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Our third subscription Concert
Friday, 14th March - featuring Winston Choi, piano
& Mark Emery, trumpet |
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Click
here for bio of
Wisnton Choi & Mark Emery
This concert was held on
Friday, March 14, 2003
at Edward Pickman Concert Hall
for directions please click on the address
27 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA
02116
for more info call
800-896-7340 or email info@kalistos.org
Tickets can be purchased at the door at the following prices
$15 adults
$10 students
$5 seniors and children under 14
SPECIAL OFFER
for MIT, Harvard and Tufts students
2 for 1 offer, $10 gets both of you in.
[must have valid student id] |
Winston Choi, piano
Press Quotes:
"Many attendees rose to pay their respects for what this most promising
pianist had accomplished. He was deserving of the reception. One could
easily be impressed not only by the skill level of his technique but by a
poetry in the hands and heart"
Herald Times
"Winston Choi performed in place of the scheduled soloist, and conquered the
course in a musical, athletic manner. He has proved on previous occasion, as
he certainly did here, a commanding technique"
Hoosier Times
"He performed very nicely, observing the formal as well as the fanciful
aspects with amusement and skill and managing the abrupt fits and starts
adroitly. Delightful."
Door County Advocate
Pianist, Winston Choi is currently a student of Ursula Oppens in the Certificate
of Performance Program at Northwestern University. He obtained both his Master's
and Bachelor Degrees at Indiana University, receiving the Performer’s Certificate,
studying with Menahem Pressler. Early piano studies began in Toronto,
Canada, where he was in the Young Performer's Program at the Royal Conservatory
of Music of Toronto (R.C.M.) taking lessons with Marc Durand and Leon Fleisher.
Winston is winner of numerous international and national competitions. Most
recently, he won 1st place in the Orleans Concours International, held in
France. His prize engagements include recital and concerto appearances
in France and Spain, as well as recording contracts with Harmonia Mundi and
Quadro Frame. He also won 1st place in the Soloist Division of the
2000 International Krystof Penderecki Competition. He is one of the
few two-time winners of Indiana University's Piano Concerto Competition,
and has also won the grand-prize of the 2000 Indianapolis Matinee Musicale,
the 2000 Kingsville Piano Concerto Competition, and the 1999 Crane Festival
of NewMusic Solo Performer Competition.
Winston performs frequently in solo recitals, as a collaborative pianist,
chamber musician and concerto soloist. He has also been featured on
radio for WFIU (Indiana) and WFMT (Chicago) in live and recorded broadcasts.
New York audiences first heard him when he played with flutist Ken Chia in
their New York debut at Carnegie-Weill Recital Hall. His concerts have
brought him to venues in Poland, the Netherlands, China, Malaysia and Brunei.
Orchestras he has been featured soloist with include the Peninsula Music
Festival Orchestra, the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto Symphony Orchestra,
the North Toronto Collegiate Institute Symphony Orchestra, the Indiana University
Concert Orchestra, and the Fort Collins Symphony Orchestra.
He is also actively involved in the performances of contemporary music, playing
in numerous new music festivals and conferences. In April of 1999,
he performed Post-Partitions by Milton Babbitt for the composer's induction
into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He has premiered dozens of new works and has had numerous works dedicated
to him. Composers he has worked with include Leslie Bassett, P.Q. Phan,
Sven-David Sandstrom, and Elliott Carter.
[Special Announcement : Winston Choi will present a free recital at Tufts University on 5 pm Sunday, March 9, 2003]
The recital is free and open to the Public. Recital will
begin at 5 pm in the Parlor room at the Music Dept building on the
campus of Tufts University.
