José García-León, Dean
new music new haven Aaron Jay Kernis, Artistic Director
New Music for Orchestra with
Yale Philharmonia Samuel Hollister and Stefano Boccacci, conductors
Thursday, December 7, 2023 | 7:30 p.m. Woolsey Hall
Program Arseniy Gusev b. 1998
Five Collective Dreams
Dayton Hare b. 1996
Estuary
Forrest Eimold b. 1999
Ad Oculos
Luke Haaksma b. 1997
Endling Song
Kyle Rivera b. 1996
Parallactic Trichroism
As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profiles Samuel Hollister, conductor
Stefano Boccacci, conductor
Conductor, pianist, harpsichordist, composer, and theorist Samuel Hollister believes that music tells powerful stories that create and strengthen communities. He serves as the music director of the Civic Orchestra of New Haven, and in 2022 he joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as the interim director of orchestral activities. Currently pursuing a D.M.A. in orchestral conducting at the Yale School of Music, Hollister serves as conducting fellow for the Yale Philharmonia and as the assistant to Peter Oundjian. Hollister holds two master’s degrees in orchestral conducting and music theory pedagogy from Peabody Conservatory, where he studied with Marin Alsop. While an undergraduate in music and mathematics at Yale, he conducted the Saybrook College Orchestra and concert productions of Mozart’s Requiem and Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil. He has conducted world premieres of opera and concert music at Yale, Peabody, the University of Rhode Island, with the PHACE ensemble in Vienna, and elsewhere around the world. He conducted and arranged the Peabody Opera’s 2020 production of Britten’s Turn of the Screw, bringing singers together virtually even as the world grappled with a pandemic. He joined the music staff of Opera Saratoga in 2022 as a conductor and pianist and was named a conducting fellow at the Eastern Music Festival in 2019, returning on invitation in 2021. In 2018 Hollister founded Aurora Collaborative, a Rhode Island nonprofit music organization, to provide opportunities for musicians and artists of any age or background to collaborate and communicate their own musical narratives.
Colombian-Italian conductor Stefano Boccacci is a versatile symphonic, opera, and ballet conductor. He has worked with professional orchestras and opera productions in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America. He has worked with the Welsh National Opera Orchestra, the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and has assisted conductors Carlo Rizzi, Mark Wigglesworth, and Giancarlo Guerrero, among others. Recent commitments include working as assistant conductor at the Immling Festival in Germany, the Welsh Ballet, Buxton International Opera Festival in the UK, and with the Ensemble Multilatérale in Paris (2022). He is a current conducting fellow at Yale University and assistant conductor of the Yale Philharmonia and conductor Peter Oundjian. Boccacci is a conducting teacher at the University of Oxford (Hertford College), a visiting artist and orchestral tutor at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and has recently joined Yale’s Music in Schools Initiative as a conducting teacher. He has conducted and assisted opera productions in the UK, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, and Colombia. His repertoire includes La bohème, Suor Angelica, Rigoletto, Turn of the Screw, Così fan tutte, Dido & Aeneas, and Carmen. He works as language coach in Italian, French, English, and Spanish.
Artist Profiles, cont.
Staff
Boccacci has trained with Jac van Steen, Carlo Rizzi, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, John Fisher, Patrick Fournillier, and Johannes Wildner. Completing his research project at the Université de Strasbourg, his research focuses on programming and production of twentieth-century chamber operas by Xenakis, Weill, and Piazzolla.
general manager Jeffrey M. Mistri
Student Profiles Forrest Eimold ’24MM Student of Aaron Jay Kernis Arseniy Gusev ’24MM Student of David Lang Luke Haaksma ’24MM Student of Aaron Jay Kernis Dayton Hare ’24MM Student of Martin Bresnick Kyle Rivera ’24MM Student of Martin Bresnick
assistant manager & music librarian Samuel Bobinski office assistant Lucas Zeiter
Program Notes by the composers Five Collective Dreams arseniy gusev Five Collective Dreams is inspired by Berlioz’s program to his Symphonie fantastique. Instead of focusing on one artist’s dream, they reflect the story of a group of artists which get lost in a sequence of shared dreams. Mis-en-place A new drug, which allows people to share one dream, is being tested. A group of artists decides to do an experiment together. They fall asleep, and their dreams merge. I. Passions The artists are surrounded by the fragments of people they love, pieces of bodies are floating around them, but can’t connect together. The artists are terrified and run away.
