2016 Program Book

Come join us!

Welcome to SkanFest!

Welcome to a new season of world-class music by the lake! Whether you are here for the first or the fiftieth time, you have arrived at an especially exciting moment for the Skaneateles Festival. With its traditions as strong as ever, the Festival looks to a bright future as it unveils the new Robinson Pavilion at Anyela’s Vineyards. This state-of-the-art amphitheater overlooking the lake will bring you the most thrilling performers from around the world for many years to come. And it all starts now.

Artistic Directors Aaron Wunsch & Julia Bruskin

pg. 6

The Parker Quartet pg. 10

Hilary Hahn pg. 24

This summer’s lineup is an ambitious mix of “never before” and “back for more.” The Robinson Pavilion debuts with four spectacular events, and indoor events include appearances by superstar violinist Hilary Hahn and innovative programs like Paris 1900 (August 12), Is it Jazz? (August 19), Passion, Past and Present (September 1), and Tango Tour (September 2). We hope you will return for more than one performance. When you do, you will start to hear our four Festival themes emerge from the varied programs: Paris, 1900 Let music transport you to Belle Époque Paris, around 1900—the city of painters Monet and Degas; the new Eiffel Tower; and an astonishing array of romantic and racy music, from Debussy and Ravel to Poulenc’s Moulin Rouge-like cabaret entertainment, The Masked Ball.

Dance to It Dance makes its Festival debut this summer, as maverick choreographer Austin McCormick brings dancers from his Company XIV to Skaneateles. Throughout the festival, hear music grounded in dance rhythms from all over the world. You might just find your foot tapping.

All That Jazz The word “jazz” turns 100 years old this year. In a tribute to the wide-ranging influence the great American art form has had on composers almost everywhere, hear how jazz plays a role in all kinds of music over the last 100 years. Oh, and hear plenty of straight-up jazz, too!

21st Century Tunes What does the music of our century sound like? We have some spectacularly gifted young composers at work in the past 15+ years – they are not afraid of breaking the boundaries between classical, jazz, and pop, and their music ranges from witty and fun to heartbreaking and poignant.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis pg. 38

Whatever your age, background, and familiarity with music, we hope you will find something to uplift, surprise, and move you in each program. Music has the power to shape how we feel, to broaden how we think, and to help us find new joy and optimism in our lives.

This is a place where the performers and audience are one community – so by all means, introduce yourself to us and to the performers you hear. Share with us how you feel about the performances, and strike up a conversation. Music is a living art, and we are all part of it together. Whatever your age, background, and familiarity with music, we hope you will find something to uplift, surprise, and move you in each program. Music has the power to shape how we feel, to broaden how we think, and to help us find new joy and optimism in our lives. This is a place where the performers and audience are one community – so by all means, introduce yourself to us and to the performers you hear. Share with us how you feel about the performances, and strike up a conversation. Music is a living art, and we are all part of it together.

pg. 50

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Skaneateles Festival

2016

Board of Directors

Advisory Council

Dave Birchenough, President Dana Hall, Vice President George Bain, Treasurer Bill Mahood and Ginny Marty, Co-Secretaries Joyce Jowaisas Miki Bangs John King Joan Christy Bill Lynn Edward Conan Amy Neumann Barb Connor Louise Robinson Jessica Danial Margaret Sovik David Duggan Doug Sutherland Koko Fuller Michael Tutor Scott Hafler Doug Whitehouse Scott Johnston

Thomas Bersani Ellen Bifano Beth Boudreau Mary Cotter

William Davis John DeFrancisco Michael P. Falcone Lindsay Groves

Claire Howard Daniel Labeille Andy Latchem Sharon Magee

Andrew Ramsgard David Robinson (1924-2006)

Administration Susan Mark, Executive Director Julia Bruskin & Aaron Wunsch, Artistic Directors Steve Frackenpohl, Director of Operations Christine Grayton, Executive Assistant Office Interns: Emily Cook, Cateryna Kochan, Lydia Parker, Laurel Parker

Corey Riley, Technical Assistant Jackie Riley, Musician Liaison Alex Van Riper, Stage Assistant Crew: Ben Blackwell, Zachary Driscoll, Alex Flanagan, Ethan Goldstein, Will Johnson, Jon Niebuhr, Matt Oliver Outside the Box Business Solutions, Bookkeeping Nancy Boyce, Graphic Designer

A Special Thank You to our 2015 Volunteers Mark and Diane Aberi Lillian and Bernard Asher George Bain Miki Bangs Henry and Helga Beck Dave Birchenough and Carrie Lazarus Alyssa Blount Nancy and Jessy Boyce Mary Bradly Patience Brewster and Holly Gregg Lynn and David Brown Carol Brownscheidle Carol Bryant Judy Bryant Mary and Charlie Buckley Betsy Burton Corinne and Bill Buterbaugh Patti Carey Maryellen Casey and Bruce Keplinger Joan Christy and Tom Bersani Kip Coerper

Ed and Paula Conan Barb Connor and Doug Wood Carol Ann Cook Susie Dailey Jessica and Patrick Danial Donna and Bill Davis Mary Dooley Evan and Liz Dreyfuss Kim and Charley Driscoll Bill Eberhardt, Sherwood Inn Dave Figura and Laura Downs Hamilton and Fran Fish Paul and Erika Fiutak Judy Fox Steve and Sandi Frackenpohl Pam Freeman Koko Fuller Mary Gardner Judy Gelston Helen, Michael, and Phoebe Glowacki David Graham

Joe and Dom Grasso Dana and Susan Hall Mike and Mary Hearn Scott Heinekamp Tom Higgins Don Hughes Marc and Shelly Kennedy Mary Knepper Wendy and John Kopley Kay Kraatz Kimball and Jim Kraus Josephine Kress Don and Christy Lemp Chuck and Nancy Lewis Gail van der Linde Craig Lindsey and the First Presbyterian Church Sharon, Marshall, Kathryn and Grace Magee Todd and Jill Marshall Anne and Charlie McElroy Jeff and Madonna Meyer James and Nancy Mion

Peter Moller Richard Naughton Jim and Patti Nocek, Anyela’s Vineyards David and Ann Neibert Bob and Sally Neumann Beth Oddy Jeff Paston Dan and Lisa Riordan Louise Robinson Bill and Suzanne Ryan Mary Sennett Kevin and Betsy Sio Sharon Slater Mona Smalley Carolyn Smith Lynn and Corinne Smith Peter and Elsa Soderberg Margaret Sovik Jan Sterling Anita Sterns

Carol and William Stokes-Cawley Peggy Surdam Don and Chacea Sundman Jennifer Sutherland Joan Thomsen Glenys and Jack Tobin Gustav Niebuhr and Margaret Usdansky Gail van der Linde Connie Walters and Mark Bostick Patty Weisse and George Thomas Jo and Bob Werner Robert and Margaret White Doug and Peg Whitehouse Susan Wolstemholme Sheryl Woodmansee

A special thanks to all the volunteers and cooks who made Summer Suite such a great success.

Acknowledgements Artist Pianos – Steinway Pianos Maryellen Casey and Bruce Keplinger, “Cybersolvers” – Webmaster and Computer Coordinator Dave Birchenough & Carrie Lazarus, Patience Brewster & Holly Gregg, Maryellen Casey & Bruce Keplinger; Elizabeth & Evan Dreyfuss; Koko Fuller; Helen Glowacki, Doug & Judy Robertson; Sherwood Inn; Chacea and Don Sundman – Musician Dinners Joan Christy – Musician Dinners and Guarantor Reception Bill Gilbane & Jeffrey Tousey – Summer Suite Hosts First Presbyterian Church – Concert Location

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Programs and artists subject to change. © The Skaneateles Festival 2016

Koko Fuller – Ticket Sales ChaseDesign – Brochure and Program Cover Design Skaneateles High School – Music Stands & Percussion Arthur Nick Smith – Piano Tuning Pete and Danette Davis – Photography Bonnie Scolaro – Oriental Rug The Manor – Tent Many thanks to the generous Skaneateles residents who open their homes to the Festival’s visiting musicians.

The Festival Future Campaign Donors Thank you for your generous support of The Robinson Pavilion, The Artist Fund, and The Legacy Fund GIFTS OF $100,000+ Henry and Helga Beck Michael and Noreen Falcone Bob and Sally Neumann GIFTS OF $50,000 - $99,999 Allyn Foundation Emerson Foundation a bequest from Henry Panasci Peter and Elsa Soderberg GIFTS OF $10,000 - $49,999 George S. Bain Dave Birchenough & Carrie Lazarus Judy Bryant, In memory of Gladys A. Bryant Joan Christy and Tom Bersani Central New York Community Foundation Ed and Paula Conan Bob and Sue Congel Barb Connor and Doug Wood Mary Cotter Jessica and Patrick Danial Donna and Bill Davis Sid and Suzanne Devorsetz David Duggan and Lynn Cleary Dan and Colleen Fisher Steve and Sandi Frackenpohl Koko Fuller David S. Graham Wendy Graham and Virginia Graham Livingston, in memory of Jean S. Graham Dana and Susan Hall Linda and Bruce Kenan Andrea Latchem Ginny and Fred Marty Jim and Julie Moore and the Fletcher Foundation Louise Robinson Doug Sutherland and Nancy Kramer Jim and Salli Tuozzolo Adam and Kim Weitsman GIFTS OF $1,000 - $9,999 Ivan and Mimi Ace, in honor of Louise Robinson Ed and Sharon Barno Lynne and Richard Bennett Gwen Birchenough Patti Carey Tim and Margie Creamer Susan T. Dailey Charley and Kimberly Driscoll Hamilton and Fran Fish Steven J. Ford and Patricia A. Lynn-Ford John Frank, from The Oscar Fund of the Wayne County Community Foundation Joseph and Marie Grasso Gary and Bonnie Grossman, in honor of Dave Birchenough Johnny Angel’s Joyce and Robin Jowaisas Ted Kinder, in memory of George Kinder

John and Maren King Dr. Paul and Elizabeth Koenig Chris Lego and Jeff Shingleton Sharon and Marshall Magee, in honor of Jack and Kathryn Boyce Bill and Miki Mahood Susan Mark and Mary Knepper, in honor of Louise and David Robinson John and Candace Marsellus Jill and Todd Marshall Amy and Chris Neumann Sean and Laura O’Keefe Doug and Judy Robertson, in honor of David and Louise Robinson Linda and Dan Roche Al and Vicky Sabin, in honor of Grady Charles Allen Arleen and Loren Van Riper Jack and Judy Varney, in honor of David & Louise Robinson Jo and Bob Werner Doug and Peg Whitehouse GIFTS OF $500 - $999 Carol Aroesty Bernard and Lilian Asher, in memory of John D. Asher, M.D. Arlene and Tome Bloomer, in memory of Jean Graham Joyce and Curtis Carlson Maryellen Casey and Bruce Keplinger John and Betsy Cherundolo Pamela Frame, in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Frame Georgina Gregory Scott Hafler Scott Heinekamp Wendy and John Kopley Chris and Andrea Kozub Daniel and Grace Labeille, in memory of Lisa Labeille Bob and Terry Dewitt Alan and Joan Marcoccia Coates David and Norma McCarthy Jill and George Newton, in memory of David Robinson Christine O’Connell-More David Rubin and Tina Press Kelly and Steven Scheinman, in memory of David Robinson Elaine and Michael Shende Sharon Slater Paul and Mary Torrisi Jaime Tuozzolo Margaret Usdansky and Gustav Niebuhr GIFTS OF $100 - $499 Dianne Apter and Tom McKay Miki and Dan Bangs Ann Marie Bergold Walt and Pat Blackler Cynthia A. Blume Beth Boudreau, in memory of Dr. Robert Boudreau James and Cynthia Bright David Brittain Hal and Peggy Brown

Carol Bryant, in honor of Susan Mark Mary and Charlie Buckley, in honor of the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy John and Elet Callahan Andres and Monique Cardenes, in honor of Louise Robinson Heather and Timothy Carroll Elaine and Greg Ceresko Stephen and Linda Chow Jim and Sharon Cirincione Michael and Hilda Collins Lynn K. Cornachio Paul and Gail Cowley Marilyn and Bill Darmody, in honor of Mary Gardner Danette and Peter Davis Anthony and Patricia DeAngelis Frank and Lynda DeOrio John and Monika Deskur Keila Dhondt Kate DiDonato Digital Analysis Corp.

Sharry Doyle Tim and Alison Dunn Myron and Barbara Egtvedt Carey Eidel Thomas Eldred The Fallon and Byrne Family Brian Brundage and Pamela Foresman Dr. Deborah Geer and Malcolm Skipton Amandy and Wolfgang Geihe Gloria and Joshua Goldberg The Gray House B&B William and Ann Griffith Brian and Maureen Harkins William and Karen Havens Mary and Mike Hearn Carlyn and Jack Helmer James and Pat Hertz Ronald and Doris Hill Sally Holben, in honor of Louise Robinson Joseph and Eleanore Hubbard Dr. and Mrs. Peter Huntington John and Linda Isaac Alan Johnson & Lin Kroeger Mary Jacqueline Keady Alfred Kelly and Sharon Burke Virginia and Daniel Kenney Stephen and Theresa Kline Kay Kraatz Carol Lynne Krumhansl and Jeffrey Roberts Harry and Nancy Lambright Lawrence Lardy and Edith Pennington Catherine Lathwell, in memory of Douglas J. Lathwell Dr. and Mrs. Anthony J. Leone Jr. Edward and Carol Lipson Peggy Liuzzi and David Michel Jane and David Loftus Jody Longeill Gard Lorey, DDS and Sean Smith, DDS, PC William and Anne Lynn

James MacKillop, in memory of Patricia MacKillop Cliff and Bobbi Malzman Robert and Lorraine Markley Mr. and Mrs. James Marquardt Susan Martineau Mehdi and Kathie Marvasti Loretta and Richard Marx David and Judy MacDougall Jim and Kelley McQuiggan James Mostrom Sandi Mulconry Carole and Lloyd Novick Michael and Pam Odlum, in honor of Mary Lou Kraetz JoDean and Timothy Orcutt, in honor of Mr. and Mrs. A. Gilbert Hall Jeff Paston David and Cindy Petters Judy and Arnie Poltenson, in memory of David Robinson Howard and Ann Port Nelson Price and Barbara Fought Diane and Kevin Proctor, in memory of Janet Forney Mark Roney Bill and Janice Rosbrook Anne “Jigger” Roth Ed and Pam Ryan Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Sawyer Kelly and Tony Scalzo Edith Schmitz Vito and Janet Sciscioli Gary and Virginia Shanley, in memory of Carol S. Balet Jean Shook and Chris Johnson, in honor of David & Louise Robinson Margaret Sovik Jan Sterling Carol and Bill Stokes-Cawley Hope and Sal Strods Holly Strong Peggy and Dan Surdam William and Sharon Tatro Norma Tippett Cynthia G. Tracy, in memory of Charles S. Tracy Tranquility Salon Michael Tutor and Susan Keefe David and Patricia Urban Greg and Susan Van Inwegen, in memory of Jeanne and Jack Tanier Linda Van Buskirk Robert VanGulick and Virginia Robbins John and Jean Vincent Richard and Ann Wasiewicz Mark Watkins and Brenda Silverman Dr. and Mrs. Geoffry Wickwire Monica and Bruce Williams Chuk and Reenie Wilson Don and Mary Anne Winfield Susan and Warren Wulff David Ying and Elinor Freer, in honor of David and Louise Robinson Joyce Zadzilka Warren Zwicky

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Thank you to all the Skaneateles Festival Donors!

Gifts received as of July 28, 2016

Guarantor Society Bill and Penny Allyn Artist Pianos Barclay Damon Dave Birchenough and Carrie Lazarus Gwen and Bill Birchenough Mark and Lou Bitz Ed and Debbie Brennan Rick and Ann Capozza Maryellen Casey and Bruce Keplinger ChaseDesign Joan Christy and Tom Bersani Lynn Cleary and David Duggan

Columbian Foundation Barb Connor and Doug Wood Mary Cotter Jessica and Patrick Danial The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Sid and Suzanne Devorsetz Michael and Noreen Falcone Dan Fisher Koko Fuller Sarah and Kevin Goode Donna Graber, Planning Sense Holly Gregg and Patience Brewster

Grossman St. Amour, CPAs PLLC Donna Himelfarb The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Richard Mather Fund John and Kim Mezzalingua Bob and Sally Neumann New York State Council on the Arts Onondaga County and CNY Arts Faye Panasci Realty USA

Doug and Judy Robertson Louise Robinson Bill Rosenthal and Jerry Gebo Carl Schramm and Ellyn Brown Bonnie Scolaro Juliette Klein Sharpe Fund Jary and Julie Shimer Elsa and Peter Soderberg David and Deirdre Stam Don and Chacea Sundman Doug Sutherland and Nancy Kramer Jennifer Sutherland Sieglinde Wikstrom

Dr. and Mrs. Gianfranco Frittelli David Graham The Jean Graham Trust Scott Hafler Dana and Susan Hall Johnny Angel’s Patricia A. Lynn-Ford and Steven J. Ford iHeart Media Tom and Gretchen Jeffers

Joyce and Robin Jowaisas John and Maren King Andrea Latchem Marshall and Sharon Magee John and Peggy Manring Susan Mark and Mary Knepper Fred and Ginny Marty Peter and Betsy McKinnell Dan and Kathleen Mezzalingua Chris and Amy Neumann NewsChannel 9 WSYR

Dan and Linda Roche Sutton Real Estate Salli and James Tuozzolo Jack and Judy Varney WAER Syracuse Public Media WCNY Classic FM Leah Weinberg and Paul Barron Doug and Peg Whitehouse WRVO Public Media

Robert and Nicolena Errico Georgina Gregory Mary Karr Paul and Elizabeth Koenig John MacAllister and Laurel Moranz

Bill and Miki Mahood Sean and Laura O’Keefe Frank and Frances Revoir Foundation David Rubin and Tina Press

Dan Walding, Bentley-Hall, Inc. Bob and Jo Werner

Hamilton and Fran Fish Steven and Sandi Frackenpohl John V. Frank Ron and Rose Ann Gay Melvin and Dorothee Goldman Steve and Anne Hahn Marilyn and Walter Hannig Sally Holben Louis Iannettoni Scott and Jolie Johnston Barbara Kay Jackie Keady David and Sherill Ketchum Wendy and John Kopley Barbara Kotula Roger and Anna Krieger

Carol Krumhansl and Jeffrey Roberts Daniel and Grace Labeille Jeff and Wendy LaDuca David and Stacia Landsberg Marilyn Lerman Elizabeth Liddy William and Anne Lynn James MacKillop John and Candace Marsellus Modern Kitchens of Syracuse Eric Allyn and Meg O’Connell Robert and Christine Pierce Dick and Kim Poppa Nick and Linda Rossi

Disciplined Capital Group, LLC Al and Vicky Sabin Marilyn and James Seago Jean Shook and Chris Johnson Jeffrey Stannard Jan Sterling Judith Stoikov and Richard Miller Conrad Strozik Frank and Rose Swiskey Jaime Tuozzolo John and Jean Vincent Ben and Eleanor Ware Dr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Wickwire Charles and Nancy Williams

Benefactor Roland and Tacie Anderson Henry and Helga Beck Gwen Birchenough Sam and Debby Bruskin CNY Central Ed and Paula Conan Cumulus Media Donna and Bill Davis Guy and Nancy Easter Finger Lakes Radio Group Franklin Lofts, LLC

Gold Patron Craig and Kathleen Byrum Patti Carey Michael and Fouad Dietz David Driesen and Jeanne Otten

Patron

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Bernard and Lilian Asher Miki and Dan Bangs Henry and Helga Beck Mary Bradly Judith Bryant Charlie and Mary Buckley Elet and John Callahan Alan and Joan Coates Nancy Collins Tim and Margie Creamer Lawrence Cummings and Mary Ellen Andrews Jim and Cecilia Curley Susan T. Dailey David and Lisa de Silva Bobbi and Bill Dean

Thank you!

Contributor Carol and Ron Ackles Welch Allyn Network For Good Carol Aroesty Auburn Eye MDs Matteo and Rose Bartolotta Lynne and Richard Bennett Max and Laura Berube Dave and Pat Blackwell Barbara Bloom David Brittain Hal and Peggy Brown Carol Bryant Curt and Joyce Carlson Elaine and Greg Ceresko Jim and Sharon Cirincione Phyllis Clark Nancy and Joe Clayton Rev. Becky and Kip Coerper Shawn J. Comer Paul and Gail Cowley Auburn Public Theater William and Marilyn Darmody Terry and Bill Delavan Joel and Chris Delmonico Starke Donnally Anna and Ed Egert

Mr. Robert Eggleston Myron and Barbara Egtvedt Thomas Eldred Mr. and Mrs. Peter Emerson Barbara Evans Linda and J. Randolph Evans Dorothy Fagerstrom Paul and Erika Fiutak Judith A. Fox Carolyn and Roger Friedlander Alex and Donna Giambartolomei Marilyn Giancola Thomas and Louise Gilhooley Louis Green and Nanette Sable William and Ann Griffith Agnes E. Griffith, Ph.D Dorothy Hauk Kimberly Haymans-Geisler Pamela Kirwin Heintz Jim and Patty Hertz Mary and Mark Hetrick Paula Himmelsbach Rich and Debbie Hole Jack and Ruth Howard Joseph and Eleanor Hubbard Donald Hughes

Dr. and Mrs. Eugene Kaplan Mary Faughnan-Kenien Stephen and Theresa Kline Claudia and Thomas Lambdin Renee and Joseph Lane Edith Pennington and Lawrence Lardy Rev. Frank Lioi Edward and Carol Lipson Anthony and Sandra Lombardo Mr. and Mrs. James Marquardt Norma H. Martin Loretta Marx Peggy and Bert Mersereau Peggy Liuzzi and David Michel Gary and Carolyn Mucci Bruce and Margaret Osborne Eleanor Peterson Judy and Arnie Poltenson Joel Potash and Sandra Hurd Greg and Debbie Quick Mark Roney Lawrence and Janet Ruston Milton Sack Ron Sampson Carrie and Chris Scholz

Jon and Thelie Selzer Mary Sennett Susan and Steven Shaw Dr. and Mrs. Michael Shende Sharon Slater Margaret Sovik Dr. and Mrs. Ken Spitzer Elena and Wolfram Stahl Carol and William Stokes-Cawley Holly Strong Eugene and Joan Tarolli Josephine Thomas Nancy E. Tiedemann Susan Keefe and Michael Tutor Margaret Usdansky and Gustav Niebuhr Linda Van Buskirk Dr. Kevin Walsh Ron and Jane Walsh Carol Wixson Susan Wolstenholme Bob and Jeanne Young Joyce Zadzilka

Thomas Higgins Carol Rowehl and John Kahler Elizabeth Kolodney and Barbara Sutton Myron and Luba Kopchynsky Kay Kraatz Jim and Kimball Kraus Gail Kuriger James and Jane Lanshe Edward Mazur Carrie McDonald Peter Moller Richard Moscarito Virginia Muggleton David and Janet Muir Margaret and William Murray Richard Naughton JoDean and Timothy Orcutt Elizabeth Patton David and Cindy Petters Edith Schmitz Georgia and Gerd Schneider Janet and Vito Sciscioli Brenda Switzermaier Rich and Megan Sykes

Ron Thiele Joan Thomsen Glenys and Jack Tobin Dennis and Deborah Trepanier

Laurence Webster Thomas C.Weiler Patty Weisse and George Thomas

Member Walt and Pat Blackler Bernie and Ona Cohn Bregman Dan and Theresa Brown David and Lynn Brown Brian Brundage and Pamela Foresman Diane Buell Robert and Mary Burdick Betsy Burton Patti Callahan Kathryn Carlson John and Lucia Cataldo Mary and Steven Ching Michelle Cole Ransford and Janice Cooper Michael J. Cunningham Dennis and Barbara Dundon Diane Fellerman Eleanor Filburn Mary Gardner Amandy and Wolfgang Geihe Louise Harpster William and Karen Havens Jim and Patty Hertz

An enthusiastic young audience at KidsFest!