[20 Professors Row, Medford, MA 02155] click for directions
Program
Debussy: Images, Book II
Cloches a travers les feuilles
Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut
Poissons d'or
Elliott Carter: Night Fantasies
-Intermission-
Debussy: Prelude a l'apres midi d'un faun (transcribed by Leonard Borwick / W. Choi)
Ryan Francis:
"Nocturnes"
"Night
Creatures"
from Moonlight Fantasy
Mischa Zupko: 5 Etudes for Piano
Read More
Mark Emery, trumpet
is an active freelance musician and a graduate of the New England Conservatory
of Music in Boston, MA. He has performed with the Boston Ballet Orchestra,
Chorus Pro Musica, the Boston Philarmonic, the Oregon Symphony and the New
World Symphony. Mark was a 2002 Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center
and is a former member of the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge,
CO. Performing with the Huntington Brass Quintet has occupied much
of Mark's schedule since 1998 when the group won a federal grant and moved
for one year to Stephenville , TX to teach and perform. The ensemble
has since given recitals throughour the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and
the American Composers Forum. As a result of his chamber music pursuits,
Mark has been regularly featured as a speaker at chamber music symposia in
New York, the University of Texas, the University of Maryland, and the University
of St. Thomas in Houston. Mark also enjoys working with his students
at the South Shore Conservatory, in Hingham, MA, where he is on the faculty.
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Program notes by David Carpenter
Toru Takemitsu
(b. Tokyo, 8 October 1930; d. Tokyo, 20 February 1996):
Three Film Scores
As the first Japanese composer to achieve international fame, Toru
Takemitsu was perhaps best known for his mastery of orchestration,
particularly his use of subtle timbral shadings and transparent
textures(as in Twill by Twilight,
for orchestra), and for the integration of traditional Japanese
instruments into Western ensembles (for example, the combination of the
Japanese biwa and shakuhachi with a symphony orchestra in November Steps).
Perhaps less well-known is his prodigious output of film music: by the
time of his death in 1996, Takemitsu had written music for over 90
films, most of them by Japanese directors. His approach to film scoring
neither exalted nor diminished the role of the music in the "portrayal
of reality" (as he put it) that a motion picture presents to its
audience. Rather, he regarded the entire film experience-images,
dialogue, music-as an aesthetic whole. As he remarked in his book, Confronting the Silence:
One often hears it said of a movie that only the music was good. That
is impossible: unless the movie is good, the music cannot be good. When
I wasa child, the strong impressions movies made on me came not from
the story, but from the words and images, including the music . . .
Movie scenes are constantly shifting. Movie music also must constantly
change. But when I sit down to compose, personal feelings and immediate
inclinations are inescapable. That is why participating in making a
movie enriches my life as a composer.
Indeed, Takemitsu was accustomed to not simply seeing a film
when it was nearly complete, and then make decisions about the music,
but rather he would witness the film being shot on location or in the
studio, taking in several aspects of the film's production, and in the
process he would find his musical ideas. It may seem, then, somewhat
contrary to this aesthetic stance for the composer to have arranged
music from three of his film scores for presentation as a work for the
concert hall. Yet these three movements grant us a wonderful
opportunity to witness both Takemitsu's tremendous abilities as a
composer-from his expressive lyricism and unexpected rhythmic effects
to striking, chromatically-dominated harmonies and great invention in
writing for strings-while also offering some insight into the
composer's "personal feelings and inclinations," with the music allowed
to stand alone. "Music of Training and Rest," from Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1959 boxing documentary Jose Torres,
is a prime example of Takemitsu's assimilation of Western musical
styles, in this case both jazz and blues, where divided strings
navigate almost continuous chromatic lines-first over a four-plus-two-beat rhythmic figure played pizzicato in the cellos and
basses followed by a section of imitative counterpoint, then breaking
in a more lyrical vein where the blues-tinged harmony creates an
atmosphere of moving somberness, while never crossing over into Hollywood sentimentality. The "Funeral Music," from Shohei Imamura's 1989 documentary Black Rain ,
about the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombing ofHiroshima, could very
well stand on its own as an elegy of searing intensity (not unlike
Barber's famous Adagio for Strings).
The chromaticism here nearly obliterates any sense of
tonality-linearity and attention to the melodic line predominate, each
string section maintaining its independence, stretched to the limit when
the ensemble is momentarily divided into no less than fourteen parts.
