David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE Thursday Evening, April 18, 2013 at 7:30 Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse 3,210th Concert
GLORIA CHIEN, piano BRETT DEAN, viola ORION STRING QUARTET DANIEL PHILLIPS, violin TODD PHILLIPS, violin STEVEN TENENBOM, viola TIMOTHY EDDY, cello DAVID SHIFRIN, clarinet KURT MUROKI, double bass MICHAEL LAWRENCE, host
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This concert is made possible, in part, by the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE Thursday Evening, April 18, 2013 at 7:30 GLORIA CHIEN, piano BRETT DEAN, viola ORION STRING QUARTET DANIEL PHILLIPS, violin TODD PHILLIPS, violin STEVEN TENENBOM, viola TIMOTHY EDDY, cello DAVID SHIFRIN, clarinet KURT MUROKI, double bass MICHAEL LAWRENCE, host
BRETT DEAN Intimate Decisions for Viola (1996) (b. 1961)
DEAN
AARON JAY KERNIS Perpetual Chaconne for Clarinet and (b. 1960) String Quartet (NY Premiere) (2011-12) SHIFRIN, D. PHILLIPS, T. PHILLIPS, TENENBOM, EDDY
—INTERMISSION— DEAN Voices of Angels for Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass (1996) Evocation Different Realms CHIEN, D. PHILLIPS, DEAN, EDDY, MUROKI
Join us after the concert for a discussion with composer Brett Dean and the artists, led by Michael Lawrence.
Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive, and is being recorded for future broadcast. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited.
notes on the
PROGRAM
Intimate Decisions for Viola Brett DEAN Born October 23, 1961 in Brisbane, Australia. Composed in 1996. Premiered on June 21, 1997 at the International Chamber Music Festival in Leicester, England by the composer. Duration: 10 minutes Composer, violist, and conductor Brett Dean, one of Australia’s most acclaimed musicians, was born in Brisbane in 1961 and studied at the Queensland Conservatorium before moving to Germany in 1984 to become a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic. After serving in that distinguished ensemble for 14 years and beginning to compose in 1988, Dean returned to Australia in 2000 to work as a freelance musician. He established his reputation as a composer when his clarinet concerto, Ariel’s Music, won the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers Award in 1995. Dean has since been Artistic Director of the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne (2006–10); served residencies with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (2002–03), Cheltenham Festival (2002, 2009, 2010), Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (2007–08), Trondheim Chamber Music Festival (2011), Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (2011), and Grafenegg Festival (2013); fulfilled commissions from the Berlin Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Proms, Lucerne Festival, Cologne
Philharmonie, BBC Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, and Sydney Symphony; and received such notable awards as The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Elise L. Stoeger Prize for his contributions to chamber music (2010), Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville for his violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing (2009), Australian National Music Award (2000, 2005), and an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in Brisbane. Dean has written extensively for orchestra with and without soloists (he has performed his 2005 Viola Concerto in London, Los Angeles, Sydney, Lyon, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Dresden, Stockholm, and Melbourne), chamber ensembles, chorus, solo voice, film, and radio. His debut opera, Bliss, based on a novel by two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, was critically acclaimed on its premiere in Melbourne in 2010 and has since been staged in Sydney, Edinburgh, and Hamburg. Dean writes: “This piece for solo viola was commissioned by the German violist (and my Berlin Philharmonic colleague) Walter Küssner as part of a CD project of works for solo viola planned with a Canadian recording company for the 1998-99 season. “As the title implies, this is music of a private nature, and I must say I found the task of writing a work for a single string instrument strangely akin to writing a personal letter or having an intense discussion with a close friend. The piece opens with a short series of single
motives: a minor 3rd, a major 7th, and a perfect 4th, all very distant in character, then a more assertive minor 6th - minor 9th motive, followed later by a chain of oscillating harmonics scating across the lower strings. Slowly these separate elements start reacting to one another, and the mood changes, developing from the distant nature of the opening to something more freely rhapsodic and determined, then evolving further through moments of sudden drama, anger, flighty virtuosity or even calm and tenderness. “After exploring the implications of this “conversation” and sinking to an uneasy quietness, the viola´s ensuing
whisperings gather momentum, leading to an impassioned climax. The aftermath of this peak leaves an unresolved, gently rocking echo of what has been “discussed” in the guise of the harmonics from the opening. “The name Intimate Decisions comes from a painting by my wife, the Australian painter Heather Betts. “I gave the first performance on the 21st June, 1997 at the International Chamber Music Festival in Leicester, England. The first performance in Australia followed a week later in the South Melbourne Town Hall at a recital of the National Academy of Music.”
