Faculty Notes Professor of Piano Peter Takács was a featured speaker at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in August 2013. Takács discussed Beethoven’s piano sonatas, drawing on his own experience recording the complete cycle of 32 sonatas.
Assistant Professor Yolanda Kondonassis released her album American Harp, featuring solos by John Cage, John Williams, and Hannah Lash, in June 2013. Clevelandclassical.com wrote: “Besides demonstrating her technical prowess, the album reveals Kondonassis’s musical character as the epitome of grace and charm.” Faculty members Lewis Nielson (composer) and Paul Schick (librettist) collaborated on Nova , a satirical opera directed by Jonathon Field. The opera opened the 2014 Big Box series at Cleveland Public Theatre in February.
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Barker Professor of Music Theory Brian Alegant and Barbara Sawhill, director of the Cooper International Learning Center and lecturer in Hispanic studies at Oberlin, coauthored “Making the Grade (Or Not): Thoughts on Self-Design, Self-Assessment, and SelfGrading.” The article appears in the e-book Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy. Soprano Kendra Colton ’83, assistant professor of singing, gave the Boston premiere of John Harbison’s Crossroads on November 30, 2013, as guest artist on Winsor Music’s concert series. A review in the Boston Musical Intelligencer said Colton’s performance was “fearless, rock-solid and seemingly undaunted by the vocal line’s many challenges of pitch and disjunct melodic line” and that she “clearly projected the poetry’s texts with clarity of enunciation and singular beauty of tone.” Colton took the stage in Boston again on December 15, this time with Emmanuel Music singing the North American premiere of C.P.E. Bach’s Meine Seele erhebt den Herrn, H. 819. In the fall of 2014, Colton will release a new recording on the Oberlin Music label featuring the song cycle A Reckless Heart by Welsh composer Andy Vores.
Jonathan Moyer
Assistant Professor of Organ Jonathan Moyer ’12 (pictured, below left) gave a recital in March for NEOSonicFest, Cleveland’s inaugural new music festival. One of six programs, his concert, called “Music from the Abyss,” included rarely performed works. After opening with Bach’s six-voice chorale, Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 686, Moyer performed Messiaen’s 1951 Les mains de l’abîme from the composer’s Livre d’orgue, Piet Kee’s Four Pieces for Manuals, Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative, Op. 40, and Gyorgi Ligeti’s notorious Volumina— notorious because the premiere was canceled when the organ used in rehearsal caught fire due to the exceptional demands made on the instrument. Moyer closed with one of William Bolcom’s Gospel Preludes, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The review on clevelandclassical.com called Moyer’s program “Ingenious in concept and splendid in its execution” and “an unusual and impressive addition to NEOSonicFest.”
Making Reeds Start to Finish, by bassoon professor George Sakakeeny, is a multimedia e-book focused on the specialized craft of bassoon reed-making, which has traditionally been passed down from teacher to student in the context of private lessons. The format of the book is structured around text descriptions with pictures and short embedded videos capturing the action of certain reed-making steps. There are also links to recommended suppliers for tools and other materials. Optimized for iPad and Mac computers, the e-book is available on iTunes.
Historical Performance Program Director and fortepianist David Breitman released a new recording in February featuring the Beethoven sonatas for violin and piano with violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch. To launch the release, the longtime duo performed a series of concerts in California and England to critical acclaim. San Francisco Classical Voice wrote of the January concert: “Wallfisch and Breitman were consistently lyrical in melody ... and they always kept the structure and form of each movement entirely clear and straightforward.” The CD, Beethoven: The Sonatas for Violin & Piano Vol.1, is a project on the Nimbus label and is available through digital distributors worldwide. A new recording from jazz studies professor and drummer Billy Hart is earning attention. One Is the Other is the second album on ECM by the Billy Hart Quartet featuring pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Ben Street, and tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. Formed in 2003, the group has been appearing on critics’ “best” lists for nearly a decade. It’s been a banner year for Hart: The Jazz Journalists Association also named him “Traps Drummer of the Year” for 2013. Piano faculty members Robert Shannon ’71 and Haewon Song were recently added to the esteemed roster of Steinway Artists. Ted Good, president and CEO of Steinway Piano Gallery Cleveland, said: “Ever since William Steinway created the Steinway Concert & Artists Roster in the latter part of the 19th century, Steinway & Sons has been blessed by their close association with the greatest pianists of every
MOYER, SAKAKEENY: TANYA ROSEN-JONES ’97
Six Oberlin music theorists presented at the annual Society of Music Theory conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in fall 2013. The presentations included: • Barker Professor Brian Alegant, “On Second Thought: Dallapiccola’s Revision of the Epilogo in the Concerto per la note di Natale dell’anno 1956” • Assistant Professor David Heetderks, “The Hybrid Syntax of Seventh Chords in Postmillennial Rock” • Associate Professor Sigrun Heinzelmann, “The Grundgestalt in Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimantales” • Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Jan Miyake ’96, “Two Low-Frill, Easy, and Effective
Ways to Use Technology” • Assistant Professor Andrew Pau, “‘A Flight into the Exotic Distance’: Harmony and Voice Leading in the Act IV Duet from Bizet’s Carmen” • Visiting Instructor John Reef, “Subject-Phrase Interactions in Bach’s ‘Fortspinnungstypus’ Fugues”