David Finckel and Wu Han, Artistic Directors
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE Thursday Evening, December 11, 2014 at 7:30 Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse 3,377th Concert
LUKA JUHART, accordion YURA LEE, viola PATRICK DEMENGA, cello THOMAS DEMENGA, cello ANTHONY MANZO, double bass
45th Anniversary Season
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 10th Floor New York, NY 10023 212-875-5788 www.ChamberMusicSociety.org
This concert is made possible, in part, by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation.
NEW MUSIC IN THE KAPLAN PENTHOUSE Thursday Evening, December 11, 2014 at 7:30 LUKA JUHART, accordion YURA LEE, viola PATRICK DEMENGA, cello THOMAS DEMENGA, cello ANTHONY MANZO, double bass
THOMAS DEMENGA (b. 1954)
ALFRED SCHNITTKE (1934-1998)
TOSHIO HOSOKAWA (b. 1955)
EFEU for Cello (2010) T. DEMENGA
Hymn II for Cello and Bass (1974) P. DEMENGA, MANZO
In die Tiefe der Zeit for Cello and Accordion (1994, rev. 1996) T. DEMENGA, JUHART
—INTERMISSION— VINKO GLOBOKAR (b. 1934)
VIKTOR SUSLIN (1942-2012)
Dialog über Luft for Accordion (1994) JUHART
Grenzübertritt for Viola, Cello, and Bass (1990) LEE, P. DEMENGA, MANZO
THOMAS DEMENGA
solo per due for Two Cellos (1990) P. DEMENGA, T. DEMENGA
Please turn off cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices. Photographing, sound recording, or videotaping this performance is prohibited. This evening’s performance is being streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/WatchLive, and is being recorded for future broadcast.
notes on the
PROGRAM
EFEU for Cello Thomas DEMENGA Born June 12, 1954 in Bern, Switzerland. Composed in 2010. Written for the 2010 Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann in Berlin. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 9 minutes Thomas Demenga writes, “EFEU starts with four letters from Emanuel Feuermann’s name that correspond to the following notes: E-A-F-D. In this order, these notes create pleasant and harmonious chords. Arpeggiated across three strings, they resonate
simultaneously. The musician can decide how long the beginning will last and how many repeats will follow ad libitum. Pizzicatos performed with the left hand lead into a section of trills. Suddenly the music extends over the cello’s entire range ending in a sensual piece: Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale “Alle Menschen müssen sterben,” a reminder that Emanuel Feuermann died too young. The performer may sing the last phrase of the chorale. Bell-like pizzicato, which returns throughout the chorale, is produced by placing a paper clip on the D string, about 2 centimeters from the bridge. The notes E-F-A-D (in German) are heard unmodified in the coda. The piece ends with an E major pizzicato-like chord that evokes the name Emanuel Feuermann.”
Hymn II for Cello and Bass Alfred SCHNITTKE Born November 24, 1934 in Engles, on the Volga River, in the Soviet Union. Died August 3, 1998 in Hamburg, Germany. Composed in 1974. Premiered on May 26, 1979 in Moscow by cellist Karine Georgian and bassist Rustem Gadbullin. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 6 minutes Noted for his hallmark polystylistic idiom, Alfred Schnittke has written in a wide range of genres and styles. His Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977) was one
of the first works to bring his name to prominence. It was popularized by Gidon Kremer, a tireless proponent of his music. Many of Schnittke’s works have been inspired by Kremer and other performers, including Yury Bashmet, Natalia Gutman, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and Mstislav Rostropovich. Schnittke first came to America in 1988 for the Making Music Together Festival in Boston and the American premiere of Symphony No.1 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He came again in 1991 when Carnegie Hall commissioned Concerto Grosso No. 5 for The Cleveland Orchestra as part of its Centennial Festival, and again in 1994 for the world premiere of his Symphony
No. 7 by the New York Philharmonic and the American premiere of his Symphony No. 6 by the National Symphony. Schnittke studied counterpoint and composition with Yevgeny Golubev and instrumentation with Nikolai Rakov at the Moscow Conservatory. He completed the postgraduate course in composition there in 1961 and joined the Union of Composers the same year. In 1962, he was appointed instructor in instrumentation at the Moscow Conservatory, a post which he held until 1972. Thereafter he supported himself chiefly as a composer of film scores; by 1984 he had scored more than 60 films. From the 1980s, his music gained increasing exposure and international acclaim. He has been the recipient of