The employment of both harmonics (high notes produced using a string's
overtone series), and a writhing triplet figure played sul ponticello
(that is, near the bridge of the instrument, creating a sinister,
metallic timbre) also effectively reflect the horror and pathos of the
film's subject matter-perhaps too the entire movement offers us a
glimpse of the composer's personal feelings concerning the catastrophic
events at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Finally, the "Waltz" from Teshigahara's 1966 film Face of Another
(a story about a scientist who tries to regain contact with society
after his face is disfigured in an explosion), is an impetuous
near-pastiche of theViennese dance, though the sardonic melodic style
recalls something of Shostakovich, particularly the waltzes from his
Jazz Suites. The movement is unambiguously in C minor, with the violins
taking up the melodic line in the outer sections, and the cellos
holding the tune in the more subdued trio. Divided parts, particularly
in the violas and cellos, serve to enrich the supporting harmonies
throughout the waltz, while a livelier spirit bursts forth in the
recurring A section, with the first violins take up a high-flying
counter-melody against the second violins and violas. The movement
makes splendid finish to the Film Scores-three of Takemitsu's finest
moments in his music for the movies.
Dmitry Shostakovich
(b. St. Petersburg, 25 September 1906; d. Moscow, 9August 1975):
Piano Concerto no. 1, op. 35
Dmitry
Shostakovich's first piano concerto, composed in 1933, belongs to a
period forming a significant juncture in the composer's life: along
with his 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano and the Cello Sonata, it
marks a return to his writing purely instrumental works after an
extended period of composing ballets, film music and operas (most
notably Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District of 1930 - 32).
It was also at this time Shostakovich returned to the concert stage as
a pianist after a hiatus of two-and-a-half years, premiering his
Preludes in Moscow in May of 1933, and the piano concerto the following
October with the Leningrad Philharmonic, conducted by Fritz Stiedry.
Though the concerto could correctly be termed "absolute music" (i.e.,
music with no accompanying program or storyline), the piece can be said
to exhibit characteristics of the theatrical works from the previous
years-one being the wit and sarcasm infused in the scores for the Soviet
propogandist films and ballets (revealing the composer's sometimes
cynical stance towards governmental policies), and another the lyricism
and melodiousness he sought to make an integral part of Lady Macbeth.
We hear these two very elements at the outset of the concerto, where a
rapid-fire introductory phrase in the piano and trumpet is followed
immediately by a lyrical, brooding theme in the strings, beginning with
a falling C-minor arpeggio. This arpeggio, in turn, becomes the basis
for a recurring joke later on: after the near-breathless presentation
of the first theme group, with the piano descending to its lowest C,
the falling arpeggio figure is inverted in the violins and violas,
strongly suggesting a turn to a E-flat major and a slower, more
romantically-minded second theme-the key of E-flat major does emerge,
but with a faster tempo (marked "allegro vivace" ("fast and lively") in
the score), and a comical melody parodying a classical-era piano
sonata, with the further shtick of a high glissando figure in the
violins. The joke turns up again in the recapitulation, where the
trumpet takes up the arpeggio, only to be foiled by a coy tune in the
piano which barely holds onto a tonal center of B. The blurring of
harmonic and tonal direction so prominent in the first movement is also
present in the second, only here it is employed to create an atmosphere
of unsettled melancholy: a slow waltz-like figure accompanies the
violins' plaintive E-minor melody, wandering to D-minor by the time the
piano enters, searching for the lost home key, which is just regained
with the E-minor cadence soon thereafter. What might also be heard in
the movement (as has been noted in the Cello Sonata of 1934) is a
pathos reflecting the artist's awareness of the suffering within his
own country: Stalin's policy of collectivization was being harshly
imposed in the Ukraine in 1932 - 33, causing perhaps millions of deaths
(Shostakovich himself was soon to receive the Party's disapproval in
1936 for the "unnatural music" of Lady Macbeth). The ponderous
left-hand chords in the piano at the climax of the movement might also
