 |
| 2003-2004
Season Concert No. 3 |
February 17, 2004 Tuesday 8 pm
click
here
for
directions to
Edward
Pickman Concert Hall
27 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138] |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information:
Sasha Callahan
sashacallahan@hotmail.com
info@kalistos.org
617-393-1960
KALISTOS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA FEATURES RENOWNED SOLOISTS LAURA BOSSERT AND
TERRY KING IN U.S. PREMIERE OF DOUBLE CONCERTO BY VLADISLAV USPENSKY
Boston, MA (January 21, 2004) – The Boston-based Kalistos Chamber
Orchestra’s February concert features renowned violinist Laura Bossert
and
cellist Terry King, in a U.S. premiere of Vladislav Uspensky’s Double
Concerto. The work was written for Ms. Bossert and Mr. King, and
arranged
specifically for Kalistos Chamber Orchestra and this performance.
Ms.
Bossert and Mr. King have received international prizes and acclaim for
their solo and chamber performances and their longstanding commitment
to
contemporary music. Also joining Kalistos for this performance
are members
of two acclaimed Boston chamber ensembles, Vento Chiaro and Huntington
Brass.
Tickets are $20 for adults, $10 for students/ senior citizens, and are
available at the door or by calling 617-393-1960.
WHO:
Kalistos Chamber Orchestra featuring guest artists Laura Bossert and
Terry
King
WHAT:
Arvo Part
Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Vladislav Uspensky Double Concerto for
violin and cello
Featuring Laura Bossert and Terry King
Frank Bridge
Nocturne from Suite for Strings
Benjamin Britten Variations on a theme of
Frank Bridge
WHEN:
8:00 p.m.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004.
WHERE:
Edward Pickman Concert Hall
27 Garden St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
About Kalistos
Kalistos Chamber Orchestra was formed in the winter of 2002 by a group
of
Boston area musicians brought together by their common love of music
and a
desire to contribute to the community. These players share a
willingness to
bring their varied backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences together
in a
collaborative environment, creating an orchestra that is democratic in
its
artistic direction. The group is fully rotational both musically
and
administratively, allowing each member an opportunity to explore a
broad
range of responsibilities and roles. For more information visit
http://www.kalistos.org .
|
|
|
For more info please contact us at
800-896 7340 or email info@kalistos.org
Ticket Prices
Adults $20
Students with valid ID $10
Guest
Artists' bio
LAURA ANNE BOSSERT, violinist, a Silver Medalist in the Henryk Szering
International Violin Competition has earned recognition as a soloist
and chamber musician of great artistry. She has appeared as soloist
with the State Symphony of Mexico and has collaborated with the Muir
String Quartet, the Raphael and Mirecourt Trios. This summer she
performed as a Caramoor Virtuosi at the Rising Stars week at the
Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY. In the spring Ms. Bossert with
cellist, Terry King, presented the world premiere of Lalo Schriffin’s
Double Concerto .This May, Bossert spent two weeks at St.Petersburg
Conservatory, Russia, giving Masterclasses and recitals. Bossert has
taught at the Shanghai Conservatory, University of Rochester, Eastman
School of Music and West Texas A&M . She is heard on a new video
version of Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece, the Gold Rush featuring the
chamber music of Beethoven and on a CD entitled Sombre Y Sol featuring
music for violin and guitar. Ms. Bossert is on the faculty of the Longy
School of Music, Cambridge, MA The Quartet program and Walnut Hill
School.
TERRY KING,
cellist, was a protege of the late Gregor Piatigorsky and a former
assistant to him in the famous master classes at the University of
Southern California. Many prominent American composers have written
works for King and he has premiered, commissioned and/or recorded
important cello compositions by such celebrated masters as Roy Harris,
Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, Paul Creston, Lukas Foss and many others.
King is a member of two world-class piano trios, the Mirecourt Trio,
and the International Trio. Dr. King currently is engaged in recording
projects of the major works for cello (the complete Beethoven works on
the Dutch label Erasmus) as well as American cello classics series
(CELLO AMERICA on the Music and Arts label). Dr. King currently teaches
at the Hartt School of Music, Longy School of Music and Walnut Hill
School.
What the press says about our guest soloists :
"...a master technician both in digital facility and in his richly
varied tone."
-High Fidelity Magazine
"...a master player...perfectly polished performances...magnificent
playing... can coax oceans of smooth, rich sounds from the cello."
-The New Records
"..to the instrument born...playing with passion, sweep and drive."
-Los Angeles Times
"...played with relish and technical aplomb...performances could not be
faulted."
-New York Times
Volunteer opportunities,
If you would like to volunteer for Kalistos Chamber Orchestra, we have
a number of opportunities ranging from ushers to graphic
designer. Please contact us at 800 896 7340 and leave your
contact info.
