022321 Faculty Chamber Recital - Greg Sauer, cello and Heidi Louise Williams, piano

THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MUSIC Presents

“Mirrored”

FACULTY CHAMBER RECITAL Featuring

Gregory Sauer, cello Heidi Louise Williams, piano

Tuesday, February 23, 2021 Seven-thirty in the Evening Opperman Music Hall Live: wfsu.org/fsumusic

PROGRAM Nocturne for Cello & Piano (1997)

Sonata No. 2 for Cello & Piano (1955) I. Allegro moderato II. Melancólico III. Festivo Sonata for Cello & Piano (1957) I. Allegro passionato II. Sostenuto III. Allegro Lament for Cello & Piano (1999)

Daniel Crozier (b. 1965) Camargo Guarnieri (1907–1993)

George Walker (1922–2018)

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939)

INTERMISSION Sonata for Cello & Piano Op. 6 (1932) I. Allegro ma non troppo II. Adagio – Presto – de nuovo Adagio III. Allegro appassionato Três Peças (1957) I. Allegro moderato II. Andantino III. Allegretto Grande Baião for Violoncello and Piano (2020)

Samuel Barber (1910–1981)

César Guerra-Peixe (1914–1993)

André Mehmari (b. 1977)

Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting while performers are playing. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Please turn off cell phones and all other electronic devices. Please refrain from putting feet on seats and seat backs. Children who become disruptive should be taken out of the performance hall so they do not disturb the musicians and other audience members.

Thank you for your cooperation.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS Professor of Cello Gregory Sauer performs in many different musical arenas. He has appeared in recital at the Old First Concert Series in San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Brightmusic Concert Series in Oklahoma City, at universities and schools of music such as the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt, the Shepherd School at Rice University, the University of Iowa and the University of Tennessee, among many others. Mr. Sauer was a prizewinner in the Hudson Valley Philharmonic and Ima Hogg National competitions and has performed concertos with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony, the New American Chamber Orchestra, the Quad City Symphony, Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Columbus (GA) Symphony, the Tallahassee Symphony, and the Missoula Symphony, among others.

For the 2019-2020 season, Sauer served as cellist in the Carpe Diem String Quartet, playing concerts in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, Siena, Italy, and in the group’s first China tour. Along with his brother, Thomas Sauer, Greg serves as co-Artistic Director of Chamber Music Quad Cities in their hometown of Davenport, Iowa. Other chamber music ventures have resulted in appearances at the Austin Chamber Music Center, the Snake River Music Festival, the Victoria Bach Festival, the Texas Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival, and the Garth Newel Music Center. As a member of the Fidelio Quartet, a prizewinning group in the London International String Quartet Competition, he performed concerts in the UK, Germany, Italy, and the Tanglewood and Aspen Music Festivals. Greg has recorded for MSR Classics, Harmonia Mundi, Albany, and Mark Records.

In 2006, Greg was appointed to the music faculty at Florida State University College of Music. Prior to that he taught eleven years at the University of Oklahoma, where he was named Presidential Professor. Other teaching/performing positions include a visiting professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles, summer programs such as the Texas Music Festival, the Duxbury Music Festival, the Foulger International Music Festival, the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, Red Lodge Music Festival, and the Hot Springs Music Festival.

Greg attended the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory.

His teachers included Ada Marie Snyder, Charles Wendt, Paul Katz, Laurence Lesser, Bonnie Hampton, and Colin Carr.

Praised by New York critic Harris Goldsmith for her ‘impeccable soloistic authority’ and ‘dazzling performances’, American pianist Heidi Louise Williams has appeared in solo and collaborative performances across North America and internationally, having won numerous prizes. Her engagements have included recitals at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Taiwan National Recital Hall in Taipei, the Chicago Cultural Center, the French Embassy in Washington D.C., and festivals in France and Italy. Her playing has been heard on WFMT Chicago, Classic 99 St. Louis, WQLN Pennsylvania, and KUAT Tucson, and on classical stations throughout Taiwan and Canada.