be said to reflect the harsh realities of life under Stalin, this
leading back to the pathetic mode of expression, with the trumpet
sympathetically echoing the piano's lament. The third movement
functions as an interlude of sorts, taking us from the austerity of the
second movement to the utter frivolity and sense of abandonment of the
fourth, where there is no end to Shostakovichian wit: the urgent
melody played by the first violins over hushed sixteenth notes in the
second violins and violas becomes a point of departure for numerous
variations, many indulging in "wrong note" melodies and constant
changes of key. Perhaps the most comical variation occurs when the
trumpet, having been frustratingly confined to repeated-note figures
and tunes composed of little more than arpeggios, finally gets its
chance to shine with a slower, more rustic version of the original
melody, accompanied by the strings playing col legno (that is, with the
wood of their bows, instead of the hair, on the strings). After the
trumpet's florid cadenza, the piano, not to be outdone, presents its own
extended cadenza, countered byan extended C-major cadential passage
with a prominent trumpet part-this happens not once, but twice, as if
to urge the piano to get the hell off the stage. The piano, ever the
showman, breaks into a full-fledged vaudeville (the style recalling
something of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue), and only with 17 measures of
repeated C major chords from both the strings and soloists is the
concerto brought to its show-stopping finish.
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky
(b. Kamsko-Votkinsk, Vyatka province, 7 May 1840; d. St. Petersburg, 6 November 1893):
Souvenir de Florence
In January of 1890, after the premiere of his ballet The Sleeping
Beauty in St. Petersburg, Tchaikovsky made plans to go abroad and begin
composing his opera The Queen of Spades. He settled on Florence, Italy, as a destination, which served as his
home from January to May, when he came back to St. Petersburg with much
of the opera completed, and an idea to return to a sextet for strings which he had begun sketching some three
years earlier. We cannot know how much this sextet, which was to become
the Souvenir de Florence,
was inspired by the beauty of the Tuscan capital (Tchaikovsky's letters
offer little insight in this regard), and indeed the work seems to
display as much German and Russian character as Italian. It is clear,
however, that Tchaikovsky took an inordinate amount of trouble to make
the work one of his most accomplished pieces of chamber music. As he
wrote to his brother Modest, he was intent on making the piece a true
sextet, with six independent voices that could never be arranged for
another medium. At the same time, the work was conceived on something of
a symphonic scale, as Tchaikovsky wrote it for his patroness, Nadezhda
von Meck, whose failing health prevented her from attending
concerts-the composer wrote her that it could be performed in her home,
and its grand scale could convey the impression of hearing a symphony
in a concert hall (and as we hear in today's concert, the work is
wonderfully effective as performed by a full string orchestra). After
first hearing the Souvenir in a private performance in St. Petersburg
in December of 1890, Tchaikovsky found himself not fully satisfied with
the results, and so he set about to make extensive revisions to the
work the summer of 1891, and the following December to January. The
piece received its public premiere in St. Petersburg in November of
1892 at the fourth Chamber Music Meeting of the Society of Russian
Musicians; both there and at its performance in Moscow a few days
later, it proved an instant success. The brilliance of the scoring, the
melodic invention and the assured contrapuntal skill make the Souvenir
always a fresh experience for our ears, conveying something of the
stunning first impression it had on its listeners over a century ago.
The work
begins with an arresting theme in D-minor, plunging us directly into
the music, the first violins taking the melodic line while the second
violins, violas and first cellos fill out a rich Brahms-like texture
with a vigorous eighth-note pattern. Though the first violins again
assume the most prominent voice with the sweetly melodic second theme,
it is important to note how Tchaikovsky takes special care to make the
accompaniment here a slower version of the eighth-note pattern from the
first theme-evidence of how even subsidiary roles in the music are given
their own special character, worthy of transformation and development.