Sponsorship Opportunities
We are always seeking sponsors to make our concerts possible.
Please contact us if you would like to join KCO's efforts in making our
community a more beautiful place to live in.
Frank Bridge (b. Brighton, England, 26
February 1879; d. Eastbourne, England, 10 January 1941): “Nocturne”
from Suite for Strings
From the time of his death, in 1941, up to the 1970’s, Frank Bridge’s
music went through a period of considerable neglect—even today his name
is not nearly as well-known as other English composers of the late-19th
and 20th centuries, such as Edward Elgar, John Ireland, and, of course,
Benjamin Britten. (It is actually by way of one of the works we hear
this evening, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, that his
name has become best-known.) But scholarship in the past 30 years has
taken a fresh look at Bridge and the significance of his musical
achievement, especially his more modern, experimental tendencies in the
later part of his career that placed him far in advance of many of his
contemporaries.
Bridge’s musical output can be roughly divided into two periods: the
works produced before 1920, and those after. The works of the earlier
period, wherein falls the Suite of 1909 – 1910, have their style based
on German models, particularly Brahms, but also exhibit a French
influence, notably that of Fauré. Bridge knew his audience and
what would please them—so it was with the Suite, another large-scale
orchestral work, The Sea, and chamber music such as his Phantasy
Quartet of 1910 (for piano, violin, viola and cello) that he made his
name with the British public. It was after 1920, however, that Bridge
recognized certain expressive limitations in his music, which impelled
him to expand his musical language, particularly in his use of chord
structures and bitonality—his Piano Sonata of 1924 is a prime example
of this new, modernistic style. (Some writers have also suggested that
the trauma of living through World War I was a major factor in Bridge’s
plumbing new emotional depths in his art.) The Suite for Strings,
however, is not without its darker moments, and indeed the “Nocturne,”
as Anthony Payne in his book Frank Bridge: Radical and Conservative has
suggested, foreshadows some elements of Bridge’s later style, citing a
similarity of mood between this movement and the Lament for string
orchestra of 1915.
The tonal stability so evident in the other movements of the
Suite is notably absent in the “Nocturne”: the resolution to a G-major
chord at the beginning of the movement, heralded by the violas’ high D
harmonic, is denied—instead, that D becomes the point of departure for
the first violins’ longing melody in F minor. Another near-resolution,
this time to C minor, instead gives way to a solo cello, its line
sympathetically echoed by a solo viola, followed by a
quasi-developmental section with an elaboration on the main theme,
presenting some of the richest texture of the movement. After another
appearance of the solo cello, the main theme returns in its original
form—and again, with great poise, Bridge extends the longing,
unrequieted harmonies almost till the very end, where the violas’ high
D reappears, this time finding its place in the final G major chord to
close the wistful lullaby.
Arvo Pärt (b. Paide, Estonia, 11 September 1935): Cantus in
Memoriam Benjamin Britten
Arvo Pärt, like Arnold Schönberg before him, is an composer
who was forced to invent a new method of composition that was both
deeply meaningful to him, as well as one that would be recognized as a
truly original artistic voice. Whereas Schönberg all but abandoned
tonality and functional harmony to develop his twelve-tone technique,
Pärt began his career employing serial and collage techniques, and
juxtaposing tonal and atonal sections in his music, before recognizing
a need to reinvent his musical language, which would eventually lead
him back to complete tonality. This journey began in 1968 with
Pärt’s study of Gregorian chant, and his own forays into writing
simple monody (a single melodic line, with no accompaniment), in an
effort to recapture the eloquent simplicity of first-century
ecclesiastical song in a twentieth-century musical context. In his
biography of Pärt, Paul Hillier expressed this artistic mission as
“an attempt to reconstitute art within past and future time, to fly in
the face of the disconnectedness of postmodernism and seize a cultural
meta-narrative from time so distant, yet so potently realized, that it
has the force of new life.” [1] Pärt was not the only composer to
reject the disconnectedness of much of twentieth-century music: the
American composer George Rochberg had his own rebellion against the
avant-garde’s denial of their musical heritage—he rejected the serial
method as insufficient to meet his own needs of emotional expression,
and began to find his way back to tonality. Pärt too re-embraced
the tonal system, through his invention of the “tintinnabuli” method.