numerous awards and honors, including the Austrian State Prize in 1991, Japan’s Imperial Prize in 1992, and the SlavaGloria Prize in Moscow in June 1998; his music has been celebrated with retrospectives and major festivals worldwide. More than 50 compact discs devoted exclusively to his music have been released in the last ten years. Hymn II is part of a set of four Hymns for cello and other instruments (including harp, timpani, bassoon, harpsichord, bells, and bass). They were begun in 1974 and premiered together in Moscow in 1979. The meditative quality of Hymn II is twice interrupted by waltz-like episodes before the music comes together in a traversal of the upper register of both instruments. ď ś
In die Tiefe der Zeit for Cello and Accordion Toshio HOSOKAWA Born October 23, 1955 in Hiroshima. Composed in 1994, revised 1996. Premiered on November 2, 1994 in Berlin. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 8 minutes Toshio Hosokawa combines Western and Eastern styles in his contemplative music. Born in Hiroshima in 1955, he came to Berlin at age 21 to study composition with Isang Yun and continued his studies with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. He participated in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music for a number of years before becoming a teacher there in
1990. He helped found and directed the Akiyoshidai International Contemporary Music Seminar and Festival in Yamagushi from 1989 to 1998. He has been a member of the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin since 2001 and a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin since 2006. He is the artistic director of the Takefu International Music Festival and a frequent guest at prominent contemporary music festivals, such as the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, the Salzburg Biennale, the Rheingau Musik Festival, and the MITO SettembreMusica Festival in Milan and Turin. In spring 2012 he was composer in residence at the Tongyeong International Music Festival. In summer 2012 he began a three year appointment as artistic director of the Suntory Hall International Program for
Music Composition. Nagano, Japan.
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Hosokawa has written four operas, orchestral music, chamber music, film music, and works for traditional Japanese instruments. His output includes four works for one or more accordions, two works for accordion and orchestra, and four chamber works for accordion and other instruments, including In die Tiefe der Zeit (Into the Depths of Time).
In this piece, the accordion represents the female and the cello represents the male (and, in a different version, string accompaniment represents the universe, air, and clouds) in an exploration of sound growth and decay that mirrors natural processes such as waves or breathing. “Transience is beautiful,” says Hosokawa, “The tone comes from silence, it lives, it returns to silence.”
Dialog über Luft for Accordion Vinko GLOBOKAR Born July 7, 1934 in Anderny, France. Composed in 1994. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 10 minutes Slovenian composer Vinko Globokar has written around 100 works, including solo, chamber, orchestral, and choral pieces. His highly experimental style is characterized by unusual and innovative timbres, theatrical effects, and a keen sense of humor. His works often integrate unconventional and extended techniques, including requiring instrumentalists to sing and speak. Starting with his first major composition, Voie (Path) for Narrator, Chorus, and Orchestra, he has written many genrebending large works, particularly Les Émigrés, which uses five narrators, two vocal soloists, a small choir, a jazz trio, and orchestra and L’Armonia drammatica, a ‘musical drama’ for
seven vocalists, double chorus, tenor saxophone, and orchestra. He has conducted his works with the orchestras of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Radio France, Radio Helsinki, Radio Ljubljana, and the Philharmonic Orchestras of Warsaw and Jerusalem. In 1969 he helped found the free improvisation group New Phonic Art, which has performed many of his compositions. A virtuoso trombonist, Globokar has premiered works by Luciano Berio, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, René Leibowitz, Louis Andriessen, Toru Takemitsu, and Jürg Wittenbach. Born in France, he spent his teen years in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he made his debut as a jazz musician. He subsequently studied trombone at the National Conservatory in Paris, where he received his diploma in trombone and chamber music. He studied composition and conducting with René Leibowitz, counterpoint with André Hodeir, and continued his studies with Luciano Berio. From 1967 to 1976 he was a professor at the Musikhochschule in Cologne.