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FUN at the Festival

KidsFest and Workshops are sponsored by

The Panasci Family

Educational events for all!

Gather! Music & Stories with Susan Reed FREE Event • Wednesday, August 10, 11:00 AM • First Presbyterian Church Back by popular demand, Parent’s Choice winner Susan Reed returns for a new participatory program featuring her own hit songs and music on violin, guitar, banjo, and mountain dulcimer.

Susan Reed, storyteller/singer/musician and the Parker Quartet

Time for Three Saturday, August 27, 11:00 AM • St. James Episcopal Church The superstar trio is a favorite with kids and grown-ups alike – they fiddle like no one else, and their enthusiasm is contagious.

Don’t miss their unique combo of classical, bluegrass, jazz, and country.

Time for Three Nick Kendall, violin; Charles Yang, violin; Ranaan Meyer, bass

Music Workshops Wednesday, August 24, 11:00 AM • First Presbyterian Church Artistic Directors Aaron Wunsch and Julia Bruskin will lead informal daytime workshops for music students of all ages and abilities.

All instruments welcome. Advance registration is required.

For more info: 315-685-7418 or www.skanfest.org

artist sponsorships

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Julia Bruskin and Aaron Wunsch are sponsored by George Bain and Sam & Debby Bruskin Parker Quartet is sponsored by David & Deirdre Stam Time for Three is sponsored by Peter & Elsa Soderberg, with additional support from Donna Himelfarb

The Skaneateles Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the ­support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The Parker Quartet appears courtesy of Opus 3 Artists.

EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE

Lessons with Bach Immerse yourself in the musical world of J. S. Bach – as listener and as student.

How did he create his spiritual, awe-inspiring music? What did it mean to live and make music in his world? What can we learn from the brilliant teaching method he offered his own students?

Join Festival artistic director Aaron Wunsch for musical study, multimedia presentations in history, and exclusive live performances of Bach’s music by Festival artists, at close range.

Classes • 3:00 PM • First Presbyterian Church Will include historical context, listening, and performances Class 1 – Tuesday, August 9 Class 2 – Tuesday, August 16 Class 3 – Tuesday, August 23 Class 4 – Tuesday, August 30 Skill-building Workshops • 4:15 PM • First Presbyterian Church 60-minute “Bach Workout” will include: ear training, fundamentals of reading a score, and basic composition Workshop 1 – Tuesday, August 9 Workshop 2 – Tuesday, August 16 Workshop 3 – Tuesday, August 23 Workshop 4 – Tuesday, August 30 The Skaneateles Festival’s educational programs are open to all. Top music professors and Festival performers offer participating students knowledge and insight in history, listening, and musical skill building.

Registration is required. For more info: 315-685-7418 or www.skanfest.org

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Over the past five years, Upstate University Hospital Community Campus has experienced growth and renewal. Get to know what we offer, including the region’s only senior emergency room, after-hours care for kids, unique orthopedic services, and a host of clinics providing caring staff and the newest treatments and technology. upstate.edu/community

CARING FOR PATIENTS. SEARCHING FOR CURES. SAVING LIVES. 8

Support YOUR Skaneateles Festival D ONATE for Music Today

ENDOWMENT for the Future

Donate today and support the 2017 season. Your gift will be recognized in next year’s program.

Your gift can provide beautiful music forever… when you donate to the Festival endowment fund.

SPONSORSHIP for 2017

PLANNED GIVING Forever...

Sponsor a concert or musician for the 2017 season.

Your gift of $1,500 or more can sponsor a musician or an entire concert in 2017. Your gift will be recognized in next year’s program and you will be invited to meet the musicians.

Your planned gift can demonstrate your love of music and your continued commitment to the community that is the Skaneateles Festival.

Yes, I want to support the Skaneateles Festival.

o Donate for music today o Sponsorship for 2017 Please contact me to discuss my gift options. o Name_______________________________________ Address_____________________________________ City________________________________________ State_____________________ Zip_______________

I would like to make a tax-deductible gift to the Skaneateles Festival at the following level (all donations received this summer are recognized in the following year’s program book): o Guarantor Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $2000 and up o Benefactor Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1000-1999 o Gold Patron. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $500-999 o Patron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $200-499 o Contributor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $100-199 o Member. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $50-99

o Check enclosed. .Make checks payable to: Skaneateles Festival o Charge my: o Visa o Mastercard Card # ���������������������������������������������������

Phone______________________________________ Email: ______________________________________

Exp. Date ______ /_______

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Signature ������������������������������������������������ E-Mail ��������������������������������������������������� (required for processing)

Mail to: Skaneateles Festival, 97 E. Genesee Street, Skaneateles, NY 13152 For more information call 315-685-7418 Donate online at: www.SkanFest.org

VOLUNTEER The Festival is made possible by volunteers... like you!

We are always looking for help with • concerts • post-concert receptions • food for musician dinners • musician housing • and more

If you are interested in helping, please visit the “Get Involved” section of our website SkanFest.org 9

tonight’s concert sponsorships

week 1

Dan Fisher and Mark & Leokadia Bitz

Thursday, August 11

7:00 PM Backstage Pass (for ticket holders only)

8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Backstage Pass – A New Season, A New Venue Concert – Opening Night SAINT-SAËNS

JANÁČEK

CORIGLIANO

Fantasie for Violin and Harp, Op. 124

Daniel Chong, violin Bridget Kibbey, harp

Sonata for Violin and Piano Con moto Ballada Allegretto Adagio

Ian Swensen, violin Rieko Aizawa, piano

Gazebo Dances Overture Waltz Adagio Tarentella

Rieko Aizawa, piano Aaron Wunsch, piano

intermission

DVOŘÁK

Quintet for Piano and Strings in A Major, Op. 81 Allegro, ma non tanto Dumka Scherzo (Furiant) Finale

tonight’s artist sponsorships

tonight’s media sponsor:

Bridget Kibbey is sponsored by Donna Graber, Planning Sense, Inc. Parker Quartet is sponsored by David & Deirdre Stam Aaron Wunsch is sponsored by George Bain and Sam & Debby Bruskin

CNY Central iHeart Media

The Parker Quartet appears courtesy of Opus 3 Artists.

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Parker Quartet Daniel Chong, violin Ying Xue, violin Jessica Bodner, viola Kee-Hyun Kim, cello Aaron Wunsch, piano

The Skaneateles Festival is made possible, in part, by operating support from the County of Onondaga, administered by CNY Arts.

Program Notes

T

he new season kicks off with everything we love about the Festival: • outstanding soloists and ensembles, including the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet, harpist Bridget Kibbey (“a marvel,” New York Times), and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center violinist Ian Swensen • a diverse range of moving and surprising music, by Saint-Saëns, Dvořák, Janáček, and the Academy Award-winning American composer John Corigliano • and the chemistry that makes it all magic.

Fantasie for Harp and Violin, Op. 124 (1907) CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921) Music for an unusual combination of instruments often leads us back to the performers for whom it was composed – in this case, Moravian sisters Clara and Marianne Eissler.

They enjoyed a career performing together for various heads of state, including Queen Victoria, returning in between engagements to their shared London home, where they played billiards and enjoyed the company of their (apparently Wagnerian) dog, Tristan. Saint-Saëns had promised the accomplished sisters a duo some ten years earlier, and he finally delivered it in 1907. It became their signature piece.

Saint-Saëns composed the music at Bordighera, Italy (think Skaneateles, but on the Mediterranean). He had recently returned from a successful tour of the United States, which fêted him as the greatest living French composer – a claim with which many back in Debussy’s Paris now disagreed. However, no one could dispute the prolific achievements of this 72-year-old over the six decades since his sensational piano debut at age 10. One of history’s great child prodigies, Saint-Saëns had published works in philosophy, astronomy, and archeology. Oh yes: and music. By the time he came to the Fantasie, his 124th published work, Saint-Saëns had composed continuously for over 60 years, in every conceivable genre.

This fantasy by this most French of composers featuring the most French of instruments begins in a most French manner – not with a Germanic declamation, but by wafting a few arpeggios and an insinuating melodic sigh through the air. Who knows where they might lead? Soon the violin steps into the spotlight, showing off all it can do, from fast-charging scales to full-throated crooning.

Not to be left in the dust, the harp sends its own ravishing cascades into the stratosphere. The harp gives these up, however, to start a somber dance, tentatively joined by the violin. The dance dissolves back into the original fragrant atmosphere, which the listener is in no hurry to leave.

What’s that final sound? Neither the harp nor the violin – it is the collective sigh of the audience.

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016

Sonata for Violin and Piano (1914-22) LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854-1928) Janáček’s Violin Sonata is a troubled piece from a troubled time. In 1914, dark clouds loomed on the horizon of Europe as the armies of the First World War mobilized.

Apocalyptic feelings were especially intense in the Austrian Empire, of which Janáček’s Moravia was a part – the ancient monarchy had long been weakening and now threatened to splinter. Janáček, a great lover of Russian culture, welcomed the advance of Russian troops as potential liberators, if warily, knowing (as we all do) that war rarely turns out according to expectations. The composer himself stated about the Violin Sonata: “I could just about hear the sound of the steel clashing in my troubled head….”

PERFORMER QUOTE

“I love the magical fantasy world of the Janáček Violin sonata. He writes in a musical poetic language all his own full of passion and quick shifts of mood.

A dramatic and colorful chamber work full of hidden texts of love and tragedy.

Evocative highly passionate music!”

IAN SWENSEN

In this music, the listener hears one era giving way to another. The piece is filled with lyrical, romantic melodies and folk-music naiveté, which yearn backward in time – and yet its sudden, unsettling contrasts speak to the Modern Era, one of technological, political, and social turbulence. The Violin Sonata bewitches the ear precisely because the shimmering beauty of an idealized past seems even more precious when interrupted by intense agitation, like awakening from the most wonderful dream with a start.

The Sonata begins with a disquieting gesture from the violin, responded to by the piano’s clashing steel. The instruments gradually work out their anxiety and enjoy a moment of wistful repose before repeating the process.

The second movement, entitled Ballade, ushers in the most lyrical part of the piece, a nostalgic backward glance through rose-colored glasses. The third movement presents a furious folk dance, stark and almost crude, set in relief by the aching lyricism of a brief middle section. The contrasts inherent to these first three movements reach their apotheosis in the haunting final movement, where the violin and piano find themselves separated, as if by a brick wall. The

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8/11 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

piano sends out a full-throated song, to which the violin can only offer a terse, nervous reply, played with mute.

Even as their exchange becomes more and more heated, the two are never reconciled. Scream and pound as we might, the present can never revert to the past, and the barrier between dreams and reality will never come down.

Gazebo Dances (1972) JOHN CORIGLIANO (B. 1938) Music for piano four-hands, where two pianists sit side-byside, often touching elbows, usually has both a public and a private dimension. The increased volume of twice as many fingers offers a grand and quasi-orchestral scale, and the four-hand genre got its start as a surrogate orchestra – the only way for most people to hear and try out symphonies before the era of recorded sound. Yet there you are, touching elbows, and composers could not resist the implications for intimacy – like going on a date where the composer is your only chaperone.

American composer John Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances offer a lively mix of the public, as the title implies, and the intimate – he dedicated each movement to close friends of his who play piano. The son of a longtime New York Philharmonic concertmaster, Corigliano invigorated

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American music in the 60s and 70s with his blend of visceral, athletic passagework, sophisticated but clearly narrative musical forms, and distinctly American sounds.

Since then, he has arguably become the most prominent American composer of his generation, winning five Grammys, an Oscar, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Now imagine the scene: As the composer explains, “The title Gazebo Dances was suggested by the pavilions often seen on village greens in towns throughout the countryside, where public band concerts were given on summer evenings.” Know of such a village green, by any chance?

It’s Friday night, and the band strikes up a noisy tune, which echoes over the lake. Yes, some of the chords are out of tune, but what spirit! What enthusiasm! We follow a daydreaming flutist for a while before the noisy tune jolts the band back in step. A delightfully off-kilter waltz follows (what’s that you are drinking over there on the lawn?).

Soon everyone sways together, more or less. At the end, two youngsters eye each other coquettishly. Hey, wanna dance? A private exchange follows in the third movement, a kind of love song where the band recedes to the background. All join together for the final raucous tarantella, or at least try, since not all band members successfully play the melody at the right time. Don’t worry, all’s well that ends well – which it does.

8/11 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

Quintet for Piano and Strings in A Major, Op. 81 (1887)

music from the inside – in short, from the perspective of a violist.

Of all jokes about musicians currently in circulation, violists are almost certainly the butt of well over half of them. Never mind that even Mozart favored the viola most of all, it remains thought of as the instrument of few notes, many of them repeated in a monotone – the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the string quartet.

The Quintet begins at ease, in one of the work’s many and memorable good moods, with the cellist rocking on the gentle waves stirred up by the pianist. An abrupt turn to minor invigorates all five players, and soon all are rollicking together in Good Mood No. 2. Once the revelry subsides, the viola earnestly offers a more serious rumination, leading the whole ensemble down a darker path (thanks, Viola…!). Yet the festive atmosphere prevails in the end, a celebration full of pride and joy.

Antonín Dvořák ranks high among the great violistcomposers of chamber music. At first, he was just a violist.

He played it in the Provisional Theater orchestra in Prague, under the direction of fellow Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, and in 1865 quietly started to compose chamber works. He finally declared himself a composer in 1871, and a year later, he tried his hand at a piano quintet on the model of Schumann and Brahms, which was more or less a disaster; he trashed the manuscript. A friend saved a copy, however, and many years later, in 1887, he tried to salvage the work (publishing it as Op. 5); during that process, he found himself with enough material for a new one, in the same key. It stands today as one of the few unqualified masterpieces of the genre. Dvořák’s road to composer was a slow one, and if his folksy melodies suggest a natural gift, à la Mozart, his sophistication of texture is the result of a hard-earned craft, and the ability to see

Dvořák roots the second movement in folk music of the Dumka, a lament of Ukranian origin that had recently become a symbol of Slavic pride across Eastern Europe.

Here the viola is in its element, providing one soulful sigh after another. Once it has finished brooding, the viola leads the whole ensemble into a fiery, patriotic dance; these two states continue to alternate, providing a window into the psychic state of the Slavs still under foreign control. Such nationalism continues in the third movement, albeit in a more lighthearted mood, with a furiant, a Czech dance in 3; imagine ‘a proud, swaggering, conceited man’ (the meaning of furianty). The exhilarating Finale shows Dvořák’s unsurpassed mastery in fusing folk idioms with familiar Classical forms (here rondo, fugue, and chorale), proving that even if you start out in life by repeating phrases in a monotone, you, too, can become a great composer – or the governor of California.

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week 1

tonight’s concert sponsorship

Friday, August 12 8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Don & Chacea Sundman

Paris, 1900 CAPLET

Conte Fantastique

RAVEL

String Quartet in F Major

Bridget Kibbey, harp Parker Quartet Daniel Chong, violin Ying Xue, violin Jessica Bodner, viola Kee-Hyun Kim, cello

Allegro moderato – très doux Assez vif – très rythmé Très lent Vif et agité

Parker Quartet

intermission

CHAUSSON

Concerto in D Major, Op. 21 for Violin, Piano and String Quartet Décidé - animé Sicilienne Grave Finale: Très animé

tonight’s artist sponsorships

tonight’s media sponsor:

Bridget Kibbey is sponsored by Donna Graber, Planning Sense, Inc. Parker Quartet is sponsored by David & Deirdre Stam Ian Swensen is sponsored by Mary Cotter

CNY Central

The Parker Quartet appears courtesy of Opus 3 Artists.

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Ian Swensen, violin Rieko Aizawa, piano Parker Quartet

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(See directory on page 79.)

Program Notes

S

pend an evening immersed in the glamorous and imaginative world of turn-of-the-century Paris. The Parker Quartet brings their “exceptional virtuosity” (Washington Post) to Ravel’s String Quartet; harpist Bridget Kibbey joins them for André Caplet’s entrancing Conte Fantastique, based on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe; and the evening ends with Ernest Chausson’s opulent and romantic Concerto for String Quartet, Violin, and Piano, featuring award-winning violinist Ian Swensen.

Conte Fantastique (1908; revised, 1922-23) ANDRÉ CAPLET (1878-1925) Once time travel is possible, surely Belle Époque Paris will become a favorite destination. In the shadow of the new Eiffel tower, painters, writers, and musicians gather in cafés to create and exchange ideas, drink absinthe, and generally have a good time. At the table with Debussy, Lautrec, Proust, and friends, you can find the conductor-composer André Caplet. Debussy took Caplet under his wing, praising the younger composer’s “gift for conjuring up an atmosphere,” which is fully apparent in Conte Fantastique, composed shortly after his friendship with Debussy began.

Originally for harp and orchestra, the work was first entitled The Mask of the Red Death, after a story of the same

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016 name by Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s imaginative, arresting horror stories captivated Parisian artists; in the same year Caplet wrote the Conte Fantastique, Debussy began to draft both a libretto and music for an opera on Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher (which would have premiered at the Met Opera in New York, had it ever been finished). The allegorical horror story chosen by Caplet takes place in a fictional kingdom, where Prince Prospero ignores a terrible plague by closing off his palace from the outside world and throwing a masked ball. It sounds like an ill-advised course of action, and it is. One of the guests is in a foul mood, which angers Prospero, and when he confronts the man and removes his mask, there is nothing underneath. It is the Red Death, and one by one, all drop to the floor.

Though we try to ignore it, death comes for us all.

As the horror story begins, Caplet treats the harp entirely differently from the harmonious, pastoral quality of its stereotype. Rather, it plays an ominous and dramatic role, using unorthodox harp techniques to tell us that the Red Death is already ravaging the world around Prospero’s castle. The scene shifts to the masked ball in the locked castle, where all waltz around pretending everything is perfectly fine, and here the harp assumes its more familiar role of arpeggiator-in-chief. Each time the clock strikes, the dancers feel paralyzed, but afterward they are able to resume dancing, noticing gradually that something is going

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8/12 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

wrong. At the stroke of midnight, the Red Death comes to collect payment from everyone. Through all this the string quartet is far from a mere backup band, intertwining with the harp to weave a most intricate fabric of sound.

When Caplet returned to the piece in 1922-23, reworking it for harp and string quartet, Poe’s story likely had a very different connotation. Twice wounded in World War I, Caplet had now experienced untold horror at close range; his health had been permanently damaged by the poison gas; and his own premature death from pleurisy was only a year away. Now the Red Death was real.

String Quartet in F Major (1903) MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) 100+ years later, few listeners are aware that the beloved composer of Bolero was once something of a pariah. Along with fellow provocateur painters, poets, and critics, Ravel was a member of the self-proclaimed “Apaches,” who met to discuss ways their art could assault the conservative artistic establishment. In music, the heart of that establishment was the Paris Conservatoire, which, as its name implies, was dedicated to conserving the past – and from which Ravel was nearly expelled, presumably for his incompetence (or disinterest) in composing fugues. His outside-the-box works gradually drew followers, which did not stop him from famously failing to win the top French

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composition prize, the Prix de Rome, five years in a row – even after he conceded to write a work in a genre so conservative as the String Quartet, completed in 1903. His quartet did not even make the final round, and his own teacher, Gabriel Fauré, to whom the work was dedicated, declared it “a failure.”

Fortunately, pariahs stick together. When Ravel contemplated making some alterations to his Quartet, Claude Debussy, whose own music was vehemently opposed by Saint-Saëns and others, wrote to him: “In the name of all the Gods, and mine, please don’t.” The letter must have comforted Ravel, since he knew Debussy had himself composed a quartet a decade earlier, also to mixed reviews. Some believe Ravel based his work on Debussy’s; while it is true that both works unite a German formal model with cyclical themes, their differences are more enlightening than their similarities. The sound world created by Ravel, a self-proclaimed ‘craftsman’ of Vermeer-like exactitude, is entirely his own.

Reflective and insinuating, Ravel asks that the first movement be played “very sweetly,” which is not to say innocently. This music is sensuous, yet restrained – which only enhances its sensuality. No one is quite sure whether the famous all-pizzicato passages of the second movement were designed to evoke Javanese gamelan music (which Ravel heard at the World’s Fair, in 1889), Spanish fandango guitar playing, or a battalion of mandolins heard in the Basque region, where Ravel was born. No matter: they

8/12 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

are better off remaining exotic in a general sense, as likely intended. The sultry middle section of this movement offers a contrast, a steamy evening serenade.

The third movement unfolds as a wistful meditation on the music of the first movement. There is an unmistakably vocal quality in the rich melodies, which are passed throughout the four instruments, expressive and extremely free. The whirlwind of a last movement has an unstable five beats per bar. A waltz based again on the first movement’s theme offers a brief respite from the cyclone that threatens to (and nearly does) carry all four players off the ground.

When performed in the new world in 1908, the New York Tribune declared about Ravel’s String Quartet, “there is about as much emotional nuance as warms a problem in algebra.” Be careful what you condemn: today it is the most beloved and most oft performed of all French string quartets.

Concerto in D Major, Op. 21 for Violin, Piano and String Quartet (1891) ERNEST CHAUSSON (1855-1899) Few works capture the opulence and glamour of Belle Époque Paris better than Chausson’s Concerto. In that regard, perhaps it helped to have a father who literally

built the city. As public works contractor for GeorgesEugene Haussmann, Prosper Chausson helped transform Paris into the spacious, grand City of Light that it remains today. His son’s music bears some of the same characteristics: ambitious, sensual, gilded, and yet somehow always in good taste.

Given the expansive architectural aspirations of his father, one might expect Chausson to have written for the stage, but his private, melancholy nature prevented it. He was most at home, well, at home – and so he composed chamber music and brought the world’s stage to him: Renoir, Degas, Rodin, Mallarmé, Debussy, and many others frequented his own grand salon. The salon for which the Concerto was composed (in Brussels) sheltered Pissarro and Gauguin; at the premiere, the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe played the solo violin part and was the work’s dedicatee.

In a genre unto itself, this work is difficult to classify; concerto and chamber music are musically exclusive, and yet the piece is both. Dodging this conflict, Chausson himself used the word Concert, a French term from the Baroque Era that indicates instrumental music played at a special event, regardless of ensemble size. His use of the term is also symptomatic of the great pains taken to French-ify music in the years after France’s disastrous loss to Germany, in the Franco-Prussian War. Chausson, a protégé of César Franck, often suffered criticism for the influences in his music of Richard Wagner, and Chausson himself said of his music in 1888 that some “de-Wagnerization is necessary.” If the Concerto does employ Wagnerian harmony and the kind of endless, passionate lyricism one associates with the German opera master, its suave, curvaceous melodies are nonetheless unmistakably French.

The piano’s opening notes sound as if chiseled from stone, like a sculptor’s first three swings of the hammer.

Gradually these notes find definition and become the solo violin’s heroic theme, now clothed in a refinery of piano arpeggios. The glorious and grand sonority of the full ensemble is truly something to behold – the ChampsÉlysées of chamber music – yet intimate subtleties can also emerge from the group, as the subsequent theme shows.

The three notes return throughout, a kind of passionate mantra that finds fulfillment in a final outpouring from everyone that eventually subsides into silence.

The gently flowing Sicilienne retains an undercurrent of passion but generally pursues calmer waters. True to the word “Sicilienne,” this movement is the French version of an Italian dance (siciliana), bearing the marks of Gabriel Fauré’s harmonic language. The third movement is a solemn, almost Dantesque rumination, rendered more human by a few fragile, lonely moments with the solo violin and piano. The piano leads the hard-charging Finale, serious at first, but the solo violin takes the ensemble airborne, toward sunnier skies. In the end, the piano sings a major-key version of its theme, and all take flight for an aerial view.