Perpetual Chaconne for Clarinet and String Quartet Aaron Jay KERNIS Born January 15, 1960 in Philadelphia. Composed in 2011-12. Premiered on July 16, 2012 at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon by David Shifrin and the Orion Quartet. Tonight is the New York premiere of this piece. Duration: 15 minutes Aaron Jay Kernis’ music figures prominently on orchestral, chamber, and recital programs worldwide. He has been commissioned by many of America‘s foremost performing artists, including soprano Renée Fleming, violinists Joshua Bell and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, soprano Dawn
Upshaw, and guitarist Sharon Isbin, and by institutions including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Birmingham Bach Choir, Minnesota Orchestra, and Los Angeles and Saint Paul chamber orchestras, the Walt Disney Company, James Conlon’s first season at the Ravinia Festival, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History. He looks forward to new works for trumpet soloist Philip Smith with the New York Philharmonic and a consortium of “Top 10” college wind ensembles, the Seattle Symphony, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Recent recordings include a disc of his song cycles by soprano Susan Narucki (Koch) and orchestral works by the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Cedille). Mr. Kernis
received the Grawemeyer Award for the cello concerto Colored Field and the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2 (“musica instrumentalis”). He has also been awarded the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and received Grammy nominations for Air and the Second Symphony. In Minnesota’s Twin Cities, he has served as composerin-residence for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Public Radio, and the American Composers Forum, and, since 1998, as New Music Advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra, a position he retains to this day. He is chairman and co-director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, a program that gives young composers the opportunity to hear their works played by one of the world’s great orchestras. He has taught composition at the Yale School of Music since 2003. Kernis writes: “Over the past decade I’ve been fascinated by the great variety of approaches composers have used to develop their ideas in sets of theme and variations—from logical, incremental progressions found in William Byrd, Bach, Mozart, and early Beethoven—to the later, more fantastical approaches of so many composers of the late Romantic period. I am most intrigued by the innovative, intuitive, and transformative approaches to variation found in fantasias from the 1600s and then again from late Beethoven, Schumann, and
Brahms to the late 20th century. Many of these works feature what is frequently called ‘developing variations.’ “Developing variations tend to begin from small cells and grow outward bit by bit. They can suddenly catch fire and explode toward wholly unexpected places or find logical paths that mutate so much that the music and listener frequently reach new territory. “Perpetual Chaconne grows out of four main ideas: the falling lines in the violins that open it, the lyrical, expressive music that is introduced by the clarinet, a group of minor chords that is the harmonic grounding (the chaconne) of the whole work, and the rocking, alternating triplets that pass from instrument to instrument. Everything else in the piece varies one or more of these ideas, and maps an emotional journey from mournful lyricism to increasingly abstract, harsh gestures and back. Some of the ideas return to echo earlier appearances in the work, but most are varied and transformed all the way through to the end. The piece is in one movement of about 15 minutes. “Perpetual Chaconne was written between fall 2011 and May 2012, and was commissioned for David Shifrin and the Orion Quartet by Chamber Music Northwest, Sante Fe Chamber Music Festival and for John Bruce Yeh and the Calder Quartet by the La Jolla Music Society for Summerfest.”
Voices of Angels for Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass Brett DEAN Composed in 1996. Premiered on June 12, 1996 in the Kammermusiksaal der Philharmonie in Berlin by pianist Imogen Cooper, violinist Mi-Kyung Lee, cellist Ludwig Quandt, bassist Esko Laine, and the composer as violist. Duration: 26 minutes Voices of Angels was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for its chamber music recital series; the piece was written for and dedicated to
Esko Laine and Imogen Cooper. The intricate score was inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s first two Duino Elegies, which were written around the time of the First World War. The poems, restless reflections on the mysteries of death and existence, portray angels as beautiful and enticing but ultimately terrifying. The score to Voices of Angels is inscribed with this excerpt from the first Duino Elegy: “Angels (it’s said) are often unable to tell whether they move / amongst the living or the dead. An eternal current / hurtles all ages through both realms for ever, / and drowns out their voices in both.”
