Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf

March 26, 2006

2007-03-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 26 March 2007
070326
Today’s Selections:
1. Elliott Carter Four Lauds for Solo Violin 19’36
2. Lou Harrison Six Sonatas 20’34
3. Aaron Copland Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp, and
Piano 18’03
4. Stefan Wolpe Encouragements for the Piano. 24’30
5. Roger Hannay Chanson sombre 10’50
Total time: 93’33
Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.
As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.
CD 1, Bands 4-7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC) Four Lauds for Solo Violin (1884-2000): Rolf Schulte, violin: the Music of Elliott Carter, Volume Six , Bridge Records 9177 http://www.bridgerecords.com/
Malcolm MacDonald writes in his Liner Notes that accompany our first piece this afternoon: Rolf Schulte gives an impassioned performance of the series of solo violin pieces which [Elliott] Carter ha collected under the title Four Lauds (using ‘laud’ not in hits sense of a religious service, but in the sense of a song of praise) belong to the large number of short virtuosic instrumental works which he has composed since the 1970s as tributes to and presents for friends and colleagues. Though they may at first appear like ‘occasional’ works or chips from the workbench, these brief and variously capricious utterances are the reverse of ephemeral. Instead, . . . they must all be ranked among the most important new music for their various instruments of the past few decades: classics, in fact.
The four Lauds, written between 1999 and 2000, are arranged not in chronological order, but as follows: Statement – Remembering Aaron, which recalls Aaron Copeland, and was written in 1999); Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi, was written in 1984; Rhapsodic Musings, which was written as a gift to Robert Mann, 1st violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2000; and Fantasy – Remembering Roger, which was written in 1999 for the violinist Rolf Schulte, whom we will hear in performance in a moment.
Time: 4. I Statement – Remembering Aaron 04’47
5. II Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi 06’36
6. III Rhapsodic Musings 03’09
7. IV Fantasy – Remembering Roger 05’04
Total time: 19’36
CD 2: Bands 19 – 24: Lou Harrison (1917, Portland OPR – 2003, en route to Cols. OH): Six Sonatas for harp and guitar (1943): John Schneider, guitar; Amy Shulman, harp; Arr. by John Schneider. Just West Coast, Bridge 9041 http://www.bridgerecords.com/
John Schneider, who arranged most of the music on this CD entitled Just West Coast, tells us that "Lou Harrison studied composition with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, though it is Harrison’s fascination with non-Western music that has certainly exercised the more profound influence over the composer. Well known as a performer, calligrapher, artist, ethnomusicologist, and instrument builder, Harrison . . . composed for practically every medium, including symphony orchestra, opera and the ballet, and such solo instruments as guitar and harpsichord. This rich musical background, coupled with his sensitivity and respect for music of the past is best summarized by his wonderful motto: ‘Cherish, Conserve, Consider, Create.’
"The Six Sonatas (1943) were originally for pianoforte or cembalo, meaning the ‘plucking string keyboards.’ The composer tell us:
My Six Sonatas are Mission-style pieces. They were directly stimulated by my studies about and feelings for the land, peoples, and history of California. Indeed, they are part of the ‘Regionalist’ school of thought that was so prevalent and, for a young person, stimulating in the 1930s. these Six Sonatas reflect the romance and geometry of impassioned Spain, as well as the pastoral Indian imagery of native America in its Western life. The artistic model was, of course, Scarlatti and Manuel de Falla.’
We’ll hear John Schneider on the guitar and Amy Shulman playing the Celtic Harp.
Time: 19. Moderato (guitar solo) 02’36
20. Allegro 03’29
21. Moderato 05’23
22. Allegro 01’51
23. Moderato (guitar solo) 03’38
24. Allegro 03’37
Total time: 20’34
Running time: 40’10
CD 3: Band 1: Aaron Copland (1900, NY – 1990, North Tarrytown, NY): Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp, and Piano (1947-8): Richard Stoltzman, clarinet; London Symphony Orchestra; Lawrence Leighton-Smith, conductor. (No other soloists listed) BMG Classics 09026-61360-2.
Clarinetist Richard Stoltzman writes in his liner notes,
Because Aaron Copland wrote his Clarinet Concerto (in 1947-48) to a commission from Benny Goodman, it was natural for Copland to turn to the jazz idiom. He once told Phillip Ramey that his decision to use jazz materials was "inspired by Goodman’s playing," but that "contrary to certain commentators, the jazz elements in the Clarinet Concerto have nothing to do with the ‘hot jazz’ improvisation for which Benny Goodman and his sextet were noted."
Goodman introduced the concerto with the NBC Orchestra conducted by Fritz Reiner on November 6, 1950, and it quickly established itself in the repertory. Its form is unusual: two movements joined by a lengthy cadenza. The ABA first movement is informed by a bittersweet lyricism personal to Copland. Jazz material first appears in the exhibitionistic cadenza and then dominates the rondo-like last movement. Copland noted that some of the material in this exuberant, playful finale is born of "an unconscious fashion of elements obviously related to North and South American popular music (for example, a phrase from a currently popular Brazilian tune, heard by me in Rio, became embedded in the secondary material)."
Copland does not name the Brazilian tune.
We’ll hear Richard Stoltzman on the clarinet. Lawrence Leighton-Smith conducts the London Symphony Orchestra. The two movements and the cadenza are not separated from each other.
Time: 1. Concerto for Clarinet, et al 18’03
Running time: 58’11
CD 4: Bands 7 – 13: Stefan Wolpe (1902, Berlin – 1972, NY): Encouragements for Piano. First Piece. Battle Piece (1943-1947): David Holzman, piano. Stefan Wolpe – Compositions for Piano (1920-1952). Bridge Records 9116 http://www.bridgerecords.com/
According to Austin Clarkson, who provides the liner notes for this superb Bridge Records CD, Stefan Wolpe was influenced by the "new music" of late Scriabin, early Schoenberg, Bartók, Satie, and others. His "instrument was the piano." Clarkson continues, "During the darkest days of the second World War, Wolpe planned a series of seven compositions for solo piano entitled Encouragements." It took Wolpe almost five years to complete the piece, which is divided into two parts, which he finally did, according to Clarkson, because he discovered that the themes of both parts "had a common basis in [the octatonic scale] that [Olivier]Messiaen described in his book Technique of My Musical Language. "Both [parts are] reminiscent of the anti-fascist songs and marches that Wolpe had composed a decade earlier in Berlin."
We’ll hear pianist David Holzman perform Stefan Wolpe’s Encouragements for Piano. First Piece. Battle Piece.
Time: 7. Quasi presto 03’30
8. Molto sostenuto 04’49
9. Con moto ma non troppo 02’11
10.Vivo 04’58
11.Moderato 01’17
12.Con brio 02’28
13.Allegro ma non troppo 04’27
Total time: 24’30
Running time: 82’41
CD 5: Bands 7: Roger Hannay (1930, Plattsburgh, NY – 2006 ?, Chapel Hill, NC): Chanson Sombre for flute, viola, and harp (1972). The Cleveland Reconnaissance ensemble. Selected chamber Music of Roger Hannay, Volume II. Modern Recordings, Chapel Hill, NC. American Historical Preservation Recordings. Recorded in performance, January, 29, 1982.
Roger Hannay and I became fast friends first by email and later during two live interviews I was privileged to conduct over the past decade. I became acquainted with Roger because his first cousin, Eleanor Hughs, and her husband Arnold and I had been close friends since 1970, when I moved to Sullivan County. Roger, who taught for many years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was a well known and highly regarded composer. The writer Nicholas Slonimsky described him as "an unprejudiced and liberal music maker." He was also a wag and a wit with a sense of humor that always kept him in stitches. His premature death occurred before I was able to travel to North Carolina to visit him. But, much as I wish I had met him in the flesh, I feel that he and I bonded both because our personalities meshed and our tastes in music were similar, although, of course, Roger Hannay’s grasp of this mysterious medium far outreached mine. Come to think of it, our politics were quite similar. I imagine that he is turning over in his grave quite frequently these days.
Let’s listen to his 1972 composition Chanson sombre for flute, viola, and harp, performed live by The Cleveland Reconnaissance Ensemble in 1972.
Time: 7. Chanson Sombre 10’50
Total running time: 93’33
We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Four Lauds for Solo Violin; Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp, and Piano; Lou Harrison’s Six Sonatas; Stefan Wolpe’s Encouragement; and Roger Hannay’s Chanson sombre. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week when our featured Elliott Carter composition will be his Three Occasions for Orchestra. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

March 19, 2007

2007-03-17T13:06:00.000-07:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 19 March 2007
070319a
Today’s Selections:
1. Elliott Carter Concerto for Piano and Orchestra 22’31
2. Volkmar Andreae Quartet for Flute, Violin, Viola, and ‘Cello 14’17
3. Ottorino Respighi The Birds 18’29
4. Olivier Messiaen Couleurs de la Cité Céleste 16’54
5. Maurice Ravel Sonata for violin and ‘cello 21’32
Total time: 93’33
Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.
As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.
CD 1, Band 7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC) concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1964-5): Ursula Oppens, piano; SWF (Südwestfunk) Symphony Orchestra, Michael Gielen, conductor. Arte Nova Classics CD ANO 277730 http://www.allegro-music.com/artnova
According to Stefan Lipka and William d. Tennant’s liner notes, [Elliott] Carter wrote his only piano concerto while in Berlin in the mid-1960s. He planned the work as an 85th birthday present for Igor Stravinsky, who had long been an Elliott Carter supporter."
David Schiff provides the historical background against which Carter wrote his piano concerto with some fascinating information: "Cold War tensions following the construction of the Berlin Wall left their mark 9on the Concerto. Carter remembers the constant sound of machine-gun fire from a US Army target range near his studio – a sound that echoes through the second movement. The isolation of Berlin and its hostile surrounding may have suggested the dramatic confrontation of piano and orchestra in the Concerto, although the Concerto may reflect other events in the recent German past as well."
Schiff then quotes Michael Sternberg, who reviewed the first performance of the Carter Piano Concerto, which took place in Boston under the baton of Erich Leinsdorf in 1967: "Sternberg wrote that ‘Carter’s Concerto established the most dramatic confrontation of solo and orchestra since Beethoven.’ [Schiff continues:] Carter set out to discover a new dramatic meaning for the concerto form. He chose to portray a conflict ‘between an individual off many changing moods and thoughts and an orchestra treated more or less monolithically – massed effects pitted against protean figures and expressions.’ The soloist ins not a hero but an anti-hero in an alien world. (Ursula Oppens . . . compares the piano soloist to an operatic heroine.) The Concerto is Carter’s most passionate and tragic composition." (253-4)
In a time warp where no continuous world view appears to exist, one wonders whether anyone under the age of 40 even remembers what the Berlin Wall was. Lack of familiarity with art forms that refer and relate to it, and other significant events, is just another price we pay for what will soon be our collective ignorance of the past.

In his excellent liner notes, David Schiff, who also wrote the definitive study of Elliott Carter, tells us that Carter’s Variations for Orchestra . . . are a summation of the works Carter wrote after . . . 1948. The listener will hear passages recalling the Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, [written in 1950, which we heard several weeks ago] and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, ‘Cello, and Harpsichord [1952, which we have heard numerous times on this program]. But the eclecticism reaches far beyond Carter’s own music. Aaron Copland once remarked on Carter’s wide knowledge of the music of his time; the Variations are a monumental synthesis of many different kinds of modern music . . .Thee are not only surface resemblances to Schoenberg and Berg, but there is also Carter’s closest approach to serial technique." Many composers, Ives, Debussy, Nancarrow, Cowell, Harris, and others find their ways into the nine variations of this piece, which I hope you will enjoy even as your mind jumps around while it makes sense of this canonic work. Although Variations for Orchestra comprises an Introduction, a Theme, nine Variations, and a Finale, there are no breaks between the sections.
Time: 1. I 10’01
2. II 12’30
Total time: 22’31
CD 2: Bands 14-17: Volkmar Andreae (1879, Bern – 1962, Zürich): Quartet for Flute, Violin, Viola, and ‘Cello (1942): Tessa Brinckman, flute; Daniel Rouslin, violin; Victoria Gunn Pich, viola; Lori Presthus, ‘cello. Glass Sky North Pacific Music NPM LD 021.
There don’t seem to be a great many Swiss composers, either pre- or post 1900; perhaps my ignorance is showing here. Volkmar Andreae, however, is one who, though his canon is rather slim, is a very interesting one. Today we offer his Quartet for Flute, Violin, Viola, and ‘Cello, which he wrote in 1942. The anonymous liner notes argue that this "lush and tempestuous work reflects Swiss composer Andreae’s vast knowledge and love of late 19th and 20th century romantic, impressionistic, and neo-classical repertoire. Andreae . . . was a major conductor and personality in the musical world [who] was offered a conducting post with the New York Philharmonic upon [Gustav] Mahler’s death [and later became permanent guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra]. He was an advocate of Bruckner’s music, and supported contemporaries such as Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Honneger. Many of his compositions were in direct response to musicians and singers he worked with.
Time: 14. Molto vivace 01’36
15. Adagio, non troppo lento 02’45
16. Molto vivace 03’04
17. Molto lento – Molto vivace 06’41
Total time: 14’17
Running time: 36’48
CD 3: Bands 5-9: Ottorino Respighi (1879, Bologna – 1936, Rome): The Birds (1928?): BBC Philharmonic, Patrick Thomas, conductor: BBC Music, March 2007.
Ottorino Respighi composed his suite The Birds during the mid-1920s. The liner notes tell us that "the main melodic material is drawn from lute and harpsichord pieces by Rameau, Pasquini, Gallot, and an anonymous 17th century composer. To each movement Respighi gives a specific title, and the music is peppered with imitations of birdsong, against a backdrop of evocative alfresco atmospheres.
"In the central section of the ‘Prelude’ there are already the clear pre-echoes of the warbling to come later, as a busy woodwind section sketches initial strands of ornithological mimicry. ‘The Dove’ brings a cooing solo oboe to the fore, spinning a wistful cantilena; and in ‘The Hen.’ By contrast, strings peck and cluck insistently. ‘The Nightingale’ serenades on flute and horn, with chirruping piccolo and glistening celesta; while the incessant two-note interjections of congregated woodwind in ‘The Cuckoo’ is self-explanatory, cheerfully rounding off what has been justly termed ‘this delightful musical aviary.’
Time: 5. Prelude 03’05
6. The Dove 04’15
7. The Hen 02’48
8. The Nightingale 03’56
9. The Cuckoo 04’25
Total time: 18’29
Running time: 55’17
CD 4: Band 1: Olivier Messiaen (1908, Avignon – 1992, Clichy): Couleurs de la Cité Céleste (1963): Groupe Instrumental a percussion de Strasbourg; Orchestre du Domaine Musical; Yvonne Loriod, piano; Pierre Boulez, conductor. ERATO CD 4509-91706-2.
I decided to follow the Respighi suite with a 1963 composition by one of my very favorite 20th century composers, Olivier Messiaen’s Couleurs de la Cité Céleste, (The Colors of the Celestial City), because, as you probably are all aware of by now, Messiaen was enthralled by birdsong. Messiaen’s compositions invariable focus on religious themes – he was a committed Catholic, and his music reflects his beliefs in ways that to my pagan ears ring true. The piece originates, according to what I think are Messiaen’s liner notes, in five quotations from Revelation:
"A rainbow round about the throne" (4:3)
"And the seven angels which had seven trumpets" (8:6)
"A star . . . and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit" (9:1)
"That great city . . . and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal" (21:11)
"And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardony; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, Beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacynth; the twelfth, an amethyst." (21:19, 20)
"The form of this work is based entirely on colors. The melodic or rhythmic themes, the complexes of sounds and timbres, all develop as would colors. In their constantly renewed variations, there appear as if by analogy varying colors – warm, cold; complementary, each influencing its neighbor; colors blending to white; depressed by the proximity of black. Or one could compare these transformations to the characters acting on several stages, one above the other, and playing several different dramas simultaneously.
"All the musical material –plain-song hallelujahs, Indian or Greek rhythms, permutations of time-scales, bird-song of various countries – are accumulated and put to serve color, and the combinations of sound that represent and evoke it. . . .
"The bird-song of New Zealand (Tui-bird and bell-bird) is contrasted with the "bottomless pit," with the pedal notes of the trombones and the resonance of the tom-toms. With the cries of the araponga of brazil contrasts the ‘colored extasy’ of the fermata: the red of the sard-stone, red spattered with blue, orange, gold, milky-white, emerald green, violet amethyst, purple violet, and blue violet. The piece no more comes to an end than it had a beginning, but it turns round on itself like a rose window of flaming and invisible colors." (Liner notes)
Time: 1. Colors of the Celestial City 16’54
Running time: 72’11
CD 5: Bands 8-11: Maurice Ravel (1875, Ciboure – 1937, Paris): Sonata for Violin and ‘Cello (1920-22): Gautier Capuçon, ‘cello; Frank Braley, piano. Virgin Classics 7243 5 45492 2 9.
Maurice Ravel composed his Sonata for Violin and ‘Cello between 1920 and 1922 at least partly in reaction to the so called "Group of Six’s" reaction to the "pre-war ‘masters’," including Franck, Ravel, and "even Stravinsky." In short, against what the group thought of as pre-war Romanticism. Rather than become annoyed, according to Marcel Marnat (Transl. Hugh Graham), "[Ravel] simply played them at their own game, with more talent and certainly with more real daring. Thus was sketched out [today’s offering, his Sonata for Violin and ‘Cello. . . Here Ravel was suggesting a sequel to the three baroque sonatas undertaken by Debussy during the war. Spurred on by the new instrumental resources thus discovered, he followed up the experiment by adding a crackling Très vif and then returned to the attack with a passacaglia, before ending with a rondo in which he caricatured the Groupe des Six, conferring an unexpected ferocity on one of their sacrosanct ‘popular themes.’" (Liner Notes)
Whatever the motivation, the result is this superb chamber piece which we are about to hear!
Time: 8. Allegro 05’00
9. Très vif 03’18
10. Lent 07’10
11. Vif, avec entrain 05’54
Total time: 21’32
Total running time: 93’33
We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Volkmar Andreae’s Quartet for Flute, Violin, Viola, and ‘Cello; Ottorino Respighi’s The Birds; Olivier Messiaen’s Colors of the Celestial City; and Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and ‘Cello. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week when our featured Elliott Carter composition will be his Four Lauds for Solo Violin. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

070312 Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, WJFF Noon to 2:00PM

2007-03-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 12 March 2007
070312
Today’s Selections:
1. Elliott Carter Variations for Orchestra 22’17
2. Alan Hovhaness Meditation on Orpheus 12’04
3. Karl Amadeus Hartmann Jazz Toccata and Fugue for Piano 09’02
4. Karel Husa Fantasies for Orchestra 19’31
5. Amy Beach Four Songs 10’46
6. Peter Lieberson Horn Concerto 17’44
Total time: 91’24
Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.
As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.
Many thanks to all our loyal members who contributed to our pledge drive that ended officially last Thursday, right before we broadcast The Gumbo Shop. We missed out goal by a bit, but we know that those of you who were able to help us towards it did your best. Many, many thanks!
Today, I’m going to say "Hello" to a young friend of mine, Zac Blitz, who turned 15 last week and who is busy recuperating from a very long, arduous, complicated operation. Belated birthday greetings, Zac! You’ve always been courageous and gritty. I know that you will weather this temporary storm and return to your normal, daily routine very quickly. I send my love to you and your family – your folks, Kate and Matt and your sister Sarah Rose – and wish you all strength and fortitude and pleasant days ahead in the near future!
CD 1, Band 7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC) Variations for Orchestra (1954-5): Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; Michael Gielen, conductor. New World Records CD NW 347-2.
In his excellent liner notes, David Schiff, who also wrote the definitive study of Elliott Carter, tells us that Carter’s Variations for Orchestra . . . are a summation of the works Carter wrote after . . . 1948. The listener will hear passages recalling the Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, [written in 1950, which we heard several weeks ago] and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, ‘Cello, and Harpsichord [1952, which we have heard numerous times on this program]. But the eclecticism reaches far beyond Carter’s own music. Aaron Copland once remarked on Carter’s wide knowledge of the music of his time; the Variations are a monumental synthesis of many different kinds of modern music . . .Thee are not only surface resemblances to Schoenberg and Berg, but there is also Carter’s closest approach to serial technique." Many composers, Ives, Debussy, Nancarrow, Cowell, Harris, and others find their ways into the nine variations of this piece, which I hope you will enjoy even as your mind jumps around while it makes sense of this canonic work. Although Variations for Orchestra comprises an Introduction, a Theme, nine Variations, and a Finale, there are no breaks between the sections.
Time: 3. Variations entire 22’17
CD 2: Band 5: Alan Hovhaness (1911, Somerville, MA – 2000, Seattle) http://www.hovhaness.com/hovhaness.html: Meditation on Orpheus, Op. 155 (1958) Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor. Delos DE 3168.
Alan Hovhaness, who was born in Somerville, MA, in 1911, and who died in Seattle in 2000, developed what the liner notes refer to as an "eclectic" interest in many different cultures and places, including his own ethnic background, which was Armenian, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese. He was also a New Englander to liked to take "long walks among the hills of New Hampshire [which] brought about curious meditative moods . . . accompanied by strong sensations of being both in a New England countryside and at the same time in some oriental country such as China or India, with mountains becoming giant melodies."
He was, according to Neil Stannard, "an admirer of the Greek nation and its mythology. Meditation on Orpheus . . . is a musical representation of that part of the Orpheus legend that describes the Greek hero’s descent into the underworld in search of his deceased wife, which results in his own death. The composer provides the following note: ‘The music is in the form of a fantasy-rondo, with interludes and accompaniments in free rhythm of planned chaos, sometimes murmuring mysteriously, sometimes rising to threatening climaxes of orchestral tornadoes. The symbolic love quest of lamenting Orpheus against the infernal wind of the land of Pluto brings disaster and devastation.’"
Meditation on Orpheus is, in my opinion, a moving, exciting piece of program music, a symphonic poem, as it were. In it, one hears a microcosm of much of 20th century music.

Time: 5. Meditation on Orpheus 12’04
Running time: 34’21
CD 3: Bands 6,7: Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905, Munich – 1963, Munich: Jazz Toccata and Fugue for Piano: Siegfried Mauser, piano. Virgin Classics CD VC 7 91170-2 261 257.
Michael Stewart writes in his liner notes that accompany our next offering: "There were few composers writing in the 1920s on whom Jazz did not, however fleetingly, exert its influence. [Karl Amadeus] Hartmann’s contribution came in the form of his Jazz Toccata and Fugue [for Piano] of 1928, in which Hindemith piano textures and neo-baroque forms play host to a variety of Jazz styles; the Toccata opens with a four note boogie in the bass, and the Fugue, marked ‘in a fast Jazz tempo,’ culminates in an energetic ‘Charleston.’ We’ll hear Siegfried Mauser perform this jewel on the piano.
Time: 6. Toccata 05’21
7. Fugue 03’41
Total time: 09’02
Running time: 43’23
CD 11: Bands 1-4: Karel Husa (*1921, Prague): Fantasies for Orchestra (1956): Orchestra des Soloistes de Paris, Karel Husa, conductor. Phoenix CD 128.
I thought it would be fun to listen to Karl Husa’s Fantasies for Orchestra, since we began our program with Elliott Carter’s Variations for Orchestra. Coincidentally, the two pieces were written within a year or so of each other; of course, Husa, who 85 last August, is still a kid compared to Carter, who turned 98 in December. Both are superb composers, giants of the 20th and 21st centuries, whose music remains practically unknown among American concert goers. Why?
The anonymous liner notes tell us that "[t]here are three Fantasies: the first is an aria, written in contrapuntal style mostly for the string body of the orchestra, with piano, winds, and percussion helping only in the climax of the piece. The immediately following Capriccio is a sort of ‘concertante’ for three trumpets, piano, percussion, and the group of wood-wind instruments (piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet), with strings often only in the background. . . . The third Fantasy, a Nocturne, treats equally all the groups of the orchestra. In this movement, new colors and other new possibilities in orchestrations have been explored."
Besides being a superb composer, Karel Husa is also a wonderful person to be with. His students at Cornell and Ithaca College were very fortunate to have studies with him, in my opinion.
Time: 5. Aria 05’58
6. Capriccio 06’34
7. Nocturne 06’59
Total time: 19’31
Running time: 62’54
CD 5: Bands 19-22: Amy Beach (1867, Henniker, NH – 1944, NY): Four Songs: "In the Twilight," Op. 85 (1922), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; "Mine Be the Lips" (1926)Op. 113, Leonora Speyer; "Dark Garden" (1932) Op. 131, Leonora Speyer; "I Shall Be Brave" (1932) Op. 143, Katherine Adams. Patrick Mason, baritone; Joanne Polk, piano. Songs of Amy Beach Bridge Records Bridge 9182 http://www.bridgerecords.com/.
Bridge Records has once again produced a superb CD, this time with an array of songs by Amy Beach that stretch from 1887 to 1932. According to the liner notes, Beach "was the first woman composer (in America surely, but also in the wider Western musical world) for writing successfully in so many of the large forms of the late nineteenth century: symphony, concerto, oratorio, and chamber music.
"After her death," continue the notes, "and until very recently, the accepted picture of Amy Beach was that of a great talent somewhat stifled, somewhat out of touch. Performances of her works, once common in recitals and concerts, are rare. Of her more than one hundred and twenty songs, only a few are known to the public. Yet Beach’s musical language, though Romantic, is not outdated. In her songs, as in all her work, we are witness to a brave, largely self-taught artist with a singular voice and ability to show how a composer with a thorough grasp of her craft can sing with a passion an emotional transparency many of her more famous male colleagues never achieved."
The notes end with a quotation from Amy Beach: "Remember that technique is valuable only as a means to an end. You must first have something to say – something which demands expression from the depths of your soul. If you feel deeply and know how to express what you feel, you make others feel."
We’ll hear four of her songs, "In the Twilight, written to a poem by Longfellow; "Mine Be the Lips," and "Dark Garden," set to poems by Leonora Speyer; and "I Shall Be Brave," written to a poem by Katherine Adams. The baritone is Patrick Mason; Joanne Polk is the pianist.
Time: 19. In the Twilight 03’32
20. Mine Be the Lips 02’24
21. Dark Garden 01’53
22. I Shall Be Brave 02’57
Total time: 10’46
Running time: 73’40
CD 6: Bands 12,13: Peter Lieberson (*1946, NY) http://209.218.170.3/composers/lieberson_bio.html: Horn Concerto (1998-9): Odense Symphony Orchestra, Donald Palma, conductor; William Purvis, horn. Peter Lieberson Bridge Records Bridge 9178 http://www.bridgerecords.com/
I first heard music by Peter Lieberson, believe it or not, on Performance Today, right before the Grammy Awards, if my memory does not fail me. I believe that Fred Child was interviewing David Starobin, of Bridge Records; and I thought perhaps that the Bridge CD, Peter Lieberson, might have been up for an award. However, I’ve never had the patience to sit through those events, and, try as I might, I cannot seem to Google the information I need to obtain this information. A young person, no doubt, would simply have looked at the Google link, smiled, and gone immediately to the correct page.
In any case, the CD is a gem. I thought we might end today’s program with Peter Lieberson’s 1998-9 Horn Concerto, which features horn player William Purvis and the Odense Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Donald Palma. The composer notes that the "Horn Concerto was commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for William Purvis." Lieberson continues, "I have always loved the French Horn. Like the viola, to me it is an instrument of the heart. In my concerto, I emphasize the lyrical qualities of the horn, but there are other moods, too, feisty, dance-like, and humorous." The Horn Concerto is written in two movements, though there is very little pause between them. They are called, simply, a quarter note = 108; and a quarter note = 96.
The piece is delightful. My heartfelt thanks go out to Bridge Records for fighting the good fight and publishing so many wonderful CDs filled with music written during the last hundred or so years.
Time: 12. I 08’31
13. II 09’13
Total time: 17’44
Total running time: 91’24

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Variations for Orchestra; Alan Hovhaness’s Meditation on Orpheus; Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Jazz Toccata and Fugue for Piano; Karl Husa’s Fantasies for Orchestra; 4 songs by Amy Beach; and Peter Lieberson’s Horn Concerto. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week when our Elliott Carter composition will be his Double Concerto. Until then, this is Gandalf, thanking you for listening and, once again wishing Zac Blitz, to whom I dedicated today’s program, a happy, if somewhat belated, 15th birthday; best wishes for a speedy recovery and a great year; and the joy of New Music to one and all!

