Read Jezioro's full piece here.

JoAnn Falletta

The final concert on Sunday, with the BPO under the baton of JoAnn Falletta, will begin with David Felder’s Linebacker Music, originally written for the BPO in 1993. You can sample the beginning of Linebacker Music on the Center’s soundcloud.

The second piece of the concert will be by composer Augusta Read Thomas, described in October 2012 by the New Yorker as “a true virtuoso composer”. The BPO will perform her recent work Aureole, which was just given its world premiere by the DePaul Symphony Orchestra only a week ago.

The final piece of the concert, which will follow without an intermission, will be Yehudi Wyner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto Chiavi in Mano, and will feature soloist Geoffrey Burleson. We recently blogged about Chiavi in Mano, read more about it here. 

Ticket information can be found here. We look forward to seeing you at Slee Hall!

Link to this post here.

June in Buffalo Performance Institute concert June 7th!

Eric Huebner, JiB Performance Institute Director

The June in Buffalo Performance Institute has been going strong since last Thursday, May 30th, when the JACK Quartet inaugurated the Institute with a gorgeous performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 1 at the beautiful M&T Bank in downtown Buffalo. Since then Performance Institute participants have been working closely with the JACK Quartet, Eric Huebner, and Tom Kolor and members of the Talujon Percussion Ensemble preparing for Friday (June 7th) night’s concert at 7:30 p.m. in Baird Recital Hall at the University at Buffalo.

The full list June in Buffalo Performance Institute participants:

Ross Aftel, percussion

Hangyu Bai, piano

T.J. Borden, cello

Jade Conlee, piano           

Nicholas Emmanuel, piano

Matthew Geiger, percussion

Manuel Laufer, piano

Michiko Saiki, piano

Friday night's concert will also feature a guest appearance by violinist Irvine Arditti, who will perform Brian Ferneyhough's Intermedio alla Ciaconna, the full program is below.

June in Buffalo Performance Institute Concert, June 7th, 7:30 p.m., UB Baird Recital Hall

Chinary Ung:  Spiral no. 1                                               

Ross Aftel, percussion, T.J. Borden, cello, and Nicholas Emmanuel, piano                                                                                                      

Anton Webern:  Bagatelles, op.9                                               

members of the JACK Quartet with T.J. Borden

Brian Ferneyhough:  Intermedio alla Ciaconna                                   

Irvine Arditti, violin

                                               

                                             ---  intermission ---

Ralph Shapey:  Gottlieb Duo                          

Matthew Geiger, percussion, Manuel Laufer, piano

Anton Webern:  Two Pieces (1899), Three Little Pieces op. 11   

Hangyu Bai, piano, and Jonathan Golove, cello

                       

Charles Wuorinen:  Fifty-Fifty                                                 

Jade Conlee and Michiko Saiki, pianists           

The next day, on Saturday, June 8th, JiB Performance Institute faculty and participants will perform works by JiB composers Clint Haycraft and Megan Buegger, and works by Zimmerman, Cage, Babbitt, Carter, Stockhausen, Sciarrino, and Rivas. The concert will begin at 3:45 p.m. in B1 Slee Hall for the first piece by Megan Beugger, and then move up to Baird Recital Hall at 4:00 p.m. for the rest of the program. Check out the Performance Institute website, like their page on facebook, or follow the Center for 21st Century Music on twitter for more updates.

Link to this post here.

Yehudi Wyner's Piano Concerto "Chiavi in Mano" at June in Buffalo 2013

We’re enjoying having Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner on the Composition Faculty of June in Buffalo 2013, and looking forward to hearing his music this week. On Wednesday, June 5th, Talea Ensemble will give a concert featuring Wyner’s Refrain, and on Saturday, June 8th, SIGNAL's concert will feature Wyner’s Passage, which will be conducted by Brad Lubman, and feature soloists Irvine Arditti on violin and Ken Radnofsky on saxophone. Both concerts will be at 7:30 p.m. in Slee Hall.