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
Picked by the Boston Globe as one of the Superior Pianists of the Year and described by that newspaper as one “… who appears to excel in everything,” pianist Gloria Chien made her orchestral debut at the age of 16 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since then she has appeared as a soloist under the batons of Sergiu Comissiona, Keith Lockhart, Thomas Dausgaard, and Irwin Hoffman. She has presented recitals at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Jordan Hall, Harvard Musical Association, Caramoor Musical Festival, Verbier Festival, Salle Cortot in Paris, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. An avid chamber musician, she has been the resident pianist with the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston since 2000. She has recorded for Chandos Records, and recently released a CD with clarinetist Anthony McGill. In 2009 she launched String Theory, a chamber music series at the Hunter Museum of American Art in downtown Chattanooga, as its founder and artistic director, and the following year she was appointed director of the Chamber Music Institute at the Music@ Menlo festival. A native of Taiwan, Ms. Chien is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, where she was a student of Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun. She is an associate professor at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and a member of Chamber Music Society Two. She is a Steinway Artist. Winner of the Chamber Music Society’s Elise L. Stoeger Prize and a Grawemeyer Award, Brett Dean is a composer, violist, and conductor. He studied in Brisbane before moving to Germany in
1984 where he was a permanent member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for 14 years. He began composing in 1988, initially concentrating on experimental film and radio projects and as an improvising performer. In 2000 he returned to his native Australia to concentrate on his composition, and he now shares his time between homes in Melbourne and Berlin. Alongside his composing, he enjoys a busy career as a viola player, and since 2005 has been performing his own Viola Concerto with many of the top orchestras worldwide. He is a committed chamber musician and in 2010 he performed alongside the Australian String Quartet at the Cheltenham Festival (where he was composer-in-residence) to give the premiere of his string quintet Epitaphs. Other recent and upcoming plans include projects with the Doric Quartet, Britten Sinfonia, and a composer residency at Yellow Barn, Vermont. He is now enjoying a blossoming conducting career, and his programs usually center around his own works alongside other composers. Recent conducting engagements include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, and SWR Symphonieorchester Stuttgart as part of a season Artistic Residency. Kurt Muroki has performed with the Jupiter Chamber Players, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, New York City Ballet, 92nd Street Y, and Bargemusic. His festivals appearances include Marlboro Music Festival, Festival L’Autonne at IRCAM, and the
Aspen Music Festival. He is also active playing commercials; movies with titles including the Oscar-winning film The Departed, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Julie and Julia, and Moonrise Kingdom; and popular and classical recordings with such artists as The Who, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Itzhak Perlman. He has collaborated with the Guarneri, Juilliard, and Tokyo quartets among others, and has performed concerto tours throughout Asia and the United States. A native of Maui, Hawaii, he began his musical studies on the violin and went on to study the double bass at The Juilliard School with Homer R. Mensch. He is currently on the faculty at SUNY Stony Brook and the McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University. He is also on the board of directors of the International Society of Bassists, is a D’Addario Strings Artist, and is an Artist of the Chamber Music Society. Mr. Muroki plays a double bass once owned by the famous double bassist Domenico Dragonetti and attributed to Nicolò Amati circa 1665. The Orion String Quartet is one of the most sought-after ensembles in the United States. With over 50 performances each year, the members of the quartet—violinists Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips (brothers who share the first violin chair equally), violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Timothy Eddy—have worked closely with such legendary figures as Pablo Casals, Rudolf Serkin, Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Peter Serkin, members of TASHI and the Beaux Arts Trio, as well as the Budapest, Végh, Galimir, and Guarneri string quartets. They remain on the cutting edge of programming with their wide-ranging commissions
from composers Chick Corea, Brett Dean, David Del Tredici, Alexander Goehr, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, Marc Neikrug, Lowell Libermann, Peter Lieberson, and Wynton Marsalis. This season the quartet makes appearances at the Yale School of Music—performing the entirety of J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue with Windscape—and at the Chamber Music Societies of Philadelphia and Westchester. This season offers a special introspective two-week collaboration with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at New York City’s Joyce Theater featuring musical excerpts and arrangements of works by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Ravel, and Schubert. The Orion also embarks on its first-ever tour of Japan with stops in Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kumamoto, and Hyogo. The ensemble has achieved an enviable reputation for its interpretations of Beethoven’s string quartets, and has recorded the complete quartets for Koch International Classics. Outside of the recording studio, the ensemble first performed the entire cycle for the innovative Beethoven 2000 series of free concerts at Alice Tully Hall in May 2000, and the quartet has subsequently performed the complete Beethoven cycle in Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Deerfield (MA), Indiana University in Bloomington, Santa Fe, and San Juan, PR. Most recently the Orion Quartet recorded a 2010 Bridge Records release of various Peter Lieberson works, featuring the premiere recording of the composer’s Piano Quintet with Peter Serkin, and the
