Slee Sinfonietta: A History

As we approach the 30th anniversary of this ensemble, we here at Edge of the Center thought it appropriate to write a short history celebrating the Slee Sinfonietta. The Sinfonietta was co-founded by David Felder and Magnus Mårtensson  in 1997. From its outset it was a unique ensemble in the chamber orchestra milieu. It is typical for chamber orchestras to be a rather fixed group, perhaps a work here or there will add or subtract a few musicians, but overall the core group remains the same. It is also typical for a chamber orchestra to be specialized in one era of music. For example, the Handel Haydn Society or the Boston Modern Orchestra Project are both chamber orchestras which specialize in their respective eras. The Slee Sinfonietta is different. Felder and Mårtensson founded the group with flexibility as a core value, both in instrumentation and programming. The desire was for the ensemble to specialize in the overlooked, underperformed pieces both in historic eras and the contemporary repertoire. The result of this was that both the personnel on stage and programming was extremely varied. 

Mårtensson leading the early Sinfonietta

In the early years of the Sinfonietta, the programming would playfully combine 18th-Century works with the contemporary. Composers of our own time and the 18th-Century both enjoyed writing for chamber orchestras, both looking on either side of the 19th-Century bloat. The very first performance of the ensemble was on April 15, 1997 and featured Wagner, Mozart and Bartok, names we don’t often associate with the Slee Sinfonietta. A more typical program of the early years is the performance on January 26, 1999 whose program included Handel, Felder, Franco Donatoni, Schnittke, Knussen, and Shostakovich. Here you can see the inclusion of 18th-Century works in Handel, with less performed contemporaries like Italian, yet Cage-influenced Franco Donatoni and the Soviet iconoclast, Alfred Schnittke who was recently deceased at the date of the performance. We will spotlight one more program to complete the image of the early years which occurred on April 16, 2002 under the baton of Mårtensson:

Nils Vigeland – To Jenter
Nils Vigeland – Songs Without Words
C. A. Hall – Elegy
CPE Bach – Concerto in D Minor
Luigi Nono – Canti per 13

Again we see an imaginative combination of the contemporary and the 18th-Century.

Of course, we cannot go any further without discussing June in Buffalo. The Sinfonietta has always had a duel function: to showcase underperformed works to the UB community and to serve as the de facto ensemble-in-residence at June in Buffalo. The programming at June in Buffalo for the ensemble is much more closely tied to the visiting senior composers. A snapshot of any June in Buffalo program communicates who is there during that year’s festival. June of the year 2000 gives us a program including Bernard Rands, Roger Reynolds, and Augusta Read Thomas. June of 2003 has a program of Philip Glass, Charles Wuorinen and John Corigliano. The flexibility and diversity behind the impetus to start the Slee Sinfonietta equally has gone into the planning for June in Buffalo. The composers listed for the two programs have great theoretical and stylistic diversity and have often been used by those making polemics. Yet, here their music sat together under the direction of Mårtensson.

An extraordinary moment in the Sinfonietta’s history is the inaugural concert of the Center for 21st-Century Music which coincided with a visit to UB from the 14th Dalai Lama in September 2006. To celebrate this historic moment, the Center for 21st-Century Music invited Philip Glass, who had recently written the score for the Martin Scorsese film Kundun which depicts the early life of the Dalai Lama. The performance included David Felder’s Chasmal, Charles Wuorinen’s Epithalamium, and Glass’s Songs of Milarepa and Symphony No. 3. Songs of Milarepa takes its text from an 11th-Century Tibetan Buddhist poet and saint, Milarepa. The celebration featured a screening of Kundun and a question and answer session with Glass following the concert.

The Slee Sinfonietta has a deep relationship with Charles Wuorinen, as can already be seen in the programs described above. His name appears often on Sinfonietta programs throughout the history of the ensemble. Wuorinen himself has often led the ensemble, for example during an all-Wuorinen performance in April 2011, and again at June in Buffalo 2013. The composer was a faculty member of the department, a frequent senior composer at June in Buffalo and indeed was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from SUNY in 2013. 

Wuorinen leading the Sinfonietta

After Magnus Mårtensson’s departure from Buffalo, the Sinfonietta has worked with some of the great conductors of the world. These include James Baker, Christian Baldini, Brad Lubman, Jeffrey Millarsky, Matthias Pintscher, Andrew Rindfleisch, Gil Rose, Case Scaglione, Harvey Sollberger, and Robert Treviño. 

A number of phenomenal guest soloists have performed with the Sinfonietta, including sopranos Laura Aiken, Julia Bentley and Lucy Shelton; bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood; bass Ethan Herschenfeld; violinists Irvine Arditti, Jaime Laredo, Tim Fain, Viviane Hagner and Yuki Numata Resnick; pianist Ursula Oppens; flutists Pierre-Yves Artaud, Mario Caroli, and Tara Helen O'Connor; and French hornist Adam Unsworth. The ensemble has had recorded releases on Mode, Coviello and Albany Records. 

 Jonathan Golove is the current the director of the Sinfonietta, and under his direction the ensemble has continued its tradition of performing underperformed contemporary repertoire. The ensemble is still made up of the fine performance faculty in the Music department as well as Buffalo-area musicians, many of whom are associated with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. At any Sinfonietta concert the reader may attend an exciting and innovative program is sure to be found, as well as an unpredictable instrumentation on stage. We at Edge of the Center look forward to the future of the Slee Sinfonietta to discover yet more overlooked masterpieces and present new works of today!

Please look below this text to hear an excellent recording from Slee Sinfonietta's history, David Felder’s Inner Sky with flute soloist Mario Caroli.