070226 Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, WJFF, www.wjffradio.org

2007-02-25T10:44:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 26 February 2007
070226
Today’s Selections:
1. Elliott Carter Eight Etudes and a Fantasy 19’28
2. Stefan Wolpe Excerpts from Dr. Einstein’s Address about Peace in the Atomic Era 06’14
3. Olivier Messiaen Le Merle noir 05’56
4. Toru Takemitsu Rain Tree Sketch II 04’28
5. George Crumb The River of Life 43’02
6. Terry Riley G Song 11’11
7. Igor Stravinsky Pastorale 02’49
Total time: 92’58
Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.
As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.
CD 1, Band 7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC)
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790: Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for woodwind quartet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon) (1949-50): Michael Faust, flute; Christian Hommel, oboe; David Smeyers, clarinet; Dag Jenson, bassoon: Elliott Carter – Chamber Music for Winds CPO999 453-2
David Schiff (The Music of Elliott Carter, 97) tells us that "[the] Eight Etudes began as blackboard exercises at Columbia University in 1949. . . . Disappointed in his students’ efforts, Carter began to sketch small woodwind pieces on the blackboard, each one exploiting a different aspect of the ensembles. The Etudes became studies for Carter as well as his students. By isolating compositional problems, he discovered many of the techniques that would become the basis of his mature style."
Carter wrote the Fantasy after he had finished the Etudes. "[The Fantasy] combines [all the Etudes], giving the illusion that the Etudes are warm-up exercises for the episodes of an elaborate fugue. " (100)
Time: 4. Maestoso 01’29
5. Quitely [sic] 01’06
6. Adagio possible 01’36
7. Vivace 01’43
8. Andante 02’18
9. Allegretto 02’37
10.Intensely 01’16
11.Presto 01’36
12.Fantasy: tempo giusto 05’47
Total time: 19’28
CD 2: Band 1: Stefan Wolpe (1902, Berlin – 1972, NY): Excerpts from Dr. Einstein’s Address about Peace in the Atomic Era (1950): Patrick Mason, baritone; Robert Shannon, piano. Bridge 9209 http://www.bridgerecords.com/
Bridge Records has just come out with a superb CD containing works by the German born composer Stefan Wolpe. Austin Clarkson and Larson Powell provide these fascinating liner notes.
In January of 1950, President Harry Truman announced that the U.S.A would build the hydrogen bomb, and on February 12, Albert Einstein responded by speaking out against the bomb on a television program hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt. The next day his speech was printed in the New York Times, and two days later, Stefan Wolpe write in his diary, ". . . it is time that all men should be freed and the perpetually besieged, exploited, and defiled earth with them. It is time to precisely define the concept of mankind’s freedom." Wolpe was about to have a Composer’s Forum concert in March in the McMillin Theater (now the Miller Theater) at Columbia University. As if [his] song on Isaiah, the Battle Piece for piano, and the Quartet for trumpet were not a sufficient call for freedom (and enough music for half a concert that he would be sharing with Dane Rudhyar), Wolpe poured his outrage into setting nearly one-half of Einstein’s speech for voice and piano and adding it to the concert program. It was courageous enough for a world-renowned scientist and pacifist to oppose the H-bomb during the McCarthy era, but for a free-lance German-Jewish composer with a history of communist associations it was reckless defiance. The marching pules and grim C-minor of the opening recall the Kampfmusik (music of the struggle against fascism) that Wolpe had composed copiously during the early 1930s. the repeated exclamations of "the H-bomb" and "general annihilation" give way to mainly triple meter for the appeal to the Cold War powers to find a way out of the impasse, to do away with mutual fear, and to renounce violence. The lone voice closes by insisting time and again that "the basis of trust is loyal give and take." (Liner Notes)
Time: 1. Excerpts from Dr. Einstein’s Address 06’14
Running time: 25’42
CD 3: 2nd CD; Band 11: Olivier Messiaen (1908, Avignon – 1992, Clichy): Le Merle noir (1951): Karlheinz Zoller, flute; Aloys Kontarsky, piano. EMI Classics 7243 5 86525 2 9 http://www.emiclassics.com/
The last offering on a 2005 release by EMI of works by Olivier Messiaen is a short 1951 piece for flute and piano entitle Le Merle noir, which James Harding tells us, in his liner notes, is "a test piece for flute which evoked the blackbird. It foreshadows the full-scale birdsong works he was subsequently to composer." Slightly shorter than 6 minutes long, Le Merle noir is a delightful piece in its own right, making clear the joy the great Messiaen took in composing his later bird songs. Also on this two disc set is Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, which, although almost 80 minutes long, definitely deserves a hearing, which I will perhaps provide us with next week.
Time: CD 1, Band 11. Le Merle noir 05’56
Running time: 31’38
CD 4: Band 11: Toru Takemitsu (1930, Tokyo – 1996, Tokyo): Rain Tree Sketch II, in memory of Olivier Messiaen (1992): Peter Serkin, piano. RCA Victor Red Seal CD 09026-68595-2.
Toru Takemitsu, a definite favorite of mine, composed this short piece in memory of Olivier Messiaen in 1992. Raphael Mostel calls Rain Tree Sketch II "the most accessible and immediately appealing of Takemitsu’s solo piano works. The ABA form gives it a more classical air. It is a gentle and joyful tribute bearing the seraphic indication "Celestially Light."
Time: 11. Rain Tree Sketch II 04’28
Running time: 36’06
CD 5, 1st CD: Bands 1-9: George Crumb (*1929, Charleston, WV): The River of Life- Songs of Joy and Sorrow – A Cycle of Hymns, Spirituals, and Revival Tunes for voice, percussion, Quartet and Amplified Piano [American Songbook I]: Ann Crumb, soprano, Marcantonio Barone, piano; William Kerrigan, Susan Jones, David Nelson, Angela Nelson, percussion; Orchestra 2001, James Freeman, conductor. http://www.bridgerecords.com/
Bridge Records has very recently produced another gem in its recordings devoted to the great George Crumb, whom I had the great good fortune to interview several years ago after attending a concert in which his daughter, Ann, provided most of the vocal music. Ann Crumb is the soprano in this song cycle, The River of Life, which Eric Bruskin tells us that the composer has described as "my Ivesian thing." Bruskin continues:
As soon as Crumb decided to extend his original set of Appalachian songs into the much larger American Songbook, it seems inevitable in retrospect that some of the hymns and revival tunes would be associated with Charles Ives. Both composers’ fathers were bandmasters, and both grew up with the sounds of American folk music. Both composers became famous as experimenters in sound, and both have produced unique and memorable bodies of work which – unusually in twentieth-century music – people feel affection for, not just respect.
Listeners who hear The River of Life for the first time may or may not be able to identify the specific pieces without some assistance. To be sure, Crumb often alters the tunes, but his alterations, as Bruskin points out, "are both more subtle and more tightly woven into the melodic structure than is typical of Ives." In fact, in my humble opinion, Crumb manages to go beyond the obvious surface melodies of these pieces to capture their essences in ways that are startlingly incisive and even unexpected. Incidentally, the ending of "Give Me that Old Time Religion" is not the result of a flawed disc. Erik Bruskin tells us that "Crumb springs a surprise ending inspired by a childhood memory of something that went wrong one day while [he was] listening to this song on the radio."
Time: 1st CD 1. Shall We Gather at the River 07’53
2. Will there be any Stars in My Crown? 04’46
3. Amazing Grace! 04’16
4. Give Me That Old Time Religion 03’49
Time is a Drifting River: A Psalm for Daybreak
and Morning (Instrumental Interlude) 02’58
6. Were You There When They Crucifi8ed My Lord? 05’01
One More River to Cross ("Noah’s Ark" –
A Humoresque) 03’09
8. Nearer, My God, to Thee 04’36
9. Deep River 06’30
Total time: 43’02
Running time: 79’08
CD 6: Band 3: Terry Riley (*1935, Colfax, CA) http://www.o-art.org/history/LongDur/Riley/RileyNA.html: G Song (1981): Kronos Quartet: David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello. Hannibal HNCD 1509 http://www.rykodisc.com/
The great Terry Riley, whom I also had the privilege of interviewing several years ago, was one of the founders, if that be the correct term, of what we now know as "Minimalism." Perhaps his most well known piece is his In C, which needs to be beheld as spectacle as well as heard as music. Riley wrote G Song in 1981, as nearly as I can tell. Mark Swed tells us in his liner notes that "G Song is based on a 16-bar theme comprised of G minor scales played asymmetrically over a jazz chord progression. It is based on a theme and variations for saxophone and keyboard that Riley composed in 1973 for the French film Le Secret de la Vie. The quartet version [which we area about to hear] is considerably expanded into a large variation movement, with the originally improvised saxophone melodies transferred to and developed in the viola." (Liner Notes)
Time: 2. G Song 11’11
Running time: 90’19
CD 7: 1st CD, Band 11: Igor Stravinsky (1882, Oranienbaum – 1971, NY): Pastorale (1933 version): Israel Baker, violin; Columbia Chamber Ensemble. SONY Classical SM2K 46297 (Boxed set)
Let’s end today’s program with a short piece by Igor Stravinsky, his Pastorale, which he "originally conceived as a song without words for soprano with piano accompaniment." Stravinsky composed it as such in 1907 and later created three different arrangements of it. Stravinsky created the version we’ll hear now in 1933 for violin and wind quartet.
Time: 1st CD, 11. Pastorale 02’49
Total running time: 92’58
We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Eight Etudes and a Fantasy; Stefan Wolpe’s Excerpts from Dr. Einstein’s Address about Peace in the Atomic Era; Olivier Messiaen’s Le Merle noir; Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II; George Crumb’s The River of Life; Terry Riley’s G Song; and Igor Stravinsky’s Pastorale. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week when our featured Elliott Carter piece will be his 1954-5 Variations for Orchestra. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

February 19, 2007, 12 Noon to 2:00PM, wjffradio.org

2007-02-17T15:46:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 19 February 2007
070219
Today’s Selections:
1. Elliott Carter Piano Sonata 26’29
2. Charles Ives An American Journey 64’46
Total time: 91’15
Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.
As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.
CD 1, Band 7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC)
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790: Piano Sonata (1945-6): Paul Jacobs, piano. Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79248-2 http://www.nonesuch.com/Hi_Band/discography.cfm?artist_id=22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonesuch_Records
Our Elliott Carter offering today is his 1945-6 Piano Sonata, a piece we have actually broadcast a number of times over the years. Most of the time, I have chosen the Charles Rosen performance which appears on a Bridge Records CD (9090); to be sure, Rosen is a superb pianist and interpreter of Carter. Today, however, I’ve decided to begin our program with a version performed by pianist Paul Jacobs. Interestingly enough, the Paul Jacobs performance is three minutes and forty-eight seconds longer than the Rosen performance, for reasons that are not immediately clear to me. Lloyd Schwartz’s liner notes quote remarks made by the pianist in 1982 as follows:
"Today, [the Piano Sonata] is recognized as the fines work of Carter’s early period and as one of the strongest pieces of American music of the forties." Schwartz continues: "In many ways, it is an excellent introduction to Carter, because although the details of rhythm, harmony, and articulation are complex . . . the basic structure is immediately graspable. And powerful.
"There are two movements, and in each movement, an initial gesture – a tempo, a color, a harmony – is interrupted by its virtual opposite. A literary analogy might be the interpenetrating gyres of Yeats’s later poetry, where both tension and, at certain points, balance are crated by the simultaneous movement in opposite directions of two opposing forces within a single personality or in the larger movements of history, as if each of these forces were striving to become its own opposite."
Time: 20. Maestoso 11’30
21. Andante 14’58
Total time: 26’29
CD 2: Entire: Charles Ives (1874, Danbury, CT – 1954, NY): An American Journey (Compilation, by Michael Tilson Thomas): San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Vance George, director; San Francisco Girlls Chorus, Sharon J. Paul, director; San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor & piano; Thomas Hampson, baritone. RCA Victor/BMG CD 09026-67703-2 http://www.rcaredseal-rcavictor.com/
Today is Presidents Day, and Hendrik Hertzberg has written a wonderfully insouciant lead piece in this week’s double issue of The New Yorker’ "The Talk of the Town, which he titles, "Too Many Chiefs" and in which he poses the question: Is today President’s Day (singular apostrophe); Presidents’ Day (plural apostrophe); or, simply, Presidents Day (no apostrophe). The surprising answer, according to Hertzberg, is "None of the above." The writer then tells us that in order to crate a three day weekend, Congress, in 1968, simply announced its own version of a papal Bulla: Henceforth, the third Monday in February will be celebrated as Washington’s Birthday. How, then, did today become "President’s/s’/s Day? Here Hertzberg is at his saucy best: "It was a local department –store promotional that went national when retailers discovered that, mysteriously, generic Presidents clear more inventory than particular one, even the Father of His Country. Now everyone things it’s official, but it’s not." Grazie mille, Hendrik!
In any case, although I looked far and wide, I was unable to discover a piece of music written to apotheosize the only U.S. President to graduate from my fair alma mater, Calvin Coolidge; instead, I discovered on my shelf a compilation of works by Charles Ives amassed by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas under the rubric An American Journey. Many, if not most of the selections, are selections from longer pieces, and, thus, partial pieces that I try hard never to broadcast. However, because Michael Tilson Thomas has arranged these quite beautifully into a singular, thematically viable collection, I think it may be a perfect piece with which to honor any or all of the presidents of the United States, whatever today’s real name is.
Here’s what Tilson Thomas has to say, and I will quote him at some length:
Nearly 100 years after it was written, Charles Ives’s music remains as visionary, defiant, tenderly evocative, and paradoxically contrary as ever…
On this CD, I have chosen music reflecting some of Ives’s most constant themes. We begin with pieces reflecting his boyhood – memories of his hometown and of the most important figure in his life, musically and personally – his father, George Ives . . . who encouraged his son to listen creative, to imagine and to experiment. The pieces From the Steeples and the Mountains and "The Pond" are both vivid examples of this kind of thinking, which makes the most visionary statements out of the simplest things.
We then turn to evocation of landscape with Three Places in New England. These pieces are richly expressive tone poems that tell of a place, an event that occurred there, and the feelings of the boy and later the man who remembers them.
Works concerning war form the next group. These have an amazing range, from the zany "They Are There!" to the utterly profound "Tom Sails Away," one of Ives’s greatest songs. In "They Are There!" (adds Thomas) I have followed the phrasing and style of Ives’s own historic piano/vocal recording.
Finally, we turn to the topic of religion. These pieces evoke variously ardent congregationalism, the carnival atmosphere of the big-time revival circuit, and truly profound mystical experience. Ives appreciated the warm fellowship of organized religion, but it is his visionary expression of spirituality in a work such as The Unanswered Question That is perhaps the most personal expression of his inner thoughts.
(Michael Tilson Thomas concludes:): Ives encourages performers to be creative participants in the shaping of his work. Many alternative suggestions are presented in the manuscripts and in his own writings about his muskc. In these performances, I have used different-sized ensembles, solo voice, and unison chorus, and editorial options from many sources based on my instincts and feelings about this music, so long familiar. It is my hope that . . . many new listeners may come to appreciate the extraoerdinary crative range of Ives’s expression and the importance of his message for today. (Liner Notes)
There are 17 separate musical sections in An Ameridcan Journey. The 10th, In Flanders Fields was orchestrated by our friend David Del Tredici; John Adams orchestrated the 15th, Serenity. Glenn Fischtall plays the trumpet solo in The Unanswered Question.
An American Journey was recorded at Davies Hall in San Francisco on 30 October 1999.
Time: 1. From the Steepels and the Mountains 04’15
2. The Things Our Fathers Loved 01’47
3. The Pond (Remembrance) 01’42
4. Memories 02’30
5. Charlie Rutlage 02’38
6. The Circus Band 03’02
7. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common 08’51
8. Putnam’s Camp (Redding, CT) 05’22
9. The Housatonic at Stockbridge (MA) 04’06
10.In Flanders Fields 02’41
11.They Are There 02’52
12.Tom Sails Away 02’48
13.Symphony No.4 - III: Fugue 06’38
14.Psalm 100 01’35
15.Serenity 02’00
16.Genheral William Booth Enters Heaven 05’42
17.The Unanswered Question 06’19
Total time: 64’46
Total running time: 91’15
We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata and a compilation of works by Charles Ives by Michael Tilson Thomas, called An American Journey. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week when our Elliott Carter selection will be his 1949/50 composition Eight Etudes and a Fantasy. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Feb. 12, 2007 Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. www.wjffradio.org

2007-02-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 12 February 2007

070212

Today’s Selections:

1. Elliott Carter Three Poems of Robert Frost 04’46
2. Mel Powell Six Love Songs 07’55
3. Jake Heggie from Natural Selection 09’07
4. Adolphus Hailstork Settings from the Song of Solomon 06’49
5. Jon Harbison Mirabai Songs 18’19
6. Gerald Finzi Six Songs by Shakespeare 17’16
7. Gadi Kaplan To My Love (two versions) 06’34
8. Gandalf (Not your host!) “Hearts in Celestial Unison” 05’03
9. Bob Ostertag All the Rage 16’15

Total time: 92'04

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. [Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.]

[As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.]

CD 1, Band 7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC)
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790: Three Poems of Robert Frost (1942/1980) Patrick Mason, baritone; Speculum Musicae, David Starobin, conductor: Bridge Records BCD 9014 http://www.bridgerecords.com/

Elliot Carter composed his Three Poems of Robert Frost in 1948 for piano and voice; he orchestrated them in 1980. David Schiff tells us that “Carter began his settings of American poetry with Robert Frost.. . . The three poems, ‘Dust of Snow,’ ‘The Rose Family,’ and ‘The Line Gang,’ “ . . . are now published as a group”; but, continues Schiff, “‘The Line Gang’ calls for a heavier voice than either “The Dust of Snow’ or ‘The Rose Family’ require. And is not up to the artistic level of the other two songs. The Frost songs are the closest Carter ever came to the charming vocal manner of Copland and Barber. ‘The Dust of Snow’ can be sung by a non-virtuoso . . . and have often served as encores for a song recital. ‘The Dust of Snow . . . sets off the poet’s words in the blank spaces of a winter landscape. ‘The Rose Family’ is Frost’s response to Gertrude Stein. Carter captures the poem’s tongue-in-cheek tone by setting it in a fast moving 5/8 meter, a little frantic, a bit off-center. . . . ‘The Line Gang’ portrays a noisy construction crew breaking through a forest to put up phone and telegraph lines. . . The musical punch-line, an imitation of a telegraphic key-punch, though cleverly set up early in the song, suggests a comic attitude not apparent in the text.”

Time: 1. Dust of Snow 01’22
2. The Rose Family 01’20
3. The Line Gang 02’00

Total time: 4’46

Wednesday we celebrate Valentine’s Day, traditionally, by now, the feast of love and lovers. It is a bitter-sweet holiday for me, as my wife Carol died just a few hours after it ended, on February 15, 1994. I dedicate this program to her memory, and to the memory of Naomi Kaplan, whose husband, Gadi, we interviewed on this program recently, and whose piece "To My Love" we will play during today's program.

CD 2: Bands 8-13: Mel Powell (1923 or 1933, NY – 1998,?): Six Love Songs (1950). Oregon Repertory Singers, Gilbert Seeley Artistic Director. Koch CD 3-7253-2-H1.

Mel Powell, who was born Melvin Epstein, began his musical life as an American Jazz pianist and, in fact was chosen as pianist for Benny Goodman’s band, where he changed his name to, as Baker’s puts it, “the more mellifluous Mel Powell.” “At the heighth of his powers as a jazz player and composer he discovered that he had muscular dystrophy and could no longer travel with the band; whereupon, he turned to “serious composition.” He composed his Six Love Songs in 1950. Davie Preiser writes in his liner notes, “[Mel Powell’s] choral music is firmly in the American tradition, with clear part-writing and easier harmonies [than are to be found in his instrumental music]. Perhaps the sources of the text led to a simpler style. Six Love songs, while not exactly old-fashioned, has a nostalgic feel. It was modeled on Six Chansons Six Chansons by Paul Hindemith. We hear Six Love Songs (1950), by Mel Powell. Oregon Repertory Singers, Gilbert Seeley Artistic Director. The texts are anonymous 17th century works for four-part mixed voices.

Time: 8. Song 01’19
9. The contented Lover 02’00
10. What Can We Poor females Do 00’34
11. On a Lady Sleeping 01’49
12. The Bee 00’51
13. A Lover Am I 01’26

Total time: 07’55

Running time: 12’41

CD 3: Bands 11,12,13: Jake Heggie (b. 1961, West Palm Beach, FL): from Natural Selection (1997, by Gini Savage): “Animal Passion,” Alas! Alack!” “Joy Alone (Connection).” (1999). Nicolle Foland, soprano; Jake Heggie, piano. BMG Classics 09026-63484. http://www.bmgclassics.com/

Jake Heggie has deservedly become quite a well known composer over the past few years. His first opera, Dead Man Walking, with a libretto by Terrence McNally took the opera world by storm in 2000; he has also written Anna Madrigal Remembers, for Chanticleer and Federica von Stade, who is certainly one of his muses. Anna Madrigal, many of you may know, is a character created by Armistead Maupin and played by Olympia Dukakis in the 6 hour TV version of Maupin’s Tales of the City. Not surprisingly, Heggie has written serious song cycles based on a variety of poets. Today, I thought it would be fun to listen to some selections from poet Gini Savage’s cycle Natural Selection (1997), for which Jake Heggie composed music especially for singer Nicolle Foland, who was one of the resident artists at the San Francisco Opera at the time. The entire cycle consists of five songs, of which three are recorded on this CD: “Animal Passion,” “Alas! Alack!” and “Joy Alone (Connection)”

Time: 11. Animal Passion 03’19
12. Alas! Alack! 02’29
13. Joy Alone (Connection) 03’19

Total time: 09’07

Running time: 21’48

CD 4: Bands 7 and 8: Adolphus Hailstork (*1941, Rochester, NY): Arise My Beloved and Set Me as a Seal Upon Thine Heart. The McCullough Chorale, Donald McCullough, conductor. Troy CD 156.

A Valentine’s Day program would not, I suppose, be complete without some choral music set to verses from The Song of Solomon. Adolphus Hailstork has kindly provided us with two such compositions, Arise My Beloved and Set Me as a Seal Upon Thine Heart. The McCullough Chorale, Donald McCullough, conductor, perform these beautiful pieces. Troy CD 156.

Time: 7. Arise My Beloved 02’30
8. Set Me as a Seal 04’19

Total time: 06’49

Running time: 28’37

CD 5: Bands 13 – 18: Jon Harbison (*1938, Orange, NJ): Mirabai Songs (1982), Translated by Robert Bly: Georgine Resick, soprano; Warren Jones, piano. Bridge Records CD 9134. http://www.bridgerecords.com/

Our next song cycle is, perhaps, a bit different from the sentimental songs we expect – and perhaps demand – on Valentine’s Day. Here’s what Jon Harbison’s liner notes tell us: “Mirabai’s ecstatic religious poetry was written in sixteenth-century India. When she was twenty-seven, her husband was killed in a war. Rather than sacrifice her own life, as custom required, she left her family compound, wrote poems to the god Krishna (“the Dark One”), and sang and danced them in the street as an outcast.” Harbison continues, “My cycle Mirabai Songs, for voice and piano, includes all six poems in Robert Bly’s Red Ozier Press chapbook, which I bought by sheer chance . . . in 1980.”

Some of our listeners may recall that several years ago, I interviewed Robert Bly for another WJFF program. One of these days, I hope to get around to interviewing Jon Harbison, who has indicated he would allow me to do so.

Time: 13. It’s True, I Went to the Market 03’03
14. All I Was Doing Was Breathing 02’48
15. Why Mira Can’t Go Back to Her Old House 01’59
16. Where Did You Go? 02’36
17. The Clouds 03’16
18. Don’t Go, Don’t Go 04’37

Total time: 18’19

Running time: 46’56

CD 6: (3rd CD in set) Band 3: Gerald Finzi (1901, London – 1956, Oxford): Let Us Garlands Bring (1929-1942), Op. 18. 6 songs for baritone and piano. Dae San No, baritone; Laura Ward, piano. Boxed Set: On Wings of Song, presented by the Marilyn Horne foundation. Disc 3.

Gerald Finzi, who died much too young of Hodgkins disease, composed numerous vocal works and cycles, among which baritone Dae San NO sings quite beautifully on this disc from a boxed set of works called On Wings of Song, presented by the Marilyn Horne Foundation. Written between 1929 and 1942, this cycle comprises five compositions set to texts by William Shakespeare: The cycle is called Let Us Garlands Bring; it includes 1. “Come away, Come away, Death,” from Twelfth Night iv; 2. “Who Is Sylvia Silvia?” from Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3, ii”; 3. “Fear No More,” from Cymbeline, 4, ii; 4. “O Mistress Mine,” from Twelfth Night, 2, iii; and 5. “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” from As You Like It, 5, iii.

Time: 3. On Wings of Song 17’16

Running time: 64’12

CD 7: CD 2: Entire: Gadi Kaplan (Date of birth, place): “To My Love,” folk version and jazz version. Magda Fishman, soprano; Yuval Cohen, piano. Private CD.

Our next selection was composed by a new found friend, Gadi Kaplan, who was our telephone guest last December 11th. He wrote this piece in memory of his beloved wife.

Time: 1. Folk Version 03’16 03’12
2. Jazz Version 03’22 03’22

Total time: 06’34

Running time: 70’46

CD 8: Band 7: Gandalf (*?, Austria): “Hearts in Celestial Unison,” from Colors of a New Dawn (2004?): Gandalf, acoustic instruments. Real Music CD RM 3155. http://www.reaslmusic.com/

About a year or so ago, our friend Sonja Hedlund presented me with a CD called Colors of a New Dawn, composed by a mysterious individual who calls himself Gandalf. Affixed to the CD was Sonja’s terse note, “This has to go to you!”

When you’ve been given a name such as “Gandalf,” I suppose it is only natural that your ears prick up when you hear that someone else also calls himself by that name. In fact, it turns out that “Gandalf” is one of the most popular names extant today. Alas, I know almost nothing about the Gandalf who composed Colors of a New Dawn except these very few liner and jewel case notes:

Gandalf was born in Austria, Exactly where or when I know not. However, the jewel box notes continue, “”Gandalf blends acoustic, electronic, and spherical sounds and weaves folk elements into a symphonic structure to create his unmistakable and unique musical style.”

Gandalf, himself, provides these thoughts about today’s selection, “Hearts in Celestial Unison”: “Imagine one of those special moments when you are with someone you really love and you both feel like your hearts are beating in perfect harmony with the whole creation.”

This is a Valentine’s Day Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf by a composer named Gandalf. Enjoy!

Time: 7. Hearts in Celestial Union 05’03

Running time: 75’49

CD 9: Entire: Bob Ostertag (*1957, Albuquerque, NM): All the Rage (1992): Sara Miles, libretto; Eric Gupton, reader; Kronos Quartet: David Harrington, John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello. Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79332-2.