quartet also released Leon Kirchner’s complete string quartets on Albany Records. Past recordings include Wynton Marsalis’s first classical composition for strings, At the Octoroon Balls (String Quartet No. 1) for Sony Classical, Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet and Piano Quintet with Peter Serkin, and Mendelssohn’s Octet with the Guarneri String Quartet, both on Arabesque. The Orion is an Artist of the Chamber Music Society and quartet-in-residence at the Mannes College of Music. The members of the quartet serve on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music, The Juilliard School, Queens College, Rutgers University, and the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Since 1993, the quartet has maintained a summer residency at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Orion String Quartet gained immediate attention in the classical music world when its founding members, each with distinguished solo and chamber music careers, officially formed the ensemble in 1987. The quartet chose its name from the Orion constellation as a metaphor for the unique personality each musician brings to the group in its collective pursuit of the highest musical ideals. Violinist Daniel Phillips enjoys a versatile career as an established chamber musician, solo artist, and teacher. He has performed as a soloist with the Pittsburgh, Houston, New Jersey, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Yakima symphonies. He appears regularly at the Spoleto USA Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Chesapeake Music Festival,
and the International Musicians Seminar in Cornwall, England. He has also been serving on the summer faculties of the Banff Centre, Heifetz Institute, and the Colorado College Music Festival. A member of the renowned Bach Aria Group, he has toured and recorded in a string quartet for SONY with Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, and Yo-Yo Ma. Recently he shared the solo spotlight in a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Santa Fe with violinists Benny Kim, Bella Hristova, and William Preucil. He has made concerto appearances with the Nova Philharmonic in New York and the Queens College Symphony under Maestro Maurice Peress. Todd Phillips has performed as a guest soloist with leading orchestras throughout North America, Europe, and Japan including the Pittsburgh Symphony, New York String Orchestra, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with which he made a critically acclaimed recording of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Deutsche Grammophon. He has appeared at the Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Santa Fe, Marlboro, and Spoleto festivals, and with Chamber Music at the 92nd Street Y and New York Philomusica. He has collaborated with such renowned artists as Rudolf Serkin, Jaime Laredo, Richard Stoltzman, Peter Serkin, and Pinchas Zukerman and has participated in 18 Musicians from Marlboro tours. He has recorded for the Arabesque, Delos, Deutsche Grammophon, Finlandia, Marlboro Recording Society, New York Philomusica, RCA Red Seal, and SONY Classical labels. Violist Steven Tenenbom has established a distinguished career as chamber
musician, soloist, recitalist, and teacher. He has worked with composer Lukas Foss and jazz artist Chick Corea, and has appeared as a guest artist with such ensembles as the Guarneri and Emerson string quartets, and the KalichsteinLaredo-Robinson trio. He has performed as a soloist with the Utah Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, and Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, and toured with the Brandenburg Ensemble throughout the United States and Japan. His festival credits include Mostly Mozart, Aspen, Ravinia, Marlboro, June Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Music from Angel Fire, and Bravo! Vail Valley. A recipient of the Coleman Chamber Music Award and a former member of the Galimir Quartet, he is currently a member of the renowned group TASHI and the piano quartet OPUS ONE. Cellist Timothy Eddy has earned distinction as a recitalist, orchestral soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, and teacher. He has performed with such symphonies as Dallas, Colorado, Jacksonville, North Carolina, and Stamford, and has appeared at the Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Aspen, Marlboro, Lockenhaus, Spoleto, and Sarasota music festivals. He has won prizes in numerous national and international competitions, including the 1975 Gaspar Cassado International Violoncello Competition in Italy. Mr. Eddy was frequently a faculty member at the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshops at Carnegie Hall. A former member of the Galimir Quartet, the New York Philomusica, and the Bach Aria Group, he collaborates in recital with pianist Gilbert Kalish. He has recorded a wide range of repertoire from Baroque to avant-garde for the Angel, Arabesque,
Columbia, CRI, Delos, Musical Heritage, New World, Nonesuch, Vanguard, Vox, and SONY Classical labels. A Yale University faculty member since 1987, clarinetist David Shifrin is artistic director of Yale’s Chamber Music Society series and Yale in New York, a concert series at Carnegie Hall. He has been an Artist of the Chamber Music Society for 23 years and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004, inaugurating the CMS Two program and the annual Brandenburg Concerto concerts. Currently in his 32nd season as artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, he has collaborated with the Guarneri, Tokyo, and Emerson string quartets and is a member of the KavafianSchub-Shifrin Trio. Winner of the Avery Fisher Prize, he is also the recipient of a Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A top prize winner in competitions throughout the world, including Munich, Geneva, and San Francisco, he has held principal clarinet positions in The Cleveland Orchestra and the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski. His recordings have received three Grammy nominations and his performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra was named Record of the Year by Stereo Review. He has also released two CDs of Lalo Schifrin’s compositions, one of which was nominated for a Latin Grammy. At home with the work of such contemporary composers as John Adams, Joan Tower, Bruce Adolphe, and Ezra Laderman, Mr. Shifrin commissioned a concerto from Ellen Taaffe Zwilich that he premiered at CMS and with the Buffalo Philharmonic in 2002.
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