Yehudi Wyner

The final concert of June in Buffalo 2013 will be on Sunday, June 9th, at 2:30 p.m. in Slee Hall, when the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will perform works by JiB Faculty composers that will conclude with Wyner’s Piano Concerto, Chiavi in Mano, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Our guest Geoffrey Burleson will join JoAnn Falletta and the BPO as the piano soloist on Chiavi in Mano – Burleson’s playing has been described as “vibrant” and “compelling”  by the New York Times, who also praised his “command, projection of rhapsodic qualities without loss of rhythmic vigor, and appropriate sense of spontaneity and fetching colors.”

A recent 55-minute audio interview with Yehudi Wyner, by Christopher Lyon, is available at the Huffington Post. For a little more information, we’ve excerpted a small bit from Wyner’s biography and reproduced it below, the complete bio can be found at the Milken Archive:

“For nearly a half century Yehudi Wyner has been recognized as one of America’s most gifted composers. Although born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he grew up in New York City. His father, Lazar Weiner (1897–1982), was a leading exponent of Yiddish high musical culture, both as a choral conductor and as a composer, and is now the acknowledged avatar of the Yiddish art song medium. Throughout his youth, Wyner was exposed to his parents’ Yiddishist intellectual milieu, and their home was frequented by literati and artists from the Yiddish cultural orbit. (His father had the spelling of his children’s surname changed—though not his own—to preclude a common mispronunciation.)

“By the age of four or five, no doubt inspired by the music he heard in that environment, Wyner began improvising short pieces that had an eastern European Jewish folk or Hassidic character. He started his formal musical life as a pianist, although he never studied with his father—who was himself a brilliant pianist. While a piano student of Loni Epstein at The Juilliard School, Wyner became increasingly attracted to composition, which he then studied at Yale with Richard Donovan and Paul Hindemith, and at Harvard with Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. After completing his undergraduate work, he spent a summer in residence at the Brandeis Arts Institute in Santa Susana, California, a division of the Brandeis Camp, where the music director was Max Helfman (1901–1963), one of the seminal figures in Jewish music in America. That program brought together college-age students as well as established Jewish—and especially Israeli—composers, in an effort to broaden the Jewish artistic horizons of young musicians. There, Wyner came into contact with some of the most creative and accomplished Israeli composers and other artists of that period, and he was introduced to new artistic possibilities inherent in modern Jewish cultural consciousness.”

Check out the video below of Yehudi Wyner's Quartet for Oboe and String Trio, performed by the Mimesis Ensemble at Fenway Park:

Link to this post here.

Charles Wuorinen receives honorary doctorate from UB, conducts Slee SInfonietta at June in Buffalo 2013!

Charles Wuorinen

We’re looking forward to Tuesday, June 4th, when University at Buffalo President Satish K. Tripathi will present June in Buffalo 2013 Faculty Composer Charles Wuorinen with an honorary doctorate from UB. The brief award ceremony will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Slee Hall, after which two recent works by Charles Wuorinen will be performed. First will be Wuroinen’s Piano Quintet, to be performed by the JACK Quartet and pianist Eric Huebner. Wuorinen will then pick up the baton and lead the Slee Sinfonietta in his It Happens Like This, a dramatic and sometimes jocular cantata in which the composer has set text from seven poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate. It Happens Like This will feature 12 members from Slee Sinfonietta, who will be joined by four vocalists: soprano Sharon Harms, alto Laura Mercado Wright, tenor Steven Brennfleck, and bass Ethan Herschenfeld.

The Slee Sinfonietta performing Ligeti's Piano Concerto

Charles Wuorinen has been a friend to the Center for 21st Century Music for many years now – his full biography can be found on our 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.

The Sinfonietta presents a series of concerts each year that feature performances of challenging new works by contemporary composers and lesser-known works from the chamber orchestra repertoire. Founded in 1997 by composer David Felder, and comprised of a core group including UB faculty performance artists, visiting artists, national and regional professionals and advanced performance students, the group is conducted by leading conductors and composers. More can be found on the history of the Sinfonietta at their program archives. 

Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on twitter for more updates on the Slee Sinfonietta and June in Buffalo 2013. 

Link to this post here.