II. Scene in the nightclub Everyone in the nightclub is faceless but they know that their lovers will have faces once they remember their names. For some reason, no one can recall the name of their lover. Little by little, their faces also start to disappear. III. City Evening sounds of the city, first welcoming but quickly becoming more and more predatorial. In the noise, everyone is trying to hear the sound of their heart but only the giant heart of the city is heard. IV. Execution Faceless and heartless, the artists are brought to the slaughterhouse where they are trying to restore their bodies by exchanging organs with each other. Little by little, they lose their bodies completely. V. Dance of the hollow spirits The air in the empty and cold space is ruffled by quiet echoes of tears and bitter laughter, produced by the forsaken spirits of the artists who are lost in their collective dreams.
my mind. But today, as climate change places an ever-greater strain on the river system, I often think about its imperiled future. A combination of drought, poor planning, and bad policy nearly emptied the river’s reservoirs last year, but for decades before it had been drying up downstream, dammed and diverted for human consumption. At the Colorado’s mouth, where in centuries past the river formed an estuary with the Gulf of California, the desert has overtaken the riverbed and water rarely reaches the ocean. Now, like so much of the natural world in the Anthropocene, the estuary exists only in the traces left behind in the memory of the earth. My piece follows the river’s course, from the stillness of snowcapped peaks to the stillness of the dry desert riverbed, in what I hope is my own small contribution to this memory. Ad Oculos forrest eimold Accompanying concerti from a piano puts you in a rather odd relationship with “the orchestra.” “His gaze remained sharp.”
Estuary dayton hare The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the American Southwest. Starting from its headwaters in the Rockies, throughout an otherwise arid region the river irrigates vast hectares of agricultural land and provides millions of people with drinking water. As one of those millions during my childhood, thoughts of where the water came from or where it went rarely crossed
On the one hand, it feels impossible for the piano to obtain the seemingly infinite array of colors available to the orchestra; on the other hand, it is precisely this inaccessibility of orchestral sounds on the piano that makes them all, in a way, equally transmissible. “Sometimes he would use a drastic but extremely simple method to open my eyes [...].”
Program Notes, cont. The first time I saw someone read from full score—a piano teacher accompanying his student—I’ll never forget how little he chose to play. Chasms of silence intervened; everything mattered, and the notes dissolved before his eyes…. “He would cover the upper system of the piano accompaniment with one hand and, pointing to the vocal line and bass, say […]: ‘I only read this.’” Brahms’s Violin Concerto was the first concerto I accompanied from full score; having worked with about a dozen players on the piece, I wondered what it would be like if they played through the solo part together. What would my job be, then? “Through such a procedure, the unnaturalness of the invention was often demonstrated to me ad oculos.” (Gustav Jenner, 1905) Endling Song luke haaksma An “endling” is the last documented member of a species or subspecies. Endling Song integrates instrumental representations of endling vocalizations into an orchestral landscape, referencing the “songs” of various lost birds and also the “calls” of several mammals and reptiles as source material. In its entirety, the piece traces the progression of a conscious being gradually becoming aware of its own expiration — meandering isolation twists into exasperated anger, only to wither and die. There is no political argument at the core of Endling Song. It only portrays a field of expressional diversity that can no longer be heard.
Parallactic Trichroism kyle rivera For me, Parallactic Trichroism represents a sonic space where time functions as a three-dimensional spatial object. As time flows interact, the results can have either constructive or destructive effects on temporal velocities. There are times in my life when I can see distinct flashes of the past or future radiating into my perceived present. Much like the colors of trichroic crystals, glimpses of déjà vu, nostalgia, and premonitions are features of a space where temporal distances converge. In this piece, my goal is to explore how these concepts influence the way I relate to and experience time.
Yale Philharmonia Roster Peter Oundjian, principal conductor violin i Charlie Lovell-Jones Xingzhou Rong Miray Ito Caroline Durham Laurel Gagnon Minji Lee Chaofan Wang Mercedes Cheung Jimin Kim Minkyung Lee violin ii Emma Carleton Sung-Chi Chang Jeein Kim Josh Liu Sory Park Albert Gang Amy Oh Jeongmin An viola Katie Liu Matthew McDowell Wanxinyi Huang Andy Park Emily Rekrut-Pressey Ayano Nakamura cello Charles Zandieh Jenny Bahk Jakyoung Huh Ga Eun Lee Amanda Chi Robin Park
double bass Patrick Curtis Hector Ponce Min Kyung Cho flute Daniel Fletcher Michael Huerta Jarrett May oboe Mickenna Keller Maren Tonini Alec Chai clarinet Jonathan López Amer Hasan Nickolas Hamblin bassoon Anjali Pillai Lucas Zeiter horn Franco Augusto Ortiz Torrin Hallett Will Sands Corey Schmidt Amber Wang Gretchen Berendt Oved Rico Braydon Ross trumpet Eric Evans Jonathan Hunda Will Rich
trombone Yuki Mori David Seder bass trombone Jackson Murphy tuba Alexander Friedman timpani Makana Medeiros percussion Chad Beebe Han Xia Michael Yeung harp Yun Chai Lee piano Yongqiu Liu Po Han Chiu electric guitar Joe Tollefsen
Upcoming Events at YSM dec 8
Soovin Kim, violin Faculty Artist Series 7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall Free admission
dec 8
Yale Schola Cantorum Christmas Celebration Institute of Sacred Music 7:30 p.m. | Woolsey Hall Free admission
dec 10
Paul Watkins, cello & Boris Berman, piano Faculty Artist Series 3 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall Free admission
dec 11
Tuba Studio Recital YSM Ensembles 4:30 p.m. | Sudler Recital Hall Free admission
dec 12
Guitar Chamber Music YSM Ensembles 7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall Free admission
dec 13
Lunchtime Chamber Music 12:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall Free admission
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