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tonight’s concert is generously sponsored by

week 1

Jary and Julie Shimer

Saturday, August 13 7:30 PM Robinson Pavilion

In honor of Louise Robinson

at Anyela’s Vineyards Rain Location: West Genesee High School

First Night at Robinson Pavilion MOZART

GLASS

Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major, K. 218 Allegro Andante cantabile Rondeau

Piano Concerto No. 2, “After Lewis and Clark”

Ian Swensen, violin

Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner, piano

The Vision Sacagawea The Land

intermission

BEETHOVEN

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 Poco sostenuto – Vivace Allegretto Presto – assai meno presto Allegro con brio

Skaneateles Festival Orchestra Tito Muñoz, conductor VIOLIN Sarah Crocker Vonsattel, concertmaster Sara Mastrangelo* Amy Christian Molly Werts McDonald Ainur Zabenova Susan Spafford

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Peter Rovit Andrew Bergevin

BASS Edward Castilano

VIOLA Melissa Matson* Olita Povero Olivia Chew

FLUTE Elizabeth Shuhan* Juliana Pepinsky

CELLO Lindsay Groves* Rosemary Elliott

OBOE Anna Petersen* John Lathwell

CLARINET Allan Kolsky* Victoria Krukowski

TRUMPET John Raschella* Herbert Smith

BASSOON Matthew McDonald*

TIMPANI AND PERCUSSION Aaron Locklear

HORN Alexander Shuhan* Maura McCune Corvington

tonight’s artist sponsorships

tonight’s media sponsor:

Tito Muñoz is sponsored by Sarah and Kevin Goode Ian Swensen is sponsored by Mary Cotter Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner is sponsored by Patricia A. Lynn-Ford & Steven J. Ford Sarah Crocker Vonsattel is sponsored by Roland and Tacie Anderson

Finger Lakes Radio Group CNY Central

*denotes principal

The Skaneateles Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the ­support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Program Notes

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016

D

on’t miss the historic first Festival concert at the Robinson Pavilion, at Anyela’s Vineyards. See and hear what is possible at the new amphitheater when the Skaneateles Festival Orchestra fills the stage under the baton of Tito Muñoz, “a major talent in the making” (Cincinnati Enquirer). As you look out over the lake, hear Mozart’s melodious Violin Concerto No. 4 (with Ian Swensen, violin); Philip Glass’ ode to Nature and exploration, Piano Concerto No. 2 (“After Lewis and Clark”), featuring teenage phenom Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner; and Beethoven’s timeless Seventh Symphony.

Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major, K. 218 (1775) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) So numerous were Mozart’s accomplishments by age 19 that it was difficult to keep track of them all. “Many people do not even know that you play the violin,” wrote his father, Leopold, to the young composer-performer, in 1777.

But did he ever. “I played as if I were the greatest fiddler in all of Europe,” wrote Mozart to his father after a performance in Munich – and he rarely exaggerated. Certainly it had helped to have a father who was a leading authority on the violin; Leopold published the still-consulted Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing in the same year as his son’s birth. Mozart had also engaged with some of

Europe’s great violinists while on tour to Italy and elsewhere. Of course, mastering the violin is not the same as composing a successful violin concerto. Check – you can add that to his list of achievements, too.

The Violin Concerto in D Major, K. 218, is the fourth of Mozart’s five teenage essays in the genre, which he thereafter left behind to devote himself to the piano concerto. While Mozart may be far from your average teenager, his Violin Concerto is full of teenage behavior, nonetheless: mood swings, a swooning love song, and various practical jokes, of the musical variety. So beware, there’s a teenager in the room.

The initial theme itself might grace a Classical-Era work by any composer, and the orchestra’s presentation of it sounds well-mannered enough. Just as the listener feels at ease, Mozart’s soloist dashes in, raising the theme a full two octaves higher into the air, as if on stilts, for a kind of circus trick. Seriously: please come down from there! He slinks down, only to go right back up again. Soon he is leaping up and down, with the gaps ever wider, like a voice going through puberty. The secondary theme has a little chromatic angst to it – but, like, whatever, and soon the game of ups and downs is back in play.

From the outset, the amorous second movement makes one thing clear: it’s date night. All the feelings here are

Thank you, Louise!

Tonight's concert marks the beginning of a new era for the Skaneateles Festival. It is fitting that we take this opportunity to thank Louise Robinson for her gracious hospitality at Brook Farm for 36 wonderful years.

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8/13 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

intimate, sung with true, almost embarrassing sincerity. A simple, lyrical theme in quarter notes sets the mood. Soon one feels a pulsating heartbeat, the eighth notes in the orchestra, as the violin sighs its way down a scale. Now what do I do? The eighth notes quicken to sixteenths, and the orchestra and soloist exchange some nervous chatter, repeated a second time. Did I already say how beautiful the stars are? Awkward! Now the whole progression of melodies repeats, and finally a cadenza allows the soloist to pour out his heart, followed by a few final sighs.

The concluding rondo finds our protagonist in the mood for pranks. Just as the lilting melody gets going, it trails off with a shrug of the shoulders. As if. Suddenly he launches into a completely different theme in a different time signature – this audacious move, a mere 15 bars into the movement, entirely disregards the Classical rules of decorum. Who do you think you are?! After a series of increasingly curt exchanges between the soloist and orchestra, both sides finally calm down, and the soloist agrees to give the genteel first theme a second try. The soloist and orchestra are right back again pushing each other’s buttons, however, and this time, the soloist launches into a real tirade. OK, fine – let’s try something different. The ensuing pastorale doesn’t last either; after returning briefly to the minuet, the raucous jaunt brings our movement to a close – except that at the very last moment, the soloist puts on the brakes. Gotcha!

Piano Concerto No. 2, “After Lewis and Clark” (2004) PHILIP GLASS (B. 1937) The musical language Philip Glass created in the 1960s is one we all speak today: its propulsive rhythms, alternately ecstatic and ruminative, are ubiquitous in TV commercials, film scores, and the works of younger composers. The simplicity of its musical materials (i.e., major and minor scales and arpeggios) and their constant repetition might lead one to suspect that this language is also fundamentally limited in expression, but a work like Glass’ Second Piano Concerto proves otherwise. Its wide canvas captures the vast landscape, ambition, and vigorous individuality that have defined the American experience for over two centuries.

The work has a specifically American story to tell.

Commissioned for the 200th anniversary of the exploratory journey by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from St. Louis to the Pacific coast (1804-06), Glass pondered how music could reflect the spirit of this difficult expedition. Although programmatic, Glass’ Concerto is less interested in narrative plot than in portraying psychic states of strong individual characters. In this he follows similar concerns in his famous trilogy of operas about Einstein (Einstein on the Beach), Gandhi (Satyagraha), and Pharaoh Akhnaten (Akhnaten). The concerto medium proves an excellent fit, since by nature it pits a single individual against larger, external forces.

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The first movement, entitled “The Vision,” summons the determination and mental toughness of the travelers as they imagine the very real dangers of the unprecedented and unpredictable journey. President Thomas Jefferson hoped the explorers could chart a water route through the forbidding landscape, but no one knew whether they might succeed. The piano’s rocking waves imagine the dark waterways that might eventually lead to the Pacific Ocean. As the piano drives ever forward, the orchestra starts to flow along, as if the explorers’ force of will bends the landscape to part before them. Despite the grim tone of the movement as a whole, there is something unrelentingly optimistic in it all.

The second movement, “Sacagewea,” features the flute, a Native American instrument, as a way of honoring the role of the Shoshone woman who helped the foreigners navigate the languages and customs of tribal Native Americans. Cross-cultural interchange, also an American ideal, is at the heart of this alternately plaintive and playful music. The final movement, “The Land,” refers not only to the topography itself, but also its timelessness, a theme explored in other Glass works. Perhaps it suggests a fundamental link between the American landscape and our society’s longstanding cultivation of religious life and spirituality. Here, the piano is at its most vigorous, requiring real stamina from the performer. Yet the conclusion is not triumphant; instead, the music fades away into the distance. The journey of which Glass speaks goes on.

8/13 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 (1812) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827) Today, Beethoven’s symphonies are such cultural bedrock that it is easy to forget they were not designed to be popular. When Beethoven first presented his Seventh Symphony, a generally sunny and uplifting work, at a performance in 1813, he accompanied it with Wellington’s Victory, a bombastic escapade celebrating a minor victory in Spain over Napoleon’s older brother, which pastes together several national anthems (including God Save the King) and involves the shooting of cannons. There can be no doubt this was supposed to be the popular work – and it was, too. Today, Wellington’s Victory is never played. The greater work, referred to at the time only as a “companion piece” to Wellington’s Victory, is his Symphony No. 7. The Symphony’s lengthy and complicated form, sophisticated rhythmic interplay, and lack of memorable tunes precluded its popularity then; in short, it is an aspirational work rather than a congratulatory one.

Today, thanks in part to Beethoven, the aspirational can also be popular.

Of course, that first performance was probably dreadful.

Beethoven knew full well it would be difficult to play, by the standards of the time. Neither Vienna nor any other city in the world had a standing symphony orchestra that

rehearsed regularly; players could count only on a single dress rehearsal, if that; and parts were written by hand, inevitably with errors. Beethoven assembled the finest orchestra he could muster, including the concertmaster Ignaz Schuppanzigh, frequent interpreter of his chamber music, and Louis Spohr, a young virtuoso violinist (and inventor of the chinrest). Yet it proved necessary for Beethoven to “conduct,” which apparently meant wildly waving his arms around in the air, as if chopping meat.

Symphonic conducting was not yet the elegant and elevated profession it is today, and symphonies were generally given without a conductor, while the concertmaster (called the “director”) took the lead role, stomping a foot in time if needed. The Seventh Symphony was so complicated, however, that extraordinary measures were necessary, and so Beethoven took on the role of a traffic cop: he tried to make sure no one got into a major accident. The sight of him madly gesticulating to avoid catastrophe must have been terrible. Therefore, the music was also aspirational in the sense that no one at the time could really play it. Today we may actually hear it a few steps closer to the way Beethoven idealized it in his own head, despite the passage of time.

At first, the symphony consists of elements that have yet to realize their potential – chords, as if chopped from granite; arpeggios, descending through the sky; scales, like droplets of water. This slow introduction occupies almost a full third of the first movement, without a melody in sight.

What finally sets this world in motion is a dotted rhythm that discovers its own existence, after 73 repetitions of the note E. Happy to be alive, this rhythm frolics among the flutes and oboes, convincing the whole orchestra to join in its dance. Then it sets about prancing its way through every possible interval, key, and register (high and low).

As a whole, the movement renews the listener’s faith in the potential of life: perhaps anything really is possible.

The clouds immediately turn dark in the second movement, an entrancing, gloomy set of variations, again on a rhythm (long, short-short), rather than a theme.

Once under the spell of this movement, you will not want to leave it; even at the premiere, the audience demanded it be repeated on the spot. Beethoven imperceptibly adds layers to the movement, until the full orchestra speaks in a powerful voice that echoes in the mind and is felt in the gut. Next, in the third movement, it’s time for some comedy. The jaunty repeated notes and sudden contrasts are clearly the province of Italian comic opera, while the contrasting middle section turns to the world of Nature – the transformational effect of a great mountain vista (or a lake, if you will!). The exuberant final movement expresses the boundless energy and optimism to which we all aspire.

Beethoven asks the orchestra to play “con brio,” with vigor. Those first performers may not have been able to do it justice, but what a thrill it must have been to see them try. Beethoven’s aspiration for us is to go back to our own lives and do likewise.

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tonight’s concert is generously sponsored by

week 2

Sieglinde Wikstrom

Wednesday, August 17 7:30 PM First Presbyterian Church

tonight’s artist sponsorship

Hilary Hahn is sponsored by John & Kim Mezzalingua SKANEATELES FESTIVAL

DINING SPECIAL

summer suite sponsorship

Upon presentation of two Skaneateles Festival tickets, on the night of the event, The Sherwood Inn will offer 10% off your final dinner bill.

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Summer Suite with

Hilary Hahn & Friends Hilary Hahn, violin; Robert deMaine, cello; Natalie Zhu, piano MENDELSSOHN

Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 Allegro energico e con fuoco Andante espressivo Scherzo: Molto allegro quasi presto Finale: Allegro appassionato intermission

TCHAIKOVSKY

Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 “To the Memory of a Great Artist” Pezzo elegiaco (Moderato assai – Allegro giusto) Tema con variazioni: Andante con moto – Variazioni finale e coda

Summer Suite Following tonight’s concert join us for an elegant dessert & wine reception at the beautiful home of

Bill Gilbane & Jeffrey Tousey 85 East Genesee Street, Skaneateles

tonight’s artist sponsorships

Robert deMaine is sponsored by Jennifer Sutherland Natalie Zhu is sponsored by Donna Graber, Planning Sense, Inc.

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With additional support from Grossman St. Amour and Pascale Liquor Square

The Skaneateles Festival is made possible, in part, by operating support from the County of Onondaga, administered by CNY Arts.

Program Notes

T

he “brilliant and beautiful” (New York Times) violin playing of Hilary Hahn captivates audiences all over the world, but few communities have such a bond with her as Skaneateles does. She returns with two of her favorite colleagues, pianist and longtime recital partner Natalie Zhu, and Los Angeles Philharmonic principal cellist Robert deMaine, for a program of soulful and stormy trios by Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky.

Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845) FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) In theory, Felix Mendelssohn was a perfect torchbearer for the tradition of “chamber music.” The son of a wealthy banker and the grandson of a philosopher, he grew up in the kind of chamber for which such music was usually intended – a gathering place for nobility, intellectuals, artists, and wealthy merchants. His education was impeccable, though the musical part of it hardly seemed necessary: Felix was one of the great child prodigies, declared by the poet Goethe to have surpassed even Mozart. His early works, including string quartets and the glorious Octet (heard at the festival last summer), follow in the Classical tradition: sophisticated, playable, good-natured. The

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016 C-minor Trio, however, takes the torch of tradition and drops it into an ocean of kerosene.

The very first ominous notes give the listener wind of a conflagration to come. The tense, propulsive energy of this movement has something in common with the C-minor touchstone for Mendelssohn’s generation (and perhaps for all time) – the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. However, the hushed tones here make Mendelssohn’s trio more ominous. A conciliatory secondary theme only briefly douses the flames. While Mendelssohn masterfully crafts the movement from his various thematic fragments, à la Beethoven, the listener’s overall impression is of a dramatic narrative of great intensity. The famous scene from his great oratorio, Elijah, where Elijah calls down fire from heaven, could not have been far from the composer’s thoughts; in fact, he began to compose it in the same year as the Trio.

Cooler temperatures prevail in the lilting second movement, where any heat consists only of a heart’s ardent longings. Its rounded phrases dovetail one into the next, so that the whole movement is one long, patient feeling of uplift. The third movement is alter ego to the second: hushed, serious, and slightly wicked. It has the hallmarks of all Mendelssohn’s scherzos, a fleet brilliance and lightness

25

8/17 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

of touch, but this one contains far less than the usual measure of joy. Rather, it is like the scurrying of some forest goblin, who vanishes before you know it.

PYOTR ILLYCH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)

Truth be told, Tchaikovsky was no great fan of the piano trio. When his new patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, proposed he consider such a work, he replied: “To my ears the acoustic combination of piano with violin or cello is completely incompatible. In this sonority the instruments seem to repel one another, and I assure you that any kind of trio or sonata with piano or cello is absolute torture for me…” Despite the rather amusing severity of this statement, he changed his mind just a few months later.

The impetus was the sudden passing of his friend and mentor, Nikolai Rubinstein, at the age of 46. By offering Tchaikovsky a position at the new Moscow Conservatory, Rubinstein had given the younger composer a foothold in the music world, from which he had launched his career.

Rubinstein himself had composed five trios, so perhaps Tchaikovsky came to the genre for this reason. Composing the trio may also have been a kind of personal challenge to himself.

Beloved for its memorable, heartfelt melodies and Mozartean elegance, Tchaikovsky’s music usually seems to uphold musical tradition in ways that listeners find comforting. Perhaps this is why the Piano Trio in A minor is so rarely performed; it does not seem to sufficiently conform to our expectations of its composer, nor of the

It was not an easy road. “At first I had to force myself to write something and for my mind's ear to become accustomed to this combination of instruments,” he noted.

“But now I am working with interest and enthusiasm.”

The sound world he created is richer and broader than the trios of his predecessors – virtually symphonic in

The final movement, one of Mendelssohn’s most inspired, reconciles the disparate emotional states of the piece thus far. The cello lunges upward yet sinks back down, the sign of some unfulfilled passion. A secondary theme of great determination fails to quell this heated desire – but Mendelssohn speaks here not of romantic love, rather of life’s unfulfilled ambitions and disillusionments.

Enter a third theme, quietly at first, but it has the answers – a Lutheran chorale. When the chorale returns a second time, in glory, it seems to transform this chamber music into something celestial, a heavenly symphony. The walls of the chamber are forever gone.

Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50, “To the Memory of a Great Artist” (1882)

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trio genre. The sprawling work is unlike any Classical model: programmatic, unusual in form, and emotionally raw. It is a trio bursting at the seams.

8/17 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

texture, yet still well fit to the individual instruments.

The composer himself doubted whether it would work. “I am unsure whether this is really symphonic music just arranged for a trio, rather than being specifically designed for them. I took great pains to avoid this, but I don't know that it has turned out this way." It does work, but the performers must give it their total conviction, leaving the decorum of chamber music behind, as if stepping on to an operatic stage.

Tchaikovsky entitled the first movement “elegiac piece,” thus linking it to Rubinstein’s death. Although its tragic tone is immediately apparent, the movement traverses a vast emotional distance, quickly expanding beyond the personal. Rich piano chords announce a triumphant procession, clearly a crowd scene. From here on, the movement veers from the battlefield to the amorous and back to the tragic, in Tolstoyan manner.

The same four-note pattern lies beneath these various emotional transformations, like an inescapable mantra. At the end of the movement, the opening theme reappears, almost morbidly stretched out, as the funereal takes hold once again.

After the heavy emotions of the first movement, the second begins with a feeling of catharsis by presenting a much lighter, even delightful theme, which hardly seems

Susan Reed delights the crowd at KidsFest.

as if it could be the basis for a 25-minute set of variations.

It is – in every conceivable emotional character, from confectionary scherzo, to wallowing and wailing lament, to ballroom waltz, to driving fugue, to triumphant parade.

Many performers cut out some part of this extravagant enterprise, as its length and scope seem just too much.

Yet great art often exists just on the border of what taste will allow, and if the performers have the stamina, the unexpected return of the first movement’s elegiac theme can make the listener’s hair stand on end. By this point, the piano trio as we know it is dead and buried. We have entered the great beyond.

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week 2

Thursday, August 18 8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Koko Fuller In loving memory of her mother, Patricia M. Fuller

The Good Song FAURÉ

La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61

John Moore, baritone Kyu-Young Kim, violin Jennifer Choi, violin Jonathan Chu, viola Julia Bruskin, cello Edward Castilano, bass Natalie Zhu, piano

Une sainte en son auréole Puisque l’aube grandit La lune blanche luit dans les bois J’allais par des chemins perfides J’ai presque peur, en vérité Avant que tu ne t’en ailles" Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été N’est-ce pas?

L’hiver a cessé

KHACHATURIAN

Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano Andante con dolore, con molto espressione Allegro Moderato

Todd Palmer, clarinet Jennifer Choi, violin Natalie Zhu, piano

intermission

STRAUSS

Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 13 Allegro Scherzo: Presto – Molto meno mosso Andante Finale: Vivace

tonight’s artist sponsorships

Julia Bruskin and Aaron Wunsch are sponsored by George Bain and Sam & Debby Bruskin Natalie Zhu is sponsored by Donna Graber, Planning Sense, Inc. 28

Kyu-Young Kim, violin Jonathan Chu, viola Julia Bruskin, cello Aaron Wunsch, piano

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(See directory on page 79.)

Program Notes

T

onight’s program offers three different ways to sing your heart out: Fauré’s achingly lyrical cycle of love songs, La bonne chanson (The Good Song), in a setting for string quartet, piano, and the “commanding” Met Opera baritone John Moore (New York Times); the raucous folk songs of Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano; and opera great Richard Strauss’ ardent and fiery Piano Quartet in C Minor.

La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61 (1894) GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924) Beethoven and Antonie Brentano, Brahms and Clara Schumann, Fauré and Emma Bardac: did they, or didn’t they? While books, films, and generations of music students have speculated on whether these forbidden relationships were intimate or platonic, the only concrete evidence is musical. Fauré’s largest and most passionate song cycle was the only child of his relationship with Bardac, and he dedicated it to her. Fauré was 17 years older; both were married with two children. The wife of a wealthy, aloof banker, Bardac was a talented soprano, and Fauré was clearly charmed by her voice as well as her wit and intelligence. Although we can never know what it sounded like, Emma’s manner of singing was probably in Fauré’s mind when he composed La Bonne Chanson, even if he scored it from the man’s perspective (for baritone).

For his muse, Fauré selected nine poems by Paul Verlaine, both a brilliant choice and a natural one.

Verlaine was a friend of the composer, and the floating imagery of his symbolist poems seems the perfect counterpart to Fauré’s weightless melodies and kaleidoscopic harmonies. In his selection of poems, the composer avoided some of Verlaine’s darker, emotionally overwrought verses. Furthermore, his musical style, forged in the study of church music, usually shies away from the outpourings of either German songs or Italian opera.

As a result, the song cycle is full of profound subtleties but serene surfaces. Many listeners, even sophisticated musicians like Saint-Saëns, disliked it. Marcel Proust remarked, “The younger musicians almost universally dislike La Bonne Chanson. It seems too needlessly complex… but I don’t care, I adore it.”

In the first poem (“Une Sainte en son auréole”), the lover compares the beloved to a haloed saint, accompanied by a restrained, neo-Medieval motet; but he can’t help the imagery of his comparison from becoming sensual, so he quickly ends the poem. The second song (“Puisque l’aube grandit”) is an outpouring of happiness at dawn, and of modulations, to every imaginable key. The third (“La lune blanche”), by contrast, is a serene nocturne, and Fauré proves himself a master of capturing moonlit calm (he published 13 Nocturnes for solo piano over the course of his life). In the fourth song (“J’allais par des chemins

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016 perfides”), the lover’s “painfully uncertain” paths, portrayed by torturous harmony changes, are clarified by the lover’s command to “walk on!”, sending the song at last to its home key. The fifth song (“J’ai presque peur, en vérité”) conveys the poet’s inner agitation at finding himself in love. The sixth song (“Avant que tu ne t’en ailles”), perhaps the most expressive of all, compares the transformation of dawn into day to the lover’s longing for union – the sun just can’t rise quickly enough. In the seventh song (“Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été”), the lover anticipates his wedding day with fluttering heartbeats, but when he imagines the union, the song becomes a suspended, almost holy calm. The eighth song (“N’est-ce pas?”) features two nightingales, the lovers’ souls, flying together, as shifting harmonies circle higher and higher – music only Fauré could have written. The transcendent final poem (“L’hiver a cessé: la lumière est tiède”) finds winter turning into spring; but as “all my hopes are at last fulfilled,” there is no need for spring – any season will do.

If you allow it to intoxicate you, you may find the restrained beauty of Fauré’s music as powerful as any other music. As the great writer Victor Hugo described it, this song cycle is “a bouquet in a bombshell” – or, perhaps more accurately, a bombshell in a bouquet.

Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano (1932) ARAM KHACHATURIAN (1903-1978) Aram Khachaturian’s bridging of cultures was not merely a compositional project, for he walked across that bridge

A rapt audience fills First Presbyterian Church.

29

8/18 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

every day of his life. Of Armenian heritage, he grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia, raised on the local folk music. He played recreationally in a wind band before shipping off to study biology at the University of Moscow. Khachaturian couldn’t stay away from music, however, and managed to enroll in the Moscow Conservatory at age 26. Biology would have been the safer bet: what for 200 years had been the Russian Empire woke up one morning as a socialist republic, and to say the sands of cultural life were shifting would be an understatement. For the next 40 years Khachaturian managed to shift with them – of the three premiere Soviet composers, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian, he did so most skillfully of all.