In the 1970s, he ran the department of instrumental and vocal research at IRCAM in Paris. He then taught and conducted 20th-century repertoire with Orchestra Giovanile Italiana based in Fiesole (Florence) for 16 years. In 2003 he was made an honorary member of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Globokar lives in Paris. In 1994, Globokar wrote a set of four solo pieces based on the classical elements—Dialog über Erde (Dialogue about Earth) for percussion, Dialog über Feuer (Dialogue about Fire) for double bass, Dialog über Wasser (Dialogue about Water) for electric and acoustic guitar, and Dialog über Luft (Dialogue about Air) for accordion. Dialog über Luft contrasts
the push-pull motion of the accordion with the inhale and exhale actions of human breath, demonstrated in a spoken section of several nonsense phrases in the performer’s native language, interwoven with the French words: inspire transpire respire aspire Musicologist and journalist Peter Niklas Wilson writes, “Globokar gladly accepts the melodic and rhythmical clichés associated with the accordion, but exaggerates them, pushes them over the brink into a wild, grotesque frenzy: sonic overkill, Balkan folklore on acid.”
Grenzübertritt for Viola, Cello, and Bass Viktor SUSLIN Born June 13, 1942 in Miass, Ural Region, Soviet Union. Died July 10, 2012 in Hamburg, Germany. Composed in 1990. Premiered on May 14, 1991 in Trossingen, Germany by the Contra-Trio (Eckart Schloifer, viola; Klaus Heitz, cello; and Michinori Bunya, double bass). Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 13 minutes
Viktor Suslin was a member of the postWorld War II generation of Russian composers. He attended the Kharkov Conservatory before going to Moscow to study composition with Nikolai Peyko
and piano with Anatoly Vedernikov at the Gnessin Institute. By the time he graduated in 1966, Khrushchev’s political-cultural “thaw” had ended and official performance bans affected Suslin from the beginning of his career. Suslin worked for the publisher Muzyka after graduating, producing editions of important works by Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Charles Ives, and contemporary Russian composers such as Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, and Sofia Gubaidulina. In 1979 he was publicly denounced for unauthorized performances abroad and he applied to leave the Soviet Union. The following year his membership in the Soviet Composers’ Union was revoked and he was dismissed from his position at Muzyka. Upon his immigration to West Germany in 1981, he wrote Leb’wohl
(Farewell), which was dedicated to Gubaidulina. In Germany he became an editor for Sikorski Music Publishers and taught at Lübeck Musikhochschule near Hamburg. From the 1980s onward, Suslin’s works were performed at contemporary music festivals in Paris, Cologne, Tokyo, Salzburg, Lockenhaus, Zürich, and later in Moscow and St. Petersburg. His works were championed by many famous musicians, including Gidon Kremer, David Geringas, and Mark Pekarsky.
Suslin’s small but highly diverse and imaginative catalogue contains many works of chamber music, a number of which are for unusual combinations of instruments. His writing ranged from highly structured to improvisatory and aleatory works. The title Grenzübertritt (Crossing Beyond) refers to leaving the well-tempered system in favor of a new method of quarter-tone composition, which marked, for Suslin, “a transition into the 21st century.”
solo per due for Two Cellos Thomas DEMENGA Composed in 1990. Tonight is the first CMS performance of this piece. Duration: 10 minutes Thomas and Patrick Demenga perform together across Europe and around the world. They have appeared recently at the London Cello Society in England, Festival Calanca Demenga in Switzerland, Musikfestwoche Meiringen in Switzerland, Musikfest Kreuth in Germany, with Camerata Bern in Switzerland, and in a Slovenian Philharmonic concert with Luka Juhart. Their duo recordings include Cello Duets, the two-CD set 12 Hommages a Paul Sacher, and Lux aeterna. They perform a variety of works from Baroque to new music, including pieces by Thomas Demenga such as the two-cello concerto Relations, Duo? o, Du…, and tonight’s solo per due.