An ardent promoter of new music, Williams has worked with many distinguished composers. Her Albany Records solo album Drive American was named among the top 10 classical albums of 2011 in the Philadelphia City Paper, featured in Fanfare’s 2012 Critics’ Want Lists, and has been described as ‘veritably operatic’, ‘bold yet thoughtful’, ‘provocative and stimulating’ (Fanfare), possessing ‘…the muscularity and poetic power to bring this demanding repertory to life’ (American Record Guide).

Her 2019 Albany Records solo release Beyond the Sound, featuring sonatas by Griffes, Walker, Floyd, and Barber, garnered this headline by British music critic Colin Clarke: “Brilliant programming meets performances of fire meets excellent recording meets superb documentation: this is a significant release from all angles.” An avid chamber musician, Williams has collaborated with numerous outstanding American and international artists. Collaborative recording projects for Albany Records include her award-winning 2018 release with soprano Mary Mackenzie, Vocalisms, a 2-disc album devoted to premiere recordings of American Art Songs by Crozier, Harbison, Primosch and Rorem; and an album of North and South American cello-piano duos planned for 2021 with cellist Gregory Sauer. She has also recorded for the Naxos and Neos labels.

Recipient of both a 2020 Undergraduate Teaching Award and a 2020 Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor Award from Florida State University, Williams joined the FSU College of Music in 2007. Her growing roster of graduate and undergraduate students have won regional, national, and international recognition, and are actively employed in teaching and performing roles across the U.S. and abroad.

Williams completed the B.M., M.M., and D.M.A. degrees at the Peabody Institute, where she studied with Ann Schein and coached chamber music with Earl Carlyss, Samuel Sanders, Stephen Kates, and Robert McDonald. She is artist-faculty for the MasterWorks Music Festival, festival pianist for the Sunriver Music Festival since 2018, and has also taught and performed at the Interharmony International Music Festival in Italy. For more information, visit www.heidilouisewilliams.com.

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM Crozier: Nocturne for Cello & Piano Described as “harmonically lush and lyrically soaring” by the New York Times, music

by Daniel Crozier has been performed or recorded by the Fort Worth Opera, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the New York City Opera, SongFest, and saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Crozier’s awards include four nominations for awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and first prizes in the National Opera Association Chamber Opera competition and Fresh Ink. Crozier is currently Professor of Theory and Composition at Rollins College in Winter Park Florida.

Nocturne for Cello and Piano (1997) was premiered at the Aspen Music Festival by cellist Jason Duckles and pianist Blair McMillen. The piece evolves through an exploration of the relationship between four interdependent but contrasting musical ideas. It does homage to Chopin, whose favorite instrument after the piano was the cello.

Guarnieri: Sonata No. 2 for Cello & Piano Championed by Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, Camargo Guarnieri (19071993) helped to place Brazil on the map of twentieth-century art music. His Cello Sonata No. 2 (1955), written at the summit of his artistic maturity, introduces folk elements within a traditional Western European structure. As opposed to the rhythmic vitality of the outer movements, the slow movement, marked “Melancholic,” is a poignant, haunting cantilena.

– André Golbert

Walker: Sonata for Cello & Piano George Walker (1922-2018) was a trailblazer. Among many firsts, he was the first Black composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, the first Black graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, and the first Black instrumentalist to appear as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He composed nearly 100 works, ranging from symphonies, cantatas, and concertos to chamber music and solo works. He received numerous commissions from entities including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Walker composed his Cello Sonata in 1957 using a traditional three-movement structure to display his highly original and distinctive voice. The opening Allegro passionato bristles with energy that emanates from the triplet ostinato figure in the piano which opens the

piece. A much calmer chorale-style second theme provides a brief respite while maintaining an intervallic unity with the opening music. Overall, a sense of fierce angularity dominates this movement until that energy becomes too much to bear, and the coda dies away to a quiet, haunting close. The slow second movement takes up from this quiet place and spins a starkly mournful aria. Walker composed this in ABA form, in which the middle section employs a bluesy canon between piano and cello based again on the intervals of the first movement opening. Titled Allegro, the third movement is a lively, rhythmic rondo in which a whimsical, syncopated motive alternates with a devilish ostinato. The distinctive beat pattern of the ostinato provides ample opportunity for rhythmic games and a wild boogie-woogie quality.