Although a student work, Khachaturian’s Trio is typical of the neo-folkloric direction in which his music would continue. Here and elsewhere (such as in his eyeballrollingly famous Sabre Dance, from 1942) Khachaturian made modernist techniques such as repeated dissonances and complex polyrhythms sound like logical outgrowths of folk music, rendering them palatable to both audiences and the Soviet culture ministry. Unlike some of his later works, the Trio manages to do all this and remain wonderfully sincere, alternately enthusiastic and tender. It also pioneers this combination of instruments; Bartók’s better-known Contrasts (heard at the festival last season) were composed six years afterward.

The Trio starts off in the fantasy realm of improvisation, with the violin and clarinet each doing entirely its own thing at the same time, creating a wonderfully florid polyphony. The piano manages to keep them more or less together with its steady rhythm but veers off into its own flights of fancy now and again. In the impish second movement, the threesome seems to realize something can be gained from uniting in purpose and together explores the many sides of a single folk melody, from the comic, to the contemplative, to the grandiose. In his music, Khachaturian brought together folk idioms from many regions under the Soviet umbrella, including Azerbeijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The final movement presents an Uzbek melody, at first

30

completely unadorned and lonely, and sends it, like a nomad, on a remarkable journey. A showcase for his imaginative variation technique and virtuosic treatment of the instruments, the movement repeats the same melody countless times without seeming repetitive. The three instruments are in tremendously high spirits, but rather than shutting the book with a final chord, Khachaturian allows his story to trail off gently, into the listener’s imagination, where it journeys on.

Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 13 RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949) When the widely respected New Yorker music critic Alex Ross declared Richard Strauss “the composer of the century” in 1999, he surprised many of his readers, who thought of Strauss as primarily belonging to the 19th century, not the 20th. He straddled the two eras chronologically and musically, and he was able to bridge their aesthetic divisions like no one else. In his Piano Quartet, from 1884, we see just how deep his roots in the 19th century were, as well as a glimpse of where his music would grow in the 20th.

Even in this youthful work, Strauss instinctively bridged the aesthetic divisions of the 1880s, during which the followers of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner were at each other’s throats in the so-called “War of the Romantics.” Strauss wondered why he couldn’t have it both ways. His father, a horn player in the Munich Court

8/18 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

Orchestra, had played Wagner’s music under Wagner’s baton, but detested it; he instilled in his son an appreciation for the classical, conservative values of Beethoven. In a typically teenage act, the 17-year-old composer surreptitiously managed to get hold of the 2-ton Wagner score to Tristan and Isolde, which he studied in secret. Yet he greatly admired Brahms, too, and by the year after this Quartet he worked alongside Brahms to prepare the Meiningen Orchestra for its first performance of the Fourth Symphony. When he decided to compose a Piano Quartet in 1884, he chose the same key as Brahms’ most recent quartet (Op. 60, from 1875), the tragic C Minor.

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Although it begins in a tragic tone, the first movement quickly gives way to optimism and tenderness, a sign that Strauss’ temperament was fundamentally different from Brahms’. The instrumental music of Richard Strauss is perhaps the most unremittingly heroic of any composer, and he would soon give up chamber music for the broader canvas of operas and tone poems, where his heroes could run wild. In the middle part of the movement, the listener has a glimpse of the athletic spirit of those later tone poems, as our theme gallivants across keys, registers, and instruments. Tragedy looms once more toward the end of the movement, but our hero survives in a blaze of C Major.

The mood shifts entirely in the brilliant scherzo, alternately playful, spooky, and intimate. Here, the lithe, virtuosic instrumental technique of the composer of Don Juan is fully on display. In the third movement, Strauss draws upon the aching, lyrical tenderness of his songs – so vocal is this movement that the listener can almost imagine the words, surely a furtive exchange of love. Here, Strauss has already synthesized the sighing passion of Wagner’s love music into his own, inimitable style. The final movement burns all bridges. It charges so furiously through its terrain, the listener knows a happy resolution of this story will not be possible. However, taken as a whole, the Piano Quartet is an uplifting work – it shows just how broad is the scope of what four players can do when guided by a composer of Strauss’ abilities – whatever the century.

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tonight’s concert sponsorship

week 2

Friday, August 19

7:00 PM Backstage Pass (for ticket holders only)

David Graham, the Jean Graham Trust, and Ginny & Fred Marty

8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Backstage Pass – What it means to “Play Jazz” Concert – Is it Jazz?

GERSHWIN arr. Heifetz

Three Preludes

Allegro ben ritmato e deciso Andante con moto Agitato

Jennifer Choi, violin Natalie Zhu, piano

BERNSTEIN

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano

Todd Palmer, clarinet Natalie Zhu, piano

DALBAVIE

Axiom for Piano, Clarinet, Bassoon and Trumpet

POULENC

Le bal masqué, for Baritone and Chamber Ensemble, FP 60

Grazioso Andantino – Vivace e leggiero

Préambule et air de bravoure Intermède Malvina Bagatelle La dame aveugle Finale

Todd Palmer, clarinet Adrian Morejon, bassoon Peter Evans, trumpet Aaron Wunsch, piano John Moore, baritone Anna Petersen, oboe Todd Palmer, clarinet Adrian Morejon, bassoon Peter Evans, trumpet Jon Klibonoff, piano Kyu-Young Kim, violin Julia Bruskin, cello Kyle Peters, percussion

intermission

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tonight’s artist sponsorships

tonight’s media sponsor:

Julia Bruskin and Aaron Wunsch are sponsored by George Bain and Sam & Debby Bruskin Robert deMaine is sponsored by Jennifer Sutherland Natalie Zhu is sponsored by Donna Graber, Planning Sense, Inc.

WAER Syracuse Public Media The Skaneateles Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the ­support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

program, continued...

MARSALIS

Rampart St. Rowhouse Rag from String Quartet No. 1, At the Octoroon Balls

COLTRANE

Improvisation on Leo

SCHOENFIELD

Peter Evans, trumpet

Café Music

Allegro Andante Moderato Presto

Jennifer Choi, violin Robert deMaine, cello Jon Klibonoff, piano

Program Notes

O

n the 100th anniversary of the word “jazz,” we consider the question everyone was asking back then: “What IS jazz?” This diverse and diverting program looks at the many ways jazz has crossed paths with traditional concert music, in works ranging from Gershwin to Bernstein to Coltrane to Wynton Marsalis’ String Quartet (At the Octoroon Balls) to Francis Poulenc’s raucous music hall entertainment for nine, Le bal masqué (The Masked Ball).

Three Preludes (1926), arr. Jascha Heifetz GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1942) LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990)

Axiom for Piano, Clarinet, Bassoon and Trumpet (2004) MARC-ANDRÉ DALBAVIE (B. 1961)

Le bal masqué, for Baritone and Chamber Ensemble, FP 60 (The Masked Ball, 1932) FRANCIS POULENC (1899-1963)

Rampart St. Rowhouse Rag from String Quartet No. 1, At the Octoroon Balls (1995) WYNTON MARSALIS (B. 1961)

Jennifer Choi, violin Kyu-Young Kim, violin Jonathan Chu, viola Julia Bruskin, cello

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016

Improvisation on Leo JOHN COLTRANE (1926-1967)

Café Music (1986) PAUL SCHOENFIELD (B. 1947) “A strange word has gained wide-spread use in the ranks of our producers of popular music,” wrote the New York Sun in 1917. “It is ‘jazz,’ used mainly as an adjective descriptive of a band.” Like so many to follow, the writer struggled to describe what jazz is, comparing it to a musical virus that causes dancers to jump and wiggle. The sources from which it coalesced are diverse: the blues, ragtime, and popular songs, at the least. Jazz therefore originated through a blurring of boundaries, and its boundaries have remained fluid ever since.

The sudden popularity of jazz took some by surprise, and inevitably there was a backlash. In 1924, an editorial writer for The New York Times called jazz “a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tom-tom beating of savages.” In the same year, bandleader Paul Whiteman organized a public effort to synthesize the sound of jazz with the classical orchestra, a concert at New York’s grand Aeolian Hall called “An Experiment in Modern Music.” Although jazz had some of its roots in the classical tradition, this was among the first efforts to bring it into a concert hall.

Sergei Rachmaninoff and violinist Fritz Kreisler were among those who attended the performance. Whiteman approached George Gershwin to write a piece for piano

33

8/19 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

and his ensemble, Rhapsody in Blue, which became an American classic.

Although the name itself links a classical form (rhapsody) with a jazz element (the blues), Gershwin came to both jazz and classical music as an outsider. A trained composer in neither, he started as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger while still a teenager, in 1914. He hit the big time in 1920 with Swanee, recorded by then-superstar singer Al Jolson. Gershwin’s musical interests were wide, however, and he quickly gained familiarity with the latest jazz and classical styles. An outstanding pianist, as more than 100 piano rolls attest, Gershwin continued on his path of combining the styles in his Three Preludes (1926). Taking his cue from Chopin, whose 24 Preludes, Op. 28, are a classic in the genre, Gershwin set out to compose 24 of his own. He only polished up three, in the end, but they are absolute gems: well crafted, crackling with energy, and just plain fun.

An attention-getting blue note introduces the little melodic idea that will guide the first prelude; soon it is buzzing with syncopations. This is the Roaring 20s, in a nutshell. The second prelude derives directly from Chopin’s Prelude in A Minor, but Gershwin transfers it to a sultrier setting, a precursor to his Summertime, from Porgy and Bess. The final prelude strums on a Spanish guitar without losing any of the prior preludes’ jazziness. Its electric energy makes one wish, as with the 20s as a decade, that it could have lasted longer.

After World War I, jazz quickly crossed the Atlantic, offering a fresh sound for a European continent tired of itself and searching for a new identity, after years of conflict. One war conscript who took interest was the composer-pianist Francis Poulenc, active in the avantgarde scene in Paris, where composers mixed jazz with experimental techniques inspired by Surrealism, Futurism, and Dadaism. Poulenc performed at least twice in absurdist jazz bands: the “infernal jazz band” organized by Jean Cocteau for a Futurist exhibition, and on New Year’s Eve, 1920, for a masked ball, as part of an ensemble called “Le Jazz-Band Parisien.” His Le bal masqué (1932) suggests a similar scenario. Aside from the modified jazz band instrumentation, jazz is not overtly mimicked here; rather, Poulenc captures the raucous spirit of the Parisian music halls where jazz bands played for European youth desperate for a good time. His inclusion of riffs and chords in common with jazz show his familiarity with the art form. Poulenc later denied the influence of jazz, saying in 1935, “I do not like it, and I especially do not want to hear about its influence on contemporary music.”

Whatever you say, Francis.

Le bal masqué is also unabashedly Surrealist.

Commissioned by one of Surrealism’s patron saints, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, for her “spectacle-concert,” Poulenc (in his own words) set out to “create a vocal style that would be both hallucinatory – something like the 34 photographs of crimes, or vulgar, popular magazines – and

full of jarring ideas, mixing vulgar harmonies with refined ones, deforming words and sounds.” He chose nonsensical poems by Max Jacob, which are even more so in English translation, since they lack the witty French onomatopoeia that provides their only logic, the sound of one word leads to another. They are absurdist portraits of some people you’d probably never want to meet – but what great fun it is to hear about them.

Le bal masqué opens with an extended instrumental introduction, which sufficiently establishes the zany, playful atmosphere. This is music of high spirits, and probably also liquid spirits. The music turns dour for the appearance of Madame la Dauphine, who, oh, by the way, happens to be dead. Along comes a Chinaman in search of vegetables. The Count D’Artois is on the roof, watching the moon through a telescope – it IS bigger than his finger, after all. But watch out! A steamship runs into a house.

After a mellow but demented instrumental intermezzo, the Madame Malvine enters. Who is she? Well dressed, she can dance, but she eats too much! A literary type, but don’t treat her too well, she doesn’t like that. She, too, is apparently also dead. God bless! A brutal instrumental bagatelle follows, in which the violin appears to be possessed by the devil, à la Paganini. In comes an overweight blind lady who drinks too much; her eyes are bloodshot.

Wow, can she laugh, though! Poulenc called the last movement a portrait of the poet, Max Jacob, who enters after a tango. He likes to fix old cars. You may not be so

8/19 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

eager to visit him at home – in his house, everything smells like the skin of a dead goat.

In the year Poulenc wrote Le bal masqué, an American teenager was playing piano in a jazz band for weddings; he would later do as much as anyone to integrate the sound of jazz into concert music. Leonard Bernstein first heard jazz on the radio and couldn’t get enough of it, especially W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues. In 1956, he arranged this work for a performance by the New York Philharmonic together with Louis Armstrong’s band, and he later recorded an album with Dave Brubeck, as well as composed for jazz band. His first published work, the Clarinet Sonata (1942) already shows the influence of jazz on the 23-year-old composer. Bernstein was always something of a sponge, absorbing the musical styles he heard, and one also hears the influence of Aaron Copland, and of Paul Hindemith, who was at Tanglewood with Bernstein the prior summer.

The first movement takes its cue from Hindemith’s neo-tonal harmonic ideas, recently promoted in his treatise The Craft of Musical Composition. Yet the tender, reflective lyricism is typical of the Bernstein we know and love. The Boston Globe review described the second movement as “choc-a-block full of jazzy, rocking rhythms.” Aside from a few blue notes, however, the harmony here is very much Bernstein’s own – as if the jazz rhythms helped him discover his compositional voice. As a whole, the piece

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exudes the youthful optimism that Bernstein himself always seemed to embody.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, jazz continued to inspire the French. Having taken root in the music of Maurice Ravel (like the “Blues” in his Violin Sonata) and the composers of “Les Six” (which included Poulenc), younger composers found more abstract points of contact, including its rhythmic vitality, its virtuosic riffs, and the sound quality of both its instruments and its increasingly complex harmonies (timbre, often called “color”). While their music may not be grounded in the blues at all, the influence of jazz surfaces in their works in surprising ways.

Marc-André Dalbavie’s Axiom (2004) provides an interesting example. Dedicated to György Ligeti (himself a fan of jazz greats Thelonius Monk and Bill Evans), Axiom begins with a massive avalanche of falling piano octaves.

As the speed increases, the pitches blend together, a common feature of both fast jazz riffs and experimental electronic music (which Dalbavie studied at IRCAM, the French electronic music center, in the 1980s). Free, improvisatory passages filled with ethereal, Bill Evans-like harmonies ultimately give way to a hard charging concluding section, full of wacky, Thelonius Monk-like riffs. The end is an avalanche in reverse: the music returns to stone.

Though its influences are diverse, Axiom remains thoroughly French in spirit. Above all, it revels in sonority.

The peculiar instrumentation Dalbavie took from Claude Debussy, who envisioned such a combination but did not have the chance to realize it before his death.

In the 1960s, jazz moved in a more experimental direction, led by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Improvisation had been a longstanding characteristic of jazz, but these visionaries dramatically increased the freedom given to the performer, first typified by Coleman’s 1960 album, Free Jazz. The name stuck. While the inherently experimental free improvisation was never destined to go mainstream, it continues to be a field of great creativity, as well as cross-pollination with the Classical world. Trumpeter Peter Evans typifies this overlap; he is both a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), a major force in contemporary music, as well as an improviser who travels the world. His improvisations are mesmerizing and border on the superhuman.

Here, he has chosen John Coltrane’s Leo, from the experimental album Interstellar Space, recorded in 1967, the year he died.

Perhaps no name is more synonymous with jazz today than trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. His tireless work as a bandleader, composer, arranger, and promoter of the art form has shaped the current landscape of the jazz world.

Yet he has always had one foot in the Classical pond as well. At age 14, he performed Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic, and then he studied at Tanglewood and Juilliard. Born in the same year as Dalbavie (1961), Marsalis advocated passionately for more mainstream acceptance of jazz, and he was crucial in making it a permanent part of Lincoln Center, starting 35

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with his “Classical Jazz” series in 1987. He continued to make forays back into the Classical world, such as his recording of Baroque arias for trumpet with opera star Kathleen Battle, and in his own compositions, such as his string quartet, At the Octoroon Balls (1995).

This most archetypical of Classical genres might seem to be the least likely to succeed in a jazz context. However, Marsalis cleverly chooses to evoke oldworld New Orleans, and the quartet both sets an elegant, society backdrop and plays as the dance band. It effectively inhabits a middle ground between the two worlds that Marsalis knows so well. The scenario is a fancy social gathering where Creole men pair up with Octoroon (one-eighth African) mistresses.

In the final movement, Rampart St. Rowhouse Rag, all dance to a ragtime, an immediate precursor of jazz. Yet here are traits also of later developments in jazz – the blue notes, and the solo riffs.

“Everybody was in their finest clothing. At the Octoroon Balls there was an interesting crosssection of life,” Marsalis explains.

“People from different stratums of society came together in pursuit of pleasure and fulfillment. The music brought people together.”

Musical styles, too.

disparate elements such as Hasidic melodies from his Jewish heritage, Classical and jazz idioms, and quasi-Broadway tunes, among others. His Café Music (1986) has become a favorite in the piano trio repertoire. About the work, he writes:

“The idea to compose Café Music first came to me in 1985 after sitting in one night for the pianist at PERFORMER QUOTE Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“I am especially excited to perform Wynton Murray’s employs a house trio that plays entertaining dinner Marsalis’ String Quartet No. 1, At the music in a wide variety of Octoroon Balls, which is a representation styles. My intention was to write a kind of high-class of the American Creole perspective dinner music – music which could be played at a restauthroughout life in New Orleans, richly rant, but might also (just represented in this very idiomatic work. barely) find its way into a concert hall. The work draws For the longest time, I have been a huge on many of the types of music fan of Mr. Marsalis, and grew up listening played by the trio at Murray’s.

For example, early 20thto both his Haydn Concerto alongside his century American, Viennese, light classical, gypsy, and jazz records with complete marvel at how Broadway styles are all he could have so many different colors and represented. A paraphrase of a beautiful Chassidic melody variety on the trumpet. The same is true in is incorporated in the second this composition where both the jazz and movement.”

classical worlds blend seamlessly in

Even today, musicians cannot agree on one definicomplex and beautiful ways.” tion of jazz. For some, the blues is an essential JENNIFER CHOI component; for others, it is a relic of the past. For some, improvisation is critical; others would leave that up to the composer. Contemporary meanings of the word jazz are as diverse, if not more so, Some composers blend styles in their music as a matter than they were when the mysterious word first applied to of course. One is composer-pianist Paul Schoenfield, music. We still don’t know exactly what it is – and that’s whose chameleon-like music sometimes seems to wear probably for the best. multiple hats at the same time. An exponent of the American cultural melting pot, Schoenfield brings together

A Cozy Hearth Fireplace & Stove, LLC Brian Bartholomew Owner

1086 State Fair Blvd Syracuse, NY 13209 (315) 487-3473 (Phone) (315) 487-3477 (Fax) brian@acozyhearth.com

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tonight’s concert is made possible with support from the

week 2

Saturday, August 20 7:30 PM Robinson Pavilion

at Anyela’s Vineyards Rain Location: West Genesee High School

Noreen & Michael Falcone Fund for Artistic Excellence and the Bob & Sally Neumann Fund for Jazz and Innovative Programming

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis Program will be announced from the stage. f e at u r i n g

Wynton Marsalis, Trumpet Kenny Rampton, Trumpet Marcus Printup, Trumpet Ryan Kisor, Trumpet Chris Crenshaw, Trombone Vincent Gardner, Trombone Elliot Mason, Trombone Victor Goines, Saxophone/Clarinet Ted Nash, Saxophone/Clarinet/Flute Walter Blanding, Saxophone/Clarinet Sherman Irby, Saxophone/Clarinet Paul Nedzela, Saxophone/Clarinet Carlos Henriquez, Bass Ali Jackson, Drums Dan Nimmer, Piano

tonight’s media sponsor:

News Channel 9

The Skaneateles Festival is made possible, in part, by operating support from the County of Onondaga, administered by CNY Arts.

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A

legend comes to Skaneateles: world-famous trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the nine-time Grammy winner and international star, brings the entire Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to the new Robinson Pavilion stage at Anyela’s.

More than a back-up band, this 15-piece ensemble brings together the top soloists and arrangers on the scene. The Festival is pleased to be able to provide the opportunity to hear the finest performers in jazz today.

Festival Future The Skaneateles Festival extends its appreciation to Bob and Sally Neumann and Noreen and Michael Falcone Their love for great music and leadership giving are helping to secure the Festival’s future and allowing us to bring the highest caliber musicians to our lakeside community.

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tonight’s concert sponsorship

week 3

Thursday, August 25

7:00 PM Prelude Concert 8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Gwen & Bill Birchenough and Dave Birchenough & Carrie Lazarus

Prelude Concert Featuring the 2016 Robinson Award winner, pianist Chris Spinelli

Fantasie in F Minor, Op. 49

Chris Spinelli, piano

KAPUSTIN

Concert Etude Op. 40, No. 6 “Pastorale”

Chris Spinelli, piano

BRAHMS

Hungarian Dance No. 19 in B minor Hungarian Dance No. 5 in F-sharp minor

Chris Spinelli, piano Aaron Wunsch, piano

CHOPIN

In Motion DEBUSSY MUHLY

PROKOFIEV

Première rhapsodie for Clarinet and Piano

Todd Palmer, clarinet Aaron Wunsch, piano

Motion

Todd Palmer, clarinet Borromeo String Quartet Nicholas Kitchen, violin Kristopher Tong, violin Mai Motobuchi, viola Yeesun Kim, cello Aaron Wunsch, piano

Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 119 Andante grave Moderato Allegro, ma non troppo

Julia Bruskin, cello Aaron Wunsch, piano

intermission

SHOSTAKOVICH

Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57 Prelude: Lento Fugue: Adagio Scherzo: Allegretto Intermezzo: Lento Finale: Allegretto

tonight’s artist sponsorships

Borromeo Quartet is sponsored by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Julia Bruskin and Aaron Wunsch are sponsored by George Bain and Sam & Debby Bruskin 40

Borromeo String Quartet Aaron Wunsch, piano

Please support our sponsors and advertisers. (See directory on page 79.)

The Robinson Award The Robinson Award is an annual scholarship awarded to a young musician who exemplifies the values cherished and embodied by David and Louise Robinson, Festival co-founders. Thirty-seven years ago, David and Louise opened their hearts and their home to musicians, their families, and the audiences who come to hear them perform. Their lakeside home, Brook Farm, was a gathering place and rehearsal space for musicians, and the performance venue for the Festival’s outdoor Saturday evening concerts for 36 seasons.

Created in 2002, the award is given each year to a young musician whose character, musicianship, and community service reflect the values of David and Louise Robinson – enthusiasm and dedication to music of high quality.

David & Louise Robinson

2016 Winner Christopher Spinelli, pianist Christopher Spinelli is a 2016 graduate of Fayetteville-Manlius High School. A three-consecutive year winner of the CNYAMT Piano Competition, he entered and won the senior division at age 14. At age 12, and again at 16, he was a finalist in the Syracuse Symphony Youth Concerto Competition. He has participated in various piano competitions in Upstate New York, including the Thousand Islands International Piano Festival and Competition for Young People at Cape Vincent.

He has also participated in the Civic Morning Musicals Wednesday Recital Series in 2014, 2015 and again in 2016. He was the 2015 winner of the James and Katherine Andrews Young Artist Instrumental Competition held at the Crane School of Music, and was privileged to perform with The Orchestra of Northern New York. CNYAMT has awarded Christopher the 2016 Music Scholarship.

Chris enjoys improvisational Jazz sessions with his Dad. A high honor roll student, he excels in Latin, and enjoys writing. He has served as accompanist for his high schools’ Jazz Chorale and as organist for his church.

Chris looks forward to studying music performance under Dr. Robert Auler at SUNY Oswego this fall.

Both Christopher and his parents credit his musical accomplishment to John Spradling’s expertise, passion, patience and teaching style.

Our thanks to those who have contributed to the Robinson Award

Anonymous Brenton and Mary Bradly Barb Connor Fletcher Foundation David and Louise Robinson Skaneateles Area Council for the Arts

Frank and Jan Smith Karl and Peggy Smith Dr. and Mrs. Kenneth Spitzer Diane Walsh and Dick Pollak Suzanne Weitz Welch Allyn

If you would like to contribute to the Robinson Award Fund, please call 315-685-7418.