solo per due started during one of the Demenga brothers’ frequent improvisation sessions when Patrick created a jazz-inflected theme (using 11 of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale). It not only proved useful as a basis for one-time improvisation but Thomas remembered it and was later inspired to write it down almost unchanged as one of the themes for this piece. Another inspiration came when Thomas took a vacation to the Australian rainforest. The particular song of two birds, interlaced with the ambient sounds of the forest, contribute to the tight interplay between the two cellists and the vast sonic range of the piece: “I tried to use every possibility for how the cello can create sound,” says the composer. The piece is fully notated except for an improvised section near the end. The musicians shift seamlessly from reading the score to improvising and back in this virtuosic display of intricate percussive writing and imaginative tone colors.
meet tonight’s
ARTISTS
Cellist Patrick Demenga appears regularly at the most renowned festivals and music centers throughout Europe, South Africa, the U.S., Canada, South America, Australia, and Asia. He frequently collaborates with musicians such as Heinz Holliger, Mario Venzago, Dennis Russel Davies, Leif Segerstam, Jesús López Cobos, Howard Griffith, Christoph Poppen, Leonidas Kavakos, Alexander Lonquich, Isabelle Faust, and Natalia Gutman, as well as with orchestras like the Zurich Tonhalle Orchester, Symphonieorchester Basel, RSO Vienna, Camerata Bern, Münchner Kammerorchester, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Kremerata Baltica, and Ensemble Modern. His many radio and television recordings as well as numerous LPs and CDs (Novalis, Accord Musidisc, ECM, Sony Classical), have made him known to an international audience. He has premiered works by composers such as Isang Yun, Gerhard Schedl, and Heinz Holliger. He teaches a concert class at the Lausanne Conservatory and also teaches diverse international master classes. For several years, he directed the cello festival Viva Cello in Liestal/Basel. He is artistic director of the Vier Jahreszeiten-Konzerte in Blumenstein near Bern, Switzerland and of the Musikfestwoche Meiringen. He obtained the award “Der Goldene Bogen” (Golden bow) in 2001. He studied at the Bern Conservatory, in Cologne with Boris Pergamenschikow, and with Harvey Shapiro in New York. Cellist Thomas Demenga is an internationally renowned soloist, composer, and teacher. He has performed at many important festivals and musical centers worldwide and given numerous concerts with musicians such as Heinz Holliger, Gidon Kremer, Thomas Larcher, Hansheinz Schneeberger, Tabea Zimmermann, and Paul Meyer. He has appeared as a soloist with distinguished orchestras such as the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester, Boston Symphony Orchestra, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, ORF-Symphonieorchester Wien, TonhalleOrchester Zürich, and Zürcher Kammerorchester. His voice as a composer and interpreter of 20th and 21st century works gives a new and complementary dimension to both the historical performance practice of Baroque music and his virtuoso interpretations of the classical and romantic repertoire. Last season he played the six Bach solo suites combined with modern solo works in three concerts in London’s Wigmore Hall. He was “Artiste étoile” at the Lucerne Festival in summer 2003 and in 1991 he was the first Swiss composer to be awarded first prize for his composition solo per due by the congress of the Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs. His work is documented on a series of CDs issued by ECM New Series and his latest CD Chongur with Thomas Larcher and accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti has been awarded the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Fono Forum: Star of the Month, Grammophon: Editors Choice, and Le monde de la musique: le choc du mois. He teaches at the Hochschule für Musik in Basel.