I’m going to end today’s Valentine’s Day program with a piece composed by Bob Ostertag in 1992. Sara Miles wrote the libretto; Eric Gupton is the reader. All the Rage was written for Kronos. Its commissioning was made possible by a grant from Meet the composer/Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, in cooperation with Lincoln Center, Wexner Center, and San Antonio Performing Arts Association. The Kronos Quartet’s royalties for the sale of this recording are dedicated to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFar).

I end with this piece because I believe that William Blake’s words still provide the best overview of the subject of love: “Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy!” (“Visions of the Daughters of Albion”)

Time: Time: 16’15

Total running time: 92’04

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Three Poems of Robert Frost, by Elliott Carter; Six Love Songs by Mel Powell; Settings from the Song of Solomon, by Adolphus Hailstork; Mirabai Songs, by Jon Harbison; Songs from Natural Selection, by Jake Heggie; Six Songs from Shakespeare, by Gerald Finzi; For My Love, by Gadi Kaplan; “Hearts in Celestial Unison,” by Gandalf (Not your host!); and All the Rage, by Bob Ostertag. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next Monday when we will feature Elliott Carter’s 1945-6 Piano Sonata. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you a very Happy, loving Valentine’s day and the joy of New Music.

February 5, 2007. Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, WJFF 90.5fm Jeffersonville, NY www.wjffradio.org

2007-02-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 05 February 2007

070205
Today’s Selections:

1. Elliott Carter Enchanted Preludes 06’30
2. Carlos Chávez Sextet for Piano and Strings 31’05
3. Wynton Marsalis Sweet Release 30’46
4. Olivier Messiaen Cinq Rechants 17’20
5. George Perle Bassoonmusic 05’47

Total time: 91’27

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. [Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.]

[As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.]

CD 1, Band 7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC)
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790: Enchanted Preludes (1988)Harvey Sollberger, flute; Fred Sherry, ‘cello. Elliott Carter – Eight compositions (1948-1993): Bridge Records BCD 9044 http://www.bridgerecords.com/

In his excellent liner notes, musicologist David Schiff tell us that Elliott Carter’s 1988 composition, “Enchanted Preludes, for flute and ‘cello, was composed in 1988 to honor the 50th birthday of Ann Santen, musical director of Cincinnati’s public radio station, and a champion of new music. Carter has compared this piece to a Mendelssohn scherzo; it is fairy-dust music full of trills and tremolos. Although both instruments play different intervals and at different speeds, they pursue the same elfin mood. The title comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens, The Pure Good of Theory, ‘All the Preludes to Felicity,’ stanza 7:

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

We’ll hear flutist Harvey Sollberger and ‘cellist Fred Sherry perform Carter’s Enchanted Preludes.

Time: 2. Enchanted Preludes 06’30

Here’s another example of my long time contention that I am proof of the amended adage that although you may be able to teach an old dog you tricks, you cannot guarantee that he will be able to perform them well. Having mastered, I thought, the nuances of the spreadsheet on the computer, and having determined to do a cycle of Elliott Carter’s works, one each week until I had broadcast every one I could get my hands on, I typed in the information and arranged them chronologically – or so I had thought. The works in question took up almost two pages. I began, of course with page one, and have continued to air them in the order they appear on that page. From time to time, I wondered why there seemed to be chronological gaps in the list. The other day, quite by accident, I happened to glimpse at page two and discovered, to my amused chagrin, that although the spread sheet did, in fact, list his works chronologically, it did so only if the date were a single number. Thus, 1939 is listed before 1942, etc. What I did not realize was that any composition for which I typed in a span of dates, such as 1939 – 1942, was arranged in its own special list at the end of page 2. So, having discovered once again that “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men/Gang aft a-gley.” I will begin to correct the chronological mistake by playing catch-up with those pieces I have missed. Next week, I’ll feature Elliott Carter’s Three Poems of Robert Frost, which he composed in 1942 and revised in 1980.

CD 2: 2nd CD: Bands 1-5: Carlos Chávez (1899, Mexico City – Mexico City, 1978): Sextet for Piano and Strings (1919): Lorenz Gamma and Tereza Stanislav, violins; Jan Karlin, viola; Sebastian Toettcher and Steve Richards, ‘cellos; Ming Tsu, piano. Carlos Chávez – Complete Chamber Music Vol. 4: Southwest Chamber Music: Cambria CD8853A/B. http://www.swmusic.org/

Southwest Chamber Music and Cambria Master Recordings have provided 20th century classical music lovers with a lovely series of the complete chamber music of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, who was born near Mexico City in 1899. The anonymous liner notes tell us that Chávez composed his Sextet for Piano and Strings in 1919, when he was still in his teens, and Mexico was embroiled in the relentless violence of . . . revolution.” (Liner notes, 10). The chamber piece did not receive its first recording until early in the 21st century. The notes continue: “The never-ending chronicle of loyalties and disloyalties that mark the Mexican

Revolution find a potent release in the harmonies and structural ideas in the Sextet. How the music sounds Mexican is unique. Chávez has a youthful penchant for combining and abandoning harmonies that provide a potent telescope of his entire career. . . . The dreamlike qualities of much of the Sextet, though evoking Wagner, Debussy, and early Schoenberg, come as much from Chávez’s need to be done with an overall harmnic hierarchy.” Chávez demonstrates “a predilection for doubling the string parts . . . [creating a] particular flavor [that is] reminiscent of the famous mariachi ensemble of Mexico [that is] unique to [his] early period, and the one dead giveaway of the location of the composer’s soul.”

The piano part of the fifth and final movement of the piece has been “inextricably lost, and no score has yet come to light.” Max Lifchitz reconstructed this part of the score, based on his understanding of the first four movements and the strings composition of the fifth.

Time: 1. Lento 02’34
2. Allegro con brio 07’04
3. Andante 11’18
4. Presto scherzando 04’46
5. Allegretto 05’23

Total time: 31’05

Running time: 37’35

CD 3: Bands 1-5: Wynton Marsalis (*1961, New Orleans): Sweet Release (?): Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Wess Anderson, alto and sopranino sacophone, clarinet; Sherman Irby, also saxophone, clarinet; Victor Goines, tenor saxophone; Geideon Feldstein, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet; Roger Ingram, Ryan Kisor, Russell Gunn, Jamil Sharif, trumpets; Wycliffe Gordon, trombone and tuba; Ron Westray, Wayne Goodman, Bob Trowers, trombone; Eric Reed, piano; Rodney Whitaker, bass; Herlin Riley, drums; Pernell Saturnino, conga and Latin percussion; Stanley Harris, percussion and assistant conductor; Wynton Marsalis, trumpet and conductor Sweet Release & Ghost Story Two More Ballets by Wynton Marsalis: SONY Classical/Columbia SK61690. http://www.sonyclassical.com/

You may wonder why I have chosen a ballet by Wynton Marsalis for our third selection today. The answer is simple: although Marsalis is considered a jazz composer usually, he composes his jazz in styles that, in my opinion, are in their own way post-modern and fit neatly into what I consider contemporary classical music. Here’s what Stanley Crouch has to say about Marsalis’s ballet, Sweet Release: “At just under thirty-four minutes, Sweet Release is an extraordinarily concise extended work. Everything introduced in the first and second sections, melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically – is recast throughout the remainder of the piece, with the brief third section a contrapuntal combining of the core materials from the previous two parts, both set within the Afro-Hispanic frame that will dominate parts four and five. In all, we hear dissonance and consonance, a polyphony that rises from the New Orleans front line of traditional jazz, dramatic tempo changes, an angularity we have rarely heard utilized so successfully, and a grip on swing that will shake the blues away.

“Marsalis knows well how to develop his themes with reiterations or sustained melodic variations, how to bring harmony we hve heard earlier into another position. All these qualities are evident in the way that Sweet Release, beginning with section four, builds up into the next part, creating an ever more complex narrative of contrasting rhythmic, metric, harmonic, and contrapuntal intricacy, all the while giving extension, elaboration, and searing refinement to the writing that featured the trumpet and the trumbone in the [first three] sections. The ways in which Marsalis musically makes his way back to his initial proposition in the last three pares are precise but illusively magical examples of the brilliance.”

The piece is written in five sections: Home: Beyond This Rage; Church: Renewing Vows; Church Basement: Party; Street: Make room for Me; Home: Give Me Your Hand.

Time: 1. Home 07’51
2. Church 07’19
3. Church 05’28
4. Street 04’24
5. Home 05’44

Total time: 30’46

Running time: 68’21

CD 4: Band 9: Olivier Messiaen (1908, Avignon – 1992, Clichy): Cinq Rechants pour 12 parties vocales réelles (1948): Soloists of the choruses of L’O.R.T.F.: Nicole Robin, Gisèle Prevert, Marcelle Legendre, sopranos; Arlette Friedmann, Josette Pudleitner, Antoinette Kerguelin, contraltos; Régis Oudot, Roger Cotton, Jean-Claude Le Mee, tenors; Charley Guigui, René Chauvaut, Mario Haniotis, basses; Colette Brullebaut, choral director; Marcel Couraud, conductor. ERATO CD 4509-91708-2.

Olivier Messiaen composed his Cinq Rechants for 12 unaccompanied vocalists in 1948, just before his wife Claire underwent severe surgery that left her mentally compromised and behaviorally erratic. In their essential book, Messiaen, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone write: “Significantly, the score of Cinq Rechants . . . has no explanatory introduction, apart from brief notes for the performers. The last of these reads: ‘The work is a song of love. This word alone is sufficient to guide the singers in the interpretation of the poem and the music.’ The title is a homage to Claude Le Jeune’s Le Printemps, a work repeatedly used by Messiaen in his class.” The authors then quote the liner notes of the recording we are about to air by Marcel Douraud:

‘In Le Printemps the couplets are called chants, the refrains rechants. Melodically, [Cinq Rechants] derives from two sources: the harawi or yaravi, a love song from the folk music of Peru and Ecuador; and the alba, a medieval song of the dawn, in which an unearthly voice warns the lovers that the night of love will finish.’

The comments that Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone make concerning this incredible piece and it likely relation to what had become an increasingly strained, if not estranged relationship between Olivier Messiaen and his wife Claire are too numerous to summarize gracefully. If Messiaen moves you as he moves me – like few other composers of any time and place – I highly recommend getting hold of a copy of this book and using it as a guide to Messiaen’s works.

Time: 9. 12 Rechants 17’20

Running time: 85’41

CD 5: Band 17: George Perle (*1915, Bayonne, NJ): Bassoonmusic (2004): Steven Dibner, bassoon. George Perle – A Retrospective Bridge records CD 9214A/B. http://www.bridgerecords.com/

Let’s end today’s program with a short piece by the great composer George Perle called, simply, Bassoonmusic. David Starobin, who wrote the liner notes for this Bridge Records double CD, tells us that Bassoonmusic . . . [was commissioned] by Steven Dibner, [our soloist and] the San Francisco Symphony’s associate principal bassoonist. Bassoon Music is Perle’s second work for solo bassoon, the first being the Three Inventions of 1962. From the outset of this six minute long work, Perle delights in the juxtaposition of highly contrasting musical ideas. Initially, a jocular staccato figure is followed by a lyrical and tender melody, both of which are immediately repeated. What follows is a masterful expansion of these materials into a work that uses the bassoon’s different registral ‘personalities’ to create music that is at once playful, nostalgic, and referential.”

Time: CD 2, 17: Bassoon Music 05’47

Total running time: 91’27

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Enchanted Preludes; Carlos Chávez’s Sextet for Piano and Strings; Wynton Marsalis’s Sweet Release; Olivier Messiaen’s Cinq Recherches; and George Perle’s Bassoonmusic. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week when our featured Elliott Carter piece will Three Poems of Robert Frost as well as other great 20th and 21st century classical music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music.

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, Monday, January 15, 2007, Noon to 2:00PM. wjffradio.org

2007-01-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 15 January 2007

070115

Today’s Selections:

1. Elliott Carter Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi 06’30
2. George Walker Cantata for Soprano, Tenor, Boys Choir,
And Chamber Orchestra 12’46
3. Fela Sowande Yoruba Lament 07’57
4. William Grant Still Suite for Violin and Orchestra 12’39
5. Duke Ellington Suite from ‘The River’ 26’50
6. Dumisani Maraire Mai Nozipo 06’54
7. Dumisani Maraire Kutambarara 07’10
8. Roger Dickerson Essay for Band 08’34

Total time: 88’40

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1, Band 7: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC)
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790: Riconscenza per Goffredo Petrassi (1984): Rolf Schulte, violin. Bridge BCD 9044 www.BridgeRecords.com

David Schiff recalls in his essential book, The Music of Elliott Carter that the great composer considered the Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi (1904, Rome - ?) “to be his best musical friend. Riconoscenza [per Goffredo Petrassi] is the first of two tributes [Carter wrote in honor of Petrassi]. . . . It is an example of temporal counterpoint,” continues Schiff. “Three ideas unfold in small, interspersed episodes, creating the illusion that we are hearing three pieces, expressive, percussive, and peaceful, at once. Each mood brings out a different aspect of the violin: singing, scratching, and sustaining, and each has its own harmonic makeup and rhythmic character. Each character evolves through the piece, and the form of the piece itself grows out of the developing relation of its three moods.

We’ll hear violinist Rolf Schulte perform the 1984 Riconscenza by Elliott Carter on Bridge Records BCD 9044. The word Riconscenza, by the way, means “Gratitude.”

Time: 7. Riconscenza 06’30

CD 2: Bands 18, 19: George Walker (*1922, Washington, DC) http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/1617/bio.html?200713: Cantata for Soprano, Tenor, Boys Choir, and Chamber Orchestra (1982): Joyce Mathis, soprano; Walter Turnbull, tenor; Boys Choir of Harlem; Orchestra of St. Luke’s; Warren Wilson, conductor. Albany Records, Troy 136.

George Walker, whom I had the great privilege of interviewing a number of years ago, deserves to be much more widely known and frequently performed than he is. He writes, in his liner notes, that the “Cantata for Soprano, Tenor, Boys Choir, and Chamber Orchestra was commissioned by the boys Choir of Harlem. It was complete in April of 1982. The premiere of the work was given at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, on June 20th, 1982.

“The Cantata is a setting of Psalm 23 and four verses from Psalm 24 in the King James version of the New Testament. . . .

“The work is divided into two parts. An introduction suggests the pastoral ambiance of the 23rd Psalm. The initial verse is intoned by the tenor soloist. This intonation is heard several times during the unfolding of the Psalm. The occurrence of the word “water” in the text evokes special effects from the boys choir. The final verse of the Psalm offers a brief quote from the spiritual Steal Away. The second part of the Cantata revels in the exultation of the text. The recurrence of rhythmic figures that vary in duration and density is a characteristic aspect of this section. A single boy chants, “Selah,” to bring this work to a tranquil conclusion.”

Time: 18. 23rd Psalm 09’51
19. Four Verses from the 24th Psalm 02’55

Total time: 12’46
Running time: 19’16

CD 3: Band 2: Fela Sowande (1905, Oyo, Nigeria – 1987, Ravenna, OH) http://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/Sowande.html: Yoruba Lament (?): Lucius Weathersby, organ. Albany Records, Troy 440.

20th and 21st century composers as a whole have an almost insurmountable task when they attempt to get their music recorded. African and African American Black composers have an even more difficult time. Fela Sowande, who was born in Nigeria in 1905 and died in Ohio in 1987, is an African composer whose works combine classical, church, and African music is an individual about whose music too little is known and even less is recorded. The liner notes to the piece we are about to air, Yoruba Lament, give the reader a taste of the incredible life Sowande lived in order to develop his musical talents and compose. “Western and African ideas prevail in his music, which include organ works such as Yoruba Lament . . . which shows quite a strong influence of Anglican Church music combined with Yoruba pentatonic melodies.” The fact that the liner notes indicate that “there is currently a move to set up a center to research and promote Sowande’s works as many remain unpublished or out-of-print, is proof enough of the neglect this extraordinary composer has suffered. The fact the Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Classical Music lists the composer but only two of his works is another indictment against good taste. We’ll hear my late sweet friend Lucius Weathersby perform Fela Sowande’s Yoruba Lament on the 1864 “Father” Willis Organ.

Time: 2. Yoruba Lament 07’57

Running time: 27’13

CD 4: Bands 15 – 17: William Grant Still (1895, Woodville, MI – 1978, LA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grant_Still: Suite for Violin and Orchestra (ca. 1944): Louis Kaufman, violin; The Standard Hour Symphony Orchestra (1947); Henry Svedrofsky, conductor. Cambria CD –1121.

Thanks to William Grant Still’s daughter Judith Ann, we are able to hear a great deal more of this great 20th century composers music than of that of other deserving composers. Still composed the piece we are about to hear, Suite for Violin and Orchestra around 1944, when it premiered in Boston. Tony Thomas tells us in his liner notes that Stills “opted to key the suite to descriptions of works by African-American artists. The first of the three movements was inspired by Richmond Barthe’s African Dancer; the second by Sargent Johnson’s Mother and Child; and the third by Augusta Savage’s bronze Gamin. As we are going to hear the broadcast of the suite performed live on September, 1945, by violinist Louis Kaufman and The Standard Hour symphony Orchestra, listeners will no doubt notice how sound quality has changed during the past 63 years; there is a sharpness to the violin’s recorded sound, for instance, that would not be acceptable today. I must admit, I kind of like this echo-y quality; it brings me back to my youth!

Time: 15. African Dancer 04’19
16. Mother and Child 05’51
17. Gamin 02’29

Total time: 12’39

Running time: 39’52

CD 5: Bands 5-11: Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899, DC – 1974, NY)http://www.dukeellington.com/: Suite from “The River” (1970): Detroit Symphony Orchestra; Neeme Järvi, conductor. CHANDOS CD CHAN 9154.

The liner notes to our next selection are interesting enough to quote most of it. Michael Fleming writes, “Duke Ellington was one of the most prolific of composers. Even The New Grove Dictionary of Music in America gives up on trying to number his compositions, settling for a figure ‘about 2000.’ Some are short, of course, written to fit on a 78-rpm record. But he always had the desire to tackle larger forms, and when the chance came to him he did so.

“His son, Mercer Ellington, recalls that ‘the idea for The River had been kicking around for several years, ever since Stanley Dance had suggested an extended work depicting the natural course of a river.’ The elder Ellington composed the music for The River in 1970, during the same period when The New Orleans Suite was taking shape. . . .

“Mercer Ellington sees the suite as a ‘religious allegory,’ noting that his father’s thoughts were then turning more to spiritual matters. This is supported by the composer’s words, prefaced to the score: ‘of birth . . . of the wellspring of life . . . of reaffirmation . . . of heavenly anticipation of rebirth,’

“That is one way of hearing The River, but there is a literal level of meaning, which Ellington himself explained in his book Music Is My Mistress. There he describes an imaginary journey down the river, beginning at the ‘Giggling Rapids,’ passing through ‘The Lake,’ and ending at ‘The Vortex,’ [also referred to by Ellington as ‘The Whirlpool]: ‘an experience in which, of course, you must really immerse yourself to appreciate the hazards.’”

The version of Duke Ellington’s Suite from ‘The River’ was orchestrated by Ron Collier.

There are 7 sections: Spring, Meaner, Giggling rapids, Lake, Vortex, Riba, and Village Virgins. We’ll hear Neeme Järvi conduct the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in this performance of Duke Ellington’s Suite from ‘The River.’

Time: 5. Spring 03’00
6. Meander 03’57
7. Giggling Rapids 02’55
8. Lake 06’51
9. Vortex 02’13
10. Riba 03’18
11. Village Virgins 04’21

Total time: 26’50

Running time: 66’02

CD 6a: Band 1: Dumisani Maraire (*1943, Zimbabwe)http://www.worldmusicpress.com/letyourvoicebeheard.htm: Mai Nozipo (Mother Nozipo) (1990): Kronos Quartet: David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello. Piece of Africa. Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79275-2.

Between 1989 and 1991, the Kronos Quartet recorded eight compositions by African composers entitled Pieces of Africa. The first and last pieces on the CD were written by Zimbabwean Dumisani Maraire. The first one, called Mai Nozipo, means, in Shona, “Mother Nozipo.” The composer, Dumisani Maraire, has this to say about the piece: “My aim was to portray the life of my mother, who passed away in 1989. I wrote this piece in three parts. The first portrays life with my mother on earth. It was all very loving and full of caring and happiness. The second part is sad, portraying her death. The third movement is happy again, portraying that my mother is well, cares for and looks after me and all her children still on earth, as she now lives her new life in the world of spirits or in heaven. We shall all meet her when we die.”

We’ll hear “Mother Nozipo” performed by the Kronos Quartet.

Time: 1. Mai Nozipo 06’54

Running time: 72’56

CD 6b: Band 12: Dumisani Maraire (*1943, Zimbabwe): Kutambarara (“Spreading”) (1990): Kronos Quartet: David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello. Piece of Africa. Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79275-2.

The final piece on Kronos Quartet’s CD Pieces of Africa is another piece by Dumisani Maraire, this once entitled Kutambarara, which means “Spreading” in Shona.

Maraire writes, in 1991, “What is spreading is African concepts, perspectives, philosophies, traditions, and cultures through African music. This is now being done by Africans themselves. It is true that African traditions, cultural norms and aspects have been spread for years all over the world. However, this spreading was by non-Africans which in some ways was an interpretation of Africa by non-African scholars, writers, film makers, and so on. Africa and Africans have been suppressed for a long time. It was only around 1950 that Africans resisted and fought for their rights in their own land and started gaining the political power to rule themselves and try to determine their own future.

“The other message of the song is that not all non-Africans oppressed Africans. Actually, there were and still are non-Africans who fought and fight to free Africa from oppression financially, educationally, and politically. Music can dismantle cultural, political, and racial barriers.”

Time: 12. Kutambarara 07’10

Running time: 80’06

CD 7: Band 14: Roger Dickerson (*1934, New Orleans) http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Dickerson-Roger-Donald.htm: Essay for Band (1962): Northern University Wind Symphony; Dr. Patricia J. Hoy, conductor. William Grant Still 100th Anniversary Celebration: Music of Afro-American Composers. NAUWS CD 003.

Carl Helmer tells us in his liner notes that “Roger Dickerson hails from New Orleans, Louisiana. He began piano studies at the age of eight through private piano instruction and continues his music education in the public schools in New Orleans. Mr. Dickerson’s advanced music studies were with Bernhard Heiden at Indiana University and Karl Schiske at the Academie für Musik and Darstellende Kunst in Vienna, Austria. He toured with the blues artists Joe Turner and “Guitar Slim.” . . .

“After returning to the United States in 1962, Dickerson turned his attention to composition. Essay for Band, one of his best known works, which we’ll end today’s program with, was composed in this year. His music borrows elements from blues, jazz, and soul music, but he combines these with contemporary classical traditions. . . . He was the subject of a 1978 public television documentary film, New Orleans Concerto.

Time: 14. Essay for Band 08’34

Total running time: 88’40

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi; George Walker’s Cantata for Soprano, Tenor, Boys Choir, and Chamber Orchestra; Fela Sowande’s Yoruba Lament; William Grant Still’s Suite for Violin and Orchestra; Duke Ellington’s Suite from ‘The River’; Dumisani Maraire’s Mother Nozipo and Kutambarara (‘Spreading’); and Roger Dickerson’s Essay for Band. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century classical music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music.

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, Noon - 2:00PM, WJFF, 90.5fm, Jeffersonville, NY

2006-12-11T06:49:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 11 December 2006
061211

Today’s Selections:
1. Gadi Kaplan Three Songs 05’45
2. Gadi Kaplan To My Love (folk version) 03’12
(jazz version) 03’22
3. Gadi Kaplan Liturgical Music 04’01
4. Gadi Kaplan from Songs of Wisdom and Praise 06’51
5. Gadi Kaplan Leyad Hamizbe’ach 13’44
6. Claude Debussy Nocturnes: Sirenes 08'56
Total time: 36’55 plus any (Ravel: TBA)

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin today’s program which features composer and poet Gadi Kaplan, let's hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to welcome Dr. Gadi Kaplan to WJFF today. Dr. Kaplan, who lives in the city, spent a good part of his working life as Senior Technical Editor of a technology publication, and we will soon discover just how long he has been composing music and how he became involved in this art form. Gadi, welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Thank you for taking the time to be with us this afternoon!

1. Gadi, let’s find out something about you: where were you born, where did you grow up, and where were you educated?

2. The Program Notes to a 2005 concert put on by the Astoria Music Society as one of the Manhattan Concert Series, mention that before you retired, you were professionally engaged as Senior Technical Editor of a technology publication. Tell us a bit about that, if you don’t mind!

3. It is certainly not unheard of for composers, poets, artists to work in non-artistic professions. How did you get involved in music and poetry? (Did you study composition, for example?
)
4. Gadi, the first three songs of yours that we will play, Three Songs, are sung in Hebrew. Do you see yourself as coming out of a particular musical tradition when you write songs with Hebrew Lyrics? (Explain, if you will.)

5. As I indicated a bit earlier, the first of your compositions that we will broadcast are Three Songs, whose melodies are extraordinarily tender, even haunting, yet definitely 20th century. Perhaps you would introduce these songs, so that I don’t butcher their names! What do the titles of the first and third songs mean? And what are the songs about?

6. The second song, “Madrigal” is set to a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca. What drew you to the great early 20th century poet and dramatist?

7. Lorca wrote several Madrigals. Alas, I do not understand Hebrew well enough to make out which one you have set to music here, and I wonder if you’d mind enlightening me!

CD 1: Entire: Gadi Kaplan: (Date and place of birth?): Three Songs: “Im Ha’lay’la Ha’ze,” lyrics by Le’a Goldberg; “Madrigal,” words by Federico Garcia Lorca; Hebrew translation by Refa’el Eli’az; “Ahava,” lyrics by Dalia Rabikovich. Naomi Kaplan, alto; Gadi Kaplan, piano. Originally recorded on a tape in 1971. Private CD.

Time: 1. Im Ha’Lay’la Ha’ze 01’43
2. Madrigal 02’52
3. Ahava 01’10
Total time: 05’45

8. Three wonderfully composed and sung songs by our guest today, Gadi Kaplan. Gadi, the music you have written here is understated and in some ways almost delicate; yet it commands my attention immediately, and I find myself rapt in the sounds of both the music and the words. Do you compose quickly? Or do you labor over your works?

9. I’m assuming that the singer of these three lovely song was your late wife, Naomi. Was she a professional singer?

A reminder that our guest today on Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf is Gadi Kaplan, who studied music in Re’ali High School in Haifa, Israel, and with Professor Leo Edwards, of Mannes College.

10. Gadi, I note that you served in an entertainment unit of the Israel Defense Force. What were your responsibilities in that capacity, and did you do any composing for any of the performances you were responsible for?

11. Gadi, How difficult is it to get a composition performed, and how have you gone about arranging performances? What about recordings?

12. When you write lyrics, Gadi, do you write in Hebrew first and then translate into English? Or do you write in whatever language you decide is appropriate for the music?

13. A reminder that our guest today on Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf is Gadi Kaplan, retired Senior Technical Editor of a technology publication and composer of some truly beautiful songs and lyrics.

14. Gadi, tell us something about your professional life as a Senior Technical Editor. What subjects did your publication focus on, and what were your specific responsibilities?

15. I’d like to move on to the next selections we are going to broadcast, “To My Love,” a song which you’ve composed in two versions, a folk version and a jazz version. Please tell us something about the background of this song, and explain what motivated you to write it in two different styles?

16. I see that you do not play the piano on this recording. Do you prefer to perform your own music, or are you just as happy, or happier, to listen to someone else interpret your music?

17. Who is the soprano, Magda Fishman, whom we will hear in just a moment?

18. Let’s listen to two versions of “To My Love,” music and lyrics by our guest, Dr. Gadi Kaplan.

CD 2: Entire: Gadi Kaplan (Date of birth, place): “To My Love,” folk version and jazz version. Magda Fishman, soprano; Yuval Cohen, piano. Private CD.