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Program Notes

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our diverse selections show music’s ability to embody physical movement: the balletic arabesques of Debussy’s Première rhapsodie for clarinet and piano (featuring Grammy winner Todd Palmer); millennial fave Nico Muhly’s infectious buildup of momentum, Motion, for string quartet, clarinet, and piano; Prokofiev’s jetpropelled Cello Sonata; and Shostakovich’s masterpiece in neo-Baroque dance rhythms, the Piano Quintet.

Première rhapsodie for Clarinet and Piano (1910) CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016 The rhapsody begins gently, as if emerging from a haze.

It’s dreamlike soundscape, sonorous yet playful, has something in common with the composer’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the fountain scene from his opera Pelléas and Mélisande. Sometimes mischievous, sometimes reflective, our clarinet protagonist is bewitching in the same elusive way as Mélisande – she entrances, but before one can respond, she is on to something else. Despite these momentary, fleeting diversions, Debussy’s rhapsody does have an overall arc of gradually increasing animation, concluding with a whirling and joyful dance.

Now, dear clarinetists, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

Since the start of conservatory training in Paris in 1796, Motion (2010) a rite of passage for all music students across the world NICO MUHLY (1981) has been the jury, or final exam, which involves playing difficult works for all the school’s teachers in one’s instruNico Muhly is a bright star among the recently orbiting ment. This is neither the student’s nor the teacher’s idea generation of composers born in the ’80s. He typifies them of a good time. While it passes all too quickly, one goes in his aversion to ideological battles over what music home with a lifetime supply of should be, and he bounds nightmares, usually variations effortlessly through concert PERFORMER QUOTE on not being prepared (or halls, across opera stages, and properly clothed) for the exam. into Icelandic nightclubs. His “It’s always a ‘homecoming’ for me when I The repertoire list usually opera Two Boys, about an includes grimace-inducing internet romance gone seriously play the Premiere rhapsodie of Debussy. names, like Sevchik, Czerny, awry, premiered at the Met It’s one of the first clarinet works I ever and Grützmacher. One bright Opera in 2011, and his second spot for the wobbly-kneed opera is to premiere there in learned (at 18), and essentially the piece clarinet class of 1911 at the 2019. A protégé of Philip Glass, of music that determined where Paris Conservatoire: Your he inherited Glass’ media mandatory piece for the exam savvy without ending up my burgeoning years as a musician has been especially composed entirely hitched to the elder for the occasion by Claude composer’s musical language. would commence. ” Debussy, who has just joined Both bookish and boyish, his the Board of the Conservatoire. distinctive musical style TODD PALMER Fortunately, he will not be in energetically mixes elements the exam. from English choral music and American minimalism, an unlikely but winning Debussy’s selection of the rhapsody is a logical one, combination. given this work’s purpose. A rhapsody is by definition a free-form work with contrasting sections, enabling the student instrumentalist to display several different moods and techniques in a short amount of time. This kind of music also fits Debussy’s natural inclinations toward musical freedom, and the result is a masterpiece rather than a mere means to an end. The descriptive indication “Première” suggests Debussy may have considered other such works (imagine a rhapsody for students in double bass! percussion! tuba!). In a sense, he did follow through, but for a different medium: five years later, in 1915, Debussy launched a project to compose six sonatas for “diverse instruments.” He completed only three before his death in 1918 (for cello and piano; violin and piano; and flute, harp, and viola), but they bear considerable similarity to the Première rhapsodie in their imaginative changeability.

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About his sextet, Motion, Muhly writes: [17th-century English composer] Orlando Gibbons’ verse anthem “See, see the Word is incarnate” is one of my favorite pieces of text setting: Gibbons divides up Godfrey Goodman’s verses into solo bits for solo or coupled countertenors, who weave in and out of a texture of viols. Then, the chorus comes in at the end of each verse, like a 1960s girl group, echoing the soloist: “let us welcome such a guest!” “good will towards men!”

Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorized everything and then would get entranced by the soloists (how can you not get drawn into a line like “See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood, the prick of thorns, the print of nails”?) and miss my entrance. This piece, Motion, tries to capture the nervous

8/25 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

energy of obsessive counting. The piece is built on little repeated fragments from the Gibbons, as well as an extended quotation and ornamentation of one of the verses, where the viola and the cello criss-cross one another and the other instruments create a messy grid of anxious quavers. The piece ends ecstatically, using as its primary cell Gibbons’ melody “in the sight of multitudes a glorious ascension.”

The title comes from a vision of Christ’s reign: “The blind have sight and cripples have their motion” – the word “motion,” in Gibbons’ setting (and my appropriation), comprising three syllables.

Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 119 (1949) SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953) For someone little interested in politics, Sergei Prokofiev had the misfortune to live at a time when they were simply inescapable. First, he had to navigate the First World War and the Russian Revolution, to which, like Rachmaninoff, he responded by emigrating to the United States. There he found the public already enamored of Rachmaninoff, with

Members of ECCO gather on the porch at Brook Farm after their performance.

comparatively little interest in Prokofiev’s modernist music and drier, more exacting manner of playing the piano. In 1920, he gave Europe a try, with considerable success, but was increasingly dismayed to find Stravinsky both in higher public esteem and personally combative toward his own musical aesthetic. Too modern for America, and too conservative for Europe, in 1936 he went where he knew he would be the leading composer: The Soviet Union.

Blithely ignoring the signs of an intensifying crackdown on artists, including the recent official condemnation of Shostakovich, Prokofiev moved his family to the USSR at the height of Stalin’s paranoia. For several years, Prokofiev managed to find success, but ultimately his passport was confiscated, and in 1949, much of his music blacklisted. In that year, he composed his only cello sonata.

True to his aim of keeping politics and music separate, one hears no sign of personal torment in the Cello Sonata, Op. 119. It is a broad, rich, and melodious work, and in this regard takes full advantage of the cello’s natural capabilities. Prokofiev was increasingly occupied with composing and refining melodies in his later years, whether out of personal interest or because he thought melodious works had a greater chance of official acceptance. “To find a melody that is intelligible to an inexpert listener and at the same time original: that is the composer’s most difficult task,” he wrote shortly before composing the Sonata. Yet the Sonata is by no means solely an intimate work. It is Russian in the vein of Tolstoy: epic, soulful, and carefully crafted. In fact, Prokofiev’s most consuming project during this period had been his opera of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he continued to revise until his death in 1953.

The cello begins full voice, in its lowest register, as if starting to narrate a long and important tale. While it may be against the backdrop of a vast canvas, the story seems to be one of personal interactions among strong characters. A page turns, and a hero rides out, determined to make a name for himself. Later in the movement, this impulse leads to a climax in battle; when the smoke clears, the sun is shining. With the second movement, the scene shifts from the battlefield to the playground. Children’s music was a safe haven for Soviet composers, who could be relatively certain such works would be officially accepted, and Prokofiev composed children’s piano music, songs, and, most lastingly, Peter and the Wolf. Here, the piano sings tra-la-la to the gentle accompaniment of the cello’s

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pizzicato, followed by a game of cat and mouse. The song returns after a reflective, lyrical interlude. The final movement revisits the epic, but something of the naive spirit of the prior movement remains, calling to mind Tolstoy’s Natasha or Pierre. As with these characters, life’s experiences inevitably temper such enthusiasm, and a struggle leaves the music exhausted but its head unbowed.

Given the political climate, Prokofiev could have no idea whether the Cello Sonata would be officially accepted or rejected, as such pronouncements were increasingly random. The great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter gave a trial performance for the Composer’s Union, and eventually a public performance was allowed in 1950 – though the composer could not attend, due to illness. Even in death politics hindered Prokofiev, who passed on the very same day as Stalin, March 5, 1953, and so the composer’s death was largely ignored. In the end, there really was only one place he could escape politics: in the music itself.

Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57 (1940) DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975) Shostakovich was among the first generation of Russians to grow up in the Soviet state. Unlike Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff, who saw changes at home as an impetus for moving abroad, Shostakovich was in school during the transition, where he learned Marxist ideology; he passed his mandatory exam in it and proceeded to compose ‘music of the people.’ The early Leninist policies toward the arts encouraged innovation, and Shostakovich flourished.

After considerable success in film and symphonies, he turned to opera – first, The Nose, on an absurdist tale by Gogol, and then the lurid Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, intended by the composer to expose the ills of pre-Communist society. Though Lady Macbeth was a resounding success and ran to 177 performances, Stalin attended it in 1936, followed swiftly by an official critical condemnation in the Soviet newspaper, Pravda, entitled “Muddle Instead of Music.” It effectively ended Shostakovich’s opera career. What was an out-of-work modernist opera composer to do?

The Piano Quintet is one answer, composed in the aftermath of the condemnation and the composer’s subsequent ‘rehabilitation.’ While opera was off limits, Shostakovich found instrumental music capable of conveying layers of emotional complexity, where grief, fear, optimism, and heroism could coexist. He also turned to the distant past for inspiration, particularly the music of J. S. Bach, as evident in the Quintet. This backward glance afforded the composer an honest way of renewing his musical perspective. The work received both audience and critical acclaim: it was awarded the Stalin Prize and 100,000 rubles.

The Quintet leads off with a Prelude and Fugue, making the Bach connection overt. The Prelude starts with a G-Minor tidal wave, first from the piano alone, and then enveloping the quintet. A neo-Baroque aria follows, complete with walking bass. Another wave of sound closes the Prelude, drawing a stark contrast with the intimate beginning of the Fugue. Shostakovich reserved chamber music for his most private thoughts, and although the expression of this movement hides under the cover of a venerable Baroque genre (the fugue), the fragile, fearful thoughts of the muted strings can’t help but offer an analogy for loneliness in the face of public censorship.

At its climax, all the strings cry out, with the mutes still on, a suffocated plea.

The athletic scherzo projects strength, a series of militaristic maneuvers that truly impress. There is humor here, but not of a lighthearted variety – it’s more like listening to the jokes of a straight-faced, 275-pound bearded man in uniform. In the haunting Intermezzo, a solitary violin muses high above the inexorable footsteps of the cello. This movement has a cathartic effect, and so the Finale begins breezily, with a graceful, fleet-footed melody.

Momentum builds to a vigorous, powerful second theme, which is triumphant, with a whiff of defiance; violinist Rostislav Dubinsky remembered people singing this theme on the streets and discussing the Quintet on the trams in the weeks after the 1940 premiere. However inexplicit, this music clearly meant something to those who heard it, in a way that reflected upon the hardships of the time. What for Stalin was “muddle instead of music” had become the reverse: music instead of muddle.

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tonight’s concert sponsorship

week 3

David Duggan & Lynn Cleary

Friday, August 26 8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Night with the Borromeo Quartet HAYDN

String Quartet No. 2 in F Major, Op. 77 Allegro moderato Menuetto: Presto Andante Finale: Vivace

LIGETI

String Quartet No. 1, “Métamorphoses nocturnes”

Borromeo String Quartet Nicholas Kitchen, violin Kristopher Tong, violin Mai Motobuchi, viola Yeesun Kim, cello

Borromeo String Quartet

intermission

BRAHMS

String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 18 Allegro ma non troppo Andante, ma moderato Scherzo: Allegro molto Rondo: Poco Allegretto e grazioso

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Borromeo String Quartet Melissa Matson, viola Julia Bruskin, cello

tonight’s artist sponsorship

tonight’s media sponsor:

Borromeo Quartet is sponsored by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Julia Bruskin and Aaron Wunsch are sponsored by George Bain and Sam & Debby Bruskin

WRVO Public Media The Skaneateles Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the ­support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Program Notes

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ear why the Boston-based Borromeo Quartet has a reputation as “simply the best there is” (Boston Globe). The widely lauded foursome brings its “searching musical insight” (Chicago Tribune) to Haydn’s String Quartet No. 2 in F Major, Op. 77, featuring a tender nocturnal slow movement; modern master (and 2001: A Space Odyssey composer) György Ligeti’s virtuosic Night Metamorphoses; and Brahms’ lush and romantic serenade, the great Sextet in B-flat Major, Op. 18.

String Quartet No. 2 in F Major, Op. 77 (1799) JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809) By the time he composed his String Quartet in F Major, Op. 77, no. 2, Haydn knew a thing or two about what a string quartet could be. This was his 66th and final complete quartet, near the end of his life’s work. In the same year, a little-known student of his, one Ludwig van Beethoven, published his first set of quartets, Op. 18, which would carry on Haydn’s legacy in an unbroken tradition. The 1790s were for Haydn a decade of fame, fortune, and personal satisfaction. This son of a wheelwright from a tiny Austrian village had become Europe’s most famous living composer, of which he liked to remind younger musicians, “who may see from my example that something may indeed come from nothing.” 67 years of hard work helps, too.

After several exciting seasons composing symphonies and quartets for London audiences, Haydn returned to Vienna in 1795. He dedicated his final two quartets to Prince Maximilian von Lobkowitz, a lover of symphonies and quartets in equal measure, who later received the

A beautiful sunset at the 2015 Summer Suite.

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016 dedication of several of Beethoven’s works in both genres.

The String Quartet in F Major straddles these two genres, offering a happy medium between the chamber’s intimate subtleties of expression and the symphony concert’s driving rhythms and dramatic effects.

This Quartet begins as nearly every symphony does: with a loud chord. After this attention getter, however, the music quickly turns intimate, as the first violin shares some private thoughts with three friends. Soon the whole ensemble gathers momentum, bouncing along in high spirits. In a maneuver typical of Haydn, the contemplative secondary theme is really just a version of the first, where the melody is now hidden in the second violin part. In the middle part of the movement, considerable fear and anxiety take hold of the music, but the foursome work together to assure each other back toward the initial tune.

The minuet that follows is vintage Haydn: earthy, joyful, and a little off-kilter, thanks to the cello’s refusal to stay in three beats (listen for its 1-2! 1-2! 1-2!). The slow movement sets a tender, nocturnal scene with an extended lovers’ duet between violin and cello. For its reprise, Haydn transfers the heartfelt melody to the second violin, and later the cello, as the other instruments gently and lovingly decorate and dance around it.

The Finale’s witty, playful theme does not suggest the remarkable and extensive treatment it receives from Haydn, who proves his powers undiminished at the end of his seventh decade. Through surprising twists and turns, eye-popping passagework, and contrasts of every kind, the listener sits, as Richard Strauss later put it, “with eyes and ears open in delight.”

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String Quartet No. 1, “Métamorphoses nocturnes” (1954) GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923-2006) Like Haydn before him, Ligeti treated the string quartet as a medium for trying out fanciful, surprising, and even audacious ideas. Amazingly, his life’s difficult circumstances seemed to foster rather than inhibit such creativity.

Hungarian, of Jewish descent, his father and brother perished in German concentration camps, and the composer nearly died himself, forced to the Eastern Front.

Soviet policies after the war restricted creativity that did not point toward “socialist realism,” which generally meant simple choral settings in the folk style. All this left Ligeti with a distaste for dogma of any kind, and, curious by nature, he was almost uniquely non-judgmental about musical styles. Instead, he followed his ear, wherever it led.

PERFORMER QUOTE

“In Ligeti, one detects a brilliant young artist hearing his own voice within and responding to it just as directly as Haydn does. It is a fantasia based on a few pitches

between lyrical reflections and eccentric dances creates the structural essence of the piece. While its overall plan is unlike any Classical models, Ligeti himself pointed out that the way he distributes short melodic phrases among the four instruments is typical of Haydn or Beethoven.

Suddenly, two familiar chords snap the quartet to attention, and they gallop off, ending up in a dark forest, both creepy and full of unearthly beauty. At the midpoint of the quartet, the dream shifts to a ballroom for a drunken waltz, followed by a rustic stomp. After a violin reflection and some further dancing, the cellist gets stuck on repeat, slapping its string on the fingerboard. One has to find enjoyment in these absurdist touches, the only way to maintain sanity in an era when truth was stranger than fiction. Near the end, the opening melody reappears in a fragile state. The dream trails off.

Ligeti’s gift for the dreamlike would eventually move his music from the bottom drawer to the big screen, where he found an unlikely champion in the famed director Stanley Kubrick. Ligeti’s music has reached millions through the films 2001: Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut.

String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 18 (1860) JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Brahms did not complete his “first” essay in chamber music’s most venerable medium, the string quartet, until

and he manages to build 20 minutes of written out improvisation. It is an impressive and suspenseful aural journey.”

YEESUN KIM

In his String Quartet No. 1, his ear led him to some fascinating places. As the subtitle Métamorphoses nocturnes suggests, these are the sounds of dreams, changeable in the extreme. Yet they are grounded in real life, as dreams always are – here, in the everyday music of his culture.

Ligeti did in fact take an interest in folk music, but he saw himself as an inheritor of the tradition of Béla Bartók, who had integrated authentic folk music with his own progressive musical ideas. Performances of such music were not allowed in Hungary, so Ligeti had to compose works like this one “for the bottom drawer,” as he put it. Again, circumstances may have aided his creativity, since there was no voice in his head saying, ‘Well, I certainly can’t get away with that.’ The result is a magical landscape of staggering creativity.

The Quartet begins on a kind of musical escalator, as a lyrical four-note melodic idea (to become the basis for much of the work) rides atop an ascending chromatic scale.

This leads into a fun-house room of mirrors, where folk rhythms pile up in a distorted dance. The violin and cello engage in a reflection upon the initial melody, followed by 48 another (now more humorous) dance. This back-and-forth

The ideal Skaneateles summer: cool boat, smartphone, WRVO App

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary radio

8/26 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

age 40. This was not for lack of trying. He had composed some 20 quartets but rejected them all, wallpapering his Hamburg room with them. He told his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, “I have only to lie on my back to admire my sonatas and quartets.” The shadow of Beethoven, master of the string quartet, loomed large for Brahms ever since his teacher – composer of a symphonic work literally called Beethoven’s Shadow – had offered him the following not-very-helpful advice: “It is but the delusion of misguided originality to seek in one’s own limited universe to achieve a perfection that already exists.” OK, Johannes – so try something else.

The B-flat Sextet was Brahms’ first great achievement in chamber music, scored for a fresh combination of instruments (aside from forgotten confections by Boccherini and Spohr). It was an inspired choice. By adding an extra viola and cello to the standard string quartet, Brahms shifts the center of pitch considerably lower, where he exploits his natural gifts for a rich, thick sonority. The sound world, therefore, is entirely his own – a perfection that did not yet exist.

The Sextet begins with one of Brahms’ most tuneful melodies, sung quietly and soulfully by the cellos with a murmuring viola accompaniment. This scenario might recall Brahms’ recent walking tour along the Rhine River,

a young Romantic’s online bachelor’s degree program, as it were. He instructs the performers to play “poco forte,” an oxymoronic indication peculiar to Brahms (meaning “only a little loudly”), which he would reuse throughout his life. Musicians generally think of it as an internalized forte – intense yet inward. Brahms grants his second theme again to the cello; his protagonist’s veins now pulse with the joy of inspiration, soon overflowing to all the instruments.

For the second movement, Brahms turns southeasterly, from the Rhineland to Hungary. When Hungarians emigrated after the failed revolution of 1848, Brahms heard music in the style hongrois, most notably from his performance partner, violinist Ede Reményi. But rather than allow his proud, patriotic theme an improvisatory treatment in the gypsy style, he keeps it tightly reined, à la Beethoven, in 8-bar variations. It’s back to German lands for the stately scherzo, where the string ensemble almost embodies an outdoor wind band, playing for a hunting party. The concluding rondo returns to a refined character closer in spirit to the first movement (and beginning again with two cellos and a viola). The graceful theme gives way to a vigorous two-step, which in turn yields back to the theme. It seems the graceful melody will have the final say, but the two-step makes a late-breaking appearance in the coda. Brahms is in too good a mood to end without a final “Hurrah!”

WHITE &WHITE in the village 315-685-7733

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tonight’s concert sponsorshipsProperty management, brokerage and development at its best. week 3

REFINED HISTORIC PROPERTIES. and Doug Sutherland & Nancy Kramer spaces in Franklin Square.

Saturday, August 27 7:30 PM Robinson Pavilion

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at Anyela’s Vineyards Rain Location: TBA

Leasing by Sutton Companies 315.424.1111

tonight’s artist sponsorship

Time for Three is sponsored by Peter & Elsa Soderberg

Time for Three: Dance!

Selections will be announced from the stage and will include

Time for Three: Chaconne in Winter f e at u r i n g

Time for Three Nicolas Kendall, violin Charles Yang, violin Ranaan Meyer, double bass Company XIV Austin McCormick, director and choreographer Dancers: Lea Helle, Taner Van Kuren, Nicole Von Arx

tonight’s artist sponsorship

Company XIV is sponsored by Doug & Judy Robertson with additional support from the Richard Mather Fund tf3 is sponsored with additional support from Donna Himelfarb tonight’s media sponsor:

Cumulus Media The Skaneateles Festival is made possible, in part, by operating support from the County of Onondaga, administered by CNY Arts.

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T

he superstar fiddlers of Time for Three return to Skaneateles: experience them like never before atop the stage of the new amphitheater at Anyela’s Vineyards. In a historic first, the Festival presents dancers, as brilliant up-and-coming choreographer Austin McCormick brings three members of his trendsetting Company XIV to share the stage. Sparks are sure to fly when these two charismatic trios join together for the first time.

CENTRAL NEW YORK

CONNECT WITH US 877.917.3077 bonadio.com

Albany | Batavia | Buffalo | East Aurora | Geneva | New York City | Rochester | Rutland | Syracuse | Utica

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week 4

Wednesday, August 31 FREE Community Event 5:30 PM Bailiwick Market & Café 441 Rte 5, Elbridge

SPECIAL EVEN T

Musical Happy Hour

Stop by after work for a sampling of world class music featuring

The Knights

The Knights Eric Jacobsen, conductor VIOLIN Emily Daggett Smith Ashely Vandiver Ariana Kim Guillaume Pirard

VIOLA Margaret Dyer Mario Gotoh Miranda Sielaff

CELLO Eric Jacobsen Caitlin Sullivan BASS Shawn Conley

tonight’s artist sponsorship

The Knights are sponsored by Holly Gregg & Patience Brewster 52

OBOE Gustav Highstein Geoffrey Deemer

HORN Michael P. Atkinson Chad Yarbrough KEYBOARDS Steven Beck

Please support our sponsors and advertisers.

(See directory on page 79.)

Brook Farm – the Festival’s Saturday night home for 36 years

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week 4

tonight’s concert sponsorships

Barb Connor & Doug Wood and Scott Hafler & Amy LeClair

Thursday, September 1 8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Passion, Past and Present J.S. BACH

Cantata, Dazu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes, BWV 40

J.S. BACH

Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, BWV 1048

Chorus: Darzu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes Recitative: Das Wort ward Fleisch Chorale: Die Sünd macht Leid Aria: Höllische Schlange, wird dir nicht bange?

Recitative: Die Schlange, so im Paradies Chorale: Schüttle deinen Kopf und sprich Aria: Christenkinder, freuet euch!

Chorale: Jesu, nimm dich deiner Glieder

Allegro Adagio Allegro

intermission

J.S. BACH

Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 Gigue

LANG

Light Moving for Violin and Piano (2012)

LANG

The Little Match Girl Passion (2007) come, daughter it was terribly cold dearest heart in an old apron penance and remorse lights were shining patience, patience! ah! perhaps

have mercy, my god she lighted another match from the sixth hour she again rubbed a match when it’s time for me to go in the dawn of morning we sit and cry

Guillaume Pirard, violin Ariana Kim, violin Steven Beck, piano Ekmeles Jeff Gavett, director Charlotte Mundy, soprano Tim Keeler, countertenor Brian Giebler, tenor Steven Hrycelak, bass

The Knights Eric Jacobsen, conductor VIOLIN Emily Daggett Smith Ashely Vandiver Ariana Kim Guillaume Pirard

VIOLA Margaret Dyer Mario Gotoh Miranda Sielaff

CELLO Eric Jacobsen Caitlin Sullivan

OBOE Gustav Highstein Geoffrey Deemer

BASS Shawn Conley

tonight’s artist sponsorships

54

HORN KEYBOARDS Michael P. Atkinson Steven Beck Chad Yarbrough

Ekmeles is sponsored by Andrea Latchem The Knights are sponsored by Holly Gregg & Patience Brewster The Donald J. Grout Harpsichord, built by William Dowd, Boston 1988, is provided through the kind courtesy of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Syracuse, NY.