The opening motive returns for the final time in double tempo and leads the piece to a madcap conclusion.

Zwilich: Lament for Cello & Piano Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Marie Krafft Distinguished Professor, is widely considered to be one of America’s leading composers. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award). Her works are commissioned and played regularly by the leading orchestras and ensembles throughout the world. The following is excerpted from Zwilich’s notes in the Carnegie Hall Millennium Piano Book: “Lament was written in memory of Judith Arron, whose visionary goals for Carnegie Hall were matched by her abilities to achieve them. Those of us who worked closely with Judy knew of her long struggle with illness…and how hard she fought for life. Lament was my immediate and personal response to her loss.”

Barber: Sonata for Cello & Piano Samuel Barber (1910-1981) is one of the most well-known and often-performed American composers, having achieved wide acclaim early in his career for works such as the Adagio for Strings (1936), First Symphony (1936), Violin Concerto (1939), and this Cello Sonata (1932). As a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, Barber was a triple threat—pianist, composer, and singer. Much of his compositional work is distinctly vocal in its style, and that is certainly true of the Cello Sonata.

The sonata opens with surging, striving music that becomes the basis for much of the stormy development section and returns in a curiously disembodied state at the recapitulation. A contrasting theme in this traditionally structured sonata-allegro movement is warmly lyrical, deliciously harmonized, and showcases the vocal leanings of the composer. The second movement is notable for combining a slow movement and scherzo into one structure. The song that the cello weaves into the chorale-style harmonies at the opening of this movement is another example of the lyrical genius

of Barber, already in full bloom at the age of twenty-two. This tender and gorgeous reflection is tantalizingly brief, giving way to a lively and humorously limping middle section. Upon its return, the slow music opens out into a full climax before settling quietly. The syncopated, tempestuous melody that opens the third movement is set above a roiling left-hand figure, evoking a storm at sea. The answer in the cello is cast an augmented fourth away, increasing the tension, which is never completely resolved, as the sonata ends in an aura of dark defiance.

Guerra-Peixe: Três Peças César Guerra-Peixe (1914-1993), another prolific Brazilian composer, was equally comfortable in the realms of classical, folk, and popular music. Fascinated with Northeastern Brazil’s culture, he launched an ethnomusicological research project that quickly filled travel journals with the region’s indigenous melodies and rhythms.

These notebooks would provide inspiration for his Three Pieces (1957). In the first movement, an arresting cello melody is juxtaposed with the piano’s evocative outlining of a Baião rhythm, typical of Brazilian folklore. The middle movement, whose title roughly translates as “Mourning Prayer,” depicts a body-purification ritual that the composer himself experienced during his travels, where a sorrowful chant laments the recently deceased. Inspired by a traditional percussion rhythm, the exhilarating final piece interweaves its vibrancy with the unbound lyricism of modal melodies, hence englobing two of the most prominent elements across the music of both Guarnieri and Guerra-Peixe.

– André Golbert

Mehmari: Grande Baião for Violoncello and Piano André Mehmari is considered one of Brazil’s most talented musicians. His activities as pianist, composer, and arranger are highly regarded in both popular and classical music. His compositions have been performed by leading orchestras such as Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo; his career in jazz and Brazilian popular music has attained wide attention in all of Brazil’s major jazz festivals and abroad. Emerging from the fertile artistic region of Northeastern Brazil, the Baião is a musical genre and dance style based on a syncopated duple-meter rhythm infused with elements of Amerindian, Mestizo, African, and European music. Composed in 2020 for Sauer and Williams, Grande Baião for cello and piano paints a vibrant landscape of colorful, exuberant intensity in its contrasting fast-slow-fast-slow-fast episodic structure.

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