The Center for 21st Century Music is pleased to announce our co-production with the UB College of Arts & Sciences Dean Robin Schulze and the UB Department of Music: Lukas Foss Centennial Celebration, Sunday, September 18th, at 3:00 pm in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall. We are also excited to bring this program to New York City, where we will offer the same program at the Dimenna Center in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, October 5th.
Some background and context about this exciting program has been offered by Prof. Jonathan Golove, UB Music Department faculty specializing in Music Composition and Cello Performance, who will be performing on cello throughout the program:
Lukas Foss, whom we celebrate on the 100th anniversary of his birthyear, was a brilliant, exploratory and multifarious musician. His output as a composer, to say nothing of his efforts as a conductor and pianist, ranged widely over a significant variety of major trends from the second half of the 20th century. In some of those trends, indeed, he can be seen an important pioneer. Today’s program presents by no means the widest possible survey of his output in terms of these compositional directions, but it does offer chamber works from a broad swath of time, with works composed in five decades. These works represent some of his principal interests and stylistic tendencies, including the so-called “Americana” sound from his early period, his take on minimalism in the 1970s and 80s, and his career-long engagement with literary texts. The works are organized in two groupings: the first begins with Americana pieces and concludes with the minimalist-flavored Solo Observed, which itself, in its concluding section, brings back the Americana style decades after he had moved off in other composerly directions. After this grouping of shorter works, we perform one of Foss’s masterworks, Time Cycle, in the chamber version he created following Leonard Bernstein’s triumphant 1960 premiere of the original version for soprano and orchestra with the New York Philharmonic. Of that premiere, critic Allen Hughes wrote, “The composer... has surely produced the most beautiful and most significant work of his career.”
- Prof. Jonathan Golove
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| Lukas Foss photo credit: Irene Haupt |
The concert is free and open to the public, please see the complete program below:
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