The Skaneateles Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the ­support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Program Notes

T

he timeless Passion story of life, death, and transformation has inspired artists for thousands of years. In an innovative program perfectly suited to the church stage, we pair the music of J. S. Bach with modern master (and Hilary Hahn favorite) David Lang, a 2016 Academy Award nominee for best film score. The Brooklyn-based chamber orchestra The Knights join vocal ensemble Ekmeles for a program of Bach’s exuberant Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, his Cantata, BWV 40 (with organ), and Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion, an unforgettable work of fragile beauty based on the tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

Cantata, Dazu ist erschienen der Sohn Gottes, BWV 40 JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) Cantata No. 40 dates from the most productive year of Bach’s life, his first in Leipzig. One might arguably count it as the most productive year by any composer in history.

With astonishing swiftness, Bach composed a complete cycle of about 60 cantatas, in addition to executing his numerous other duties as Kantor for St. Thomas Church.

Each of these cantatas was a musical sermon to which Bach brought his full creative powers. He had at his disposal some 25-40 singers and players, as well as a truly captive audience of churchgoers. Usually the cantata fell between the Gospel reading and the sermon, somewhere near the middle of the 3-hour service. (Try to remember this the next time you feel a religious service goes on too long.)

Bach designed Cantata No. 40 to fit the readings for the second day of Christmas; although we may associate that day with two turtledoves, the topic of this musical sermon is comparatively severe. While it continues to celebrate God’s appearance in human form, the focus is on the reason why (dazu): to fight a terrible battle against sin and Satan. The cantata is therefore an unusually potent blend of two extremes familiar to churchgoers: celebration and

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016 suffering. About three quarters of the way through, the Passion of Christ is identified as the enabler of celebration, further highlighting the contrast: “I, through the passion of my Savior, am borne away from you [Satan] into the hall of rejoicing.”

The scoring for two horns and two oboes is an inspired choice to convey contrast, since horns are usually celebratory and oboes often express sadness and suffering. The jubilant tone of the opening chorus serves a double purpose, as joyful exclamation of Christ’s arrival on earth, and as rousing battle music for the struggle that will ultimately be won over sin, death, and Satan. The central section separates the chorus into successive voices (a fugue), for a sober reflection upon the darker side of the same text. Bach subtly reintroduces a little bit of the celebration into this serious counterpoint, and gradually it transforms back into party music, a compositional tour de force from a man known above all else during his lifetime as grand master of contrapuntal wizardry.

After the tenor shares John’s Gospel about Christ as “Word made flesh,” the chorus makes a surprising reappearance. This particular cantata is highly unusual in that the chorus sings three chorales, interspersed throughout the cantata, rather than only one at the end. In a severe tone, they boil down the essential contrast of the whole cantata, Die Sünd macht Leid; Christus bringt Freud (“Sin makes suffering; Christ brings joy”); in German, Leid and Freud, sound similar, highlighting their role as polar opposites. The following bass aria (“Hellish serpent!”) is deliciously Baroque, agitatedly reveling in its extreme subject matter, as the head of Satan is crushed. The alto recitative and subsequent chorus both consider the damage done by the serpent, whose venom has dripped “upon all Adam’s children.” But then it is time to rejoice, for the battle has been won; we marvel at the tenor’s endless riffs on the verb “celebrate” (freue), to which the horns and oboes frolic about. The final chorus tells of endless joy, but in a dignified, sober tone, a reminder that this earthly life is not yet over. So, ahem, sit still, and listen to the sermon.

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First Vice President – Investment Officer

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9/1 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, BWV 1048 (1718)

Bach’s set of six Brandenburg Concertos is like that oh-so-special holiday gift from your eccentric uncle.

“Wow…Thank you...What is it?” Bach sent this… unique…gift to Christian Ludwig, the Margrave of Brandenburg, two years after he played for the wealthy prince on a trip to buy a new harpsichord for his employer back in Cöthen. Always on the lookout for professional advancement, the composer probably hoped to impress the Margrave into offering him a job. He received no reply.

Whoever opened the first page of the score and read past Bach’s flattering and flowery French dedication would have been mystified by the instrumentation of the first concerto, one of the strangest imaginable, featuring two hunting horns, three oboes, and a violin piccolo – a tiny violin. The Margrave had no such instruments at his court.

It was a risky move to send the concertos at all, since they were technically the property of his Cöthen employer, Prince Leopold, highly esteemed by Bach until the prince married his musically disinclined cousin. Although we rightly think of Bach as a religious man, he had a long history of disobeying his employers and was once even thrown in jail for it. Bach scored the concertos for the diverse instruments he had on hand in Cöthen; much of the musical material was probably recycled from his earlier post, in Weimar.

The concertos are not only eccentric in instrumentation, but also in how Bach intermixes these instruments from moment to moment (often termed musical “texture”).

This is especially true in the first movement of Concerto No. 3, where the instruments kick around the solo melody as if playing hacky sack; when not playing the solo melody, they step back into a mini chorus. If you are reading this during the performance, look up: this lively, playful movement Is fun to watch, as one follows the music passed from player to player, group to group.

In between the two outer movements of this Concerto, Bach wrote only two slow chords, perhaps to suggest an improvisation between the two, or perhaps to allow him to insert another movement he had on hand. The performers must decide for themselves, a reminder that Bach composed for performance, not posterity.

The final movement highlights a different kind of mobility from the first, namely, speed. With vertiginous vivacity and Vivaldian vigor, this collective rodeo romp charges out of the gate and doesn’t stop until it is over.

Bach has tremendous fun with the simple concept of “what goes up must come down,” which belies the complexity of the contrapuntal gears beneath this joyride; there are rarely fewer than four distinct melodies going on at any given moment. This movement proves that even counterpoint can be fun. The Margrave of Brandenburg didn’t know what he was missing.

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Light Moving for Violin and Piano (2012) DAVID LANG (B. 1957) In a transformation familiar to music history (think Beethoven, or Stravinsky), David Lang has moved from outlier to highflier. As an idealistic young composer, Lang co-founded the new music group Bang on a Can, which, as its name implies, aimed to make new music accessible and more widely available in an era when much of it was controlled by Academia. They succeeded: their 12-hour marathon concerts at unconventional venues like art galleries gradually drew followers, as did Lang’s own music, which has the propulsive motion of American Minimalism (Philip Glass, Steve Reich) but with greater flexibility and a wider range of techniques. Lang’s music is both connected to tradition and always a little subversive. (To this day, he prefers all lower case letters in his musical titles, even if now more mainstream, thanks to texting and Apple’s “i” products). There is always an emotional directness in his music, which, in combination with its rhythmic energy, invites comparison with the aesthetic of J. S. Bach.

Lang’s Light Moving was commissioned by violinist Hilary Hahn for her Grammy-winning album, In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores. About it, he writes: “When the young Philip Glass and the young Steve Reich were living near each other in New York in the late 60’s they started a furniture moving company, called ‘Chelsea Light Moving.’ Their company didn’t last too long, but I have always loved the spirit of it, and the name.

And somehow my piece reminded me of that time, that place and that sound.”

PERFORMER QUOTE

“David Lang’s The Little Match Girl passion has a beautiful stillness to it. As performers, we have to work to maintain this focused calm in order to bring out the work's incredible emotional impact.”

JEFFREY GAVETT

The Little Match Girl Passion (2007) DAVID LANG (B. 1957) David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion received the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. About it he writes: I wanted to tell a story. A particular story – in fact, the story of The Little Match Girl by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of danger and morality that many famous children’s stories do. A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is ignored, and freezes to death.

9/1 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

Through it all she somehow retains her Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.

What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts – the horror and the beauty – are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.

There are many ways to tell this story. One could convincingly tell it as a story about faith or as an allegory about poverty. What has always interested me, however, is that Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable, drawing a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. The girl suffers, is scorned by the crowd, dies, and is transfigured. I started wondering what secrets could be unlocked from this story if one took its Christian nature to its conclusion and unfolded it, as Christian composers have traditionally done in musical settings of the Passion of Jesus.

The most interesting thing about how the Passion story is told is that it can include texts other than the story itself.

These texts are the reactions of the crowd, penitential thoughts, statements of general sorrow, shock, or remorse.

These are devotional guideposts, the markers for our own responses to the story, and they have the effect of making the audience more than spectators to the sorrowful events onstage. These responses can have a huge range – in Bach’s “Saint Matthew Passion,” these extra texts range from famous chorales that his congregation was expected to sing along with to completely invented characters, such as the “Daughter of Zion” and the “Chorus of Believers.” The Passion format – the telling of a story while simultaneously commenting upon it – has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action, and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.

My piece is called The Little Match Girl Passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen’s narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach’s Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Hans Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word ''passion'' comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus – rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus’, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.

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tonight’s concert sponsorship

Friday, September 2

Juliette Klein Sharpe Fund

8:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

The Knights: Tango Tour RAVEL

Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera

SCHULHOFF

Tango from Five Pieces for String Quartet

PIAZZOLLA arr. José Bragato

Oblivion

CONLEY

Quintet

intermission

STRAVINSKY

Tango for Piano

ALBENIZ arr. Fritz Kreisler

Tango in D Major, from España, Op. 165

GOLIJOV

Last Round

PIAZZOLLA arr. Ljova

Libertango

Musicians from The Knights VIOLIN Emily Daggett Smith Ashely Vandiver Ariana Kim Guillaume Pirard

VIOLA Margaret Dyer Mario Gotoh Miranda Sielaff

CELLO Eric Jacobsen Caitlin Sullivan BASS Shawn Conley

tonight’s artist sponsorships

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The Knights are sponsored by Holly Gregg & Patience Brewster with additional support from the Columbian Foundation Aaron Wunsch is sponsored by George Bain and Sam & Debby Bruskin

KEYBOARDS Steven Beck Aaron Wunsch, piano

The Skaneateles Festival is made possible, in part, by operating support from the County of Onondaga, administered by CNY Arts.

Program Notes

I

t takes two to tango, but imagine what nine can do, in a program that culminates with Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s high octane nonet, Last Round. The Brooklyn-based Knights, “spirited and vital” (New York Times), lead us on a tango tour, which follows the most romantic dance around the world, as it inspires composers from Ravel to Stravinsky to the great tango nuevo master Astor Piazzolla.

Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera (1907) MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

Tango from Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923) ERWIN SCHULHOFF (1894-1942)

Oblivion, arr. José Bragato (1982) ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992)

Quintet (2016) SHAWN CONLEY (B. 1983)

Tango for Piano (1940) IGOR STRAVINKSY (1882-1971)

Tango in D Major, from España, Op. 165, ISAAC ALBÉNIZ (1860-1909)

arr. Fritz Kreisler (1890) Last Round (1996)

OSVALDO GOLIJOV (B. 1960)

© AARON WUNSCH, 2016

Libertango (1974) ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992) arr. Ljova (1978) Like almost any folk dance, the origins of the Latin American tango are murky. Perhaps it comes from the old Spanish word taño, “to play” the drums, as black slaves did in colonial Argentina; perhaps the word is African in origin, referring to a dance; or perhaps it is Cuban for a carnival parade. One thing is certain: the tango is well traveled. It wouldn’t be the vibrant dance it is today without having come via England, France, Spain, African countries, Cuba, and Argentina, evolving as it went. As we know it today, the tango is distinctly urban and Argentinean, with direct ancestors in the Andalusian tango and the Cuban habanera. Of course, all this means little when you’re caught up in the dance itself: its rhythms entrance, and its sensuality ensnares.

Chronologically, the earliest tango on this program is the Tango in D Major, Op. 165, by Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. He composed it in 1890 among a suite of Spanish piano dances, appropriately entitled España, for his concert debut in London. Yet Albéniz had at least a whiff of the dance on the other side of the ocean, too – he is among the very few European composers of his time to have gone to Latin America. At age 15 he boarded a ship alone to Cuba from Cadiz; he claimed to have traveled on to Buenos Aires as a stowaway – and in this context, one really wants to believe him – but shipping routes make his

“ This fund will serve as a vehicle that reflects my deep appreciation for what the people of this area have meant in my life.”

– Juliette Klein Sharpe

Longtime Skaneateles resident Julie Sharpe felt blessed by her friends and community and enriched by several local nonprofits. Before her passing in 2014, Julie designated a provision in her will to establish a fund at the Central New York Community Foundation.

The Skaneateles Festival will benefit in perpetuity from Julie’s thoughtful legacy of generosity.

Tonight’s concert is performed in grateful memory of Julie and all that she did as a Festival volunteer and supporter.

Photo provided by the Central New York Community Foundation

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9/2 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

tale implausible. He did, however, tour as a pianist to Cuba and Puerto Rico, where he likely heard the tango and its relative, the habanera. These dances share the rhythm found in his elegant Tango in D Major, to which an extra dollop of charm was added (à la viennoise) in an arrangement by the great violinist, Fritz Kreisler.

The tango would not exist as we know it without the habanera. The two were basically interchangeable until the tango took on a distinct character in Argentina – after which point (confusingly) the tango started to influence the habanera. In Maurice Ravel’s mind, the habanera was a Spanish dance, and he shared with many of his fellow composers a boundless enthusiasm for all things espagnole.

For Ravel, Spanish culture was not entirely exotic: his mother was Basque; he was born near the Spanish border, and later visited Spain. The true home of the habanera might well be on the sea between Spain and Cuba, where it moved back and forth, via the maritime route. In Cuba, black musicians added dotted and syncopated rhythms to the European contra dance (from England and France), which the habanera has never lost. Ravel’s Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera (1907) is a text-less vocalise for bass and piano that exists thanks to Amédée-Landély Hettich, an enterprising voice professor at the Paris Conservatoire, who commissioned Ravel, Fauré, and others to write vocal etudes for his students. The piece quickly started a second career for violin and piano, and so it is most often heard today. Atmospheric and sensual, it is more a reminiscence of a dance than a dance itself.

The tango became internationally fashionable in the early 20th century, in Paris (where else); by the end of World War I, the tango was the hottest ballroom dance in Europe. In Paris, the most unerringly fashionable composer was Igor Stravinsky. Whether or not one believes in his alleged affair with Coco Chanel in 1920 (Oh là là – the very year she invented Chanel No. 5!), he certainly had a knack for always hanging with the “in” crowd. However, he did not compose his Tango for Piano until 1940, in Hollywood. One of his few works composed to earn money (along with his dance revue, music for jazz band, and polka for circus elephants), he clearly composed it because the tango was popular. He even planned to have lyrics added.

However, Stravinsky was not a natural populist, and fortunately this rather dour little piece has a purely Stravinskyan ironic charm.

The tango’s non-European roots were surely one key to the dance’s popularity after World War I – along with the fox trot, the shimmy, and jazz, in general. After nearly five years of war, Europe felt shell shocked by itself. One composer drawn to the tango for this reason was Erwin Schulhoff, a talented Czech composer of German-Jewish descent whose music has recently experienced a resurgence. (Schulhoff tragically perished in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942.) This selection from his Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923) is an Argentinian tango 60 milonga, an instrumental tango with especially strong

rhythm. The one-time Dadaist Schulhoff takes a slightly subversive approach to the tango here without losing the natural serious and sensual character of the dance. He fills it with wry modernist touches, like parallel fourths, major seconds, and pentatonic scales. The gentle final chord drips with the most delicious dissonances.

The tango has never been the same since Astor Piazzolla got ahold of it. When his family moved back to Argentina from New York, in 1937, he integrated elements of classical music and jazz into the tango. This dissonanceladen strain of the dance became known as Tango Nuevo, and purists were not happy about it. But Piazzolla, a virtuoso on the accordion-like bandonéon, scored major successes abroad, and he was eventually embraced at home, too, from the 1980s on.

His songful Oblivion (1982), arranged here for piano trio by José Bragato, speaks achingly of days gone by, of love lost – hopelessly, as the title implies. His feisty Libertango (1974; arr. Ljova), on the other hand, shakes things up. The title may refer to Piazzolla’s controversial liberation of the tango from its traditional form. Libertango blends a defiant, energetic underlying rhythm with long, lyrical phrases – it may break the mold, but in so doing, it still captures the essence of the tango.

For Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov, Piazzolla was a musical giant – though not the only one. Of Eastern European Jewish descent, Golijov also finds inspiration in Classical chamber music and Jewish klezmer and liturgical

9/2 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

music. His characteristic blend of such disparate points of inspiration can be heard in Last Round, which, however, tilts toward the tango.

About Last Round, Golijov writes: Astor Piazzolla, the last great Tango composer, was at the peak of his creativity when a stroke killed him in 1992.

He left us, in the words of the old tango, 'without saying good bye’, and that day the musical face of Buenos Aires was abruptly frozen. The creation of that face had started a hundred years earlier from the unlikely combination of African rhythms underlying gauchos’ couplets, sung in the style of Sicilian canzonettas over an accompanying Andalucian guitar. As the years passed all converged towards the bandoneon: a small accordion-like instrument without keyboard that was invented in Germany in the 19th century to serve as a portable church organ and which, after finding its true home in the bordellos of Buenos Aires’ slums in the 1920’s, went back to Europe to conquer Paris’ high society in the 1930’s. Since then it reigned as the essential instrument for any Tango ensemble.

Piazzolla’s bandoneon was able to condense all the symbols of tango. The eroticism of legs and torsos in the dance was reduced to the intricate patterns of his virtuoso fingers (a simple C major scale in the bandoneon zigzags so much as to leave an inexperienced player’s fingers tangled).

The melancholy of the singer’s voice was transposed to the breathing of the bandoneon’s continuous opening and closing. The macho attitude of the tangueros was reflected in his pose on stage: standing upright, chest forward, right leg on a stool, the bandoneon on top of it, being by turns raised, battered, caressed.

I composed Last Round in 1996, prompted by Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman. They heard a sketch of the second movement, which I had written in 1991 upon hearing the news of Piazzolla’s stroke, and encouraged me to finish it and write another movement to complement it. The title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, the metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla’s spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life). The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh (it is actually a fantasy over the refrain of the song 'My Beloved Buenos Aires’, composed by the legendary Carlos Gardel in the 1930’s). But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass, with violins and violas standing up as in the traditional tango orchestras. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.

SEWARD HOUSE MUSEUM 33 SOUTH STREET, AUBURN, NY 13021

“This place is so special for me; it made Seward come alive.”

SUMMER HOURS

- doris kearns goodwin

Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 5pm; Sunday 1pm - 5pm Guided tours begin ever y hour, with the final tour at 4pm.

Themed specialty tours offered Saturdays at 11am.

CALL (315) 252-1283 OR VISIT SEWARDHOUSE.ORG FOR MORE INFO.

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tonight’s concert sponsorship

Saturday, September 3

Carl Schramm & Ellyn Brown and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

7:30 PM Robinson Pavilion

at Anyela’s Vineyards Rain Location: TBA

Festival Finale with The Knights DURANTE

Concerto for Strings No. 8 in A Major, La Pazzia Allegro affettuoso Affettuoso Allegro

VIVALDI

Concerto for Two Cellos in G minor, RV 531

SOLLIMA

Federico II from Viaggio in Italia

STEVENS arr. M. Atkinson

Allegro Largo Allegro

Suite from Run Rabbit Run I. Year of the Ox II. Enjoy Your Rabbit

Julia Bruskin, cello Eric Jacobsen, cello

III. Year of Our Lord IV. Year of the Boar

intermission

MOZART

GILBERTO arr. C. Jacobsen

Symphony No. 29 in A Major, K. 201 Allegro moderato Andante Menuetto: Allegretto – Trio Allegro con spirit

Undiú

The Knights

Eric Jacobsen, conductor VIOLIN VIOLA Emily Daggett Smith Margaret Dyer Kristi Helberg Mario Gotoh Ariana Kim Miranda Sielaff Guillaume Pirard

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CELLO

Eric Jacobsen Caitlin Sullivan BASS Shawn Conley

OBOE

Gustav Highstein Geoffrey Deemer

HORN

Michael P. Atkinson Chad Yarbrough

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Program Notes

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nown for their hip and innovative programs, the Brooklyn-based orchestra The Knights bring their “camaraderie and shared enthusiasm” (New York Times) to a wide range of music, from Vivaldi (Concerto for Two Cellos) and Mozart (Symphony No. 29) to Brazilian bossa nova legend João Gilberto and Brooklyn’s own singersongwriter Sufjan Stevens. “Is there another orchestra that seems to be having as much fun when it plays as the Knights do?” (New York Times)

Concerto for Strings No. 8 in A Major, La Pazzia FRANCESCO DURANTE (1684-1755) Our image of staid, white-wigged composers to the contrary, the Baroque Era was extravagant, sensuous, and sometimes just plain weird. The great painter Caravaggio got the ball rolling in 1594 with his perverse, selfexplanatory Boy bitten by Lizard. Bernini’s realistic Rape of Prosperina (1622) affirmed that no subject was too grotesque to be considered beautiful, summed up later

by J. S. Bach in his aria “Come, Sweet Crucifixion,” from the St. Matthew Passion (1727). Enter Francesco Durante, whose entire Concerto for Strings No. 8 in A Major depicts “La Pazzia” – “the madness.” In other words: going crazy.

Although we enjoy it when music seems autobiographical, in this case, the Neapolitan Durante was sober as a judge – a simple man, direct, and highly respected by his many pupils. His Concerto depicts insanity, well, just ‘cause. Baroque composers reveled in such extreme emotional states, which here are multifarious. The Concerto begins by stating the same melodic fragment vigorously many times in a row, then abruptly stopping for the lunatic solo violin’s logic-less elocution. Later, the violas (or viols) take over – never a good sign. They wallow in their misery, like someone who goes on about his or her troubles for too long. The ensemble interrupts with music that’s suspiciously happy, by comparison. By the end of the movement, the violas and ensemble finally arrive on the same page. The lovely slow movement is mad only in that it enjoys its heartbroken state a little too much – but the listener doesn’t mind this beautiful river of tears. The final Allegro can’t decide if it is joyful or melancholy, switching on a dime from one to the other. This is disorienting, fun, and most definitely weird.

Concerto for Two Cellos in G minor, RV 531 ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741) As a person, the vain, red headed Vivaldi was highly controversial, living up to the title of his popular set of violin concertos, La stravaganza, Op. 4 (the extravagance).

As a composer, he was nothing if not prolific. He once bragged he could compose a concerto faster than it could be copied out into parts, which could not have been too far

© AARON WUNSCH, 2015 from the truth. Dvǒrák and Elgar composed one cello concerto each; Haydn (with some help) made it to two.

Vivaldi? 26. Oh, and for good measure, one Concerto for Two Cellos, RV 531 (as in, the 531st of his works). Don’t even ask how many violin concertos the man composed.

The frequently made accusation against Vivaldi, that he reused the same musical forms over and over, is also true of most Baroque composers (including J. S. Bach), and it obscures the staggering invention present throughout Vivaldi’s music. The stormy two-cello Concerto provides an excellent example of Vivaldi’s tireless ingenuity. Instead of treating the cellos in the manner of most double concertos, which alternate solos by each instrument, he blends them together, as if one instrument resonating back upon itself. This sonic wizardry is the equivalent of dropping a stone into a placid pool, watching the reflection fragment.

In the first movement, the effect is enhanced by a furiously active orchestra, alternatively noisy and quietly tense.

In the Largo, the two cellos groan like two intertwined, suffering souls in Dante’s Inferno. The final Allegro splits up the cellos at last, and they duel one another with scale after arpeggio, occasionally locking swords with angry repeated notes.

In case you are still curious: Vivaldi composed at least 230 violin concertos. At a rate of one per week, it would take four and a half years just to listen to them all. Perhaps a little bragging is in order.

