Emily Daggett Smith: Solo Violin Concerts

Emily Daggett Smith Solo Violin Concerts Performance Program:

Performance Schedule:

Jessie Montgomery Rhapsody No. 1 (2014)

Wednesday, September 15 at 3pm Saturday, October 16 at 1pm Monday, November 22 at 12pm

Kaija Saariaho Nocturne (1994) Johann Sebastian Bach Partita No. 2 in D Minor, Ciaccona (1718–20) Andrea Casarrubios Amid a Place of Stone (2020)

University Art Museum University at Albany State University of New York

Performance Program: Jessie Montgomery Rhapsody No. 1 (2014) Kaija Saariaho Nocturne (1994) Johann Sebastian Bach Partita No. 2 in D Minor, Ciaccona (1718–20) Andrea Casarrubios Amid a Place of Stone (2020) Performance Schedule: Wednesday, September 15 at 3pm Saturday, October 16 at 1pm Monday, November 22 at 12pm

Jessie Montgomery Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator.

She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, language, and social justice, securing her place as one of the most relevant interpreters of 21st century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).

Montgomery was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s, a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation and community development. Her parents—her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller—were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought her to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Montgomery has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.

Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, which supports young African-American and Latinx string players. She currently serves as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.

She was a two-time laureate of the annual Sphinx Competition and was awarded a generous MPower grant to assist in the development of her debut album, Strum: Music for Strings (Azica Records). She has received additional grants and awards from the ASCAP Foundation, Chamber Music America, American Composers Orchestra, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization.

Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Five Slave Songs (2018) commissioned for soprano Julia Bullock by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Records from a Vanishing City (2016) for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony and the American Music Festival, and Banner (2014) – written to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of The Star-Spangled Banner – for the Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation.

In the 2019–20 season, new commissioned works will be premiered by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the National Choral Society, and ASCAP Foundation. Montgomery is also teaming up with composerviolinist Jannina Norpoth to reimagine Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha; it is being produced by Volcano Theatre and co-commissioned by Washington Performing Arts, Stanford University, Southbank Centre (London), National Arts Centre (Ottawa), and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Additionally, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony will all perform Montgomery’s works this season.

The New York Philharmonic has selected Montgomery as one of the featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a nonet inspired by the Great Migration, told from the perspective of Montgomery’s great-grandfather William McCauley and to be performed by Imani Winds and the Catalyst Quartet; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony.

Montgomery began her violin studies at the Third Street Music School Settlement, one of the oldest community organizations in the country. A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and currently a member of the Catalyst Quartet, she continues to maintain an active performance career as a violinist, appearing regularly with her own ensembles as well as with Silkroad Ensemble and Sphinx Virtuosi.

Montgomery’s teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn, and Laura Kaminsky. She holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a graduate fellow in music composition at Princeton University.

Kaija Saariaho Born in Helsinki in 1952, Kaija Saariaho studied at the Sibelius Academy with the pioneering modernist Paavo Heininen and, with Magnus Lindberg and others, she founded the progressive group known as Ears Open. She continued her studies in Freiburg with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, at the Darmstadt summer courses, and, from 1982,

at the IRCAM research institute in Paris—the city which has been her home most of the time ever since.

At IRCAM, Saariaho developed techniques of computer-assisted composition and acquired fluency in working on tape and with live electronics. This experience influenced her approach to writing for orchestra, with its emphasis on the shaping of dense masses of sound in slow transformations. Significantly, her first orchestral piece, Verblendungen (1984), involves a gradual exchange of roles and character between orchestra and tape.

Before coming to work at IRCAM, Saariaho learned to know the French spectralist composers, whose techniques are based on computer analysis of the sound spectrum. This analytical approach inspired her to develop her own method for creating harmonic structures, as well as the detailed notation using harmonics, microtonality, and a full continuum of sound extending from pure tone to unpitched noise — all features found in one of her most frequently performed works, Graal théâtre for violin and orchestra or ensemble (1994/97). Later Saariaho has turned to opera, with outstanding success. L’Amour de loin, with a libretto by Amin Maalouf based on an early biography of the twelfthcentury troubadour Jaufré Rudel, received widespread acclaim in its premiere production directed by Peter Sellars at the 2000 Salzburg Festival and won the composer a prestigious Grawemeyer Award.

Johann Sebastian Bach Johann Sebastian Bach, (born March 21 [March 31, New Style], 1685, Eisenach, Thuringia, Ernestine Saxon Duchies [Germany], died July 28, 1750, Leipzig), composer of the Baroque era, the most celebrated member of a large family of north German musicians. Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building, Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time and is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The WellTempered Clavier, Mass in B Minor, and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music. Appearing at a propitious moment in the history of music, Bach was able to survey and synthesize the principal styles, forms, and national traditions that had developed during preceding generations and enrich them all.