The touches of counterpoint present in the second theme foreshadow the
richness of the development, with the running eighth-note pattern from
the first theme undergoing constant transformation as exchanged between
the six voices. The climax of the development is a masterstroke-a broad
tutti chord (an augmented-sixth chord in A-flat minor), comes as a great
intake of breath before the re-transition to the recapitulation, whose
energy bursts further forward with a brilliant coda, finally ending at
a tempo of prestissimo (very quickly). An Italian influence on the work
is most readily apparent in the second movement: over a gentle
pizzicato accompaniment in the second violins, violas, and second
cellos, the first violins intone a melodic line highly reminiscent of
bel canto opera (whose exponents included Bellini, Donizetti and
Rossini)-a flowing, graceful melody over a simple accompaniment, with
scalar runs and other ornamentations executed with grace and dexterity.
This vocal-like material returns at the end of the movement, but with
the added expressivity of a solo cello, violin and viola taking on the
role of the operatic soloist. We turn from Italy to Tchaikovsky's
homeland in the third movement, whose opening melody suggests a Russian
folksong-first presented simply by a solo viola with an unobtrusive
accompaniment, then later with a heavy, 32nd/8th-note rhythmic figure in
the upper strings against the cellos' chant-like rendition of the
folk-tune. (Another Russian-like element can be found in the movement's
middle section, whose melody bears a striking resemblance to the
Russian Dance from The Nutcracker.) The last movement presents a
breathtaking feat of composition, particularly in terms of thematic
transformation and development. The opening melodic idea, first heard
in the first violins over piquant open-fifths and octaves in the second
violins and violas, is presented in numerous guises throughout the
movement: the second violins, violas and first cellos soon take up the
tune, the first violins and second cellos framing it with their hushed
sixteenth note pattern; in the development section following, a
tremendous string tutti makes the most forceful statement of the theme
in a rhythmic unison with the added stress of chords on every other
downbeat. Finally, in the most brilliant transformation yet, the theme
becomes the basis for a double-fugue, begun in the violins, then taken
up by the violas, and then the cellos-nowhere in the entire work is
Tchaikovsky's determination to present a true sextet more evident than
here, where the counterpoint rushes forward inexorably, and we are only
allowed to catch our breath with the restatement of the soaring,
romantic second theme, now in D major. The major modality turns out to
have the final word in this work, full of so much of the brooding
darkness we come to expect from the tormented Tchaikovsky, who
nevertheless could pull off a triumphant ending when he wanted to-a
marvelous finish to a work representing an artist at his fully mature,
magnificent creative powers.
- Notes by David Carpenter ( (c)2003 David Carpenter)
David Carpenter is a composer living in Somerville, Massachusetts. He
received his master of music degree from the Peabody Conservatory in
1998. His heroes (beyond the realm of music) are Ted Koppel and Julia
Child. Really.
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| Thank You
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This
concert would not have been possible without the generous support
of many individuals and organizations. We would like to give a
special thank you to Dr. Lisa Gruenberg and Martin Carmichael, III.
Their support, encouragement and beliefe in Kalistos has opened many
doors of opportunity and we are deeply grateful to them. David
Carpenter, who designed tonight's program and wrote the beautiful
program notes, has also helped Kalistos tremendously. It is the
support of people like David, who saw something needing to be done and
jumped in to help that will allow Kalistos to grow. Thanks are
also due to: our generous and patient friends at Budget Copy--we look
forward to working with you again in the future; Eve Callahan and Eliot
Sherman for their continues support and advice; Gnomon Copy for the
copying of the program; Kate Lucey, who shared her knowldege and time
to help Kalistos with publicity: Daniel Miller, Esq. and Volunteer
Lawyers for the Arts: Rohan Smith, Robert Palmer, and the Phillips
Exeter Academy community--our time with the Exeter students and faculty
was an absolute joy; Tamra Spector, for her dedicated work as our
intern; Daehyun Kim, for providing us with with amazing recordings of
our concerts; and Joey Stein, whose creativity and artistry are an
inspiration.
Come join the community of Kalistos.
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