PERFORMER QUOTE

“The Vivaldi Double Cello Concerto was one of the first concertos I learned to play at about age 9. I loved it so much that when we heard it on the radio during a family car trip, I convinced my whole family to wait in the car even though we’d reached our destination just so I could hear the end of the movement!”

JULIA BRUSKIN

Federico II from Viaggio in Italia (2000) GIOVANNI SOLLIMA (B. 1962) Notes by Colin Jacobsen

Giovanni Sollima’s Federico II (in its orchestral version), is a movement that is part of a larger piece called Viaggio In Italia. Sollima, a virtuosic cellist and composer in the long tradition of Italian virtuoso string instrumentalist/

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9/3 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

composers such as Vivaldi, Corelli and Boccherini, traverses what he calls the “Jurassic of the cello” (meaning the Baroque era) to the “Metal,” as he draws from rock, jazz and folk idioms from his native Sicily in his music.

Federico II was known as the enlightened and shrewd ruler of the Holy Roman Empire from 1220 till his death in 1250. He was a great supporter of the sciences and the arts, allowed for a far greater integration of ethnicities in his kingdom than was common practice at the time in Europe, and is widely credited with helping to pave the way for the intellectual advances of the Renaissance.

Sollima pays tribute to him in this rhythmically intoxicating piece. About it, Sollima says: “I felt I wanted to render the bright, joyous and multiethnic atmosphere of the court of Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) in the guise of dancing with my music.

Frederick II was an enlightened personality of great character, tolerant towards all races and religions…

Within the circles of his vast rule, the sacred Roman Empire, which stretched from Germany to most of Italy, he chose to live mainly in Palermo. He was a lover of the arts and made his magnificent court the venue for the early poets of the new Italian language…”

Suite from Run Rabbit Run (2009) SUFJAN STEVENS (B. 1975), arr. Michael Atkinson (2014)

Another major instrumental project was his 2001 album of electronica, Enjoy Your Rabbit, inspired by the animals of the Chinese zodiac, re-released in 2009 in arrangements for the unlikely medium of string quartet alone – a bold move. Stevens had help here from some expert arrangers, including composer Nico Muhly, singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, and The Knights own horn player, Michael Atkinson, who subsequently brought together this suite for The Knights. The music is entrancing, experimental, boundary crossing, and cool. Only in Brooklyn.

Symphony No. 29 in A Major, K. 201 (1774) WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Although Mozart was a famously precocious and productive young composer, most of the works he composed before the age of 20 – 10 operas, 30+ symphonies, etc. – are not frequently performed today. These facile creations are the laboratory of a young genius, trying out the ideas of others the way a child normally plays with blocks. At age 18, however, Mozart took a creative leap with the symphony that marks his adulthood as a composer. Suddenly he is inventing blocks, rather than playing with them.

Symphony No. 29, a sunny and uplifting work, is one of Mozart’s first great symphonies and among the earliest of his works beloved by musicians today. It was composed in his hometown of Salzburg; Mozart and his father had recently returned from a trip to Vienna, where the young

Though it is difficult to summarize the wide-ranging creativity of Sufjan Stevens, if one had to use a single word, it might be “Brooklyn.” Considered by many to be one of the great songwriters working today, his hip, outside-the-box aesthetic and nuanced, nonchalant intelligence seem to typify the borough’s best image of itself. Not that he’s from there. A native of Detroit, Stevens attended the famed Interlochen Arts Academy, and Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, before moving to New York. In addition to guitar, he plays the piano, drums, banjo, oboe, and English horn, among other instruments (take that, Taylor Swift). On stage, he has a distinctive presence, often wearing gigantic feathered angel wings. His 2007 multimedia ode to the city, The BQE, matches a film of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to an original symphonic-electronic score.

YOU’RE INVITED to TASTE OF

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DEBI MAZAR & GABRIELE CORCOS

of the hit series, Extra Virgin

OCTOBER 22, 2016

Check it out!

Artist CDs available at the concession table.

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DEBI MAZAR Actress, Entourage, Younger, Goodfellas

T i c k e t s at

wcny.org/tasteoffame

GABRIELE CORCOS Owner, The Tuscan Gun restaurant, Brooklyn

O N E E V E N T, T H R E E T I C K E T S 1. Taste of Fame Dinner

Enjoy a delightful evening of food, wine and storytelling. The dinner features inspired dishes from the host’s own recipes, an open bar cocktail hour, and silent auction.

sponsored by

2. Taste of Fame TV Recording Be a part of the recording of WCNY’s new Taste of Fame TV show at the WCNY Studios, featuring Gabriele Corcos and host, Nick Stellino.

Champagne welcome included.

3. VIP Studio Soiree

VIP guests will enjoy the Taste of Fame dinner, TV recording event, and an exclusive Studio Soiree champagne meet-and-greet with Gabriele, Debi, and Nick. Limo to and from the Oncenter provided. Guests will receive a personally autographed copy of Corcos’s new cookbook.

9/3 Program Notes (CONTINUED)

composer had heard the latest music by his elder contemporaries (including, presumably, Haydn). Mozart would become increasingly dissatisfied with the provincial Salzburg, and the symphony might reflect this insofar as it is a borderless work that draws upon the Italian, Viennese, and French musical styles. After his travels throughout Europe, he couldn’t help but turn cosmopolitan.

The symphony begins humbly, with a quiet two-note falling octave, the opposite of most symphonies’ selfimportant opening statements. The music quickly spreads a feeling of good will over the listener as it gradually builds momentum and envelops the whole orchestra. The lyrical second theme is vintage Mozart, expansive yet effortless.

A dose of counterpoint in the movement’s middle section foreshadows the coda, where Mozart ingeniously has the instruments enter one at a time with the falling octave, overflowing with joy.

The delicate second movement has the listener leaning forward to hear the tender tones of the muted violins.

Delightful countermelodies abound here, but the movement never feels overly complicated. Only in the coda does Mozart instruct the violins to remove their mutes, for a final expression of satisfaction. The Minuet that follows has the rustic charm of the outdoors, galloping along in dotted rhythms. The middle section turns courtly, i.e., to court, where the minuet was danced so that aristocrats

could pretend they were farmers. Finally, in the closing movement, Mozart allows the symphony to run free, with vigor and a little mischief. The two-note falling octave from the first movement is back, now with a childlike enthusiasm. After all, it hadn’t been so long since the 18-year old Mozart was himself a child—even if this is the work of a master.

Undiú (1973) JOÃO GILBERTO (B. 1931) arr. Colin Jacobsen In the public imagination, the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro is synonymous with relaxation – hot sun, white sand, and cold drinks. And, of course, the music: the mellowest of all tones is the Brazilian bossa nova, which seems to drop the blood pressures of all who hear it. For this, you can thank João Gilberto, whose intimate vocal style and syncopated guitar variations on the samba beat have defined the bossa nova from the late 1950s onward.

In 1962, he met his jazz equivalent, the honey-toned Stan Getz, and the two popularized the bossa nova worldwide with their Grammy-winning album (which includes the now ubiquitous “Girl from Ipanema”). His 1973 song Undiú is mellow even for bossa nova, consisting of the single word “Undiú,” a made-up mantra, repeated over and over. One can almost hear the waves lapping in the background. Welcome to Nirvana.

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Musician Profiles Rieko Aizawa, piano Japanese pianist Rieko Aizawa, at age 14, made her U.S. debut concerts at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall, performing Mozart’s Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K. 414, with the New York String Orchestra. Praised by the New York Times for her “impressive musicality, a crisp touch and expressive phrasing,” Ms. Aizawa has performed in solo and orchestral engagements throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe, including Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall and Chicago’s Orchestra Hall.

Highlights of recent seasons have included acclaimed performances with the New Japan Philharmonic under Seiji Ozawa, the English Chamber Orchestra under Heinz Holliger, the Festival Strings Lucerne in Switzerland under Rudolf Baumgartner, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff, the Curtis Institute Orchestra with Peter Oundjian, the St. Louis Symphony under David Loebel and a wonderfully received performance with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra.

Borromeo String Quartet Nicholas Kitchen, violin Kristopher Tong, violin Mai Motobuchi, viola Yeesun Kim, cello As it celebrates its 25th anniversary, the Borromeo String Quartet strengthens its reputation as one of the most important ensembles of our time, “simply the best.” (Boston Globe) A pioneer in its use of technology, the BSQ strives to redefine the classical music landscape through innovation. It was the first string quartet to read music from laptop computers in concert. It’s also the first classical ensemble to make and distribute its own live recordings to audiences. The BSQ’s expansive repertoire ranges from Beethoven to Gunther Schuller, to its signature cycle of Bartók string quartets, to collaborations with some of this generation’s most important composers – John Cage, György Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon, John Harbison. The Quartet performs on concert stages such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, the Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall, and at venues in Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, and China. The BSQ is quartetin-residence at the New England Conservatory, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Taos School of Music.

Julia Bruskin, cello, artistic director Since her concerto debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age 17, Julia Bruskin has established herself as one of the premiere cellists of her generation. She has soloed with conductor Jahja Ling at Avery Fisher Hall as well as with the Nashville, Utah, Virginia, and Pacific Symphonies, among others. Her CD of music by Beethoven, Brahms, and Dohnányi was praised by Fanfare magazine for its “exquisite beauty of sound and expression.” She is a frequent guest at summer music festivals, now especially as co-director of the Skaneateles Festival with her husband, Aaron Wunsch. They often play solo recitals together. She is also a member of the

Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York City. A founding member of the critically acclaimed Claremont Trio, Bruskin has recorded and toured extensively with the group. Their recording for Bridge Records of the Beethoven Triple Concerto with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra has received rave reviews. Bruskin teaches at the Juilliard Pre-College. She completed the five-year double degree program at Juilliard and Columbia University. Her major teachers have included Timothy Eddy, Joel Krosnick, Andres Diaz, Norman Fischer, and Nancy Hair.

Edward Castilano, bass String bass player Edward Castilano is a member of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and an instructor at the Syracuse University Setnor School of Music. He played principal bass in the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra until its demise in 2011, and he appeared as soloist with that organization numerous times. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he participated for six seasons in Gian Carlo Menottis Spoleto Festival in Italy and Charleston, South Carolina, where he made several appearances with the Lincoln Center Chamber Players. He has performed annually in the Skaneateles Festival since its inception in 1980. Additionally, Edward has appeared in concert with the Philadelphia, Savannah, and Spokane symphonies.

Jennifer Choi, violin Hailed by Time Out New York as “one of New York’s most reliably adventurous performers,” violinist Jennifer Choi has charted a career that breaks through the conventional boundaries of solo violin, chamber music, and the art of

Metropolitan Opera singer Lisette Oropesa sings from the porch at Brook Farm.

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Musician Profiles creative improvisation. Internationally recognized as a performer with “brilliance and command” (The New York Times). Ms. Choi is regularly sighted in solo performances of rare works that stretch the limits of violin playing often calling for extended techniques, improvisation, and the use of electronics. A prominent chamber musician, Jennifer was former violinist of the Miró String Quartet. With her involvement, the group won Grand Prize at the 1996 Fischoff and Coleman chamber music competitions. Since then, she has performed for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Ravinia Festival, Barge Music, Caramoor Music, and other chamber music series across the United States.

Daniel Chong, violin Daniel Chong was born in Southern California and began playing the violin at the age of four. At the age of twelve, Daniel moved to the east coast where he attended the Curtis Institute of Music, the Cleveland Institute, and the New England Conservatory, where he eventually earned his B.M. and M.M. degrees. His pedagogues included Robert Lipsett and Kim Kashkashian. He enjoys being a versatile musician playing with such groups as the Parker Quartet, the East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO), and DITTO Ensemble. He constantly immerses himself in anything involving film and music and prides himself on his passion for soccer. He hopes to attend the World Cup as a dedicated spectator, and plans to continue his success as a talented violinist and harpist.

Amy Christian, violin Amy Christian received her music performance degrees from Indiana University, Eastman School of Music, and CUNY Graduate Center. She studied under Franco Gulli, Charles Castleman, and Daniel Phillips. She enjoys teaching and performing equally and currently serves as a Visiting Lecturer on the faculty of Cornell University. Her students have won awards and accolades and some have gone on to very successful careers as professors and performers. As a performer, she is a member of Symphoria (Syracuse, NY) and is the acting concertmaster of the Tri-Cities Opera (Binghamton, NY) and is principal second violin of the Binghamton Philharmonic. When she is not busy on those stages, she steps in and substitutes regularly in the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic. She plays on a Sgarabotto violin from 1911 that has been in the family for decades.

Jonathan Chu, violin Violinist and violist Jonathan Chu, a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s viola section, has toured throughout Asia and Europe. He also has performed with many other ensembles: ECCO, the St. Louis Symphony and Santa Fe Opera Orchestras, as a violinist, and as concertmaster with the Juilliard Orchestra and guest principal with the St. Paul and Orpheus Chamber Orchestras. Currently, Mr. Chu is a violist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has performed with 68 the Musicians from Marlboro and Caramoor’s “Rising Stars”

series. He is also a founding member of the Io String Quartet.

His festival apprearances include Marlboro, Yellow Barn and Taos. He can also be found on the album of the rock band Vampire Weekend playing both violin and viola. Mr. Chu is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, where he graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Music degree along with a second major in economics, and the Juilliard School, where he received a Master of Music studying with Robert Mann.

Company XIV Austin McCormick, choreographer Company XIV garners critical acclaim for its unique fusion of passionate choreography, eclectic music, opera, circus, burlesque, ballet, gender-bending, over-the-top costuming, and sumptuous design. Founded by Juilliard graduate Austin McCormick in 2006, the company works in live dance/theater and film. The work is contemporary, yet inspired by theatre/ dance/opera during the reign of Louis XIV. Company XIV has been nominated for a Bessie Award, Innovative Theater Awards, and Drama Desk Awards. He won the 2011 Robert L. B. Tobin Director-Designer Grant from Opera America for new directors in opera. He was also awarded the 2010 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Best Choreography.

Musician Profiles McCormick was the first winner of the Susan Braun award from Dance Films Association in 2007. He holds a BFA from the Juilliard School and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at NYU.

Sarah Crocker Vonsattel, violin Violinist Sarah Crocker Vonsattel has been a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra since 2008. She previously held positions in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Colorado Symphony. Sarah has appeared as soloist with the musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Syracuse Symphony, and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, among others. Recent performances include appearances at Lake Tahoe Summerfest, the Dame Myra Hess Concert Series, the Bronxville Chamber Music Series, Downtown Music at Grace Church, the New Marlborough House Concerts, and the Syracuse Society for New Music. As a founding member of the Verklärte Quartet, Sarah was a Grand Prize Winner of the 2003 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, leading to concert tours in the U.S. and Italy with this ensemble. She has appeared as both performer and faculty member at festivals including the Orfeo International Music Festival (Italy), the Wellesley Composers Conference (Massachusetts), and the Musical Friends Academy (Tunisia). She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a Master of Music degree from the Juilliard School.

Robert deMaine, cello Robert deMaine is currently principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A highly sought after solo artist and chamber musician, he is the cellist of the Ehnes quartet and the Dicterow-deMaine-Biegel Piano Trio and a guest at many of this country’s finest chamber music festivals. deMaine has soloed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, the Bergen (Norway) Philharmonic, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Collaborators include violinists James Ehnes, Hilary Hahn, and Gil Shaham; pianists Emanuel Ax, Andre Watts, Jeffrey Kahane, Orion Weiss, and Yefim Bronfman; and the Beaux Arts Trio as well as the Emerson, Juilliard, Kronos, Cleveland, American, and Pacifica Quartets – among many others. deMaine was the first cellist ever to win San Francisco’s prestigious Irving M. Klein International Competition for Strings. Among the many works composed for him is “Summer Verses for Violin and Cello” by Christopher Theofanidis. Naxos released his recording of the John Williams Cello Concerto in 2015.

Ekmeles Charlotte Mundy, soprano Tim Keeler, countertenor Jeffrey Gavett, baritone and director Brian Giebler, tenor Steven Hrycelak, bass In Ancient Greek music theory, ekmeles are tones of indefinite pitch and intervals with complex ratios, tones “not

appropriate for musical usage.” In New York City, Ekmeles is a new vocal ensemble dedicated to breathing life into those disallowed tones, new and old. It is a “brilliant young ensemble… defining a fresh and virtuosic American sound” (The New Yorker). Ekmeles performs new and rarely heard works as well as gems of the historical avant-garde. Ekmeles was founded to fill the gap by presenting new a cappella repertoire for solo voices and by collaborating with these instrumental ensembles. Director Jeffrey Gavett holds degrees from Westminster Choir College and Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program. He has assembled a virtuoso group of colleagues who bring their own diverse backgrounds to bear on the unique challenges of this essential and neglected repertoire.

Rosemary Elliott, cello Rosemary Elliott, Assistant Professor of Cello at the Eastman School of Music, is principal cellist of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra in Ithaca, New York. Prior to her appointment at Eastman, Ms. Elliott was a member of the cello staff at the Royal College of Music, in London. For the last 10 years, she has been a member of the performing and teaching staff at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Brunswick, Maine. As a guest chamber musician she has also participated in the Skaneateles and Icicle Creek Chamber Music festivals, the Heifetz Academy in Wolfboro, New Hampshire, the International Musician’s Seminar in Cornwall, England, and the Kerry Chamber Music Festival in Ireland.

Artistic director of the “Morning Chamber Music” series at the Eastman School of Music, Ms. Elliott has performed with the Rochester Chamber Society, and is a founding member of the Rochester based cello quartet, the Cello Divas.

Peter Evans, trumpet Peter Evans is a trumpet player and improviser/composer based in New York City. Evans is committed to the simultaneously self-determining and collaborative nature of musical improvisation as a compositional tool. He leads the Peter Evans Quintet and the Zebulon Trio. In addition, he performs and records solo trumpet music and is widely recognized as a leading voice in the field. Evans is a member of Pulverize the Sound, Rocket Science, and Premature Burial and has played with groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble and Wet Ink. He has had commissions from the International Contemporary Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, the Donaueschingen Musiktage Festival, and the Jerome Foundation’s Emerging Artist Program. In 2014, he was Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY. He participates in major international festivals and has toured his own groups extensively in Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Lindsay Groves, cello Lindsay Groves founded the Skaneateles Festival in 1980, and served as Music Director for 11 years. She is currently Acting Principal Cellist of Symphoria, and was previously Assistant Principal Cellist for the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. A graduate of Northwestern University, she studied with Dudley Powers, former Principal Cellist of the Chicago Symphony, and met weekly with Chicago Symphony

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Musician Profiles Principal Cellist Frank Miller, as a member of the Chicago Civic Orchestra. She joined the JFK Center Opera House Orchestra in 1987 and was a frequent substitute of the Baltimore Symphony. She has been Assistant Principal Cellist of the Eastern Music Festival Orchestra, Principal Cellist of the Spoleto Festival, and has performed at music festivals in Italy, Switzerland, China, California, Alaska, Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, and Maine.

Hilary Hahn, violin In the more than two decades since her professional debut, three-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn has brought her virtuosity, expansive interpretations, and creative repertoire to diverse global audiences. In her active international career she has performed both as soloist with leading orchestras and as a recitalist. She also has built a reputation for championing contemporary music. The Skaneateles Festival audience has watched with great interest as her career blossomed: she first performed here in 1992 at the age of 12, and has returned often. Hahn took her first lessons in the Suzuki program at age three. She completed her university requirements at the Curtis Institute at sixteen – having already made her solo debuts with the Baltimore and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras, the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, and the New York Philharmonic. In 2001 she was named “America’s Best Young Classical Musician” by Time magazine. Hahn has released sixteen albums on the Deutsche Grammophon and Sony labels. Her recordings have received every critical prize in the international press and have met with equal popular success. All have debuted in the top ten of the Billboard classical chart. Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, written for Hahn, won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2013 Hahn released “In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores,” the culmination of a multi-year project to renew the encore genre, which won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. Hahn commissioned short-form works from 26 composers around the world. For the 27th encore, she held an open contest that drew more than 400 entries.

John Lathwell, oboe John Lathwell is the principal oboist of the Binghamton Philharmonic, the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, and the Tri-Cities Opera. He also performs regularly with the North Eastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, the Skaneateles Festival and is active as a chamber musician throughout the central New York area. In New York City , Mr. Lathwell has performed with The Orchestra of St. Lukes, the New York Chamber Symphony, the American Composers Orchestra, the Westchester Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Philharmonic among many others. Mr. Lathwell is a member of the music faculty at both Binghamton University and the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts. His primary teachers have been Joseph Robinson, Principal Oboist of the New York Philharmonic and Richard Killmer, Professor of Oboe at the Eastman School of Music.

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Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis Wynton Marsalis, music director, trumpet Kenny Rampton, trumpet Marcus Printup, trumpet Ryan Kisor, trumpet Chris Crenshaw, trombone Vincent Gardner, trombone Elliot Mason, trombone Victor Goines, saxophone/clarinet Ted Nash, saxophone, flute, clarinet Walter Blanding, saxophone/clarinet Sherman Irby, saxophone/clarinet Paul Nedzela, saxophones/clarinet Carlos Henriquez, bass Ali Jackson, drums Dan Nimmer, piano Jazz at Lincoln Center The mission of Jazz at Lincoln Center is to entertain, enrich, and expand a global community for jazz through performance, education, and advocacy. We believe jazz is a metaphor for Democracy. Because jazz is improvisational, it celebrates personal freedom and encourages individual expression. Because jazz swings, it dedicates that freedom to finding and maintaining common ground with others.

Because jazz is rooted in the blues, it inspires us to face adversity with persistent optimism.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra The JLCO has been the Jazz at Lincoln Center resident orchestra since 1988. This remarkably versatile ensemble performs and leads educational events in New York, across the U.S. and around the globe. The JLCO performs a vast repertoire, from rare historic compositions to Jazz at Lincoln Center-commissioned works, including compositions and arrangements by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus, and many others.

Wynton Marsalis Wynton Marsalis is the Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Born in New Orleans in 1961, Marsalis began his classical training on trumpet at age 12 and soon began playing in local bands of diverse genres. He entered The Juilliard School at age 17 and joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Marsalis made his recording debut as a leader in 1982, and has since recorded more than 70 jazz and classical albums which have garnered him nine Grammy Awards.

Bridget Kibbey, harp Harpist Bridget Kibbey “makes it seem as though her instrument had been waiting all its life to explode with the gorgeous colors and energetic figures she was getting from it” (New York Times). Bridget is a recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist Award, and a 2015 Salon de Virtuosi Grant. She is the only harpist to win a position with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society II. In addition, she won Première Prix at the Journées de les Harpes Competition in Arles, France,

Musician Profiles as well as prizes at the Concert Artist Guild’s International Competition and Astral Artist Auditions. She tours internationally as concerto soloist, recitalist, and collaborator with some of today’s most compelling artists. Kibbey has B.M. and M.M. degrees from Juilliard, where she studied with Nancy Allen. She teaches at Juilliard, the Bard Conservatory, N.Y.U., and Vassar College.

Kyu-Young Kim, violin Hailed by the Chicago Tribune for his “flawless musical and technical command”, Kim is an active soloist and chamber musician. He has recently toured throughout North America, Europe and Asia, performing in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, the Seoul Arts Center, the Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels), and the Beethoven-Haus (Bonn). He was a founding member of the Daedalus Quartet, as well as a member of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Two Program. He has also served as guest concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and is a member of both the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the New York City Ballet Orchestra. Mr. Kim is a recipient of the 2007 Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center in recognition of outstanding young artists from the Lincoln Center community. Mr. Kim’s other chamber music activities have included performances with the Chicago Contemporary Players, the DaCapo Chamber Players, and the New Juilliard Ensemble. Mr. Kim has received degrees from the Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School, and the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Jon Klibonoff Pianist Jon Klibonoff’s awards include the Silver Medal of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, the Affiliate Artists Xerox Pianists Award, the Pro Music is Foundation Award, first prize at the Kosciuszko Chopin Competition, the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and a Solo Recitalist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Klibonoff has performed with groups like the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Shanghai, Miami, and Lark String Quartets. Mr. Klibonoff has been

heard in recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the 92nd Street Y, and the National Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He has collaborated with instrumentalists including flutist Carol Wincenc, clarinetist David Shifrin, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. A graduate of the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, Mr. Klibonoff is on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music.