Time: 1. Folk Version 03’12
2. Jazz Version 03’22
Total time: 06’34
Running time: 12’19

19. We have just heard two version of “To My Love,â€ by our guest, Dr. Gadi Kaplan, performed by soprano Magda Fishman and pianist Yuval Cohen.

20. I notice, Gadi, that the pianist, Yuval Cohen, is listed on the CD as the arranger. Exactly what does that mean here?

21. Our guest today on Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf is composer and lyricist Gadi Kaplan.

22. Gadi, let’s move on to our next selections, two short pieces of liturgical music, prayers, I gather, which you were commissioned by the Park Avenue synagogue to compose. Would you fill our listeners in on the background of these two pieces, please! (also, please explain if the 2nd piece, Kadosh and Baruch Kevod, is made up of two different prayers that are meant to be sung without break.)

23. Are these pieces sung as part of a service?

24. The music of these two pieces, to my ears, comes very definitely out of the cantatorial tradition of Jewish Liturgy. Are there certain forms or concepts that you consciously followed in composing these two prayers?

25. Who are the performers?

26. Let’s listen to our guest, Dr. Gadi Kaplan’s liturgical pieces, which he composed in 1982 (?): Tsur Yisrael and Kadosh and Baruch Kevod.

CD 3: Entire: Gadi Kaplan (1935, Haifa): Liturgical Music, Tsur Yisra’el and Kadosh/Baruch Kevod (1982). Cantor David Lefkowitz, tenor; Camerata Singers; Neil Robinson, organ; Abraham Kaplan, conductor. Have I got the names and functions correct? Recorded on 3 April 1982. Private CD.

Time: 1. Tsur Yisra’el 01’48
2. Kadosh/Baruch Kevod 02’13
Total time: 04’01
Running time: 16’20

27. We’ve just heard two beautiful liturgical pieces by our guest, Dr. Gadi Kaplan, Tsur Yisra’el and Kadosh/Baruch Kevod, performed by cantor David Lefkowitz, the Camerata Singers, organist Neil Robinson, who were conducted by Abraham Kaplan. Gadi, is Abraham Kaplan a relative?

28. Let’s move on, Gadi to the your three songs (out of seven) from your collection Songs of Wisdom and Praise. Tell us something about the provenance of these songs, which had their world premiere in December of 2005.

29. What prompted you to set these particular psalms and proverbs to music?
30, Would you go into the texts of the three selections we are about to broadcast, please, Gadi!

31. Let’ss listen to three selections from our guest, Gadi Kaplan’s Songs of Wisdom and Praise: “Ashrey Ha’ish” (Psalm 1/1,3); “Ad Ana Adonay,” Psalm 13, 2-5; “Kene Chochma, Kene Vina,” (Proverbs 4/5-12).

CD 4. Gadi Kaplan (1935, Haifa): Three selections from Songs of Wisdom and Praise: “Ashrei Ha’ish,” “Ad Ana Adonay,” “Kene Chochman, Kene Vina” (2005). Private CD.

Time: 1. Ashrei Ha’ish 02’01
2. Ada Ana Adonay 02’23
3. Kene chochman, Kene Vina 02’27
Total time: 06’51
Running time: 23’11

32.We have just heard three selections by our guest, Dr. Gadi Kaplan, from Songs of Wisdom and Praise: “Ashrei Ha’ish,” “Ad Ana Adonay,” and “Kene Chochma, Kene Vina.”
33. Gadi, I’m interested in finding out what prompted you to write the first and third of these selections ad a capella pieces.

34. A reminder that composer Gadi Kaplan is our guest today.

35. Gadi, we come now to the piece that I mentioned at the beginning of the program, Leyad Hamizbe’ach (“At the Altar”) which you dedicated to the memory of your wife, Naomi. The genesis of the piece is a fascinating one, which you recount in the program notes of the 9/11 Memorial Concert at which it was featured on Saturday, September 10, 2005. Would you mind taking some time now to tell us the story of this piece? (Including how you arrived at the name.)

36. The music you’ve composed for Leyad Hamizbe’ach is a bit different from the other pieces we’ve broadcast. It has an eerie quality to it, for example, at least to my ears, that, while it is not surprising, given the context, is certainly arresting!

37. In plotting this composition, you made reference, according to the notes, to the numerical values of Hebrew letters. Would you explain how this worked for you?

38. Let’s listen to our guest, Dr. Gadi Kaplan’s Leyad Hamizbe’ach (“At the Altar”).

CD 5: Gadi Kaplan (1935, Haifa): Leyad Hamizbe’ach (2001): Rebecca Dimmick, contralto; Kate Kammeyer, English Horn; Garrett Eucker, soprano; Jessica Eucker, soprano. Private CD.

Time: 1. Leyad Hamisbe’ach 03’15
2. Neyrot 04’46
3. Tefilah 05’43
Total time: 13’44
Running time: 36’55

40. We’ve just heard the world premiere of our guest, Gadi Kaplan’s Leyad Hamizbe’ach (“At the Altar”). Gadi, I am not stretching the truth when I tell you that I weep every time I listen to this composition. It is truly a marvel, and I hope that many other audiences will have the opportunity to listen to it.

41. At this point, alas, Gadi, we have run out of your recorded music, and I can only express my disappointment. I would so like to hear A Song and Variations, which you wrote when your granddaughter was born in 2003, as well as your string quartet, Textures. Has either of these been performed in public?

42. How many other gems are waiting to be performed where your fans can hear them?

43. I know that you have been connected through your mentor, Professor Leo Edwards, with Mannes College in Manhattan. Mannes is one of the gems of those institutions devoted to music, and I have had the pleasure of meeting and even interviewing some of the composers and performers who are also associated with it. How important have your connections with various music departments been to your composing career?

44. Gadi, what are you busy working on now?

45. CD 6: Claude Debussy: Nocturnes: Sirenes. Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Eduard van Beinum, conductor. EPIC LP BC 1020.

46. Gadi Kaplan, I wish we could continue our conversation and listen to more of your music. Perhaps sometime in the not too distant future, both my wishes will be granted. Meanwhile, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for providing us with such beautiful music and for taking the time to visit with our listeners today! I wish you and your family a happy holiday season and a good year to come.
We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have visited with composer and lyricist Gadi Kaplan, and we have heard a number of songs, some liturgical music, and two versions, folk and jazz, of his piece To My Love. WE have also heard Debussy's Nocturne "Sirenes." I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed both our conversation and the music, and that you will tune in next week when Al Gallodoro will be our guest. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, Noon -2:00PM Eastern Time: 061204: WJFF 90.5fm, Jeffersonville, NY www.wjffradio.org

2006-12-03T16:17:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 04 December 2006

061204

Today’s Selections:

1. Elliott Carter In Sleep, In Thunder 20’31
2. György Kurtág Signs, games, and Messages 26’59
3. Witold Lutosławski Symphony No. 1 25’15
4. Peter Schat On Escalation 19’01

Total time: 91’38

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1, Disc 2: Bands 11 - 16: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC): In Sleep, In Thunder (1981)
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790: Speculum Musicae; Jon Garrison, tenor; Robert Black, conductor: Bridge Records 9014. http://www.bridgerecords.com/
Elliott Carter dedicated today’s composition, In Sleep, In Thunder, to his friend, Robert Lowell, who had died in 1978, four years before what Lloyd Schwartz refers to as “Carter’s ‘musical portrait’ of him for tenor and fourteen instruments.” Schwartz adds: “Carter chose six of Lowell’s ‘American Sonnets’ for his cycle: ‘three primarily about the poet’s personal relationships, and three about his crises of religious belief.’” (Liner Notes)

“’What attracted me about these texts,’” according to Carter, “’were their rapid, controlled changes from passion to tenderness, to humor, and to a sense of loss. The music reflects these very human qualities and their constantly shifting qualities. . . . I have tried to write music of continuous but coherent change, which to me is the most evocative kind.’” (Liner Notes)

The six Lowell poems Carter selected to write his song cycle for are “Dolphin,” “Across the Yard: La Ignota,” “Harriet,” “Dies Irae,” “Careless Night,” “ and “In Genesis.” The term “La Ignota” in the title of the second song means “the stranger,” or “the unknown person.” In my opinion, the music works the poems beautifully, and both are worthy of very careful attention. The mind must be awake during the experience.

Time: 11. Dolphin 03’04
12. Across the Yard: La Ignota 03’15
13. Harriet 03’34
14. Dies Irae 03’16
15. Careless Night 04’30
16. In Genesis 02’30

Total time: 20’31

CD 2: Bands 7 – 25: György Kurtág http://www.universaledition.com/truman/en_templates/view.php3?f_id=145&spr=en ! (*1926, Logoj, Romania): Signs, Games, and Messages for strings (1989- in progress): Orlando Trio: Hiromi Kikuchi, violin; Ken Hakii, viola; Stefan Metz, ‘cello. ECM New Series 1730 B00000212-02 BK02. http://www.ecmrecords.com/(*

In this week’s New Yorker, Alex Ross writes a brilliant review of the recent premiere of John Adams opera A Flowering Tree and of one of the concerts dedicated to the works of György Kurtág in Vienna on the occasion of the great composer’s 80th birthday. Here are a few of the words Ross writes about Kurtág: “György Kurtág . . . at the age of eighty, is among the last survivors of the original avant-garde generation. He is a composer of neither/nor – neither ruthlessly new in his methods nor remotely traditional, neither atonal nor tonal. Every description of his work has to be qualified and qualified again: it is compressed but not dense, lyrical but not sweet, dark but not dismal, quiet but not calm. At first hearing it suggests a cloistered, hermetic space, yet it is ventilated with many hidden influences, and has deep roots in the folk music of the Balkans.” (The New Yorker, December 4, 2006, p.103)

Kurtág’s Signs, Games, and Messages for strings, which he began to compose in 1989 and which, as far as I know, is still “in progress,” comprises 19 relatively short pieces for string trio. Thomas Bösche (transl. by Eileen Walliser-Schwartzbart) has this to say in his liner notes: Signs, Games, and Messages for strings . . . contains solo compositions for violin, viola, and ‘cello; duos and trios in various combinations; and even a string sextet. The pieces are diary-like in character, but . . . the fact that they are personal messages and ‘in memoriam compositions’ is more than a superficial trait; it says something about the nature of these signs and games, and equally about their creator.”

Time: 7. Virágaz ember, Mijakónak trio 01’31
8. Im Volkston (Népdalféle) vl 00’55
9. Hommage à J. S. B. trio 01’16
10. Zank – Kromatisch vl 01’08
11. The Carenza Jig vl 00’49
12. Ligatura Y trio 02’50
13. Jelek (Signs) I vla 00’50
14. Jelek Signs) II vla 00’36
15. Klagendes Lied vla 02’12
16. Jelek (Signs) III trio 00’47
17. Eine Blume für Zsigmondy trio 03’06
18. In memoriam Tamás Blum vla 02’13
19. Perpetuum mobile A vl 00’50
20. Perpetuum mobile B trio 01’22
21. Hommage à John Cage ‘c 01’52
22. Schatten ‘c 00’45
23. Jelek (Signs) I ‘c 00’59
24. János Pilinszky: Gérard de Nerval ‘c 01’28
25. Virág as ember, Mijakónak trio 01’30

Total time: 26’59

Running time: 47’22

CD 3: Bands 1-4: Witold Lutosławski (1913, Warsaw – 1994, Warsaw) http:hhtp://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/lutoslawski.html : Symphony No.1 (1941- 47): Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra; Antoni Wit, conductor. Naxos CD 8.554283. http://www.naxos.com/naxos/uk/naxos_uk.htm

Witold Lutosławski began his Symphony No.1 in 1941, during very turbulent times in Warsaw. It took him until 1944 to complete that movement and until 1947 to finish the other three. His Symphony No. 1 “is scored for a full orchestra that includes a large percussion section, with tam-tam, tubular bells, xylophone and celesta, a harp, and a piano . . . Lutosławski regarded this symphony as marking a closing stage in his career in a musical language that seemed [to him] unlikely to lead anywhere.” [Liner Notes] There is no reason we should not enjoy it, however. Be forewarned: the opening bars will certainly wake you up if you have been dozing!

Time: 1. Allegro giusto 05’31
2. Poco adagio 09’51
3. Allegretto misterioso 04’31
4. Allegro vivace 05’18

Total time: 25’15

Running time: 72’37

CD 4: Band1: Peter Schat http://www.peterschat.nl/ http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=199161935, Utrecht – 2003, Amsterdam (?): On Escalation, Op.18 (1968) for 6 solo percussion players and orchestra: Residentie Orkest, Richard Dufallo, conductor: Peter Schat – Complete Works Boxed set : NM Classics NM 92133. http://www2.rnw.nl/mu/catalog/musiccds/classical/NM91233

Peter Schat dedicated our final selection today to Che Guevara. “He composed On Escalation in 1968 for six solo percussionists and twenty-six instrumentalists . . . [it] is explicitly political in tone and subject matter. Schat borrowed the title from a book by the American physicist Herman Kahn on the possibility of nuclear war. Schat’s composition also centers on war, but he places the phenomenon of ‘conflict’ arising from an unhealthy balance of power in a musical frame. On Escalation was a Communist piece,’ Schat later said. ‘The musicians usurp the conductor’s authority.’ The coup is staged as follows: The twenty-six instrumentalists’ score, which is notated and conventionally conducted, is gradually undermined by the controlled improvisations of the six percussionists. An ‘escalating’ climax on the theme of Ravel’s Bolero swells in the orchestra, which despite its great strength in number is no match for the percussionists, who take over the conductor on page 18 of the score ('Conductor dismissed,’ ‘percussionists conducting’) . . . [I]t is the political dimension that is most compelling. The work was premiered at a ‘political demonstration and experimental concert’ at the Royal Carré Theater in Amsterdam in 1968. Fearing riots, some 200 police officers cordoned off the theater as a precautionary measure.” (Liner Notes by Bas van Putten, 23-24)

Time: 1. On Escalation 19’01

Total running time: 91’38

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s In Sleep, In Thunder; György Kurtág’s Signs, Games, and Messages, Witold Lutosławki’s Symphony No.1; and Peter Schat’s On Escalation. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s program and that you will tune in next week when our telephone guest will be composer Gadi Kaplan. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf Noon -2:00PM Eastern Time: 061127: WJFF 90.5fm, Jeffersonville, NY www.wjffradio.org

2006-11-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 27 November 2006
061127

Today’s Selections:

1. Elliott Carter Night Fantasies 21’00
1a. Carter in conversation with Rosen (time permitting) 06’40
2. John Harbison November 19, 1828 16’38
3. Ned Rorem Piano Concerto in Six Movements 24’43
George Rochberg Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra 18’32
5. Veljo Tormis Kullervo’s Message 10’36
Total time: 91’29
(w/ 1a: 98’09)

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.
As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1, Band 4: Elliott Carter (*1908, NYC)
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790: Night Fantasies (1980): Charles Rosen, pianist. Bridge Records 9090. http://www.bridgerecords.com/

Pianist Charles Rosen http://www.owenwhitemanagement.com/pianists/Charles-Rosen/ has this to say in his liner notes regarding today’s Elliott Carter selection:
Night Fantasies [1980] is full of melody, even some long melodic lines, but it has no themes, and no motifs – no tune is ever played twice. Textures recur, however, and so do certain intervals and chords, each with a recognizable periodic interval of its own. The rhythms belong to two sequences, which are almost incompatible with each other: the basic ration is 24 to 25; we hear rhythms that begin together, draw gradually apart, and then return. This means that the rhythm of the bar lines can never be heard in this piece, and that gives the work its impression of improvisation and freedom. In its variety of moods and expression – lyric, satiric, brutal, dramatic, contemplative, and light-hearted – it is perhaps the most extraordinary large keyboard work written since the death of Ravel.

In my opinion, for what it is worth, the effect of Night Fantasies is a kind of musical cubism, is such a term be at all meaningful.

Following our broadcast of Night Fantasies, we will play a short, six minute conversation between Carter and Rosen which expands upon Rosen’s remarks.

Time: 4. Night Fantasies 21’00

CD 2, Bands 4-7: John Harbison http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Harbison-John.htm (*1938, Orange, NJ): November 19, 1828: Hallucination in Four Episodes for Piano and String Trio (1988): Atlanta Chamber Players: Paula Peace, Artistic Director, piano; Christopher Pulgrum, violin; Paul Murphy, viola; David Hancock, ‘cello. Conversations – A Twentieth Anniversary Salute to American Composers /http://www.mindspring.com/~acplayers/ : CM 20038.

I had the great pleasure of being introduced to John Harbison a year or so ago after a concert by the Cantata Singers of Boston, who had performed one of his pieces. One of these days, I hope to interview him.

The Liner notes (4,5) explain that "[t]he date which forms the title of this evocative work is the death of Franz Schubert."

John Harbison explains the four movements of November 19, 1828: Hallucination in Four Episodes for Piano and String Trio as follows:

Introduction: Schubert Crosses Into the Next World. The trumpets of death are heard three times. Schubert begins his journey haunted by sounds which are not his music, but pertain to his music in disturbing ways.

Suite: Schubert Finds Himself in a Hall of Mirrors . . . In the hall of mirrors, music sounds in a manner previously unknown to Schubert: everything is played back immediately upside down.

Rondo: Schubert Recalls a Rondo Fragment From 1816. Emblematic of a storehouse of still-to-be explored ideas, needing centuries more, the short fragment which begins this rondo is the only one in this piece composed by Schubert in his first life.

Fugue: Schubert Continues the Fugue Subject (S-C-H-U-B-E-R-T) Which Sechter Assigned Him. Shortly before his death, Schubert went to the theorist [Simon] Sechter to work on a very specific problem pertaining to the tonal answer of the fugue subject, important to Schubert in the composition of his masses. Sechter, well aware that he was teaching the most extraordinary student who ever came for a lesson, concluded by assigning Schubert a fugue subject on his own name. Schubert was unable to undertake the task; he died about a week later, on November 19, 1828.

Time: 4. Intro 02’56
5. Suite 04’35
6. Rondo 04’31
7. Fugue 04’34
Total time: 16’38
Running time: 37’38

CD 3, Bands 2-7: Ned Rorem (*1923, Richmond, IN) http://www.nedrorem.com/: Piano Concerto in Six Movements (1969): Jerome Lowenthal, piano; The Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester, conductor. First Edition Encores – Music of Ned Rorem: Albany Records/ Troy 047 http://www.albanyrecords.com/.

Robert McMahan has this to say about Ned Rorem, whose Piano Concerto in Six Movements (1969) we will broadcast next:

"Almost alone among major talents of his generation, this gifted product of the Curtis Institute and Juilliard has never subscribed to the passing of the Romantic vision from the contemporary scene."

Rorem himself writes about his Piano Concerto in Six Movements (1969):

Each of the six movements of the concerto suggests either a kind of action or a kind of sound: Strands, Fives, Whispers, Sighs, Lava, Sparks . . . Beyond what may be evoked by these names, I am reticent to add much. Strands, a long, slow opener, is so-called because precisely it’s made up of strands: the piano plants a loud, hard seed from which orchestral tendrils emerge, one by one, until they form a Medusa’s knot which is never unraveled (as, say a fugue would normally be) but rather resolves itself through sheer exhaustion. In the entire first movement, the pianist uses only his right hand. The first movement is about six minutes long, during which the soloist’s fingers, weaving a long, long, stand, never leave the keyboard. Fives [the second movement] is loud and fast and various combinations of quintuple figures. Whispers [the third movement] is soft and fast and meant to sound like its title. Sighs [the fourth movement, is] long and slow, a theme with variations. [The penultimate movement] Lava, murky and slow, serves as an introduction to [the last movement,] Sparks which is, expectedly, a glittering finale. (Quoted by Robert McMahan in his Liner Notes)

You will, perhaps, forgive me if I detect a certain petulance – or, at least, impatience in Rorem’s tone of voice! He is certainly sui generis! I had the experience of interviewing him several years ago, and he certainly gave me a run for my money! More important, he is a brilliant composer, whose memoirs have certainly made him famous in ways that are not necessarily completely musical!

Time:

2. Strands 03’41
3. Fives 02’55
4. Whispers 03’36
5. Sighs 06’41
6. Lava 02’59
7. Sparks 04’42
Total time: 24’43
Running time: 62’21

CD 4, Band 1: George Rochberg http://www.presser.com/Composers/info.cfm?Name=GEORGEROCHBERG (1918, Paterson, NJ – 2005, Bryn Mawr, PA): Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra (1983): Joseph Robinson, oboe; Zubin Mehta, conductor, New York Philharmonic. New World Records NW 335-2 http://www.newworldrecords.org/.
George Rochberg was another extremely opinionated composer who began his career as a serialist, but famously rejected atonal music after the untimely death of his son, and who, in my experience, never missed an opportunity to denounce 12 tone music.
Michael Walsh provides this information about Rochberg’s brilliant Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra:

Although [the Concerto] contains no overt quotations from earlier music in its four continuous, thematically linked movements, there are, inevitably, recollections. The oboe’s sad, plangent musings in the first sections bring to mind the desolate lied of the English horn in Act III of Tristan, while the rolling-gaited march of the third part is reminiscent of Prokofiev. Elsewhere, the dense textures and sudden emotional outbursts invite comparison with the berg of the Three Pieces for Orchestra.
The solo writing is deliberately unvirtuosic, relying instead on the performer’s tone and command of musical line. Rochberg has said: ‘I have made no effort to exploit the extremes of the oboe because, as I see it, the main reason for writing a piece is to say something, not to concentrate on the purely technical characteristics of an instrument.’ The effect is elegiac, but restrained. The lumbering sardonic march, recalled near the concerto’s end; the indeterminacy of the closing measures; the overall sense of unease – these characteristics indicate a disquiet in the concerto’s soul, and for the oboe there can be no peace. (Liner Notes, 4-5)

Time: 1. Concerto 18’32

Running time: 80’53

CD 5, Band 16: Veljo Tormis (*1930, Harjumaa, Estonia) http://www.emic.kul.ee/heliloojad/veljo_tormis.htm: Kullervo’s Message (1994): The Hilliard Ensemble: David James, countertenor; Rogers Covery-Crump, tenor; John Potter, tenor; Gordon Jones, baritone. A Hilliard Songbook – New Music for Voices – ECM New Series 1614/15 – 78118-21614 –2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECM_%28record_label1%29.
Somewhat surprisingly, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Classical Musicians lacks an entry for Veljo Tormis, a rather wonderful Estonian composer whose works go beyond his native land to the all the Finno-Ugrian cultures. I am grateful to the Hilliard Ensemble for introducing Tormis’s music to me in its 2-CD set called New Music for Voices.
Here’s what the composer, Veljo Tormis, has to say about our final selection for the day, Kullervo’s Message:

Kullervo’s Message is composed using an episode from the 36th canto of the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala *1835/49), translated into English by W. F. Kirby (1907). The music employs some motifs from Karelian folk tunes.

The Kalevala and the Baltic-Finnic epic songs in general reflect an ancient mythical perception of the world. They contain eternal patterns of human relationships, ethical concepts and archetypal characters. Kullervo’s name is associated with the most tragic events of the epic and symbolizes revenge and remorse.

Kullervo is born in the times of fierce fighting between the two hostile kinsfolk. He survives by a miracle, is sold into slavery, becomes a victim of violence. Defiance and hatred mount in him against the whole world. He kills his slave mistress in ignorance, disgraces his own sister, and, driven by guilt, takes his own life. But first he takes his revenge on the humiliators and offenders.

Our story depicts the episode in which Kullervo rides to fight them, blowing the buck-horn. On the way, he is reached, one by one, by messengers telling him about the death of his father, brother, and sister. Only the news of his mother’s death arouses his frozen compassion. His mother was the only one who had promised to lament for Kullervo and to forgive him everything.

Time: 16. Kullervo’s Message 10’36

Total running time: 91’29

(Total running time with Carter-Rosen conversation: 98’09

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies; John Harbison’s November 19, 1828; Ned Rorem’s Piano Concerto in Six Movements; George Rochberg’s Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra; and Veljo Tormis’s Kullervo’s Message. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed these selections and that you will tune in next Monday for more great 20th and 21st century classical music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf 060501

2006-05-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
1 May 2006

060501

Today's program will be dedicated almost entirely to part of an interview we conducted with Elliott Carter towards the end of January. I hope to have the rest of the interview ready for broadcast next Monday, 060508.

I will post the particulars of the works we play today by Tuesday, 060502.

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, 060424

2006-04-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 24 April 2006

060424

Today’s Selections:

1. Edward Burlingame Hill Stevensoniana Suite No., Op. 24 21’09
2. Phillip Kent Bimstein Half-Moon at Checkerboard Square 08’21
3. Olivier Messiaen Quatuor pour la fin du temps 50’03
4. Lewis Spratlan Night Music 10’19
5. Tod Dockstader Luna Park (excerpt) 03’39
Total time of music: 93’31
Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

First, my thanks to Edie Downs for pinch hitting for me while I selfishly took a short vacation in Bangkok, where I reveled in the fact that I cannot read or understand Thai, and thus had no idea of anything that was going on in the rest of the world during my sojourn. Thanks also to Christine, John, and Kurt for covering me in other areas. Working with these and many others at WJFF are what makes this such a pleasant retirement for me.

CD 1: Bands 2,3,4,5: Edward Burlingame Hill (1872, Cambridge, MA – 1960, Francestown, NH): Stevensoniana Suite No. 1, Op. 24 (1916-17): The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Karl Krueger, conductor: American Tone Poems, Bridge Records CD 9190 http://www.bridgerecords.com/
The folks at Bridge Records in New Rochelle, NY, are one of the few recording groups who actually pay attention to contemporary "classical" music and who actually manage to record masterpieces of the past 106 years without, I imagine, realizing much of a profit from their enterprise. They have also been uncommonly generous in supplying us with their releases, and they made possible the interview two students and I conducted with Elliott Carter a month or so again, an interview that we are still editing rather feverishly, I must admit.
Their newest release, American Tone Poems, reaches back to the earlier part of the 20th century and provides us with compositions by four infrequently heard composers, Louis Coerne, Edward Burlingame Hill, Horatio Parker, and John Alden Carpenter, who, writes Malcolm MacDonald in his excellent liner notes, "all belonged to the generation of American composers who took their inspiration from the German and French music of their continental teachers[, and whose] reputations were made in the early years of the 20th century [inevitably to be] more or less discounted with the rise of a more aggressively ‘American’ school of composition promulgated by such various figures as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris[,] and Virgil Thomson. Moreover," continues MacDonald, "the truly revolutionary music of their near-contemporary, Charles Ives, tended to make such composers as [these] appear timid. Even though Hill and Carpenter made use of jazz in some of their works, Copland once described their adaptation of that resource as ‘more or less good-mannered,’ suggesting they remained hidebound by obsolete canons of taste."
What I find interesting about this short collection of tone poems is its reminder to all of us that the changes that occurred in early 20th century "classical" music were evolutionary as well as revolutionary. The entire music establishment didn’t suddenly simply abandon its grounding in the previous century no matter how startling such developments as serialism 12 tone music, aleatory music, and the Dada movement may have been.
Furthermore, as these pieces demonstrate, it is possible to enjoy the music "for its own sake, its skill[,] and fine culture.
Edward Burlingame Hill composed two orchestral suites based on works by Robert Louis Stevenson between 1916 and 1917. "The first movement is a March inspired by the poem ‘Bring the comb and play upon it,’ evoking a troop of children playing at soldiers and marching round the village." The second movement is a lullaby "whose basis is the poem ‘The Land of Nod,’ in which the child recounts his experiences in dream-land and reflects that he can never find the way back there during the day." The third movement, based on the poem "‘Where go the boats?’ is a poem about launching model boats on a river that will carry [the children] off to somewhere far away." And the last movement "is entitled ‘The Unseen Playmate,’ and is inspired by a touching poem from the section ‘The Child Alone,’ in which the child . . . invents an imaginary playmate and competitor to have company and competition."