Accordionist Luka Juhart collaborates with contemporary composers to commission new works, and has produced to date, either alone or in various ensembles, over 40 debut performances of new pieces. As a soloist, he has performed in two of Vinko Globokar’s monumental pieces, Radiography of a Novel with Symphony Orchestra SWR in Donaueschingen, Germany, and Angel of History with the Slovene Philharmonic Orchestra under the leadership of Diego Masson. His other collaborations with orchestras include the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra ORF, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the German Radio Symphonic Orchestra from Saarbrücken, Mozarteum Salzburg Orchestra, and the Windkraft and Aventure ensembles. He has performed at eminent European festivals such as the BBC Proms, Klangspuren in the Austrian Schwaz, the Warsaw Autumn, Transit in Leuven in Belgium, and November Music at the Dutch s’Hertogenbosch. He has brought out two solo albums, Dialog/Dialogue (Zavod Sploh and L’innomable records) and Deconstructing Accordion (NEOS),and his other recordings have been released by NEOS, Transit, and ORF. He studied at the State Academy of Music in Trossingen, Germany in the class of Hugo Noth, whom he joined after his finals at the music gymnasium in Maribor with Andrej Lorber. He completed his postgraduate studies in the master class of Stefan Hussong at the Academy of Music in Würzburg in 2008. He has taught at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana since 2012 and he has given workshops at various conservatories and academies across Europe. Violinist/violist Yura Lee is a multi-faceted musician, as a soloist and chamber musician, and one of the very few that is equally virtuosic in both violin and viola. She has performed with major orchestras including those of New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She has given recitals in London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Salzburg’s Mozarteum, Brussels’ Palais des Beaux-Arts, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. At age 12, she became the youngest artist ever to receive the Debut Artist of the Year prize at the Performance Today awards given by National Public Radio. She is a recipient of the 2007 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the first prize winner of the 2013 ARD Competition. She has received numerous other international prizes, including top prizes in the Mozart, Indianapolis, Hannover, Kreisler, Bashmet, and Paganini competitions. Her CD Mozart in Paris with Reinhard Goebel and the Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie, received the prestigious Diapason d’Or Award. As a chamber musician, she regularly takes part in the festivals of Marlboro, Salzburg, Verbier, and Caramoor. Her main teachers included Dorothy DeLay, Hyo Kang, Miriam Fried, Paul Biss, Thomas Riebl, Ana Chumachenko, and Nobuko Imai. Ms. Lee is professor of violin at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden, Germany. She divides her time between New York City and Berlin. Ms. Lee is a former member of Chamber Music Society Two, as both violinist and violist.
Double bassist Anthony Manzo enjoys performing in a broad variety of musical forums. A sought-after chamber musician who performs regularly at such noted venues as the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC, Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, Maine, and the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he is also the solo bassist of San Francisco’s New Century Chamber Orchestra, and a regular guest artist with the National Symphony Orchestra and the Smithsonian Chamber Society near his home in Washington DC. Formerly the solo bassist of the Munich Chamber Orchestra, he still returns often to Europe, frequently performing with Camerata Salzburg in Austria, where collaborations have included a summer residency at the Salzburg Festival, as well as two tours as double bass soloist alongside bass/baritone Thomas Quasthoff in Mozart’s “Per questa bella mano” (with performances in Salzburg, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and Istanbul). He is also an active performer on period instruments, with groups including The Handel & Haydn Society of Boston and Opera Lafayette in Washington, DC. Additionally, Mr. Manzo is a member of the double bass and chamber music faculty of the University of Maryland. He performs on a double bass made around 1890 by Jerome Thibouville Lamy in Paris (which now has a removable neck for travel!).
upcoming
EVENTS
BRANDENBURG CONCERTOS
Friday, December 12, 2014, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Sunday, December 14, 2014, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Tuesday, December 16, 2014, 7:30 PM • Alice Tully Hall Standing at the pinnacle of Baroque musical art, these festive annual performances, called a "New York Holiday staple" by The New York Times, are not to be missed.
BEETHOVEN, KODÁLY, AND DVOŘÁK
Sunday, January 11, 2015, 5:00 PM • Alice Tully Hall Powerful works including Kodály’s lovely Serenade, Beethoven’s dramatic C minor Trio, and Dvořák’s cinematic “American” Quintet comprise this exhilarating program.
ROSE STUDIO CONCERT
Thursday, January 15, 2015, 6:30 PM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Works by Crusell and Mendelssohn.
LATE NIGHT ROSE
Thursday, January 15, 2015, 9:00 PM • Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio Works by Crusell and Mendelssohn. Streamed live at www.ChamberMusicSociety.org/watchlive