As the word implies, the works based on this method resemble in many
ways the ringing of a bell—both the initial sound one hears when it is
struck, but also the rich resonance with all its overtones heard
afterwards. The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten of 1977 was one of
Pärt’s first tintinnabuli works, and it remains a major milestone
in his artistic development. The piece begins with an actual bell,
sounding an A—the funereal sonority which provides the work with both
its emotional and tonal grounding. From this A, the simplest of
melodies (taking its cue from Gregorian chant) begins in the first
violins: a descending A aeolian (natural minor) scale. This scalar
pattern is repeated in four layers of string texture below, entering
one at a time, and each playing the melody twice as slow as its
predecessor (i.e., the first violins begin with a half note, followed
by a quarter note; the second violins begin with a whole note followed
by a half note; and so on, down to the double-basses). To this is added
the essence of the tintinnabuli method: each of the other divided
string parts continuously plays one note of the tonic A-minor
triad—that is, an A, C or E. The effect is a constantly evolving
resonance of the tonic triad against the descending melodic line,
expressing wave upon wave of grief, all the while punctuated by the
bell’s lamenting A. Pärt himself addressed the highly personal
nature of this work, with respect to its dedicatee:
Why did the date of Benjamin Britten’s death—December 4, 1976—touch
such a chord in me? During this time I was obviously at the point where
I could recognize the magnitude of such a loss. Inexplicable feelings
of guilt, more than that even, arose in me. I had just discovered
Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the
unusual purity of his music . . . And besides, for a long time I had
wanted to meet Britten personally—and now it would not come to that. [2]
It is interesting to note that a similar (yet certainly more agonizing)
event in Rochberg’s life touched off a need to find a new emotional and
artistic outlet for grief: in 1964 his 20-year-old son died of a brain
tumor, and it was then Rochberg started to recognize the expressive
limitations of the serial composition, and began to incorporate more
tonal gestures in his musical language, beginning with the chamber work
Contra Mortem et Tempus. It is perhaps this recognition of the
persistent significance of human emotion in art—and not just grief, but
joy, love, hope—that allows us to recognize composers such as
Pärt, Rochberg and Britten, among many others, as great the voices
of twentieth-century music—and allow us to recognize too the continued
need for such voices in our own century.
[1] Paul Hillier, Arvo Pärt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), 74.
[2] Arvo Pärt, liner notes to ECM recording of the Cantus, quoted
in Hillier, 103.
Benjamin Britten (b. Lowestoft, England, 22 November 1913; d.
Adelburgh, England, 4 December 1976): Variations on a Theme of Frank
Bridge, op. 10.
Benjamin Britten’s ascendancy to the position as the foremost British
composer of his generation was in no small part a result of his study
with Frank Bridge (1879 – 1941), one of the more prominent British
composers of his own time. Bridge met Britten in the fall of 1927;
impressed with the thirteen-year-old’s work—particularly his forays
into a more modern harmonic idiom, with Holst and Ravel as
models—Bridge agreed to take him on as his only composition student. It
was from him that Britten learned his impeccable compositional
technique, including an ability to write idiomatically for each
instrument of the orchestra. Later in life, Britten summed up Bridge’s
influence by citing two principles: “One was that you should find
yourself and be true to what you found. [The other was] scrupulous
attention to good technique, the business of saying clearly what was in
one’s mind.” [1] The Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, written on
commission from the Boyd Neel Orchestra in 1937, aptly demonstrate
adherence to these rules, though as biographer Humphrey Carpenter [2]
has noted, the work is as much Britten’s declaration of independence
from his teacher as it is a homage to him. As Britten was one of the
first British composers to rebel against the so-called “pastoral
school” of Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams, his choice of a
decidedly pastoral theme, from Bridge’s second Idyll for string
quartet, as the basis for his variations was made not without irony:
first presented by a solo quartet against a pizzicato accompaniment in
the rest of the orchestra, Britten seized upon the theme’s harmonic
ambiguities and melodic intervals (particularly the falling fifth) to
create a dazzling array of set pieces that stretch far beyond the
placid mood of the original theme. The result is a work of tremendous
musical ingenuity with a wide scope of mood and affect, making it one
of the finest contributions to the 20th-century string orchestra
repertory. The variations are summarized below:
I. Adagio. The opening chords of the violas, cellos and
basses recall the both the falling fifth of the theme and its unsettled
harmonies; over this the violins play a quasi-recitative derived from
the latter part of the theme, the straining melody growing ever more
poignant toward the middle of the variation. The disembodied harmony
finally come to a resolution with the final, unambiguous C major chord.
II. March. The theme is transformed into an insouciant dotted-rhythm
figure in the lower strings, juxtaposed with the trills in the violins.
The triplet figure, derived from the scalar measures of the theme, adds
to the jollity, along with the pizzicato eighths, which parody the
falling-fifth figure.
III. Romance. In one of the more straightforward variations, the
violins follow the general outline of the theme, but the grace of the
melody is thrown slightly off-kilter with its implied 6/8 meter against
the violas’, cellos’ and basses’ 3/4 . The two meters come together
with the violins’ scalar descents in quarter notes, one beginning on a
B-flat three octaves above middle C—the variation ends on the same high
B-flat, played as a harmonic.