Time: 2. March 04’27
3. Lullaby 04’41
4. Scherzo 05’58
5. The Unseen Playmate 06’03

Total time: 21’09

CD 2: Band 1: Phillip Kent Bimstein (*1947, Chicago) http://www.bimstein.com/html/bio.html: Half Moon at Checkerboard Mesa (1997): Stephen Caplan, oboe; synthesizer. A Tree in Your Ear: Musicians Showcase CD MS 1014 http://www.musiciansshocase.com/

In stark contrast to the Edward Burlingame Hill suite we just heard is our next selection, an unmistakably Phillip Kent Bimstein creation called Half Moon at Checkerboard Mesa, which Bimstein created in 1997. Some of our listeners may recall that Phillip Kent Bimstein, who was born in Chicago, but who relocated to Utah, was a guest on our program several years ago. Some listeners may even remember that the theme music of this program is taken from Bimstein’s unique composition, The Door.

A delightful iconoclast, Bimstein was certainly born into the right century for articulating his own musical idiosyncrasies. Here’s what he has to say about Half Moon at Checkerboard Mesa: "On a summer night several years ago, not far from my home in southern Utah, an unsuspecting group of frogs sang by a slickrock waterhole up a narrow side canyon in Zion National Park. Little did they know their voices would soon be heard on concert stages all across the world and on the Internet. And they certainly never expected to share the bill with chirping crickets, howling coyotes, and tuxedoed classical musicians.

"But I was hiding nearby and had stealthily placed a microphone and a digital recorder at the edge of the waterhole. I also recorded the sounds of coyotes, crickets, rocks, thunder, and rushing waters of the Virgin River. After transferring these natural sounds into my computer, I shaped and arranged them on my synthesizer keyboard. Finally I orchestrated the sounds into a piece of music for tape, and wrote an accompanying score for solo oboe to interact with the natural sounds." (Liner Notes)

The results are as follows. Stephen Caplan is the oboist.

Time: 1. Half Moon 08’21
Running time: 29’30
CD 3: Entire: Olivier Messiaen (1908, Avignon – 1992, Clichy): Quartet for the End of Time (1941): Hugutte Fernandez, violin; Guy Deplus, clarinet; Jacques Neilz, ‘cello; Marie-Madeleine Petit, piano. Erato CD 4509-91708-2

If ever there was a composer whom I would have given almost anything to interview, his name was Olivier Messiaen. Widely heralded as one of the finest composers of any century, Messiaen has had a remarkable influence on many composers of the second half of the 20th century, and in recent years, he has become the subject of some very fine publications. Rebecca Rischin’s book, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet hit the book stores in December, 2003. Alex Ross’s superb review of the March, 2004, performance of the piece at Carnegie’ Weill Hall, appeared in his Musical Events column under the title "Revelation" in the March 22, 2004 issue of the New Yorker. If you have an opportunity to read this beautifully written succinct piece about one of the best known compositions of World War 2, I highly recommend it to you. Ross notes that at the première of the piece in "an unheated space in Barrack 27" of Stalag VIII A, in Görlitz, Germany, where Messiaen had been incarcerated since 1939, " [s]itting in the front row – and shivering along with the prisoners – were the German officers of the camp." (96). Ross asks how Messiaen "understood [the] eerie phrase, . . . ‘There shall be time no longer,’" and answers it in two ways: "First, it had for him a precise musical meaning. By 1941, [Messiaen] no longer wanted to hear time being beaten out by a drum – one, two, three, four; he had had enough of that in the war. Instead, he devised rhythms that expanded, contracted, stopped in their tracks, and rolled back in symmetrical patterns." Alex Ross adds, " . . . the end of time also meant an escape from history, a leap into an invisible paradise." (97). Amen to that!

The quartet is divided into 8 sections: Crystal Liturgy; Vocalise, for the Angel Announcing the End of Time; The Abyss of the Birds; Interlude; Praise to the Eternity of Jesus; Dance of Wrath, for the Seven trumpets; Tangle of Rainbows Announcing the End of Time; and In Praise of the Immortality of Jesus. It is a stunning piece whose structure at any given moment seems to be remarkably simple, yet, as Ross notes, "is heavenly to analyze but devilishly difficult to play." (97) As I listen to it, I am overwhelmed by the totality of the experience that adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts. We’ll hear Hugutte Fernandez, violin; Guy Deplus, clarinet; Jacques Neilz, ‘cello; Marie-Madeleine Petit, piano perform Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time on an Erato CD 4509-91708. As a final observation: I have this piece performed by several different groups. I always think I will alternate them, but this is the performance I like the best. The piece takes 50 minutes.

Time: 1. Liturgy 02’31
2. Vocalise 05’25
3. Abyss of the Birds 09’04
4. Interlude 01’40
5. Praise to the Eternity of Jesus 08’52
6. Dance of Wrath 06’18
7. Tangle of Rainbows 07’29
8. Praise to the Immortality of Jesus 07’53

Total time: 50’03

What a glorious piece! Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

Running time: 79’33

CD 4: Band 9: Lewis Spratlan (*1940, Miami): Night Music (1990): Veronica Kadlubkiewicz, violin; Michael Sussman, clarinet; John P. Kelley, percussion. Gaspar0 Records, GSCD- 226.
One of the first composers I ever interviewed on Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf was Lewis Spratlan, a professor at Amherst College since 1970, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2000, and a very likeable fellow indeed. I had the privilege of meeting Lew last month at Lucius Weathersby’s memorial service in Springfield, MA. He was one of a contingent of Amherst College faculty, staff, and students who came to pay homage to Luc, and the fact that both he and I were there afforded us the opportunity to meet, finally, and to chat briefly. Professor Spratlan will retire this June after 36 years on the music faculty. I plan to see him for a longer visit later in the spring when I return to Amherst for my 45 (yipes!) reunion. Here are his comments on the piece we are about to hear, Night Music:

"Night Music, whose shadow falls in among the long ones of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the Chopin Nocturnes, Martino’s Notturno, and, perhaps most evidently, Debussy’s Clair de lune, attempts to expand the metaphorical reach of the genre. . . On the largest scale, there is a shift from a cool, abstract world into one of intense, almost personal relationships among the players – a gradual discovery and passionate playing-out of mutual influence and dependence. The deepening night reveals, not obscures." Composed in 1990, it is dedicated to violinist Veronica Kadlubkiewicz.

Time: 9. Night Music 10’19

Running time: 89’52

CD 5: Band 1: Tod Dockstader (*1932, ?): Luna Park (excerpt) (1961) – trio for an oscillator and two people laughing. From A to Z, Starkland ST 203.

It is no doubt fitting that we end today’s program with an excerpt from Tod Dockstader’s Luna Park. Tod Dokstader, one learns, comes to these compositions by way of sound engineering, which he taught himself after a career in "cutting picture and sound for animated cartoons (including ‘Mr. Magoo,’ and ‘Gerald McBoing-Boing’)." The composer writes, "[This excerpt is from a work] made in the ‘classical period of electronic music. Before Keyboards [sic]. The excerpt from Luna Park, which we will hear in a moment, is a trio for an oscillator and two people laughing. Is it music? Is Bimstein’s piece music? What is music?

Time: 1. Luna Park 03’39

Total running time: 93’31

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Edward Burlingame Hill’s Stevensoniana Suite No. 1; Phillip Kent Bimstein’s Half-Moon at Checkerboard Mesa; Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time; Lewis Spratlan’s Night Music; and an excerpt from Tod Dockstader’s Luna Park. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week when we will broadcast more great 20th and 21st century music and again imply, if not ask, the question, "What is music?" Until then, this is Gandalf, thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf 060403

2006-04-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 03 April 2006

060403

Today’s Selections:

1. Frank Zappa: Greggery Peccary 21’17
2. Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach) Oratorio 22’16
3. Frank Zappa The Black Page Suite 08’25
4. Edgard Varèse Ionisation 02’26
5. John Zorn Memento Mori 28’57
6. Enrique Granados Goyescas – Quejas
ò la maya y el ruiseñor 06’53

Total time: 91’14

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Band 10: Frank Zappa (1940, Baltimore – 1993, LA?)

http://www.hotshotdigital.com/WellAlwaysRemember.3/FrankZappaBio.html; http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/zappa_frank/bio.jhtml The Adventures of Greggery Peccary (ca. 1977): Ensemble Modern; Jonathan Stockhammer, conductor; Omar Ebrahim, voice; David Moss, voice. Ensemble Modern Plays Frank Zappa – Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions: RCA Red Seal BMG 82876-59842-2

If there was ever a 20th century composer who embraced and contained the spirit of freedom to compose that 20th century music came to define it was surely Frank Zappa. According to hotshot digital’s biography of Zappa, this unique figure claimed that "his life and musical tastes changed in 1954, when he read a Look magazine story that included information about Edgard Varèse." Once Zappa found a copy of The Complete Works of Edgar Varèse, Vol. One, "he embraced its avant-garde dissonance, though his parents would let him play it only in his room." Of course, Zappa’s interests were extraordinarily wide and deep – he is supposed to have remarked that he felt "’stuck between the slide rule and the gutbucket,’ and much of his career could be seen as an attempt to reconcile these two extremes." When I was much younger, my even younger cousins, who first brought Zappa to my attention, revered him for his crazy rock-and-roll songs. But Frank Zappa was sui generis, and I doubt we’ll see his likes again soon. Today’s offering, The Adventures of Greggery Peccary, is referred to, by Terry Bozzio, http://www.terrybozzio.com/stu-tan.html, as "a mini-oratorio with complex classical music, amazing percussion . . . , and an incredibly funny plot and story line with several voice characters. It was arranged in a musical ‘collage’ style, inundated with sound effects, movie score/Broadway show type incidental music, and narration, edited together in a machine gun rapidity that only Frank could achieve.’" I suppose that Peter Schickele comes to mind here, but the two are really not comparable except insofar as they both create irresistible satire. I could easily have decided to feature The Adventures of Greggery Peckery on our Music of the Stage show, an indication of how complex crossover music has become - and how pliable.

Barry Miles, in his biography, Zappa, refers to Warner Brother’s release of Studio Tan, which contained The Aventures of Greggery Peccary "a 20-minute ballet in the tradition of Billy the Mountain . . . which became a firm favorite among Zappa’s new generation of admirers, though older Mothers (of Invention) fans dismissed it as yet more trivial nonsense." ( Miles, Barry. Zappa – A Biography. Grove Press, New York, 1st ed.: 266-7).

Enough. Let’s just enjoy this wacked out piece of post-modern? music by one of the truly innovative composers of the last century, Frank Zappa!

Time: 10. Greggery Peccery 21’17

CD 2, 2nd CD: Band 2: Peter Schickele (aka P.D.Q Bach): (*1935, Ames, Iowa): Oratorio, "The Seasonings", S. ½ TSP. Lorna Haywood, soprano; Marlene Kleinman, alto; John Ferrante, tenor; William Woolf, bass; The Okay Chorale, John Nelson, director. Royal P.D.Q Bach Festival Orchestra; Jorge Mester, conductor. Vanguard CD 2-719/720

Well, one humorist suggests another, and as I have already mentioned Peter Schickele in our first offering, it seem fair to inflict one of P.D.Q Bach’s pieces on you before you get too comfortable. I had the great privilege of interviewing Peter Schickele a couple of years ago. I’ll refrain from making further remarks, as Schickele provides his own introduction to our next piece. Anything more I might say would be inappropriate and irrelevant, not to mention irreverent!!

Time: 4. Oratorio 22’16

Running time: 44’33

CD 3: Band 2: Frank Zappa (1940, Baltimore – 1793, LA): The Black Page Suite (?), Arr. by Benedict Weisser, 2005): Calfax Reed Quintet, Oliver Boekhorn, oboe; Ivar Berix, clarinet; Raaf Hekkema, saxophone; Jelte althuis, bass clarinet; Algan Wesly, bassoon http://www.calefax.nl/home_en.asp?lang=en discovering dutch ensembles [sic] Radio Nederland Wereldomroep.

Back to Frank Zappa. Here are five of Zappa’s pieces arranged for reed quintet by the American-Dutch composer Benedict Weisser, pieces "whose freakish yet tuneful style would most likely have appealed to its creator. . . . "The liner notes continue, "Zappa’s unruly, satirical music was boycotted by most American radio stations, but in the late 1880s, he was hailed as the messiah of crossover music by contemporary music celebrities such as Pierre Boulez. Zappa’s mixture of jazz, blues, rock, and modernist styles attracted an entirely new public to modern classical music, interested more in its energy and drive than in sophisticated compositional techniques. Zappa himself called traditional classical music ‘warmed up death,’ and with his bent for originality, he’d never play a composition twice [in the same way . . . , an attitude perfectly suited to the Calefax Reed Quintet."

The five pieces Benedict Weisser arranged for this group are: "The Black Page," "No. 7," "No. 6 (Jumbo Go Away); No. 9; Interlude from Fembot in a Wet T-shirt Contest.

Time: 2. Zappa 08’25

Running time: 52’58

CD 4: Band 10: Edgard Varèse (1883, Paris – 1965, NY)
http://www.sfsymphony.org/templates/composer.asp?nodeid=199&strchar=T: Ionisation ((1929-31): ASKO Ensemble, Riccardo Chailly, conductor. London Boxed Set 289 460 208-2.
I mentioned earlier that Edgard Varèse exerted a great influence on Frank Zappa. The liner notes from the piece we just played, The Black Page Suite, include this interesting anecdote: "From the start, [Zappa’s] musical outlook transcended traditional boundaries. To test potential friends, he’d play them Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking Ionisation; if they considered it ‘nonsense,’ he’d kick them out."

"Ionisation is almost certainly the first work, and probably the most successful, to explore the structural value of all the non-pitch qualities of sound without electronic means. But it is also full of evocative qualities which stimulate the listener’s imagination. This union of structural metamorphosis and the suggestion of mystery and drama is a characteristic of Varèse’s music." (Liner Notes) The piece is very short, running only about 2 1/3rd minutes.

Time: 2nd CD, 10: Ionisation 02’26

Running time: 55’24

CD 5: Band 15: John Zorn (*1953, NY): Memento Mori (1992): The Zorn Quartet: Joyce Hammann and Mark Feldman, violins; Lois Martin, viola; Erik Friedlander, ‘cello. Tzadik CD TZ.

John Zorn’s Memnto Mori, according to his own notes, is an intensely emotional and complexly hermetic work that continues to defy comprehension by most listeners. I feel that I have come upon something really new here, and, if you let it, it will take you by the hand on a unique and emotional journey to the inner depths of a place you’ve never been to before. My predilection for non-fiction, biography, and interviews over fiction – poetry to prose is reflected in the autobiographical nature of the piece, largely about lost love and the loneliness of a scholar’s existence. . . . I feel that all of my pieces are in some way at least twenty-five percent autobiographical. At the highest level, life and art are the same, just as there is no true dividing line between form and content. The ultimate goal: truth and beauty."

There is no doubt that Zorn is experimenting here; he moves between the kind of music one expect to hear on a Bang on a Can recording and slightly more tonal sections that appear more modern than post-modern. There is no doubt that listening to Memento Mori is something of a roller coaster ride that will exhilarate, frighten, annoy, and relieve you, although not, perhaps, in any fixed order. If you’ve got the guts, hang on!

Time: 15. Memento Mori 28’57

Running time: 84’21

CD 6: Band 9: Enrique Granados y Campiña (1867, Lérida – 1916, English Channel): Goyescas: Quejas ó la maya y el ruiseñor (1911): Gabriela Montero, piano. EMI Classics 724355 8039 2 4.
Pianist Gabriela Montero writes of the piece we’ll end today’s program with: "Enrique Granados was an accomplished pianist, and the six pieces in his masterpieces, Goyesdas, embody, alongside Albéniz’s Iberia, the quintessential Spanish music for piano." Montero plays one of those six pieces on this CD, Quejas ó la maya y l ruiseñor.

Time: 9. Goyescas 06’53

Total running time: 91’14

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Frank Zappa’s Greggery Peccary; Peter Schickele’s Oratorio; Frank Zappa’s The Black Page Suite; Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation; Frank Zappa’s Memento Mori; and Enrique Granados’ Goyescas, Quejas ó la maya y el ruiseñor. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week, when we will archive our interview with the late Lucius Weathersby and his friend and mentor, Alberto Patron. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf 060327

2006-03-25T16:12:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 27 March 2006
060327

Today’s Selections:

1. Lucius Weathersby Spiritual Fantasy 04’16
2. Lucius Weathersby The Martyrs of Torrington 06’31
3. Aulis Sallinen Winter Was Hard 01’40
4. John Wyre Marubatoo 13’05
5. Jan Rokus van Roosendael Saul and David 20’18
6. Tigran Mansurian String Quartet No. 1 22’34
7. Benjamin Britten Lachrymae 16’28
8. Karel Husa Deux Preludes 09’03

Total time: 93’55

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

I want to thank Edie Downs for stepping in and taking over this program last Monday so that I could travel to Springfield, MA, and deliver a eulogy at a memorial service for Lucius Weathersby, who died on St. Patrick’s Day after suffering a massive stroke. If you are interested in learning more about this incredible composer, organist, musician, and teacher. You are invited to go to the WJFF website and then to my blog.

CD 1: Band 8: Lucius Weathersby (1968, Houston – 2006, Springfield, MA): Spiritual Fantasy (1997): Lucius Weathersby, 1864 "Father" Willis organ. Albany Records. CD Troy 440.

Band 10: Lucius Weathersby: The Martyrs of Torrington (?) (Toccata spiritoso): Lucius Weathersby, 1864 "Father" Willis organ. Albany Records. CD Troy 440.

Let’s begin our program with two pieces Lucius Weathersby composed and performed on the "Father" Willis organ, which was built in 1864 and which resides in St. Michael & All Angels Church in Great Torrington, Devon, England. Lucius, who graduated from Dillard University with a B.A. in both music and German in 1990, earned his Masters in Music with honors at The University of Northern Iowa in 1992. He was a professor at Dillard for many years; he became Artist-in-Residence at Amherst College last fall after the hurricane all but destroyed the campus of Dillard University, in New Orleans. He leaves a son, Lucius Curtis Weathersby, who was born in 1999. He also leaves an enormous number of utterly bereft friends.

I do not know the date of composition of The Martyrs of Torrington, but the liner notes tell us that the piece "was inspired by the history of the church in which this recording was made. On February 16, 1646, during the English Civil War, the town was taken over by the Parliamentary New Model Army led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. The church was blown up and 200 Royalists inside perished. This work is in memoriam to those people." As you listen to both these pieces, Spiritual fantasy and The Martyrs Torrington, you will hear one of Luc’s many, many talents: his incredible ability to play the organ.

Time: 8. Spiritual Fantasy 04’16
10. The Martyrs of Torrington 06’31

Total time: 10’47

CD 2: Band 1: Aulis Sallinen (1935, Salmi, Finland): Winter Was Hard (1969) (Arr. by Kronos): Kronos Quartet: David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello. San Francisco Girls Chorus, Elizabeth Appling, director; Earl L. Miller, reed organ; original text by Bo Carpelan. Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79181-2.

This past Saturday, The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance hosted the opening of a photography exhibit by freelance photographer Erik Freeland, whose works include scenes from Sullivan and Wayne Counties and New York City. Erik revealed that the inspiration for the name of the exhibit, Winter Was Hard, was a very short piece by the Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen, which was recorded by the Kronos Quartet on its eponymous CD produced in 1988. I thought it might be nice to broadcast this piece, which runs for under 2 minutes, and to remind our listeners that the exhibit at the DVAA does not end until April 14.

We’ll hear Kronos Quartet: David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello. San Francisco Girls Chorus, Elizabeth Appling, director; Earl L. Miller, reed organ; original text by Bo Carpelan. Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79181-2.

Time: 1. Winter Was Hard 01’40

Running time: 12’27

CD 3: Band 3: John Wyre (?) http://www.nexuspercussion.com/Nexus59.html: Marubatoo (1989?): Nexus: Bob Becker, solo marimba; William Cahn, marimba, Robin Engelman, crotales and songbells; Russell Hartenberger, vibraphone; John Wyre, solo bass marimba. http://www.nexuspercussion.com/Nexus2.html Music and the Arts CD R1296.
John Wyre, who plays the solo bass marimba in his composition, Marubatoo, was a member of the percussion group Nexus for 30 years until he resigned in 2002 in order "to devote more time to composing and exploring new horizons. The piece appears on a Music the Arts CD, a production company I’m not sure exists any more. Nevertheless, I thought that it might be fun to listen to a kind of moderate minimalist piece by a composer who must be at least as old as I am by now. Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ also appears on this CD.

Time: 3. Marubatoo 13’05

Running time: 25’32

CD 4: Bands 6-12: Jan Rokus van Roosendael (1960, Zwijndrecht, The Netherlands - 2005, Oostzaan (The Netherlands) http://www.classical-composers.org/cgi-bin/ccd.cgi?=roosendael; http://www.donemus.nl/componist.php?id=15&tab=info: David and Saul for harp and orchestra (1998). Godelieve Schrama, harp; Netherlands Radio chamber Orchestra, Michael Hamel, conductor. Radio Netherlands CD NM 92077.

Our next selection is an unusual piece for harp and orchestra which, for reasons that I am not erudite enough to understand, but which have to do with its polyphonic construction, is not referred to as a "harp concerto." Jan Rokus van Roosendael, who was born in The Netherlands in 1960 and who died a young man in 2005, composed this piece, which he called David and Saul in 1998. Anthony Fiumara’s liner notes, translated by Iain Macintyre [sic] tell us that "All the voices have equal status, although the harp is accorded more solo space than the other instruments. ‘Each voice has its own individuality,’ claims Van Roosendael. ‘That actually makes polyphony the most biblical form: individuals that come together in a single harmonious entity.’ The composer refers to the seven-part David and Saul as a ‘musical drama.’ The music relates the biblical story of the first king of Israel, and his successor, David. In this programmatic work, David is, of course, represented by the harp. His pastoral string work – based by Van Roosendael on one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations – repeatedly provokes the wrath of the brass player, Saul. Woodwinds and strings form the . . . crowd, which is an integral part of every classical music drama. The strings side with David, while the woodwinds support Saul. In the first two parts, Van Roosendael introduces the rivals Saul and David in their respective themes. The third part is about their friendship: the brass is amiably muted. That changes in the fierce fourth and fifth parts, representing Saul’s jealousy and subsequent rage. Following a lament from David, Saul finally expresses his remorse." (11)

Time: 6. Saul 02’11
7. David 04’11
8. Friendship 03’01
9. Jealousy 03’00
10. Saul’s Madness 03’05
11. David’s Lament 02’57
12. Saul’s Repentance 01’46

Total time: 20’18

Running time: 45’40

CD 5: Bands 1,2,3: Tigran Mansurian (* 1939, Beirut) http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Mansurian.shtml: String Quartet No. 1 (1983/84): In Memory of David Chandschian; Rosamunde Quartett [sic]: Andreas Reiner and Simon Fordham, violin; Helmut Nicolai, viola; Anja Lechner, ‘cello. ECM New Series CD 1905 476 3052 (10) http://www.ecmrecords.com/.

Tigran Mansurian’s website tells us that the composer was born in 1939 in Beirut and moved, in 1947, to Armenia, where his family finally settled in 1956. "In a short time, he became one of Armenia’s leading leading composers, establishing strong creative relationships with such international composers and performers as Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, Valentin Silvestrov, and other significant 20th and 21st century names familiar to many of our listeners. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich (translated by Richard Evidon) suggests that Mansurian’s First String Quartet "already suggests a late work, yet it dates from 1983/84, when the composer – who was born in 1939 . . . – was hardly an older man. And yet, in the daughtsmanlike clarity of the structure, in the almost ascetic, unadorned, laconic quality of the lines, one may still identify stylistic features associated with ripe age (and unmistakable echoes of the silvery, translucent art of the elderly Richard Strauss)."

I think that you will enjoy this piece, which strikes me oddly as more mid-20th century than anything else.

Time: 1. Allegretto 08’59
2. Agitato 06’39
3. Maestoso 06’56

Total time: 22’34

Running time: 68’10

CD 6: Band 2: Benjamin Britten http://opera.stanford.edu/Britten/bio.html (1913, Suffolk, England – 1976, Aldeburgh): Lachrymae (1950/1976) Op. 48a: Lars Anders Tomter, viola; Norwegian Chamber Orchestra; Iona Brown, conductor. Virgin Classics CDC 5 45121 2.

Michael Oliver (Liner Notes) tells us that Benjamin Britten’s "mastery of variation technique is . . . [apparent] in [his] Lachrymae; its orchestrated version is his last completed original composition." Britten wrote the piece in 1950 for viola and piano, rewriting it in 1976, the year he died, by changing the keyboard part into a chamber orchestra score. "The subject [of the piece is John] Dowland’s sombre If my complains could passions move. . . . There are ten short variations, the sixth quoting another Dowland song, Flow my tears. . . . Because of its brevity, its quietness and perhaps its melancholy, Britten’s Lachrymae has been seldom performed since his death, but in its eloquence as well as its breathtaking skill, it is one of his masterpieces."

Time: 2. Lachrymae 16’28

Running time: 84’38

CD 8: Bands 1,2: Karel Husa (*1921, Prague) http://sai-national.org/phil/composers/khusa.html: Deux Preludes (1966): Quintet of the Americas: Sato Moughalian, flute; Edward R. Gilmore, clarinet; Laura Koepke, bassoon. New World records http://www.newworldrecords.org/.

On August 7, 2006, the great composer Karel Husa, who was our guest on Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, several years ago, will celebrate his 85th birthday. We will try to speak with him before that. He wrote our final piece, Deux Preludes, for flute, clarinet, and bassoon in 1966 for a commission by the Kappa Gamma Psi chapter of the national music fraternity at Ithaca College, where Husa taught after retiring from Cornell. Keith Powers writes, "The composer notes that, as with many of his works, in Deux Preludes, he set out to explore sonorities that were ‘not recommended. For instance everyone says that the clarinet sounds beautiful in the high and low ranges, but that you must avoid the middle range. I also challenged the traditional hierarchy of the wind trio. In some places, I give the bassoon the high part and have the flute play below." (Liner Notes)

We’ll hear members of the Quintet of the Americas: Sato Moughalian, flute; Edward R. Gilmore, clarinet; Laura Koepke, bassoon. New World records perform Karel Husa’s Deux Preludes. The name Laura Koepke is probably familiar to those of us who attend The Weekend of Chamber Music Concerts regularly.

Time: 1. Prelude 1 04’35
2. Prelude 2 04’28
Total time: 09’03

Total running time: 93’55

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Lucius Weathersby’s Spiritual Fantasy and The Martyrs of Torrington, 1646; Aulis Sallinen, Winter Was Hard; John Wyre’s Marubatoo; Van Roosendael’s David and Saul; Tigran Mansurian’s String Quartet No. 1; Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae; and Karel Husa’s Deux Preludes. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century "classical" music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Lucius Weathersby: Eulogy

2006-03-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

On Friday, March 17, 2006, my dear friend Lucius Weathersby died of a massive stroke which he had suffered two days earlier. He was 38 years old. I travelled to Springfield, MA, on Monday, March 20, to deliver a euolgy. I am posting the euolgy in case anyone who knew Luc is interested in reading it.

Lucius Weathersby Memorial Service
South Congregational Church
45 Maple Street
Springfield, MA 01105
060320

Reverend Peter Heinrichs, Professor Davenport, Mark McClelland, Family and Friends of Lucius Weathersby:

Perhaps Emily says it best with her patented mixture of irony, wit, despair, and hope:

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.

The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.

Some love affairs last for an entire lifetime; some last for only a moment or so. Sixty-six years have taught me that how people live out their love for each other is at least as important as how long they live it out.