The Knights Colin and Eric Jacobsen, artistic directors Eric Jacobsen, conductor The Knights is an orchestral collective, flexible in size and repertoire, dedicated to transforming the concert experience.

It engages listeners and defies boundaries with programs that showcase the players’ roots in the classical tradition and their passion for artistic discovery. The Knights has “become one of Brooklyn’s sterling cultural products… known far beyond the borough for its relaxed virtuosity and expansive repertory” (The New Yorker). In recent years the Knights have collaborated with a wide range of artists including Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Dawn Upshaw, Gil Shaham, Béla Fleck, the Mark Morris Dance Group, Joshua Redman, Silk Road virtuoso Siamak Aghaei, and pipa virtuoso Wu Man. The Knights evolved from late-night chamber music-reading parties with friends at the home of brothers Eric and Colin Jacobsen. The group’s roster boasts remarkably diverse talents, including composers, arrangers, singer-songwriters, and improvisers. The musicians bring a range of cultural influences to the ensemble, from jazz and klezmer to pop and indie rock music. In performance, the unique camaraderie within the group evokes the intimacy and spontaneity of chamber music.

Allan Kolsky, clarinet Principal Clarinet of Symphoria, Allan Kolsky was born in Providence R.I., and held positions with the Louisiana Philharmonic and the Utah Symphony before joining the Syracuse Symphony as Principal Clarinet in 2002. He appeared as soloist with the SSO and performed with the Cincinnati Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Skaneateles Festival, Glimmerglass Opera and the Colorado Music Festival. In local recitals and chamber music, he has performed for Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music, Joyful Noise, and Syracuse OASIS. Civic Morning Musicals

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Musician Profiles awarded him the 2011 CMM Award for Excellence in Music Performance in Central New York. He holds performance degrees from Temple and DePaul Universities. As a student, Kolsky won a Tanglewood Fellowship and performed with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. In 2006, he joined the Music Department at Hamilton College as an adjunct Lecturer in Clarinet.

Victoria Krukowski, clarinet A member of Symphoria, Victoria Krukowski currently plays second and E-flat clarinet, and was previously a member of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra from 2001-2011. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in 1993. In 1997, she earned a Master’s Degree from the Eastman School of Music. Victoria was a frequent substitute musician in the Philadelphia Orchestra, touring the Far East in 1999, and was a member of the orchestra of the Opera Company of Philadelphia before joining the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. One of Victoria’s earliest memories is hearing the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra perform live. In 2012, Victoria was instrumental in founding Symphoria’s Healing Harmonies Program, through which musicians of Symphoria play live music with therapeutic benefits for cancer and dialysis patients in Central New York.

Melissa Matson, viola Melissa Matson, prizewinner of the Cleveland Quartet Competition (1978-80), earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, as well as a Performer’s Certificate at the Eastman School of Music. Matson studied chamber music with the Cleveland and Juilliard Quartets, and at the Quartet Program and the Aspen Festival Center for Advanced Quartet Studies.

She is a founding member of the Chester String Quartet and also won prizes at the Munich and Portsmouth (England) quartet competitions. Matson performed on a CD, Chamber Jazz by Jeff Tyzik, released by the Rochester Society for Chamber Music. In addition to her teaching post, Matson is a soloist and principal violist with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and has been a performer with the Society for Chamber Music and the Skaneateles Festival, as well as a mentor and coach for the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.

Sara Mastrangelo, violin A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Sara Mastrangelo has moved back to Canada after many years in the USA. She was a member of the New World Symphony Orchestra in Miami before her tenure with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra from 2001-2013. In Ottawa, Mastrangelo is a first violinist with the Thirteen Strings Chambre Orchestra and performs regularly with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Mastrangelo is an active chamber musician, she has performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Banff Center for the Arts, Schleswig Holstein Music Festival in Germany, Breckenridge

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Musician Profiles Music Festival, and Skaneateles Music Festival. She holds degrees from McGill University, University of Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon University. In New York State, Mastrangelo held teaching positions at Hamilton College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the St. Peter’s Arts Academy.

Matthew McDonald, oboe Matthew McDonald was appointed Principal Bassoon of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in September 2013.

Before his appointment there, he was Principal Bassoon of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and Co-Principal Bassoon of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra in Columbus, Ohio.

McDonald has performed as soloist with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, Curtis Symphony Orchestra, Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra, and The Cleveland Orchestra. He has appeared with festival orchestras such as the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center. A graduate of the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music, he and soprano Susanna Phillips, McDonald co-founded Twickenham Fest, a chamber music festival in Huntsville, Alabama, which had its inaugural summer in 2010.

Molly Werts McDonald, violin Molly Werts McDonald joined the RPO in October of 2013 as Acting Assistant Principal Second Violin. She has

been playing in the first violin section since September 2014.

With a Bachelor of Music degree and a Certificate in World Music, McDonald was one of RPO Concertmaster Juliana Athayde’s first students at Eastman. She completed a Master of Music degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She grew up playing music with both of her parents, and gained exposure to chamber music and orchestral playing through local festivals in Kansas City. Prior to the RPO, she was Assistant Principal Second Violin of the Canton Symphony Orchestra, and she has made appearances with the Kansas City Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the New World Symphony.

John Moore, baritone A graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Program, John Moore made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera singing Fiorello in Il Barbiere di Siviglia in 2007. He first performed internationally at Welsh National Opera in 2008 singing Figaro in WNO’s acclaimed English Barber of Seville. Among the roles for which he is known are Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro (Seattle and Atlanta Operas, Glyndebourne Opera Touring Ensemble), Papageno in Die Zauberflöte (Metropolitan and Portland Operas), and Donald in Billy Budd (Glyndebourne Festival and Metropolitan Opera). Future seasons include a debut with Opera Philadelphia and returns to the Metropolitan Opera.

On the concert stage, he has toured with Musicians from Marlboro and performed in recital with the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. He premiered and recorded Peter Lieberson’s The Coming of Light with the Chicago Chamber Musicians.

Adrian Morejon, bassoon Praised for his “teeming energy” and “precise control” by the New York Times, bassoonist Adrian Morejon has established himself as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral player. Morejon has soloed in New York, Boston, Vienna, Prague, Memphis, and the Miami Symphony. He is a founding member of Sospiro Winds, the bassoon duo Dark & Stormy, and the Gene Project; he is also a member of the Dorian Wind Quintet, Talea Ensemble, and Metropolis Ensemble.

He has appeared as guest artist with many groups including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Boston Chamber Music Society. Morejon is co-principal of IRIS Orchestra and has performed with the Philadelphia and Orpheus Chamber Orchestras among others. Morejon did graduate work with Frank Morelli at Yale. Earlier, he studied with Bernard Garfield at Curtis. He is currently on faculty at the Boston Conservatory, the Longy School of Music.

Tito Muñoz, conductor Tito Muñoz is in his second season as Music Director of the Phoenix Symphony. Previously, he was Music Director of the Opéra National de Lorraine and the Orchestre symphonique et lyrique de Nancy in France, and Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, and Aspen Music Festival.

Muñoz has led orchestras throughout the U.S., as well as in Europe, South America, Canada, and Asia. He made his 73

Musician Profiles professional conducting debut in 2006 with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. That same year, he made his Cleveland Orchestra debut. He was awarded the 2009 Mendelssohn Scholarship sponsored by Kurt Masur and the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Foundation in Leipzig, and was a prizewinner in the 2010 Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt. Committed to working with young artists, he leads master classes at a wide variety of schools and institutes. He attended the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen where he studied with David Zinman and Murry Sidlin.

Todd Palmer, clarinet Todd Palmer, a three-time Grammy-nominated artist, he has soloed with the Atlanta, Houston, and BBC Scotland orchestras; with the St. Paul, New York, Cincinnati, Montréal, and Metamorphosen chamber orchestras, and many other groups. He has collaborated with the St. Lawrence, Brentano, Borromeo, Pacifica, Daedalus, and Ying quartets; he has also shared the stage with sopranos Kathleen Battle, Renée Fleming, Elizabeth Futral, Heidi Grant Murphy, and Dawn Upshaw. A winner of the Young Concert Artist International Auditions, Palmer also won grand prize in the Ima Hogg Young Artist Auditions. He held principal clarinet positions in the Minnesota Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Lukes, Gotham Chamber Opera, and the Grand Teton Festival, and has participated in numerous music festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Palmer commissioned the theater work “Orpheus and Euridice” by Ricky Ian Gordon, presented by Great Performers at Lincoln Center in 2005.

Parker Quartet Daniel Chong, violin Ying Xue, violin Jessica Bodner, viola Kee-Hyun Kim, cello The Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet is renowned for their dynamic, compelling interpretations, expansive colors, and varied repertoire ranging from classical to romantic to new music. In worldwide demand, the quartet has appeared at distinguished venues, series, and festivals throughout North and South America, Great Britain, Europe, and South Korea since its founding in 2002. The Parker Quartet’s numerous honors include winning the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Grand Prix and Mozart Prize at France’s Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, and Chamber Music America’s prestigious biennial Cleveland Quartet Award. Based in Boston, the Parker Quartet’s members hold graduate degrees in performance and chamber music from the New England Conservatory of Music and were part of the Conservatory’s prestigious Professional String Quartet Training Program from 2006–2008. Some of their most influential mentors include the original members of the Cleveland Quartet, Kim Kashkashian, GyörgyKurtág, and Rainer Schmidt.

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Anna Petersen, oboe Anna Petersen joined Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra as Second Oboe in 2013. Prior to joining NACO, she was Principal Oboe of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and Symphoria and played regularly with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. She has enjoyed guest appearances as Principal Oboe with the Pittsburgh and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, the Lake Placid Sinfonietta, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2013. Anna is an active soloist and chamber musician and has soloed with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, Symphoria, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Lake Placid Sinfonietta, and the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra. She has been a fellow at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, a participant at the Masterclass Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and a performer at the Skaneateles and Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festivals.

Anna earned her Bachelor of Music Degree and Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music.

John Raschella, trumpet Prior to being Principal Trumpet with Symphoria, John was Principal Trumpet and Associate Principal trumpet of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. He has performed as Co-Principal trumpet with the Pittsburgh Symphony and has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra along with the symphony orchestras of Houston, Minnesota, Buffalo, Rochester and Jacksonville. In the summers he has performed as principal trumpet of the Eastern Music Festival in North

Musician Profiles Carolina and the Spoleto festival in Italy as well as a frequent performer at the Skaneateles Festival. Mr. Raschella attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music where he received an artist diploma. Mr. Raschella has taught at Ithaca College and is on the faculties of Hamilton College and Syracuse University.

Susan Reed, violinist, folk musician, singer, storyteller Boston’s Susan Reed uses original songs and stories to work magic with families. Her aim is to inspire a life-long love of music. She has won many Parents’ Choice, Mom’s Choice, Creative Child Magazine, and National Parenting Publications awards for her recordings and books. Reed performs with orchestras nationwide, drawing audiences into the rich world of classical music. She also plays in her family string trio, TatuMianzi. She is active as a Suzuki clinician and also chairs the Board of Overseers at the New England Conservatory of Music. She is a mentor in the NEC’s Entrepreneurial Musicianship program. Before launching her solo career, Ms. Reed was Director of Suzuki Studies at New England Conservatory of Music and she founded the Ogontz Suzuki Institute in Lyman, New Hampshire. Her formal training includes both a bachelors and a Master’s degree in violin performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner, piano At just 18 years-old, Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner was named the 2014 Gilmore Young Artist, an honor awarded every two years singling out the most promising American pianists of the new generation. He received the Atlantic Council’s 2014 Young Global Citizen Award, along with fellow recipients Robert De Niro, Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Lee Kuan Yew, and Presidents Enrique Pena Nieto and Petro Poroshenko. Llewellyn made Juilliard history at age 14 as the youngest-ever admitted to the College Division. In 2009, he performed solo at the White House for President Obama; and in 2013, for the Presidential Inauguration concert at the Kennedy Center. General David Petraeus recognized Llewellyn “for his courageous humanitarian contributions through the arts” and for “strengthening the ties that unite our nations,” in a Pentagon performance. To excite more youth

Aaron Wunsch mentors a budding young musician. about classical music, Llewellyn performed 16 concerts for 20,000 North American students; for an anti-bullying campaign, he performed “Beethoven and the Bully” for 6,000 students.

Alexander Shuhan, horn Alexander Shuhan, is Associate Professor of Horn at Ithaca College, and a founding member (1993) of Rhythm & Brass, an international touring, performing and recording ensemble. He is principal horn with the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra and performs frequently with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and the Skaneateles Festival. He has studied at Southern Methodist University with Greg Hustis, the Eastman School of Music with Verne Reynolds, and the Pre-College Division of the Juilliard School with Harry Berv.

Shuhan is also an accomplished composer and arranger, having written a number of works for Rhythm & Brass. His composition “Awakenings” is featured on the most recent Rhythm & Brass recording entitled “Inside The Blue Suitcase.”

Elizabeth Shuhan, flute Elizabeth Shuhan is a private flute teacher and flute instructor at the Hochstein School of Music and a flute instructor at Cornell University. She is an active freelance flutist in the central New York region and regularly performs chamber music as a member of the Shuhan Duo. As the current principal flutist with the Fort Smith Symphony, she

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Musician Profiles

and a recent collaboration composing a full-length ballet for Garth Fagan Dance.

has recorded for the Naxos label. She was formerly second flute/piccolo with the North Arkansas Symphony and has also held the position of 2nd flute/piccolo with the Meridian (MS) Symphony. As a soloist, she has performed with the Hunstville Youth Symphony, the Music Festival of Arkansas Orchestra, the North Arkansas Symphony and the Fort Smith Symphony. Ms. Shuhan studied music education and flute performance at the University of Southern Missisippi earning a Bachelor of Music degree and continued her studies with flute performance and pedagogy at the University of Arkansas earning a Master of Music degree.

Susan Spafford, violin Susan Spafford, violinist, is a member of the Richmond Symphony, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, and the Lancaster Festival Orchestra. She has played regularly with the symphonies in Harrisburg and Allentown, Albany, Binghamton, and ProMusica, and other regional orchestras. An advocate for the importance of music in education, she has collaborated with organizations such as VH1, ASTA, and MENC. As a natural extension of her performing and education roles, Ms. Spafford helps run The Music Paradigm, an organization that works with orchestras around the world to help promote classical music and develop new audiences. Ms. Spafford earned her Master’s degree and Bachelor’s degrees from the Eastman School of Music, has completed teacher training courses with the Suzuki Association of Americas.

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Ian Swensen, violin A native of New York, violinist Ian Swensen came from a musically gifted family of Norwegian and JapaneseHawaiian descent. He studied at The Juilliard School and at the Eastman School of Music. He has lived in the Bay Area for nearly 20 years, teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Sacramento State University. He is a passionate pedagogue, and his students have gone on to major positions in orchestras and teaching institutions around the world. Swensen also maintains an active schedule as

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Herbert Smith, trumpet Herb Smith is third trumpet with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. A graduate of The Eastman School of Music, he began playing in the orchestra after graduating in 1991. He works with students through the Young Audiences of America and Rochester City School District Artist in Residence program. Smith plays many gigs with his jazz quartet and is a frequent substitute player for the Chautauqua Symphony and Buffalo Philharmonic orchestras. He has played with many notable artists, including Al Jarreau, Natalie Cole, Doc Severinsen, and The O’Jays. He also has played for many commercial jingles recorded in Rochester, N.Y. Other ventures include composing music for silent films, writing musical arrangements for local bands in the area,

Musician Profiles soloist and chamber musician, appearing at Music@Menlo, with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society and other venues.

He has performed with members of the Juilliard, Cleveland, Emerson, Takács, Concord, and Tokyo quartets, as well as Menahem Pressler, Gilbert Kalish, Mark O’Connor, and Yo-Yo Ma. He is one of the few musicians to have been awarded the Walter W. Naumberg International Competition’s top prize for both chamber music and violin.

His recordings can be found on the Telarc and Deutsche Grammophon labels.

Time for Three Nicolas (Nick) Kendall, violin Charles Yang, violin Ranaan Meyer, double-bass Time for Three is a group that defies traditional genre classification. With an uncommon mix of virtuosity and showmanship, the American trio performs music from Bach to Brahms and beyond. They are well-known for giving worldpremieres by Pulitzer Prize-winners William Bolcom and Jennifer Higdon, as well as playing originals and their own arrangements of everything from bluegrass and folk tunes to ingenious mash-ups of hits by the Beatles, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake and others. Time for Three – Tf3 for short – has performed in Carnegie Hall, in jazz clubs, at European festivals, at NFL games, and at the Indy 500. The group’s YouTube bullying-prevention video, “Stronger,” has inspired students across the globe, eliciting features on CNN and the Huffington Post. Ever since Tf3 members were fellow students at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, they have wowed media and fellow artists with their charismatic musicianship. NPR said: “In person, the members of Time for

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Three come off as just three dudes in a band. But with their staggering technique and freewheeling genre-crossing, it’s hard not to be swept up in the force of their contagious energy.”

Aaron Wunsch, piano, artistic director Praised for his bold interpretations and communicative sensitivity, pianist Aaron Wunsch appears regularly on concert stages throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. In addition, he makes frequent recital and teaching tours to China and Indonesia. Also lauded for his chamber music performances, he collaborates with artists including cellist Lynn Harrell, clarinetist Charles Neidich, violinist Rolf Schulte, and the New York Woodwind Quintet. A vigorous proponent of contemporary music, he works closely with composers including Charles Wuorinen, Steve Stucky, Chen Yi, Fred Lerdahl, Kaija Saariaho, and Thomas Adès.

He has recorded works by Anton Webern and Nico Muhly.

Wunsch graduated cum laude from Yale College and then was a Fulbright Fellow at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.

He completed Master’s and Doctoral degrees at The Juilliard School. His piano teachers included Peter Frankl, Karlheinz Kämmerling, Robert McDonald, Andras Schiff, Jerome Lowenthal, and Claude Frank. Wunsch teaches music history, chamber music, and piano at The Juilliard School. In addition to his position as co-artistic director of the Skaneateles Festival, he is co-artistic director of the Music Mondays concert series in New York City.

Ainur Zabenova, violin Ainur Zabenova received her bachelor’s degree from the Almaty State Conservatory in Kazakhstan. She also held the position of Concertmaster of the chamber orchestra Kamerata Kazakhstan from 1997 until 2001. In 2002 she came to the U.S. to pursue her master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music with Professor Oleh Krysa and graduated with the Performer’s Certificate. She joined the RPO in the fall of 2003. Zabenova teaches violin at the University of Rochester and is pursuing her doctorate at Eastman.

Natalie Zhu, piano Natalie Zhu has performed widely in North America, Europe, and Asia as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician.

From 1997 to 2006, she toured with Hilary Hahn throughout the U.S. and in Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Lyon, Lucerne, Hamburg, Geneva, London, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She has performed with both the Vermeer and Miami quartets and collaborated with members of the Guarneri, Orion, Mendelssohn, and Ying Quartets as well as the Beaux Arts Trio. Zhu received a 2006 Musical Fund Society Career Advancement Award, the 2003 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the 2003 Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Award. She also won the Astral Artistic Services 1998 National Auditions as well as grand prize in the both the 1988 and 1989 Young Keyboard Artists Association Competition.

She was the first-prize winner in the Johanna Hodges Piano Concerto Competition in 1988 and 1991, and also received its 1991 Concert Series Award. Zhu began piano studies at six in China and emigrated to the U.S. at eleven. She studied at the Curtis Institute and at the Yale School of Music.

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Directory Thank you for supporting those that support the Festival.

Art/Music/Theatre

Civic Morning Musicals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Gallery 54 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Geneva Music Festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Robert Oddy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Skaneateles Historical Society Museum . . . . . . 13 Society for New Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Seward House Museum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Syracuse Arts.net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music . . . . . . . . 72 Syracuse Opera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Syracuse Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Automotive

Burdick BMW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Education

Manulius Pebble Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Equestrian

* Marcellus Equestrian Center . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Consultants

The Bonadio Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Educational Consultants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 * Donna Graber, Planning Sense . . . . . . . . . . . 16 * Grossman St. Amour, CPA, PLLC . . . . . . . . . 26 Port & Company, CPA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Wells Fargo Advisor, LLC . . . . . . . . 55, back cover Foundation

Central New York Community Foundation . . . . . 23 Health

Crouse Hospital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Eye Plastic & Reconstructive Surgeons of Central New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Hematology Oncology Associates . . . . . . . . . 61 Hospice of the Finger Lakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Michael J. Paciorek, MD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Upstate University Hospital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Media

* CNYCentral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 * Cumulus Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 * Finger Lakes Radio Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 * iHeart Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 * News Channel 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 * WAER Syracuse Public Media . . . . . . . . . . . 34 * WCNY Public Television & Radio . . . . . . . . . . 64 * WRVO Public Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Preservation/Conservation

Westlake Conservators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Real Estate

* Franklin Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Realty USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 * Sutton Real Estate Company, LLC . . . . . . . . . 51 Retail

Artist Pianos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 A Cozy Hearth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 The Craftsman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 J.D. Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Marty’s Barn Cellar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 * Patience Brewster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Upstate Printing, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Carol Watson Greenhouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 White & White Antiques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 * Wood, LLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Restaurant/Food

1911 Spirits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 * LakeHouse Pub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 * Mirbeau Inn & Spa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 * Pascale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 * Sherwood Inn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Wegmans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Tourism

Skaneateles Chamber of Commerce . . . . . . . . 30

Insurance

Parsons & Associates, Inc. . . . . . . inside back cover Legal

Bond, Schoeneck & King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 * Mackenzie Hughes LLP . . . . . . . inside front cover Scolaro, Fetter, Grizanti, McGough & King, P.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

* Sponsor

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A Christmas Suite

Concert Information All concerts are held in Skaneateles, August 10 – September 3, 2016 Tickets can be ordered at www.skanfest.org or by calling (315) 685-7418.

Saturday concerts at the Robinson Pavilion at Anyela’s are held at 7:30 pm outdoors. Patrons may arrive as early as 6:00 pm and picnic on the lawn.

Carry-in/carry-out. Some restrictions apply.

Suggested items to bring: Lawn chairs, blankets & flashlights (chairs are provided in A seating only).

Call (315) 685-7418 (or check skanfest.org) after 3:00 pm on Saturdays for rain location announcements.

Ticket exchanges may be made up to 24 hours prior to concerts. Unused tickets returned less than 24 hours before the performance will be acknowledged as a contribution to the Skaneateles Festival.

Any unused ticket may be exchanged for a ½ price ticket to a Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music concert during their 20162017 Season (subject to availability).

Doors open for all concerts 30 minutes prior to concerts.

Cameras & recording equipment may only be used with the permission of the Skaneateles Festival.

SAVE THE DATE

Saturday, December 10, 2016 A collection of Christmas Stories and Music Reservations will be taken starting November 1st Hosted by

The Falcone Family

A Christmas Suite Contributors – 2015

The Falcone Family

Remember to silence all electronic devices.

Please tell businesses listed in the program that you appreciate their support of the Skaneateles Festival.

Skaneateles Festival 97 East Genesee Street Skaneateles, NY 13162 (315) 685-7418 • www.skanfest.org

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Presented by the

Skaneateles Festival

GUARANTORS

Ed and Debbie Brennan Rick and Ann Capozza, Barclay Damon Realty USA PATRONS

1911 The Inns of Aurora Joan Christy and Tom Bersani Dan McCann Bob and Sally Neumann Sherwood Inn

Bill Rosenthal and Jerry Gebo Don and Chacea Sundman Doug Sutherland and Nancy Kramer SUPPORTERS

Henry and Helga Beck Barb Connor and Doug Wood Paul and Elizabeth Koenig