IV. Aria Italiana. In perhaps the most fun-loving variation,
Britten suggests a send-up of a Rossini aria, with the first violins as
the prima donna, against a pizzicato accompaniment (marked “quasi
guitara” in the second violins and violas). The falling fifth figure is
expanded to ever greater intervals in the first violins, finally
reaching the span of two octaves by the variation’s end.
V. Bourée Classique. The falling fifth takes on a decidedly
rustic character here, played on the open A and D strings in the first
violins and cellos. This figure creates an ongoing harmonic conflict,
sandwiched between the changing harmonies marked by the stringent
chords in the rest of the orchestra. In a bravura solo, a violin takes
on both these roles, in a style of string writing, as Peter Evans has
noted, reminiscent of Stravinsky. Like the first variation, resolution
is achieved only with the final chord, in this case, a D-minor triad.
VI. Wiener Walz. Britten’s musical wit is again evident here, with the
C-centered tonality skewed by chromatic inflections, both in the
semitone clashes between the second violins and violas, and in the
first violins’ writhing, scalar melody; while the two chordal “sighs”
recall the opening chords of the theme. After a contrasting episode
which provides somewhat more tonal stability, the strings’ timbres
undergo a complete transformation in the recapitulation of the first
section—the second violins and violas playing col legno (with the wood
of the bow), the first violins recapping their melody with a
wraith-like tremolo played sul ponticello (near the bridge of the
instrument), and the chordal sighs played pizzicato.
VII. Moto perpetuo. The unrelenting sixteenth note pattern here
effects a complete inversion of the theme’s original pastoral mood, its
demonic forward motion centered on the key of D minor. The melodic line
moves in a rapid-fire exchange between all the string sections, most
brilliantly displayed in the final bars, with the 16th-note figure
traded off between the chordal exclamations.
VIII. Funeral March. Over a repeating, appropriately dirge-like figure
in the cellos and basses (again, a falling fifth), the violins and
violas intone their despairing lament, with the melodic leaps of the
theme expanded and filled in with rising and falling glissandos. In a
tip of the hat to Bridge, the harmonies of upper strings’ triplets near
the middle of the variation recall Bridge’s Ravel-like sonorities,
demonstrating Britten’s skill in blending familiar elements with new
ones.
IX. Chant. Perhaps nowhere else in the work is Britten’s mastery of
string tone-color so wonderfully displayed: with the divided violins on
high harmonics, the cellos play pizzicato, half of them plucking the
string in their extreme upper range, producing the brittle, cavernous
sonority which accompanies the “song” in the divided violas, which is
now but a ghostly memory of the theme.
X. Fugue and Finale. A brilliant contrapuntal display begins the
variation, with the theme fragmented in the restless fugue subject (the
melody heard at the outset of the variation). Before the basses can be
added to the fugual mix, however, a recap of some of the previous
variations begins: first, a reference to the dotted-rhythmic figure of
the “March,” then the descending quarter-note scale from the “Romance,”
and finally, after a reappearance of the march material, an elaboration
on the “Bourée Classique.” The fugue then resumes, this time
with the theme presented in nearly its original state by the string
quartet (which introduced the theme at the beginning of the work). But
Britten’s true homage to his teacher is saved for the very end: in a
tempo marked “slow and solemn” some of the pastoral beauty of Bridge’s
Idyll is regained, but not without Britten’s own melodic poignancy
added in the violins’ upper range, supported by hushed tremolos in the
violas and pizzicato in the cellos and basses. A gradual accumulation
of sound, affirming the D major tonality, finishes off the finale to
this, one of Britten’s instrumental masterpieces.
[1] “Britten Looking Back,” Sunday Telegraph, 17 November 1963, quoted
in Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 17.
[2] No relation.
Program notes (c) 2004 by David Carpenter.
David Carpenter is a composer living in Somerville, Massachusetts. He
and Boston-area composer Dan Kennedy, a master’s student at the New
England Conservatory, will be presenting a concert of original works at
the First Parish Church in Beverly on April 18th at 3pm. Come hear some
new voices in contemporary music!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Please support our
generous sponsors
|
|
 |
|
|
| |
 |
|
|
Our past concerts
2003-2004 season
October
9, 2003
November 20, 2003
February
17, 2004
May 21, 2004
2002-2003 season
May
19, 2002
September
27, 2002
November
1,
2002
March 14,
2003
May 9, 2003
Phillips
Exeter
Residency
February 17-18, 2003
Dean
College
Concert
February 22, 2003
|
|
| |
|