Lucius Weathersby came into my life on January 17, 2005, after I had broadcast his performance of Kevin George’s Organ Suite on my weekly program devoted to 20th and 21st century "classical" music, a feature of our local grass roots, public radio station, WJFF, in Jeffersonville, NY.

Somehow, Lucius, who was still teaching African World Studies, Piano, Humanities, and other courses at Dillard University, where he had majored in music and in German as an undergrad, discovered that I had aired his performance, and he contacted me by phone. It didn’t take long for us to establish a friendship that only his death could have divided.

The first time we spoke, I asked him if he would consider appearing on my program, by telephone, as a guest artist and composer. In what I came to know as typically thoughtful of Lucius, he asked only that I combine the visit with an appearance by his friend, composer Alberto Patron, who was living in Pordenone, Italy, near Venice.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic about the possibilities, and we arranged for a two hour three way telephone visit among the three of us. The fact that I was actually able to forget that I am technologically disabled and set up the three way call still amazes me, but right on schedule, Lucius and Alberto’s voices beamed out over the airwaves and streamed over the Internet for a solid two hour visit.

We spent much of that program discussing Alberto Patron’s music, which he calls Aporetic music, and Lucius’s performance of it on the piano, using a CD entitled My Journey to the Aporetic Music as our source of music. Lucius’s performance was, as I already knew, more than wonderful; it was compelling, and the broadcast elicited more calls from satisfied listeners than I usually get in a month.

After the broadcast, Lucius and I engaged in a regular correspondence and finally met last April in New Jersey, where I drove to pick him up in order to attend a Master’s Degree clarinet recital at Tenri Cultural Institute in lower Manhattan.

The recital featured a chamber piece by Lucius that provided more evidence that here was a young man of great energy, great talent, and great promise. Everyone in attendance knew they were listening to something special when his piece was played, and they responded with the kind of applause reserved for the very best composers.

Shortly after Lucius returned to Dillard University to resume his teaching duties, he and I decided that we would work on a music festival devoted entirely to African and African-American "classical" composers, an event that would probably be in the offing by now, had not the demon hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

I intend do my utmost to bring about this series in his honor , perhaps at the brand new Bethel Woods Music Festival, recently built on the grounds of the 1969 Woodstock Festival in Bethel, NY, where the New York Philharmonic will perform some of its summer concerts. I welcome anyone who is interested in helping such a project become a reality.

Regardless of what the future may now bring, the winds of nature had their way and put our dream on hold, while Lucius scrambled to find a place to teach and earn a living wage. To their everlasting credit, two institutions of higher learning stepped up to the plate and hit home runs, if I may be permitted the metaphor: both Brown University, in Providence, and Amherst College, my own alma mater, offered him positions. He accepted the Amherst College offer and began his visiting Artist-in-Residence duties there during the fall semester.

I was, of course, delighted that Lucius would be living where I could get to see him occasionally; but I was even more pleased that he would become a presence among Amherst students who would discover that this talented teacher was also one of the kindest, most gentle, giving people they would ever cross paths with.

The moment I met Lucius in person, I knew that I was in the presence of the good pied piper, the musician who attracted young people and old because the music of his pen and the music of his life inevitably led all who came under his influence along paths that opened up more possibilities than they might have discovered otherwise.

Lucius was much more than a seductive personality: he was a unique individual with a song to sing to humanity; a love song that is as ageless as it is beautiful; as wise as it is compelling; as necessary as it is desirable.

Typically, the last email I received from Lucius, dated January 24th, was a mass mailing whose purpose was to inform his friends that he had just recorded a CD to benefit the musicians who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. There wasn’t a selfish bone in that man’s body. He affixed a post script to that message that read: "I want to go to Brown with you. Call me! I would also like to come up to see you soon." Alas! for the best laid plans of mortal beings!

Many of you who were fortunate enough to know Lucius Weathersby more intimately than I was able to know him will no doubt have your own memories of a talented musician, a beautiful human being, a loyal friend. I know that in the short period of time that I was privileged to be his friend, I grew to love him without reservation. When I learned that he had died, I broke down and wept – selfish tears, I admit – for the loss of a person whose life added many dimensions to my own, yet who looked for nothing special in return except for honest friendship.

Towards the beginning of the radio program that Lucius and Alberto appeared on, I asked Luc to talk about the relationship of composition to performance in his life. This is how he responded: "I feel that if you are not able to transmit to an audience to whom you are trying to get across a certain idea, then it’s dead. Why create if you cannot transmit? The purpose of creation is to share, and I make sure that whatever I can create – or the creation of others – I share with others. That’s the whole purpose." If a man’s worth can be gleaned from a gnomic statement, then "The purpose of creation is to share" can serve as Lucius Weathersby’s epithet.

Lucius, My Friend, it is true that I am gladder that you lived than I am sad that you left; but I am nonetheless sorely unhappy that I will not be able to put my arms around you once more and listen to your beautiful bass voice softly booming out songs of friendship and love to the world. As you begin your long journey back into memory, I will strive to respond to the inspiration you have given me as your gift and try to help along those ideals you cherished and lived for. Perhaps if we all live that way, the love affairs, short and long, small and great, that you entered into while you were alive will continue into the indefinite future.

Rest in peace, my beloved friend, Lucius. May your name always be for a blessing for all of us who knew and loved you.

(Immediately after I had delivered these words, I regretted not including the following sentiment: Lucius was one of the few people I have ever met about whom one could truly say, "He was never a stranger in a strange land."

I plan to rebroadcast my January, 2005, interview with Lucius Weathersby and his friend and mentor, Alberto Patron, in April, 2006.)

Bob Rosengard Amherst College ‘61
Host, Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Mondays, Noon – 2:00PM EST
President, WJFF Board of Trustees
WJFF
P.O. Box 546
Jeffersonville, NY 12748
www.wjffradio.org
wjff@wjffradio.org
845-482-4141
gandalf@bronzedragon5.com

2006-03-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 13 March 2006

060313

Today’s Selections:

1. Bright Sheng, Two Folk Songs 10’51
2. Hans Eisler, Kleine Sinfonie 10’47
3. Anton Webern, Quartet, Op. 28 07’45
4. Russell Woollen, Three Madrigals 13’00
5. Nino Rota, Cinque Pezzi Facili 08’33
(Traditional Air) 03’18
6. Peter Maxwell Davies, Violin Concerto 31’00
7. Kevin Volans, Walking Song 05’47

Total time: 90’48

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Bands 3,4: Bright Cheng (*1955, Shanghai): Two Folk Songs from Chinhai (1990): "Morningstar Lily," "A Pair of Mules": Emblems: The John Oliver Chorale; John Oliver, Music Director): Koch International Classics CD 3-7178-2H1.

Bright Sheng, who was born in Shanghai in 1955, "started piano lessons when he was five, but his musical education was seriously interrupted by the Cultural Revolution.: Because he was the grandson of an engineer who had been educated in America, Sheng and his family were considered "politically tainted," and he had a difficult time pursuing a musical career. Eventually, he found a temporary home with a provincial band in Tibet, which was far less interested in political "purity" than those closer to his root. Steven Ledbetter continues, in his liner notes: "There he worked almost entirely on his own as a pianist and timpanist with a dance company in Chinhai, the province that borders Tibet, and collected the folks songs used as the basis of the present composition" which we will hear shortly. He moved to New York in 1982 and has since been composer in residence at the Lyric Opera in Chicago. . . . John Oliver, then head of the Tanglewood vocal program . . . commissioned Two Folk Songs from Chinhai for his chorale in Boston.

As you listen to these two short pieces, you may be able to discern Sheng’s ability to combine his native Chinese tradition with his affinity for what Ledbetter calls "the masterpieces of Western music. "He has searched for his own musical voice by melding the two very different traditions in which he has been trained, producing a brightly colored and highly evocative language that makes an immediate appeal." (Liner notes).

Time: 4. Morningstar Lily 02’49
5. A Pair of Mules 08’02

Total time: 10’51

CD 2: Bands 6 – 9: Hanns Eisler (1898, Leipzig – 1962, Berlin): Kleine Sinfonie (1932): BBC Symphony Orchestra; Ilan Volkov, conductor. BBC Music, Vol 14, No. 7: BBC SSO.
By now, many listeners are somewhat familiar with the biographical highlights of Hanns Eisler, who was born in Leipzig at the very end of the 19th century; became a Marxist at an early age; studied with Schoenberg; fled Germany when the Nazis came into power, because it was doubly dangerous for a Jewish Marxist, a "degenerate composer" to stick around the Third Reich; collaborated with Berthold Brecht; settled in the US in 1938, where he wrote film scores; and was deported as a Communist by the McCarthy Un-American Activities Committee. Eisler relocated in East Germany and died in Berlin in 1962.

The liner notes tell us that Eisler’s Kleine Sinfonie "belongs to a period when he was reacting to the concepts of ‘high art’ and [was] deeply involved in works of political theater. . . . Eisler wanted to write a parody of a symphony: an un-sentimental, jun-bombastic piece, alluding to jazz and popular styles, but carefully crafted (‘full of bite and precision’)and embracing Schoenbergian 12-note technique and the rhythmic, vigorous style he called his ‘battle music.’ The music is pervaded by irony, and burlesque, but also by a sense of lament for lost certainties."

Time: 6. Theme and Variations 04’40
7. Allegro assai 01’59
8. Invention 01’42
9. Allegro 02’26

Total time: 10’47

Running time: 21’38

CD 3: Bands 21, 22, 23: Anton Webern (1883, Vienna – 1945, Mittersill): String Quartet, op. 28: Emerson String Quartet: Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker, violins; Lawrence Dutton, viola; David Finckel, ‘cello: Deutsche Grammophon CD 445-828-2.

Anton Webern worked on his final string chamber piece, his String Quartet, op. 28, between November 1936 and March 1938. The three movements, according to Paul Griffiths, can be regarded "as a set of variations with some elements of sonata form, a scherzo, and a fugue – though, as in all late Webern, the forms are multiplex."

Norman Lebrecht’s interesting The Book of Musical Anecdotes, reveals that Webern was interested in the development of the relatively new practice of psychoanalysis. He decided to consult with Alfred Adler in 1913 and writes, in a letter to Schoenberg, "Well then, yesterday I was for the second time with [Adler]. I just do not know what he is driving at. Yesterday, by means of a thousand questions, he tried to establish how much of the effeminate there is in me. Ah, what sense does all this make! . . .I go every day to Dr. Adler. I have to tell him everything, simply everything,. There is not much left that he does not know by now. From it all he concludes always the same thing: my spells of indisposition were a transference of the battleground from the real world into that of illness." (The Free Press, New York, 1985, 311.)
Webern, whatever his problems, exerted a significant influence on Boulez and Stockhausen.

Time: 21. Mässig 03’49
22. Gemächlich – Bewegt 01’45
23. Sehr fliessend 02’11
Total time: 07’45

Running time: 29’23

CD 4: Bands 10-12: Russell Woollen (1923, Hartford – 1994, Charlottesville, VA): Three Madrigals, Poetry by Elinor Wylie (1978): The American Camerata; John Stephens, conductor; Musikanten, Kerry Krebill, director. AmCam Recordings ACR-10311.

Russell Woollen, who was born in 1923 in Hartford, CT, was ordained into the Catholic priesthood in 1947 and joined the faculty of Catholic University in Washington D.C. as a professor of Romance Languages. He "later transferred into the then fledgling music department," (Liner notes) leaving the priesthood in 1964 (Baker’s, 1516).

Woollen composed the music to quite a few poems by the American poet Elinor Wylie in 1978, including the Three Madrigals that we are about to hear: "Velvet Shoes"; "Three Wishes"; and "Beauty." He evidently found in Wylie’s poems "an attitude and imagery which he liked tremendously." We’ll hear them performed by the American Camerata, John Stephens conducting; and Musikanten, Kerry Krebil, director.

Time: 10. Velvet Shoes 04’07
11. Three Wishes 04’32
12. Beauty 04’21

Total time: 13’00

Running time: 42’23

CD 5: Bands 8-12, 15: Nino Rota (1911, Milan - 1979, Rome): Cinque Pezzi Facili (Five Easy Pieces) (?) and Danny Boy (Traditional) James Galoway, flute; Phillip Moll, piano. RCA Victor/BMG 09026-63725-2 http://www.rcaredseal-rcavictor.com/

Nino Rota (né Rinaldi) is probably best known to most people as the composer of film music, notably The godfather I and II. He was also a brilliant composer of ballets, orchestral music, chamber music, and vocal music. Sir James Galway, the noted flutist, has included Rota’s Five Easy Pieces on his CD entitled Music for My Little Friends. Galway became involved in a project undertaken by the breakaway branch of British Flute Society called "Flutewise." Through this connection Galway met a number of children who were registered as members of the group. At an event dubbed "Sticky Buns," he met some of these children who had gathered to eat Danish pastries and drink lemonade and play their flutes. Among this group were two badly handicapped children who suffered from severe manual birth defects, but, in Galway’s words, "in spite of it, were both playing flutes. I think this individual event touch me more than any other event in my life. Liz [Goodwin, who was shepherding this flock,] had raised money to buy flutes and have them specially altered by the great British flute maker Williams Simmons [who] had rebuilt the mechanism of each flute to enable these children to play." The flutist concludes, They will never be "James Galways," but the happiness glowing from these children was so touching I will never forget this Sticky Buns event.

"I think," adds Galway, "this was a turning point in my life. It was then I realized that I should dedicate my time and energy not only to helping children play the flute, but should help with other things as well. The fact that these children were here because of James Galway made me stop and think twice. It made me recognize that I should do what I could to help children around the world and also make life more comfortable for those children who are not so fortunate." I hope you will forgive me if I append to Galway’s performance of Nino Rota’s Five Easy Pieces his performance of a traditional piece that you will all recognize at once.

Time: 8. La passaggiata di Puccettino 01’35
9. Serenata 01’37
10. Pavana 02’03
11. La chiocca 01’37
12. Il Soldatino 01’36

15. Danny Boy 03’18

Total time: 11’46

Running time: 54’09

I must admit that I have trouble reading James Galway’s account of his experience without weeping, which is easy to do, because he reminds me how easy it to make children unhappy with themselves; yet how much easier it is to help them find joy in themselves. How often do those of us who are charged with the responsibility of caring for children in some fashion forget that it’s not about adults; it’s about children. What better way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day than to celebrate the happiness of children and to vow to help them achieve such bliss!

CD 6: Bands 4-6: Peter Maxwell Davies (1934, Manchester, England): Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1985): Isaac Stern, violin; The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, André Previn, conductor. SONY Classical CD SMK 64 506.

Robert Adelson tells us in his excellent liner notes that Peter Maxwell Davies composed his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in fulfillment of a commission by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for their 40th anniversary celebration. Davies dedicated the piece to Isaac Stern, who premiered it on June 21, 1986. According to the composer, "[The concerto] was to be played in the awe-inspiring cathedral of St. Magnus, a building steeped in centuries of Norse and Scottish history, in an island setting between the tumults of the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean. The music is pervaded by sounds of sea and sea-birds. Its acoustics took into account the natural resonance of the building, and its rhythms and melodies show Scottish origins, particularly in the long, hushed violin melody of the slow movement and the reel-like feel to the close of the whole work." (Liner notes)

Time: 4. Allegro moderato 16’44
5. Adagio 06’40
6. Allegro non troppo 07’36

Total time: 31’00

Running time: 85’09

CD 7: Band 2: Kevin Volans (*1949, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa): Walking Song (1984) for flute, harpsichord, and four handclappers/fingerclickers. Netherlands Wind Ensemble. Chandos CD CHAN 9563.

Kevin Volans, who was born in South Africa in 1949, moved to Northern Ireland in 1986 and settled in Dublin in 1989. As far as I know, he still resides there, an Irish citizen, although he obviously also travels and was composer-in-resident at Princeton in 1992. He wrote Walking Song in 1984 "at the request of Jill Anderson of the Durban Art Gallery for the opening of an exhibition. In the event, the chatter occasioned by the cheese and wine completely drowned out the piece. The opening material owes a debt to the music of the Ba-benzele pygmies who alternately sing and blow notes on a panpipe made from the hollow stem of a papaya leaf.

Time: 2. Walking Song 05’39

Total running time: 90’48

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Bright Sheng’s Two Folk Songs from Chinhai; Hanns Eisler’s Kleine Sinfonie; Anton Webern’s Quartet Op. 28; Russell Woollen’s Three Madrigals (based on poems by Elinor Wylie; Five Easy Pieces by Nino Rota; Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Violin Concerto; and Kevin Volans’ Walking Song. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century "classical" music. Until then, this is Gandalf, thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

2006-03-05T11:49:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 06 March 2006

060306

Today’s Selections:

John Adams Harmonium 33’47
Witold Lutosławski Concerto for Orchestra 28’26
György Ligeti Six Bagatelles 11’39
Isang Yun Rencontre für Karinette, Harfe, und Violoncello 16’42
George Rochberg Muse of Fire 17’35

Total running time: 92’41

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Bands 3,4,5: John Adams (*1947, Worcester, MA) http://www.earbox.com/: Harmonium (1980-1981): BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales, Bournemouth Symphony Chorus; Grant Llewellyn, conductor. John Adams, BBC Music CD, Vol. 11, No. 2.
Paul Griffiths tells us in his liner notes to the BBC Music CD that contains today’s opening selection, that Harmonium, "was Adams’ breakthrough piece, and its title, more than [25] years ago, was a defiant boast. Harmony rules: tonal harmony, glorious and rich, brilliant and dark. But the title also honors an unpretentious instrument, the substitute organ of country churches, and thereby recognizes something hymn-like and simple in this setting of words by the visionary poets John Donne and Emily Dickinson."

The first of the triad of poems is Donne’s "Negative Love,"
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/886/ followed by two of Dickinson’s poems, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" http://www.bartleby.com/113/4027.html and "Wild Nights ." http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1608/. If you are not familiar with this work by John Adams, you may be a bit surprised by the manner in which he has composed them; although you should probably not be. We’ll hear them performed by the BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales, Bournemouth Symphony Chorus; Grant Llewellyn, conductor. John Adams, BBC Music CD, Vol. 11, No. 2.

Time: 3. Negative Love 10’58

4. Because I could Not Stop for Death 12’23
5. Wild Nights 10’26

Total time: 33’47

We’ve just heard John Adams’ trilogy, Harmonium performed by the BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales and the Bernmouth Symphony Chorus under the baton of Grant Llewellyn. I find it interesting that Paul Griffiths refers to Donne and Dickinson as "visionary poets": not a phrase that would have occurred to me, I must admit.

CD 2: Bands 1,2,3: Witold Lutosławski (1913, Warsaw – 1994, Warsaw) http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/lutoslawski.html: Jeux vénitiens (1961). Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, Witold Lutosławski, conductor. EMI 7243 5 653095 2 2.

Witold Lutosławski composed his Jeux vénitiens during the last upside-down year any of us will ever experience – 1961, the year I graduated and was named "the upside-down man in our college history." The Musical Companion has some interesting observations about this piece and the context in which Lutosławski composed the piece: “From total serialism, a reaction was predictable: instead of everything being pre-determined, nothing should be pre-determined. The element of chance entered into the composer’s thinking: aleatoric music was born and even as distinguished a composer as the Pole, Witold Lutosławski embodies such episodes into a work like Jeux vénitiens. Not only was this a reaction against total serialization, but it was fostered by the ‘tyranny’ of the gramophone: the unalterable performance which can contain no surprises either of text or nuance." (The Musical Companion, Ed. By A.L. Bacharach and J. R. Pearce, A Harvest/HBJ Book, New York, 1977. 351).

We hear it performed by the Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the composer.

Time: 4. Jeux vénitiens 12’58

Running time: 46’45

CD 3: Bands 4-9: György Ligeti (*1923, Transylvania, Romania): Six Bagatelles (1953) http://www.sonyclassical.com/artists/ligeti/bio.html: Aulos Wind Quintet, Koch Schwann Mundi CD 3-6737-2.

When György Ligeti’s Bagatelles premiered in Budapest in 1953, the sixth was not performed because, according to Bärbel Siefert, "the state-controlled Composers’ Association . . . ‘advised’ against the inclusion of the sixth piece because they considered it too full of dissonances and, therefore, dangerous for the general public. Ligeti," continues Siefert, "was tolerated as a composer of music suitable for schools, but his desire to go his own way was frowned upon. . . . The Six Bagatelles were given their first complete performance thirteen years later by the Stockholm Philharmonic." (Liner Notes, transl. by Celia Skrine)
I invite you to buckle your seatbelts while you listen to these superb miniatures, as I do not want to be responsible for any damage you may be moved to inflict upon yourselves while you are listening to them.

Time: 1. Allegro con spirito 01’10
2. Rubato. Lamentoso 02’56
3. Allegro grazioso 02’36
4. Vivace ruvido 00’57
5. Adagio. Mesto 02’26
6. Molto vivace. Capriccioso 01’23

Total time: 11’39

Running time: 58’24

CD 4: Band 5: Isang Yun (991917, Tongyong, S. Korea – 1995, Berlin) http://classical-composers.org/cgi-bin/ccd.cgi?comp=yun: Rencontre for Clarinet, Harp, and Violoncello (1986): Eduard Brunner, clarinet; Marion Hofmann, harp; Walter Grimmer, ‘cello: Aurophon AU 31808 CD.

Isang Yun wrote his Rencontre for Clarinet, Harp, and ‘Cello in 1986 for the Summer Music Festival in Hitzakker/Elbe and dedicated it "’in friendship’ to Eduard Brunner, Marion Hofmann, and Walter Grimmer, who interpreted [it] at its world premiere." As nearly as I can tell, the term Rencontre is not a musical term, but simply means "encounter" in French. Wolfgang Sparrer writes: "Beyond its immanent musical subject, the title wishes to bear witness to the meeting of the musicians to whom the piece is dedicated during the Isang Yun Musical Festival in North Korea" in 1985. Sparrer continues, "The flowing development [of the piece] is greatly indebted to the peculiarities of the instruments. Conceived as a duo with harp obligato (the part of the harp can also be played on the pianoforte), the basic gesture of the ‘cello part resembles that of a song, whereas the clarinet tends to be an outcry." (Liner Notes)
As always, Yun fascinates, indeed, rivets me, even as he delights my ears and my very being. We hear a performance by the three dedicatees: Eduard Brunner, clarinet; Marion Hofmann, harp; Walter Grimmer, ‘cello on an Aurophon AU 31808 CD.

Time: 5. Rencontre 16’42
Running time: 75’06

CD 5: Band 2: George Rochberg (1918, Paterson, NJ – 12005, Bryn Mawr, PA)
http://classical-composers.org/cgi-bin/ccd.cgi?comp=rochberg : Muse of Fire (1990): Eliot Fisk, guitar; Paula Robison, flute: Arabesque Recordings Z6745 CD.

Here’s what guitarist Eliot Fisk has to say about Muse of Fire, which we will hear him perform in the company of flutist Paula Robison in a few moments: "Muse [of Fire] takes its point of departure from the opening line of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Shakespeare has his Chorus open the play by trying with mere words to evoke the sounds of war and carnage for his Elizabethan public. Today this would be handled by a big "special effects" budget, but these sources were unavailable to Shakespeare, and so he has his chorus proclaim, "O for a muse of fire/That would ascend the/highest heaven of invention." As it happened George [Rochberg] was composition this and a companion piece, Ora pro nobis (Pray for Us), just as the Gulf War was being waged. So, at the time, these titles seemed eerily prophetic. Among works for flute and guitar, the Muse is absolutely unique in its seriousness of purpose and scope," continues Fisk. "Formally, it is an extended fantasy with all the variety of character and dramatic sweep of a Shakespearean drama. From its percussive opening, through to its various scenes of romance, action, and even existential doubt, the work builds to a screaming finale with the flute at the upper end of its register supported by pounding chords in the guitar."

This seems a good piece to end our program with today.

Time: 2: Muse of Fire 17’35
Total running time: 92’41

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard John Adams’ Harmonium; Witold Lutosławski’s Jeux vénitiens; György Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles; Isang Yun’s Rencontre for Clarinet, Harp, and ‘Cello; and George Rochberg’s Muse of Fire. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century "classical" music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

2006-02-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 27 February 2006

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Today’s Selections:

Olivier Messiaen: Turangalîla Symphony 81’02
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki String Quartet No. 1 (Already It Is Dark) 13’59

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.
As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1 Entire & 2, Bands 1,2,3: Olivier Messiaen (1908, Avignon – 1992, Clichy) http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/profiles/messiaen.shtml: Turangalîla Symphony (1946-48): François Weigel, piano; Thomas Bloch, ondes Martenot; Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra; Antoni Wit, conductor. Naxos CD 8.554478-79 http://www.naxos.com/

Most of today’s program will focus on a single work, Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony, which the incomparable composer began in 1946 and finished writing in 1948. Isabelle Battioni (transl. Wil Gowans) quotes Messiaen biographer Harry Halbreich as comparing the work to "’an enormous chain of mountains.’" Battioni continues, "[According to Messiaen,] The title . . . is pronounced ‘Too-rahn-ger-lee-lah’ and comes from the Sanskrit. Its implications are richly varied: Lîla literally means a game, but game in the sense of divine workings in the cosmos, the game of creation, destruction and reconstruction, the game of life and death. Lîla is also Love.’ Turanga is ‘time that flies like a galloping horse, time that runs out like sand from an hour-glass. Turanga is movement and rhythm. Hence Turangalîla means altogether: song of love, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death.’" (Liner notes, 3)

Rebecca Rischin, in her magnificent book For the End of Time – The story of the Messiaen Quartet, relates this anecdote, told by ‘cellist Etienne Pasquier, about the symphony we are about to hear:

One time the [Paris] Opera did a ballet set to the music of Turangalîla. I was still in the Opera as a ‘cellist and I remember the first rehearsal [he laughed]. Messiaen was there. He had greatly expanded the orchestra, adding all sorts of equipment: there were ondes Martenot [a percussion instrument similar to the celeste], [additional] percussion, and a solo piano part with amplification, played by his wife, Yvonne Loriod. There was other equipment that was extremely loud. During the first half of the rehearsal, the equipment was badly adjusted and crated a horrible racket. We all had broken eardrums. At intermission, I went into the lobby with Messiaen, and he said to me: "Boy, what a racket I’m making! That must be why they criticized Debussy. He didn’t make enough noise." You see the wit that he had! He had a great sense of humor. He was an absolutely remarkable man." (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London. http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/ p.94)

Turangalîla is an extremely long symphony, comprising some ten movements and running just shy of 81 minutes. I have absolutely no intention of interrupting it for any reason short of cataclysm.

Time: CD 1: 1. Introduction 06’38
2. Chant d’amour 1 08’30
3. Turangalîla 1 05’19
4. Chant d’amour 2 11’29
5. Joie du sang des étoiles 06’15
6. Jardin du sommeil 12’24
7. Turangalîla 2 04’01
CD 2: 1. Développment de l’Amour 12’02
2. Turangalîla 3 05’21
3. Final 08’27
Total time: 80’45

What an incredible piece of music. I don’t think I would have fidgeted much during a live performance of Messiaen’s Turangalîla! And what a joyous ending!