Andrea Casarrubios Praised by The New York Times as having “traversed the palette of emotions” with “gorgeous tone and an edge of-seat intensity” and described by Diario de Menorca as an “ideal performer” with “elegance, displayed virtuosity, and great expressive power,” Spanish cellist and composer Andrea Casarrubios has played extensively as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. First-prize winner of numerous competitions and awards, she has collaborated with Ida Kavafian, Soovin Kim, Ralph Kirshbaum, Daniel Phillips, and Jeremy Denk, often appearing at Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Lincoln Center, the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, Casals Festival, SchleswigHolstein Musik Festival, and the Verbier Festival.

Casarrubios’s recent album, Caminante, presents some of her own works. Released in 2019 on Odradek Records, it was chosen as one of the “Best 2019 Classical Music Albums” by Australia’s ABC Classic. She has written works for Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, Trio Appassionata, Boccherini Music Festival, cellist Thomas Mesa and Astral Artists, Orquesta Sinfónica Iuventas, Manhattan Chamber Players, and members of the Boston Symphony and Orpheus Orchestras. Her performances have been broadcasted internationally, including NPR, WFMT Chicago, CKIA in Canada, and RTVE National Spanish Radio. As a guest soloist at Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, Casarrubios recently performed her own Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, MIRAGE (2019), among other works.

Solo appearances include recitals for cello and piano of a wide range of repertoire, performances of Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata in A minor arranged for cello and orchestra, dozens of concerts at Carnegie Hall, and performances in Spain of several works for cello and orchestra including Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C major. Casarrubios is a first-prize winner of numerous competitions including the Solo Violoncello Competition Illa de Menorca–FIDAH 2010, the SOR Solo String Concerto Competition 2009, and the National Piano Competition Rio del Oro 2005 in Spain among others. She was also awarded second and special prize at the XIV Llanes International Cello Competition 2012, and has been sponsored by the Wingate Foundation in the United Kingdom, the Spanish Cello Forum, as well as Juventudes Musicales of Madrid.

Casarrubios is a founding member of Trio Appassionata, together with violinist Lydia Chernicoff and pianist Ronaldo Rolim. The trio has performed in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall among other venues in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Brazil, and China. The ensemble released a CD on Odradek Records entitled gone into night are all the eyes in 2014. Casarrubios is also a member of the Brandenburg String Trio based in Berlin, and the Manhattan Chamber Players in New York. Her mentors have included María de Macedo, Lluís Claret, Amit Peled, Marcy Rosen, and Ralph Kirshbaum. As part of her doctoral degree, she also studied composition with John Corigliano. Casarrubios has also been influenced by working closely with Frans Helmerson, Laurence Lesser, Gary Hoffman, Timothy Eddy, Paul Katz, Hans Jørgen Jensen, Donald Weilerstein, Ludmil Angelov, Seth Knopp, Thomas Demenga, Miklós Perényi, and Leon Fleisher.

Casarrubios currently lives in New York City, where she works as an advisor for Ensemble Connect at Carnegie Hall. A passionate mentor, she has taught at The Juilliard School, Lake Champlain Music Festival, Festival de Febrero, Skidmore College, University of Southern California, as well as masterclasses on tour. Casarrubios’s latest engagements include concerts in Canada, China, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and the United States.

Emily Daggett Smith Emily Daggett Smith performs as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician, with performances across the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia. Smith made her New York concerto debut as a soloist at age twenty-one in Alice Tully Hall, playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Juilliard Orchestra and conductor Emmanuel Villaume. Since then she has performed concerti with many orchestras including Iris Orchestra, Festival Mozaic Orchestra, the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Classical Players. She has performed solo recitals across the country at venues including the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, Music in the Loft in Chicago, and Washington Performing Arts’s “Music in the Country.”

In December 2021, Smith will return to the University Art Museum to perform with members of The Knights, a New York-based collective of “adventurous musicians dedicated to transforming the orchestral experience and eliminating barriers between audience and music.”

University Art Museum University at Albany Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair August 4 – December 11, 2021

For additional information, please visit the Museum’s website: www.albany.edu/museum Support for the University Art Museum exhibitions and programs is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, The University at Albany Foundation, and the University at Albany Alumni Association.

Additional support for programming is provided by University Auxiliary Services at Albany, the UAlbany Performing Arts Center, the New York State DanceForce, Rose & Kiernan, Inc., and the Jack and Gertrude Horan Memorial Endowment Fund for Student Outreach.