David Felder’s new orchestral work to receive its world premiere by the BPO
The extended four-movement work for symphony orchestra to be
performed under the baton of the BPO’s Grammy-winning conductor and music
director JoAnn Falletta
BUFFALO, N.Y. – SUNY Distinguished
Professor David Felder’s new orchestral piece “Die Dämmerungen” will receive
its world premiere in a pair of performances by the Buffalo Philharmonic
Orchestra under the direction of JoAnn Falletta at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 5, and at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 6, at Kleinhans Music Hall.
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| The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra |
The extended four-movement work muses on various forms of twilight with each movement framed by accompanying poetic inscriptions, including those of William Carlos Williams, Dana Gioia, the Book of Psalms, as well as Frederick Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols.”
“I’m deeply honored to have been able to compose ‘Die Dämmerungen’ for JoAnn Falletta and the wonderful musicians of the Buffalo
Philharmonic Orchestra, and am very excited to hear the premiere at Kleinhans,”
says Felder, the Birge-Cary chair in music
composition in the University at Buffalo Department of Music, part of UB’s College
of Arts and Sciences.
UB faculty, staff and students will
receive a 30 percent discount for tickets purchased online through the BPO’s website by
using the code FELDER30.
“We
are thrilled to present this new work by David Felder, one of the foremost
American composers today,” said JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Buffalo
Philharmonic Orchestra. “The BPO has a long history of presenting new works.
Our audiences have come to expect it—to love it. It’s such a joy to present the
premiere performance of this great work to our audiences at Kleinhans Music
Hall. The BPO and I are happy to
celebrate the close relationship between our orchestra and the University at
Buffalo.”
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| JoAnn Falletta conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra |
For Felder, who is widely
recognized as one of the leading composers of his generation, twilight (“Die
Dämmerungen” translates from German as twilights) is an encompassing theme that
speaks to a recurring diurnal nature as easily as it references sweeping
representations of place, position and time of life.
He says light has always been a
source of fascination, its shades, durations and intensities expressed in ways often
specific to time and geography. Felder mentions witnessing the brief but
spectacular southwestern sunsets and their longer more subtle northern
counterparts, as well as looking out his backyard in East Aurora, N.Y.
The village’s name references the Roman
goddess of dawn, and inspired Felder to reflect on that mythology along with the
current historical moment in “Die Dämmerungen’s” second movement, while speculating
on twilights of persons, and civilizations, both their beginnings and their
endings, in later movements.
Felder’s use of poetic texts in “Die
Dämmerungen” represents both passion and inspiration. Poetry in this case, speaks
not only to his personal interests, but creates a frame that provides what he
calls an ancillary way of looking at the music.
That Felder explores cycles of time
in some ways speaks to his own evolution as an artist.
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| David Felder |
“Die Dämmerungen” is another step in a decades-long line of collaborations with the BPO that began in 1987 with the orchestra’s performance of Felder’s double concerto for clarinet and piano, performed as part of what was the North American New Music Festival. He also wrote in 1991 for the former BPO music director Maximiano Valdes a piece titled “Six Poems for Neruda’s ‘Alturas…’” Felder served as Meet the Composer, BPO composer in residence for three years beginning in 1993 as part of a national program that put five other composers in residence with American orchestras. And since then, he has worked with the BPO on many June in Buffalo concerts, UB’s internationally celebrated new music festival.
But his current works represents
his interest in speaking more directly and simply in his work.
“I think simplicity is among the
qualities that clarifies one’s work as we get older,” he says. “As a younger
composer, part of my focus was on the formal and technical as points of departure in working out my own
language, but as you get older and more comfortable with that language, you can
be more direct in how you disperse the material you have in hand for the
artistic purposes you desire.”
As a younger composer, Felder was
interested in writing extended single movement forms expressed in complex
formal vehicles.
“In ‘Die Dämmerungen,’ as in much
of my recent work, I’ve concentrated more on shorter, individual movements
which are essentially binary forms,” he says. “These are more simple forms than
my earlier work, basically two parts, but clearly connected – the movements
rhyme in a manner of speaking.”
Purchase tickets for Saturday, October 5, 2019, at 8:00 pm, at Kleinhans Music Hall here.
Purchase tickets for Sunday, October 6, 2019, at 2:30 pm, at Kleinhans Music Hall here.
University at Buffalo faculty, staff, and students, please don't forget the codeword for a 30% discount: FELDER30