CD 3: Band 1: Henryk Górecki (*1933, Czernica, Poland)
http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/composer/gorecki.html: String Quartet No. 1: Already It Is Dusk (1988): Kronos Quartet http://www.kronosquartet.com/ : David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud ‘cello: Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79257-2 www.nonesuch.com

It’s not easy trying to figure out what to broadcast immediately after a symphonic piece as majestic and moving as the Messiaen we have just heard. I’ve decided to end today’s program with a performance of the great Polish composer Henryk Mikołj Górecki’s String Quartet No. 1, Already It Is Dark, op. 62, performed by the Kronos Quartet. Commissioned for and dedicated to the Kronos Quartet The quartet takes its title from "[t]he opening words of a four-part church song by the 16th century Polish composer Waclaw z Szamotul." (Liner notes, David Drew, )

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki is one of the musical phenomena of the 20th century. Norman Lebrecht, in his provocative book Who Killed Classical Music credits "this humble Pole from Katowice" with "turning the world’s most sophisticated merchandising machine [the recording industry] on its head and teaching it the virtue of simple things." (Carol Publishing Group, Seacaucus, NJ, 1998. 289. Lebrecht’s point is that as a result of Górecki’s religious commitment, he composed music that "defied every tenet of record industry faith" by doing in 1993 what [n]o living symphonist had" accomplished since Shostakovich, that is, selling not only tens of thousands of copies of his Third Symphony, but, in fact, nearly a million." Lebrecht continues, "For the record industry . . . it was nothing less than a revelation. In the . . . winter of 1992-3, the classical music business found God in a record store." (290). The popularity of post-modern religious music in the latter 20th century is not something I’m prepared to go into at this point, but it certainly exists to this day. We're going to broadcast a piece that Górecki composed several years before his Third Symphony, namely his first string quartet (1988), Op. 62, subtitled "Already It Is Dark." The piece, as David Drew tells us in his liner notes, is based on material from a song by Wacław of Szamotuły from the first half of the 16th century . . . and closes with a quotation from this song. We’ll hear it performed by the Kronos Quartet.

Time: 1. Already It Is Dusk 13’59

Total running time: 94’44

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard the glorious Turangalîla Symphony by Olivier Messiaen, and the superb String Quartet No. 1, Already It Is Dark, by Henryk Mikołj Górecki. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next wee for more great 20th and 21st century "classical" music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

2006-02-19T13:42:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 20 February 2006

060220

Today’s Selections:

Hans Krása’s Symphonie 16’14
George Walker’s Poème for Violin & Orchestra 17’45
Anton Webern’s Five Pieces 10’38
Messiaen’s La Ville d’en haut 09’17
Janàček’s Piano Sonata 1.X 14’56
Roger Hannay’s Time Remembered 09’56
William Grant Still’s Lyric Quartet 14’17

Total time: 93’03

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Disc 2: Bands 12,13,14: Hans Krása (1899, Prague – 1944. Auschwitz) http://www.musica.cz/comp/krasa.htm: Symphonie (?)Brigitte Balleys, soprano; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor. London CD 289 455 587-2

Simply put, the term Entartete Musik means “degenerate music,” and “consists of works by composers suppressed or displaced during” the Third Reich. (cover, boxed set, Hans Krása). One composer whose music was so designated was the Czech composer, Hans Krása, whose intense love for his native city, Prague, lulled him into staying there until it was too late for him to escape the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia. He was arrested shortly after finishing his children’s opera, Brundibar, and interned in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. In 1944, he was removed to a concentration camp, probably Auschwitz, where he died.

He wrote his Symphony for small orchestra in 1923. The third movement is set to a poem by Rimbaud called “The Lice Pickers,” which appears in a collection by the great French poet called “A Season in Hell and Other Poems.” The poem appears in both German and English translations in the liner notes to Krása’s opera Betrothal in a Dream and Symphonie, today's selection. We’ll hear Brigitte Balleys, soprano; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor. London CD 289 455 587-2

Time: 12. I Pastorale 06’59
13. II Marsch 04’42
14. III Die Läusesucherinnen 04’23

Total time: 16’04

CD 2: Bands 5,6,7: George Walker (1933, Washington, D.C.) http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/1617/bio.html: Poème for Violin & Orchestra. Gregory Walker, violin; Cleveland chamber Symphony; Edwin London, Music Director. Albany Records, Troy 270.

Three years ago this May, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr. George Walker, a superb composer who also excelled as a pianist and who began a distinguished career at Rutgers University in 1969. His awards, including a Fulbright, a John Hay Whitney, a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller, and a MacDowell Fellowship, read like an encyclopedia of honors.

He composed his Poème for Violin & Orchestra in 1991. It is, according to the composer, “a revised version of an earlier Violin Concerto, that is ‘by no means a tranquil piece,’ alternating between an ‘intense lyricism’ and ‘dramatic qualities, which you hear particularly in the final movement.’ It is dedicated to [Walker’s] mother in tribute to her extraordinary devotion to her family and friends. ‘I think,’ said the composer, ‘she would have liked the piece.’” It appears to me to have all the earmarks of a neo-Romantic composition.

Poème for Violin & Orchestra is written in three movements named for their metronomic timings:

Time: 5. I Eighth Note = 88 08’12
6. II Eighth Note = 72 04’02
7. III Eighth Note = 120 05’31

Total time: 17’45

Running time: 33’49

CD 3: Bands 4,5,6,7,8: Anton Webern (1883, Vienna – 1945, Mittersill)
http://w3rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/webern.html: Five Pieces (1909) (also referred to as Five Movements for String Quartet – cf. Baker’s): Kronos Quartet www.kronosquartet.com : David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello. Elektra Nonesuch CD 9 79318-2 www.nonesuch.com

One of WJFF’s very good friends, Martha Franco, asked me the other night if I might consider playing some Anton Webern, whom she had discovered at some point and become enamored of. I really need to expand my collection of this incredibly brilliant Viennese composer, usually associated with the so-called 2nd Viennese School in the same breath as Schoenberg and Berg. However, Webern left precious little in the way of composition when he had his life cut short by the friendly fire of an American soldier in Mittersill in 1945 – approximately three hours worth.

Charles Shere, in his fine liner notes, argues that “Anton Webern was harder for the public to ‘understand’ [than Berg]. . . Because it is so concise, Webern’s music seems more esoteric, more enigmatic. The Five Pieces, Op. 5, were written the year before Berg’s Quartet, in 1909, but on first hearing, the music is exotic, condensed, full of extremes, now nearly audible, now extraordinarily dense.” Shere continues, “It’s probably best not to pay attention to it the first few times: better to let the music find its way through the ear, not the mind. . . . Schoenberg would say later that Webern’s gift was ‘to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath.’”

Time: 4. I 02’26
5. II 02’22
6. III 00’38
7. IV 01’43
8. V 03’29

Total time: 10’38

Running time: 44’27

CD 4: Band 8: Olivier Messiaen (1908, Avignon – 1992, Clichy) http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/profiles/messiaen.shtml: La Ville d’en haut for 31 wind, brass, piano, and percussion (1987): members of The Cleveland Orchestra; Pierre Boulez, conductor. Deutsche Grammophon CD 445 821-2

Thanks again to Martha Franco, I was reminded during our pledge drive that I have not played enough Messiaen recently. Part of my problem here, of course, is that once I start to listen to Messiaen, I don’t want to stop! The next piece is one I have never aired before to the best of my knowledge, a piece written for 31 wind, brass, piano, and percussion instruments, called La Ville d’en haut, or The City Above, or The New Jerusalem; or, simply, Paradise. Paul Griffiths notes that this piece is “enormous and elemental, built from a few elements . . . ‘According to the composer, “the brass chorale represents the glory of the Heavently City. The birds of the xylophones, the woodwinds, the piano solo, symbolize the joy of the resurrected, assured of being always near to Christ. The chords’ colors change almost constantly, and symbolize in their turn the colors of the light Above.’” (Liner Notes)

What do I love about Messiaen? Rarely do I find myself particularly drawn to religious music, although I find it often beautiful; but with Messiaen, I find his music goes way beyond his religious convictions to a kind of almost pure sound. How I wish I could have met him and, if you can forgive the impudence, interviewed him!

Time: 8. La Ville d’en haut 09’17

Running time: 53’44

CD 5: Bands 1,2: Leoš Janáček (1854, Moravia – 1928, Moravská Ostrava) http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/janacek.html: Piano Sonata 1.X Z ulice [“From the Street; only 2 movements extant; inspired by the abortive but sanguine Russian revolt”] (1905) (Baker’s): Leif Ove Andsnes, piano. Virgin Classics CD VC 7 91222-2 261 658

Leoš Janáček wrote the sonata we are about to hear, Sonata 1.X Z ulice “in direct response to the killing of a Czech worker by Austrian troops during a demonstration of a Czech worker by Austrian troops during a demonstration in support of a Czech university for Brno (at that time under German Administration) on 1 October 1905.” So says Mark Audus in his liner notes. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary, on the other hand, attributes the inspiration for this piece to the 1905 Russian Revolution. Either way, the liner notes seem to be correct in discerning that in the piece, “the composer confronts harsh reality in the bleakest terms.” Indeed, there is something heartbreaking and unrelenting in the piece, which pianist Leif Ove Andsnes performs with fine comprehension, technique, and feeling.

The piece survives in two movements; Audus indicates that Janàček seized the third movement and burned it, throwing the first two movements into the Vltava River because “the music he had written in the heat of the moment excited both extreme emotion and self-criticism in the composer.” (7) The two movements survive because the “soloist had made of copy of [them] and in 1924, Janàček consented to their publication, adding the dedicatory lines, ‘The white marble staircase of the House of the artists in Brno . . . a simple worker František Pavlík falls, stained with blood . . . He came only to plead for a university . . . And was killed by cruel murderers.’”

Time: 1. Presentiment 06’20
2. Death 08’36

Total time: 14’56

Running time: 68’40

CD 6: Band 11: Roger Hannay (1930, Plattsburg – 2006, Chapel Hill) http://www.aucourantrecords.com/aurec/rogerhannay.htm: Time Remembered (1970): Donald Oehler, clarinet; Peter Pettinger, piano. Historical Preservation Recordings, Selected Chamber Music of Roger Hannay, Vol. II.

My friend Roger Hannay, who always signed his emails and letters “Hrothgar,” died on January 27, 2006 of complications following heart surgery. I became acquainted with Roger through my friends Eleanor and Arnold Hughs – he was Eleanor’s first cousin – and he was gracious enough to visit with us on our program twice. I regret that I did not make time to visit him while he was still in good health, and I deeply regret the loss of this superb composer, much admired professor, and lovely human being. I hope to travel to NC in the spring to attend a memorial concert.

There is some irony in his passing, as his cousin-by-marriage, Arnold Hughs, who died several years ago, was a much admired and well loved Director of Music for the Monticello Central School District. On Saturday, March 18, at 2:13 PM, the district will honor the late Mr. Hughs by naming the high school/middle school auditorium after him. If any of our listeners are interested in finding out more about this event, please contact Gandalf.

Meanwhile, let’s listen to this neat 1970 crossover piece by Roger Hannay, Time Remembered – a perfect name for this moment – performed so beautifully by Donald Oehler on the clarinet and Peter Pettinger on the piano. It was recorded during a Belgian radio broadcast performance on May 14, 1979.

Time: 11. Time Remembered 09’56

Running time: 78’36

CD 6: Entire: William Grant Still (1895, Woodville, MI – 1978, LA) http://www.williamgrantstill.com/wgsbiography Lyric Quartet (1960): Oregon String Quartet: Kathryn Lucktenberg and Fritz Gearhart, violins; Leslie Straka, viola; Steven Pologe, ‘cello. Recorded Jan 3, 2000, in Beall Hall at the University of Oregon http://music1.uoregon.edu/fac/gearhart/osq.html.

Quite a few years ago, I had the privilege and pleasure of interviewing William Grant Still’s daughter Judith, who provided me with fascinating anecdotes grounded in very interesting biographical information that convinced me that her father never received the acclaim that ought to have been his during his lifetime. That he was a superb and very important composer, no one who listens to his music can doubt, I think. But because he was a Black composer, the establishment refused to take him seriously. Only during the past decade, thanks in large part to the diligent campaign of his daughter and granddaughter, has Still begun to receive the attention he so richly deserves. His 1960 Lyric Quartet, a three movement piece, is a good example of Still’s neo-Romantic talents. This is a wonderful piece to end our program with today.

Time: 1. The Sentimental One 06’23
2. The Quiet One 04’48
3. The Jovial One 03’05

Total time: 14’17

Total running time: 93’03

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Hans Krása’s Symphonie; George Walker’s Poème for Violin & Orchestra; Anton Webern’s Five Pieces; Messiaen’s La Ville d’en haut; Janàček’s Piano Sonata 1.X; Roger Hannay’s Time Remembered; and William Grant Still’s Lyric Quartet. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century “classical” music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for making our February pledge drive a resounding success and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, 13 Feb 2006: Noon to 2:00PM: WJFF

2006-02-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 13 February 2006

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Today’s Selections:

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 46’54
Mark Fish’s Pictures of Miró 19’00
Paul Hindemith’s Sonate III for organ 11’35
Marc-Antonio Console’s Varie Azioni 16’48

Total time of music: 94’17

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Bands 4-7: Dmitri Shostakovich (1906, St. Petersburg – 1975, Moscow): http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/shostakovich.html Symphony No. 15, Op. 141 (1971): BBC Philharmonic; Vassily Sinaisky, conductor. BBC Music Vol14, No. 6. http://www.bbcmusicmagazine.com/

2006 also marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the great 20th century composers, Dmitri Shostakovich, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1906 and who died in Moscow in 1971. BBC Music Magazine, a publication not always noted for its attention to 20th century and contemporary composers, has issued a CD containing two complete works by the great Soviet composer and part of a third one. For that, and for their comments, I am more than a bit grateful.

The difficulties that Dmitri Shostakovich faced as a premier composer during the Stalin era in the Soviet Union are well known; although Shostakovich’s actual attitudes and states of mind are still hotly debated among musicologists and historians, as he moved in and out of official Soviet favor with some frequency. http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/dmitri.html

David Nice, in an excellent article in BBC Music Magazine (Feb. 2006), calls Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 “his last will and testament,” and argues that “it is a philosophical work in which the ailing composer, leading a restricted existence after a heart attack and the onset of a disease similar to polio, sums up the wisdom of a lifetime and reflects upon his own impending death.” (p.6)

As you listen to the piece, you will undoubtedly hear specific references to Schoenberg, Rossini, Wagner, and others.

During the summer of the early 1950s, when I was yet a youngster, a recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which he composed in 1937, suddenly made the charts, and suddenly it seemed to me that I was hearing that composition more frequently than any of the pop songs of the era. Let’s listen now to Shostakovich’s last symphony as it is performed by the BBC Philharmonic under the baton of Vassily Sinaisky.

Time: 4. Allegretto 08’33
5. Adagio 16’57
6. Allegretto 04’25
7. Adagio – Allegretto 16’59

Total time: 46’54

CD 2: Bands 3-13: Mark Fish (*1969, San Diego) http://markfish.com/: Pictures of Miró (2004): members of the East West Continuo: Tessa Brinckman, flute; Daniel Rouslin, violin; Victoria Gunn Pich, viola; Lori Presthus, ‘cello. Glass Sky: NPM LD 021 http://www.northpacificmusic.com/

The contemporary “classical” music scene is alive and thriving in the Pacific Northwest, as our friend and sometime guest, composer Gary Nolan, has taken the time to remind me with two recent CDs, one of his works, one of works performed by Tessa Brinckman and East West Continuo. Because I enjoy visual program music, if there is such a term, I thought we might broadcast Pictures of Miró, a piece recorded on the latter CD, which is called Glass Sky - the CD, that is.

Mark Fish, a young composer who was born in San Diego in 1969, composed Pictures of Miró in 2004. He has also set a painting by Gustav Klimt to music (if you are not familiar with Klimt’s art, I recommend it to you heartily!)

Pictures of Miró comprises eleven movements dedicated chronologically to paintings that Miró painted from 1919 through 1960. It begins and ends with two self-portraits, with a third one interspersed. The paintings, with some commentary from the liner notes, are as follows:

1. Self-Portrait, 1919: A somewhat aloof, somewhat cubist, self-portrait, painted in brilliant red. Picasso loved it, bought it, and kept it for the rest of his life.

2. Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926: One of Miró’s most famous paintings. As the viola barks like a dog, the flue and violin’s thready high notes depict the moon hanging in the sky. Ascending pizzicati in the strings represent Miró’s ‘escape ladder,’ a theme that reappears in later paintings.

3. The Lutanist (Dutch Interior 1), 1928: Miró took a trip to the Netherlands in 1926, creating his own versions of Flemish masterworks, including this 1661 painting by Hendrick Martensz, Sorgh. Here the composer uses both modern and 17th century harmony, the viola becoming the lute, while the ‘cello becomes the singing lutanist.

4. Girl Practicing Gymnastics, 1932: A comical take of the title, with the painting’s bright geometric figures reflected in the music’s light, colorful harmonies. With a supporting cast of strings, the flute as the girl first struggles with, and then overcomes, her difficult exercises.

5. Woman, 1934: This depiction of a woman’s anguish is part of Miró’s ‘Wild Period’ (encompassing this and the next painting). The figure in the painting is war and monstrous, with a wide-open mouth and sharp teeth.

6. Man and Woman in Front of Pile of Excrement, 1936: Miró had strong premonitions of the strife and terror of fascism, later realized in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. He chose this title because he thought about the artist Rembrandt saying that one can find rubies and emeralds in a pile of dung.

7. Self-Portrait, 1937: The artist uses delicate silvery greys and yellow – a significant lack of color compared to the first self-portrait’s fiery red. As penciled lines cross and fade in and out of one another, so do the melodic lines played by the quartet.

8. The Escape Ladder, 1937: Music, sky, and night are Miró’s metaphors for a leap away from the oppressive circumstances of his time – an escape ladder into creativity.

9. The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain, 1940: This painting from Miró’s Constellation Series fills up the entire canvas without any central figure dominating the space. Likewise, the quartet dances an elegant dance in equal partnership.

10. The Red Sun Gnaws at the Spider, 1948: Eyes stare out at the viewer, a large black figure reminiscent of a Chinese character. The strings and flute produce a gnawing intensity that later becomes both sparse and quaint.

11. Self-Portrait, 1960: Like the painting from the previous movement, this last self-portrait comes from Miró’s Black Period. Over the grey pencil self-portrait created twenty-three years earlier, the artist has added thick black lines as a graffiti-like personage, and a few bright red and yellow splotches. Though Miró lived for another twenty-three years after creating this painting, he said that he left this last self-portrait unfinished. The music reflects a tragic simplification of character, as though the artist had seen himself degenerate over time.

Time: 3. Self-Portrait 02’34
4. Dog, Barking at the Moon 01’10
5. The Lutanist 01’37
6. Girl Practicing Gymnastics 02’05
7. Woman 03’23
8. Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement 01’08
9. Self-Portrait 00’40
10.The Escape Ladder 00’23
11.The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight 02’28
12.The Red Sun Gnaws at the Spider 01’24
13.Self-Portrait 01’54

Total time: 19,00

Running time: 65’54

CD 3: Bands 6,7,8: Paul Hindemith (1895, Hanau – 1963, Frankfurt am Main): Sonata III for organ (1940) http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/hindemith.html: Kevin Bowyer, organist (at the Marcussen Organ of Odense cathedral, Denmark): Nimbus Records NI 5411.

A very tiny bit of the variety of the “classical” music that has been composed during the past century may be imagined by simply juxtaposing the piece we are about to hear with the two we have just heard. Paul Hindemith composed his Sonata III for organ, subtitled über alte Volkslieder in 1940, the last of three organ sonatas that he composed beginning in 1937.

Nicholas Williams argues that this and other organ pieces on this CD demonstrate that “[t]hough the conservative reputation of organ music is inseparable from the conservatism of its greatest composer, Bach, his protean character that appeals both to reactionaries and radicals has also at times brought the instrument to the forefront of contemporary styles.”

Williams adds, “Hindemith, for example, in the 1920s used the slogan ‘back to Bach’ as an avant-garde rallying cry.” (Liner notes)

The organ sonata we’ll hear, “consists of three chorale preludes, the melodies nostalgically reflecting the composer’s love of German folk material as heard in the Mathis der Maler symphony.”

Time: 6. Ach Gott, wem soll ich’s klagen 04’32
7. Wach auf, mein Hort 05’08
8. So wünsch ich ihr 01’55

Total time: 11’35

Running time: 77’29

CD 4: Bands 1,2,3: Marc-Antonio Consoli (*1941, Catania, Italy): Varie Azioni (1995): Cyrus Stevens, violin; George Fischer, piano: Vuci Siculani: Cri CD 735.

The title of our last piece, Varie Azioni, translates, according to the composer, Marc-Antonio Consoli, as either “various actions” or “variations.” Consoli composed the three movement piece for violin and piano in 1995 at the MacDowell Colony. He writes that the first movement, Cantilena, is “a kind of continuous chant”; the second movement, “Notturno Triste, . . . reflects my state of mind at this time”; and the third and last movement, Salta Fuoco, . . . is a celebration of life: wild and frenetic gestures in the solo violin are reminiscent of gypsy music, which the Spaniards left behind during their occupation of [Sicily] . . .” (Liner Notes)

Time: 1. Cantilena 05’46
2. Notturno triste 05’34
3. Salta Fuoco 05’28

Total time: 16’48

Total running time: 94’17

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15; Mark Fish’s Pictures of Miró; Paul Hindemith’s Sonate III for organ; and Marc-Antonio Console’s Varie Azioni. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next Monday for more great 20th and 21st century “classical” music. Until then, this is Gandalf thanking you for listening; reminding you that WJFF begins its Winter pledge drive tomorrow at 6:00AM; and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

05 December 2005,Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, Noon to 2:00PM, EDT, streaming online @www.wjffradio.org

2005-12-03T16:01:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 05 December 2005

051205

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Band 1: Elliott Carter (*1908, NY): Dialogues for piano and chamber orchestra (2003): Nicholas Hodges, piano; London Sinfonietta, Oliver Knussen, conductor. Bridge Records CD www.BridgeRecords.com

Elliott Carter has certainly generated both antipathy and veneration during his long career. Born in New York in 1908, Carter is still composing. Bridge Records has just released what I consider to be an astonishing CD of works Carter has written between 2000 and 2003. John Rockwell, in his book All American Music, writes,

The obsessive knottiness of [Elliott Carter’s] music suggests something . . .
Troubling. That is the too ready equation in our culture between complexity and excellence, and between pedigree and artistic work.” (43)

Quoted in Maestros of the Pen, Mark N. Grant, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1998, 309.

Joseph Horowitz, on the other hand, writes:

Of the composers who first emerged after 1895, Elliott Carter[‘s] capacity for sustained growth was unique. Both Carter’s music and reviews of music . . . exceptionally articulated the challenges – compositional and sociological – confronting the American composer.

Ever since I attended a Friday night open rehearsal, discussion, and explanation of Carter’s harpsichord quartet provided by Judith Pearce and her inimitable Weekend of Chamber Music several years ago, I have been a devotee of Carter’s music, which I find exquisitely well crafted, astonishingly compelling, impossible to ignore, and completely satisfying in every way my limited comprehension allows. I intend to broadcast the recent compositions on this CD during the next few weeks, when I am not engaged in interviews – as I expect to be next week, for example.

We’ll begin today, therefore, with the most recent work, the 2003 Dialogues for piano and chamber music, which appears first on the disc at Carter’s request for reasons that have to do the formal structure of the piece that involve his ensemble or tutti passages, reasons which I’m not sure I understand sufficiently to make clear here.

Carter himself wrote, “Dialogues for piano and chamber orchestra is a conversation between the soloist and the orchestra: responding to each other, sometimes interrupting one another or arguing. The single varied movement is entirely derived from a small group of harmonies and rhythms.” (Liner Notes)

After we have heard all four compositions, I think I will play them all on the same program. Of course, if I could figure out a way to interview Elliott Carter, I would jump at the chance. Well, I can dream, can’t I!

Time: 1. Dialogues 13’28

CD 2: Bands 4-7: George Perle (*1915, Bayonne): Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra (1990): Michael Boriskin, piano; Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz, conductor. Albany Records, Troy 292

In his book The Essential Canon of Classical Music, David Dubal writes, “[George Perle] had da distinguished teaching career at Queens College. His later years have been devoted to composition and the writing of an extraordinary series of books, which include The Operas of Alban Berg, a two-volume work on Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu, as well as his influential Twelve-Tone Tonality (1978). One of the most searching theorists, he was deeply influenced by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, which he used as the foundation of his own expanded tonality.”

Dubal continues:

“Perle’s music stems from the mind of a lucid and aristocratic thinker: he possesses formal elegance, subtlety, and a superb sense of motion. Each tone fits into a luminous pattern, and every work is created with the pain of labor, artfully concealed. His manner is beguiling, and writes his music to last.

“In each decade since the 1940s, Perle has written fine music, but it is the works of his old age – such as the three piano concertos – that are among the significant and fulfilling compositions from the twentieth centuries last years.” (684)

George Perle, who turned 85 last May, wrote his Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra in 1990 must, according to Alexander Coleman’s liner notes, “be thought of as a considerable pièce de résistance in itself and a major landmark in Perle’s career as a composer.

We’ll hear it performed on this Albany Records, Troy CD by ): Michael Boriskin on the piano; and the Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz, conductor.

Time: 4. Allegro 10’50
5. Scherzo 03’16
6. Adagio 05’27
7. Allegro 06’38

Total time: 26’11

Running time: 39’40

No doubt both Carter and Perle, because they have been so long-lived, have had the opportunity to grow, evolve, and refine their styles. Neither, I think, would be mistaken for a neo-Romantic; yet each, I submit, is exciting and inviting to listen to.

CD 3: (CD 1/3) Bands 1-10: Igor Stravinsky (1882, Orienbaum, near St. Petersburg – 1971, NY): Apollo (1928; revised, 1947): Columbia Symphony Orchestra (1964), Igor Stravinsky, conductor. SONY Music SM3K 4692

Astonishingly, my umpteen CD boxed set of the complete works of Igor Stravinsky give almost no information about what I consider to be the vital provenance on most of the works they have recorded. For example, today’s selection, Apollo, which was composed in 1928 with the title Apollo Musagète, was revised in 1947. I suppose that the fact that the 1947 title is the revised one means that we are about to hear the revised score, but I wouldn’t like to bet the family farm on it. When it is my turn to be in charge of such things, liner notes will provide accurate, essential information, or heads will roll!

In any case, Stravinsky composed this ballet, which I admit is one of my favorite pieces of music, and has been since it was a kid, in fulfillment of a commission “by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for performance in the Library of Congress,” according to Stravinsky’s own notes. The composer continues:

Apollo and the Muses suggested to me not so much a plot as a signature, or what I already have called a manner. The Muses do not instruct Apollo – as a god his is already a master beyond instruction – but show him their arts for his approval.

The success of Apollo as a ballet must be attributed to the dancing of Serge Lifar and to the beauty of Balanchine’s choreography, especially to constructions such as the ‘troika’ in the coda and the ‘wheelbarrow’ at the beginning, in which two girls support a third carrying Apollo’s lute.

In Apollo, [Stravinsky adds that he] tried to discover a melodism free of folklore. The choice of another classical sugject was natural after Oedipus Rex.

In conclusion, [Stravinsky writes] I may say that I have come to prefer the title Apollo to the original Apollon musagète.

I remember hearing Balanchine say that if listeners knew how to listen to music, ballet would be unnecessary; but, because listeners have not learned how to listen, ballet is what shows them how.

Time: 1. The Birth of Apollo 04’30
2. Variation d’Apollon 02’55
3. Pas d’action 04’37
4. Variation de Calliope 01’29
5. Variation de Polymnie 01’15
6. Variation de Terpsichore 01’30
7. Variation d’Apollon 02’07
8. Pas de deux 03’47
9. Coda 03’18
10. Apothéose 03’09

Total time: 28’37

Running time: 68’17

CD 4: Bands 2-5: John Cage (1912, LA – 1992, NY): The Seasons (ballet in one act) (1947): American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor. ECM New Series 1696 465 140-2.

Stravinsky, of course, was hardly the only composer to write for the ballet, although he is arguably the most famous during the 20th century. In 1946, Lincoln Kerstein and the Ballet society in New York commissioned Cage to create a ballet. The result was The Seasons, which, writes Keith Potter, “offered [John] Cage [the opportunity] to write for the full complement of Western orchestral forces for the first time.” (Liner Notes) “(The Seasons is, thought, probably better known in the composer’s own version for solo piano, which was made [also in 1947. The piano] features prominently from time to time in the original, too.)” The ballet was choreographed by by Merce Cunningham who was, as Potter delicately puts it, “by now Cage’s personal as well as professional partner.” With costumes and sets by Isamu Noguchi, The Seasons premiered at New York’s old Ziegfeld Theater in May, 1947.

Potter notes, later on, that }[t]hough Erik Satie was an especially important influence on Cage during this period [of his composing], … this music is closer to Stravinsky.” What do you think?

The Seasons, no surprise, is written in four movements. It might be fun to try to figure out which season leads the parade.

Time: 2. Winter 03’12
3. Spring 03’42
4. Summer 05’51
6. Fall 03’49

Total time: 16’23

Running time: 84’40

CD 5: Bands 7,8: (Dame) Ethel Smyth (1858, London – 1944, Woking, Surry): “Mrs. Waters’ Aria,” from The Boatswain’s Mate (1916). Eiddwen Harrhy, soprano; The Plymouth Festival Chorus and Orchestra, Philip Brunelle, conductor. Virgin Classics CD 9188-2.

Ethel Smyth, as nearly as I can fathom, had to practically claw her way into her professional career as a composer and a conductor. Born in London in 1858, she fought for the right to study music in Leipzig, became a suffragette in 1911 and spent several weeks in gaol (I suppose!), was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922. Dame Smyth composed The Boatswain’s Mate, a comic opera from which today’s final selections are taken, in 1911. “The action,” according to Peter Avis’s liner notes, in and around ‘The Beehive,’ a small country inn run by Mrs. Waters, a widow . . . who is described as ‘pretty, very neat; [her] manner decided and business–like, [with] an exceedingly attraactive personality with an evident sense of humour; [she is] 28 to 30 years old.’ She is being courted by Harry Benn, an ex-Boatswain, who enlists a discharged soldier called Ned Travers to help him in this task. Before long, Travers himself tries wooing the landlady. However, neither suitor is successful – for, as Mrs. Waters explains in her aria, although you might feel lonely sometimes and dream of being young again, the is no point in giving up your independence for “Mister Wrong.””

We’ll hear soprano Eiddwen Harrhy, and The Plymouth Festival Chorus and Orchestra, Philip Brunelle, conductor on a Virgin Classics CD 9188-2.

Time: 7. Introduction 05’45
8. Aria 03’10

Total time: 08’55

Total running time: 93’35

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Elliott Carter’s Dialogues; George Perle’s Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra; Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Apollo; John Cage’s ballet The Seasons; and two arias from Ethel Smyth’s comic opera The Boatswain. I remind you that this Thursday, December 8, at 7:30PM, Anastasia Solberg and The High Strung Community Orchestra will be performing at Selig Theatre, SCCC, at 7:30PM. The concert is free and open to the public. For more information, please call 845-647-5087 or go to webmaster@misucatskills.org. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed to day’s selections and that you will tune in next week when we will be interviewing live by phone ‘cellist Madeleine Shapiro,whose CD Electricity has just hit the music stores. Until then, this is Gandalf, Thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

28 November 2005, Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, Noon to 2:00PM, EDT, Streaming online @www.wjffradio.org

2005-11-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 28 November 2005

051128

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Bands 1-3: Bohuslav (Jan) Martinů (1890, Polička, Czechoslovakia, - 1959, Basel) http://www.karadar.com/Dictionary/martinu.html: Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano, and timpani (1938). John Alley, piano; Charles Fullbrook, timpani; City of London Sinfonia, Richard Hickox, conductor. Virgin Classics CD VC 7 91099-2.

Bohuslav (Jan) Martinů’s 1938 composition, Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano, and timpani, is considered one of the composer’s masterpieces. Jan Smaczney writes, “In every sense, the Double concerto, composed in the late summer and early autumn of 1938, is the masterpiece of this phase of [Martinů’s] composition. Although the work was begun after a particularly happy holiday in Moravia and Bohemia, when Martinů was full of thoughts of a permanent return home [from Paris], the concerto was completed as Czechoslovakia’s unhappy fate was decided at Munich. While Martinů relied on the framework of the concerto grosso, there is no mistaking the urgency and even desperation underlying the composition.” (Liner Notes)

John McCabe adds, in his chapter “The Solo Instrument” in The Musical Companion: “Martinů’s deeply moving double concerto for double string orchestra with piano and timpani gives the piano especially a genuinely concertante role, so that it is sometimes part of the ensemble and sometimes spotlit as a soloist. Written under the shadow of the Second World War, the intense slow movement leaves no doubt about the composer’s compassion.” (The Musical Companion, A.L Bacharach and J.R. Pearce, Eds. Revised Edition, 1984. Harvest/HBJ, USA).

Time: 1. Poco allegro 06’11
2. Largo 09’14
3. Allegro 06’25

Total time: 21’50

CD 2: Bands 2-7: Tobias Picker (*1954, NY) http://www.tobiaspicker.com/bio/html: The Encantadas for speaker and orchestra (1983): Sir John Gielgud, speaker; The Houston Symphony, Christoph Eschenbach, conductor. Virgin Classics CD VC 7 91162-2.

The great music critic and musicologist Andrew Porter tells us in his liner notes that the Alban Academy commissioned our next selection, Tobias Picker’s The Encantadas, “to celebrate its one hundred and seventy fifth anniversary” in 1983. The commission stipulated that the piece be based upon a work by one of its more famous students, Herman Melville. Picker decided to compose the piece to Melville’s The Encantadas, which he had written after his visit to the Galapagos Islands in 1841, six years after Darwin’s voyage there. (Liner Notes, 7)

Melville spent three months aboard the whaler the Acushnet, “cruising among the Galapagos Islands, following the great schools of whales to their calving-grounds. From this journey, he created The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles, an allegorical evocation of arid, volcanic islands.” The composer, Tobias Picker, and Renaud Charles Bruce have adapted six passages from Melville’s first three sketches, to be spoken over and between the musical movements. The sections are as follows:

Dream is an evocation of the evil enchantment of the islands remembered from the wooded mountains of home.

Desolation describes the scorched, barren volcanic land, inhabited only by reptiles.

Delusion emphasizes the evil possession of the place – the lava like dross from a furnace and perilous tides always lashing at the coasts. The debris from kinder climates which collects on the beaches – coconuts and sugar-cane – serve only to heighten the impression of a region outside nature.

In Diversity, the narrative moves to the tortoises, whose immense age and stubborn immovability appear ‘dateless…newly crawled from beneath the foundations of the world.

In Din, we see Rock Rodondo, home to millions of sea birds, graduated by species up the cliff faces, their constant shrieking adding to the infernal atmosphere.

At Dawn, peace and beauty are attained only in the magical hour before sunrise, when, with the wind light and the sea calm, there is a ‘dim investiture of wonder’ over the islands.

Melville took liberties with actual meteorological facts – the “scorched barren land,” for instance, actually had a plentiful rainy season, etc.

The piece is written in 6 sections, several of which encompass more than one prose passage.

Time: 2. I Dream 04’49
3. II Desolation 02’46
4. III Delusion 03’46
5. IV Diversity 10’39
6. V. Din 02’50
7. VI Dawn 05’30

Total time: 30’20

Running time 52’10

CD 3: Bands 16 – 20: Colin Matthews (*1946, London) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Matthews: Night’s Mask for chamber orchestra (1984): Patrizia Kwella, soprano; The Nash Ensemble. Lionel Friend, conductor; Fernando Pessoa, poet. Virgin Classics CD VC 7 91482-2.

Our next offering, Colin Matthew’s “Night’s Mask is a setting of a sonnet written in English by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) [who] was educated in South Africa and returned to Portugal only in 1935 [the year of his death]…The music of this setting is mainly slow, with two fast instrumental interludes, in the second of which the soloist joins.” Pessoa wrote the sonnet in English. The soprano, Patrizia Kwella, commissioned this piece and first performed it in June, 1984, with members of the English Chamber Orchestra at The Maltings, Snope. (Liner Notes by Colin Matthews, 1991).

The composer has chosen to break the sonnet into three parts and to intersperse two interludes between them.

Night’s Mask

We are born at sunset and we die ere morn,
And the whole darkness of the world we know,
How can we guess its truth, to darkness born,
The obscure consequence of absent glow?
Only the stars to teach us light. We grasp
Their scattered smallnesses with thoughts that stray,
And, though their eyes look through night’s complete mask,
Yet they speak not the features of the day.
Why should these small denials of the whole
More than the black hole the pleased eyes attract?
Why what it calls ‘worth’ does the captive soul
Add to the small and from the large detract?
So out of light’s love wishing its night’s stretch,
A nightly thought of day we darkly reach.

Fernando Pessoa

Time: 16. Introduction 03’34
17. Interlude i 01’04
18. ‘Only the stars’ 02’56
19. Interlude ii 00’49
20. ‘Why what it calls “worth”’ 02’44

Total time: 10’39

Running time: 62’49

CD 4: Band 1: Toru Takemitsu (1930, Tokyo – 1996, Tokyo) http://www.soundintermedia.co.uk/treeline-online/biog.html: riverrun [sic] for piano and orchestra (1984): Paul Crossley, piano; The London Sinfonietta, Oliver Knussen, conductor. Virgin Classics CD VC 7 91180-2.

Certainly one of the great composers of any century, Toru Takemitsu composed in a style that uniquely blended western and eastern characteristics and certainly became one of the most influential composers of the last 50 years of the past century. In his liner notes, Takemitsu writes: “riverrun for piano and orchestra is a work inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake… The music flows in the form of a musical tributary derived from a certain main current, wending its way through the scenery of night towards the sea of tonality.”

The conductor, Oliver Knussen, adds, “The real synthesis [of Japanese and western musical manners is no simple combination of the two cultural forms, but] takes place on a much deeper level: while there is hardly a moment in Takemitsu’s music which cannot be explained in western theoretical terms, there is also hardly a conjunction or phrase or gesture which would have been thought of by a composer with an exclusively western background . . . Just when one seems to be on familiar stylistic territory, a close look at the detailed dynamic inflections or fluctuations of pace makes one realize that this world is very much Takemitsu’s own.” (Liner Notes)

Time: 1. riverrun 14’15

Running time: 77’04

CD 5: Band 1: Takayoshi Yanagida (*1948, Sapporo City, Hokkaido) http://www.musicfromjapan.org/ Libretto on a Dreamy Vision for Flute and Orchestra (1993). Hiroaki Masunaga, flute; The Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Kasuhiko Komatsu, conductor. North Pacific Music NPM LD 023. http://www.northpacificmusic.com/

Let’s end today’s program with a piece by Japanese composer Takayoshi Yanagida, who, I must admit, I have heard of only recently. Born in Hokkaido in 1948, Yanagida began his studies at the age of 8 and was, according to the biographical liner notes, particularly drawn to Bartok and Stravinsky. He wrote Libretto on a Dreamy Vision for flute and orchestra as the result of a commission by the Orchestra Project by flutist Hiroaki Masunaga and conductor Kazuhiko Komatsu, both of whom appear on this CD. The liner notes indicate that Yanagida’s favorite instrument is the flute. They continue, “Following no specific program, Libretto on a Dreamy Vision envisions the unrolling of a pictorial scroll, reflecting mutations of an intrinsically Japanese melodic tenor, unfolding over time, within the flux of orchestral sonorities.

Time: 1. Libretto 17’00

Total running time: 94’04

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have featured, thanks to an anonymous donor, music that appears on four Virgin Classics CDs: Bohuslav (Jan) Martinů’s Double Concerto; Tobias Picker’s The Encantadas; Colin Matthews Night’s Mask; and Toru Takemitsu’s riverrun. We concluded our program with Takayoshi Yanagida’s Libretto on a Dreamy Vision, which appears on a North Pacific Music CD. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed these selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century “classical” music. Until then, this is gandalf, thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

07 November 2005, Monday Afternoon classics with Gandalf, noon to 2:00PM, EDT, streaming online @ www.wjffradio.org

2005-11-06T15:13:00.000-08:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 17 October 2005

051017

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Band 1: John Corigliano (*1938, NY): Pied Piper Fantasy – Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1981): James Galway, flute; Eastman Philharmonia, David Effron, conductor. RCA Victor Red Seal 6602-20RC

John Corigliano has written quite a few pieces for reeds and wind instruments. He composed his Pied Piper Fantasy, a concerto for flute and orchestra, between 1978 and 1981 at the request of James Galway, but not until he had thought long and hard about whether he wanted to write another wind concerto. Fortunately, the lure of writing such a piece for Galway proved greater than Corigliano’s desire to explore other musical territory at the time. He writes, in his liner notes, “Galway as the Piper seemed the most natural thing in the world, for to many, myself included, he is a kind of Pied Piper . . .” and here Corigliano quotes Robert Browning, upon whose poem the composer based his piece: “…to blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled, and green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled.”

The result of Corigliano’s decision is a superb piece of program music – what the composer calls “a programmatic fantasy-concerto based on the Pied Piper legend” - that comprises seven movements and, I think you will agree, is a delightful rendering of the Browning tale. The sections are called “Sunrise and the Piper’s Song,” “The Rats,” “Battle with the Rats,” “War Cadenza,” “The Piper’s Victory,” “The Burghers’ Chorale,” and “The Children’s March.” The penultimate and final movements, “The Burghers’ Chorale” and “The Children’s March,” depict the Burghers’ pomposity in the face of the Piper’s attempts to make friends with them. Inevitably, of course, “The Piper has had enough,” as the notes tell us.” He puts his flute aside and pulls a tiny tin whistle out of his pocket and plays “”The Children’s March,” as the children “swamp” the Burghers and march off the stage, through the audience, and out of the hall. What fun this would be to behold! And please note that the fade out at the end is a couple of minutes long and becomes quieter and quieter as befits the end of the story.

Time: 1. Sunrise and The Piper’s Song 09’39
2. The Rats 01’38
3. Battle with the Rats 02’39
4. War Cadenza 04’01
5. The Piper’s Victory 05’20
6. The Burghers’ Chorale 04’22
7. The Children’s March 09’27

Total time: 37’06

What a beautiful piece. John Corigliano was a guest on this program some years ago. Do you remember?

CD 2 Band 5: Libby Larsen (*1950, Wilmington, Delaware): Schoenberg, Schenker and Schillinger (1991) for flute, oboe, violin, viola, ‘cello, and EMAX II sampler: David Shostac, flute; Allan Vogel, oboe; Patricia Mabee, EMAX !! sampler; Ralph Mnorrison, violin; Roland Kato, viola; Rowena Hammil, ‘cello.

Our second selection today features a computer driven keyboard sampler which, according to composer Stephen Hartke, who also wrote the liner notes, represents Mozart’s influence in this piece by Libby Larsen, one of four that appears on a CD entitled Für Mozart. However, Ms. Larsen honors not only Mozart, but also “three other figures who have profoundly influenced American Music in the 20th century, [Arnold] Schoenberg, [Heinrich] Schenker, and [Joseph] Schillinger.” Schenker was a well known Austrian theorist as was Schillinger, who also taught. “The linking together of [these] . . . three quite disparate musical thinkers . . . deals with a separate issue that has fascinated Larsen in recent years, . . . the gradual shift in musical emphasis in both popular and art music from pitch-dominated music (as reflected in the theories of Schoenberg and schenker) to rhythm-demonated (Schillinger’s preoccupation and subsequent profound [influence] …on composers such as Gershwin and Ellington.) The . . . result is a celebration of musical diversity” found both “in Mozart’s musical world-vies and in 20th century American music.”

Time: 5. Schoenberg, Schenker and Schillinger 11’30

Running time: 48’36

CD 3: CD 1: Bands 2-11: Tan Dun (*1957, Central Hunan): Orchestral Theatre II: Re (1992): Kalevi Olli, bass; Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Muhai Tang and Kari Kropsu, conductors. Ondine ODE 864-2

Tan Dun, a favorite of mine, wrote three Orchestral Theatre pieces between 1990 and 1994. The first he called Xun; the second, which we will hear shortly, is entitled Re; and the third piece in the set is called Red. The subheading for the piece reads :”for divided orchestra, audience, bass voice, and two conductors and, according to Ken Smith’sliner notes, “lies in Tan’s ongoing musical journey. The piece, [illuminates] the inherent dramatic nature of the orchestra (the score indicates not just accented notes, but accented rests as well).” It “resulted from the 1992 Suntory Commission in Japan. . . Tan became the youngest composer awarded the prize.

The piece will jar you out of any stupor I may have put you in, and when you are least expecting it, I think. If you listen carefully, you will hear the sound of running water at the end of the composition, reminiscent, certainly, of one of Tan Dun's’ influences, Toru Takemitsu.

Time: 12. Re 18’55

Running time: 67’31

CD 4: Bands 1-4: Hans Henkemans (1913, The Hague – 1995, The Hague): Partita (1960); Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Jean Fournet, conductor. Boxed Set, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Jean Fournet 97019.

Our final selection today is the work of a Dutch composer, Hans Henkemans, with whom I am only marginally familiar. Born in The Hague, Henkemans started out to become a doctor, but soon decided to compose, as well. According to Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of 2oth Century Classical Musicians, Henkemans was an active, and successful, composer until 1969, when he essentially gave up music in order to practice psychiatry and medicine. Kees Wisse tells us in the liner notes thatwe should listen for certain recurring themes throughout the four movements. He adds, that Henkemans was “a precise composer in the detail as well as the whole . . . [placing] detailed directions over every phrase,” while still allowing a certain free rubato in parts of the piece.

Time: 1. Alla marcia 06’12
2. Movimento brioso 04’18
3. Fantasia 07’50
4. Tarantella 04’58

Total time: 23’15

Total running time: 90’45

We have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard John Corigliano’s Pied Piper Fantasy; Libby Larsen’s Schoenberg, Schenker and Schillinger; Tan Dun’s Orchestral Theatre II: Re; and Hans Henkemans’ Partita. You may find all this by gong to www.wjffradio.org. I hope that you have enjoyed our selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century “classical” music. Until then, this is Gandalf, thanking you for listening and wishing you all the joy of New Music!

10 October 2005 Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, Monday, Noon to 2:00PM, streaming online 2 www.wjffradio.org

2005-10-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf
Monday, 10 October 2005

051010

Good Afternoon, Lovers of Fine Music, and welcome to Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf, where we will hear the best of 20th and 21st century classical music as well as interviews with occasional guests. Before we begin our program, let’s hear what Liberty Green has to tell us on her weekly Arts and Culture Calendar.

As always, Liberty, we all thank you for the time and effort you have put into producing the WJFF Arts and Culture calendar.

CD 1: Bands 1 – 11: Arnold Schoenberg (1974, Vienna – 1951, Los Angeles) http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/schonberg.html : Jacob’s Ladder (Die Jakobsleiter), Oratorio for Soloists, Choruses, and Orchestra (1917, unfinished fragment: a performance version was prepared by Winfried Zillig and premiered on June 16, 1961 in Vienna. Baker’s, 1206): Siegmund Nimsgern, Gabriel; Kenneth Bowen, a summoner (ein Berufener); Ian Partridge, a rabble rouser (ein Aufrührerischer); Paul Hudson, a wrestler (ein Ringender); John Shirley-Quirk, der Auserwählte (the Chosen One); Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, a monk (der Mönch); Ortrun Wenkel, one who is dying (der Sterbende); Mady Mesplé, the spirit, or soul (die Seele): BBC Singers; BBC Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, conductor. SONY Classical SMK 48 462.

Rene Liebowitz, in a 1949 publication entitled Schoenberg and His School, tells us World War I interrupted Schoenberg’s teaching and “put a sudden stop to [his] beginning ‘international’ activity. He began writing the text [for his planned oratorio, Jacob’s Ladder] in January, 1915, but because of being drafted for the first time, could not finish it until July, 1917.” In fact, Schoenberg never did finish the oratorio; it awaited the attention of Winfried Zillig, who prepared a performance version that was first performed in 1961. To the end of his life, Schoenberg had to dodge the brickbats of the self-appointed cognoscenti who took every opportunity to beat him up in public. Here is a comment, for example, from the Musical Times of London in 1930: “The name of Schoenberg is, as far as the British public is concerned, mud.” (Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, 162).

It is true now; it was true then: Most people fear change and are quick to condemn its harbingers without making much effort to understand what the artist is trying to do. When we hear what Schoenberg had in mind for this oratorio, we might wonder if he didn’t have the 21st century in mind after all.

Clytus Gottwald (translated by Stewart Spencer) quotes Schoenberg in the liner notes: “[F]or a long time I have been wanting to write an oratorio on the following subject: modern man, having passed through materialism, socialism, and anarchy, and, despite having been an atheist, still having in him some residue of ancient faith (in the form of superstition)), wrestles with God . . . and finally succeeds in finding God and becoming religious. Learning to Pray! . . . “

Gottwald continues, “. . .[It] is clear that although [Schoenberg’s] starting point was Genesis 28:12-13, his plan left the Judaeo-Christian tradition far behind it, including, as it did, ideas not only of reincarnation and karma but also allusions to theosophy and Swedenborgian mysticism. Such syncretism . . . is grounded in the belief that no religion or religious outlook can lay claim to a monopoly of the truth . . .”

Let’s listen to this Schoenberg’s oratorio fragment, Jacob’s Ladder, performed by Siegmund Nimsgern, Gabriel; Kenneth Bowen, a summoner (ein Berufener); Ian Partridge, a rabble rouser (ein Aufrührerischer); Paul Hudson, a wrestler (ein Ringender); John Shirley-Quirk, der Auserwählte (the Chosen One); Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, a monk (der Mönch); Ortrun Wenkel, one who is dying (der Sterbende); Mady Mesplé, the spirit, or soul (die Seele): BBC Singers; BBC Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, conductor. SONY Classical SMK 48 462.

Time: 1. Gabriel, Chorus 04’51
2. Chorus, Gabriel 04’46
3. Gabriel, ein Berufener 03’54
4. Gabriel, ein Aufrührerischer 02’09
5. Gabriel, ein Ringender 03’54
6. Gabriel 02’25
7. Der Auserwählte, Gabriel 05’40
8. Der Mönch, Gabriel 05’10
9. Der Sterbende 03’30
10. Gabriel, Chorus 03’25
11. Grand Symphonic Interlude 07’25

Total time: 47’08

CD 2: Entire: Osvaldo Golijov (*1960, La Plata, Argentina) http://www.holycross.edu/departments/music/website/golijov.htm : The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994). Kronos Quartet: David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello, David Kakauer, clarinet, bass clarinet, basset horn. Nonesuch Records 79444-2. http://www.kronosquartet.org/under30/partners.html update: http://www.kronosquartet.org/info/zeigler.html

In a conversation with Brooke Gladstone that occurred in October, 10 years ago, Osvaldo Golijov, according to the liner notes, gave this account of his chamber piece The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.

I have this image of my great-grandfather, who shared my bedroom when I was seven. I’d wake up and see him by the window, praying with his phylacteries in the early light. I think of him always praying, or fixing things, his pockets full of screws. I remember thinking, three of his children are dead; how does he still pray? Why does he still fix things? But we were taught that God had assigned that task of repairing the world to the Jewish people – Tikkun Olam. Incomprehensible.

About eight hundred years ago, Isaac the Blind – who was the greatest Kabbalist rabbi of Provence – dictated a manuscript saying that everything in the universe, all things and events, are products of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet’s letters.

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind is a kind of epic, a history of Judaism. It has Abraham, exile, and redemption. The movements sound like they are in three of the language spoken in almost 6,000 years of Jewish history: the first in Aramaic; the second in Yiddish; and the third in Hebrew. I never wrote it with this idea in mind, and only understood it when the work was finished. But while I was composing the second movement, for example, my father would sit out on the deck with the newspaper, the sports pages, and every once in a while he would shout, ‘There you go! Another Yiddish chord!’

“In the prelude, the music is like a celestial accordion, rising and falling like breathing, like praying . . . like air . . . then the air is transformed into a pulse and heart.

“The whole first movement is a heartbeat that accelerates wildly . . . becoming frantic. It’s built on a single chord, rotating like a monolith. The Quartet obsesses in eighth notes, the clarinet starts a huge line in long notes, but zooms in and is caught up in the gravitational spin. The forces of God and man, they never unite, but they do commune; you can hear the dybbuk and the shofar, searching for a revelation that is always out of reach.

“The second movement opens with a hesitating, irregular pulse, a skipping heartbeat, the rhythm of death. The violin and the clarinet hold forth in monologue at the same time, like those Bashevis Singer stories told in a poorhouse on a winter night. The same four notes, the same theme, playing in endless combinations.

“Kronos is an accordion in the prelude, a klezmer band in the second movement; now, in the third movement, it’s a shepherd’s magic flute. The last movement was written before all the others. It’s an instrumental version of K’VAKARAT, a work that I wrote a few years ago for Kronos and Cantor Misha Alexandrovich. In this final movement hope is present but out of reach. There is a question woven into the hardening, inescapable pulse: why this task? Repairing a world forever breaking down, with pockets full of screws. The question remains unanswered in the postlude.”

Let’s listen to this incredible piece, Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams of Prayers of Isaac the Blind, performed by the Kronos Quartet: David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, ‘cello, David Kakauer, clarinet, bass clarinet, basset horn. Nonesuch Records 79444-2.

Time: 1. Prelude 04’14
2. Agitato 08’33
3. Teneramente 10’33
4. Calmo 07’08
5. Postlude 02’23

Total time: 32’51

Running time: 79’59

CD 3: Band 5: Noam Sheriff (*1935, Tel Aviv) http://www.kith.org/jimmosk/israel.html : Bereshit (Genesis) for Two Boys’ Voices, Children’s Choirs & Orchestra (1998). Shimrit Malihi, Itamar Zorman, Hed Meirsson, soloists; Meitar Choir, Bat-Kol Choir, Efroni Choir, Cantabile Choir, Shir Choir, Maya Shavit conductor; Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, Zubin Mehta, conductor. Signum SC SIG X110-00.

Let’s end today’s program with a performance of composer Noam Sheriff’s 1998 choral work Bereshit, the Hebrew name for Genesis. Sheriff writes, “The idea to call the work “Genesis” was first conceived by my friend, the painter Avi Eisenstein. At first I wanted to call the work “Yearning for Genesis.” I think that in each of us there is come yearning and striving for primal things, for things from our past and, actually, for all beginnings. There are those, myself included, who often say – if only we could start anew, and perhaps slightly differently!

“Our masters asked: why does the Bible begin with the letter “Bet[h] [which is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet] and not the letter “Aleph” [which is the first]? And [they] answered: because the letter “Aleph” in Hebrew is open to all directions and the letter “Bet[h]” is closed to the past and open only to the future. I really liked this interpretation and in some ways tried to adopt it to this work.”

Here is Noam Sheriff’s Bereshit or Genesis, for Two Boys’ Voices, performed by Children’s Choirs & Orchestra (1998). Shimrit Malihi, Itamar Zorman, Hed Meirsson, soloists; Meitar Choir, Bat-Kol choir, Efroni Choir, Cantabile Choir, Shir Choir, Maya Shavit conductor; Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, Zubin Mehta, conductor. Signum SC SIG X110-00.

Time: 5. Bereshit 16’28

Total running time: 96’27

With Noam Sheriff’s Bereshit, we have come to the end of another Monday Afternoon Classics with Gandalf. Today we have heard Arnold Schoenberg’s Jacob’s Ladder; Osvaldo Golojov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind; and Noam Sheriff’s Bereshit. I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed today’s selections and that you will tune in next week for more great 20th and 21st century “classical” music. Until then, this is gandalf wishing you all the joy of New Music and those of you who are celebrating Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a healthy and a happy new year – a Süsse Jahr – a year of tolerance, peace, health, happiness, and remembrance not only of all those who have gone before us, but of all those who at this very moment suffer in poverty and deprivation. L’Shana Tovah!