Miolina: The Dueling Violinists

Performing Arts Center university at albany State University of New York

2023-24

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Photo: Dayton Contemporary Dance Company

for a full listing of this season’s events.

Department of Music and Theatre University at Albany presents:

MIOLINA The Dueling Violinists Mioi Takeda and Lynn Bechtold , v i o l i n i s t s Concert made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts

Wednesday, November 29, 2023 at 4pm

Recital Hall UAlbany Performing Arts Center

MIOLINA

Music for Two Violins Program MAX LIFCHITZ

Virtuoso Furioso II. Pizzica-Pizzica III. Happy New Year Mr. Billings IV. Sounds Mysterious V. Flashbacks

RUTH CRAWFORD-SEEGER (Arranged by Gilbert Dejean)

HILARY TANN

RAIN WORTHINGTON

LYNN BECHTOLD

TAKUMA ITOH

I.

Five Impromptus

Diaphonic Suite N. 3

A girls' song to her mother

Night Stream In Tandem

The Red Camel

Stillness in the Mist

Meet the Performers Based in New York City, Miolina – violinists Mioi Takeda and Lynn Bechtold – has appeared on concert stages throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Praised by the press for the duo’s "brilliance of sound, technical mastery, and stunning expressivity, " Miolina is known for championing music by living composers. The ensemble has garnered grants from among others, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Japan Foundation of NY, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Women Composers, Inc., and New Music USA. Miolina’s recordings are distributed by the NAXOS label.

Mioi Takeda was a scholarship student of Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki at The Juilliard School before earning a Doctor of Musical Arts from The City University of New York under the guidance of Itzhak Perlman. Recognized for her "superb eloquence and purity of tone," Dr. Takeda has served as concertmaster for many orchestras and chamber ensembles.

Lynn Bechtold received her master’s degree from Mannes – The New School for Music where she was a student of noted violinist Felix Galimir. Prior to that, she obtained a double degree in Violin and English from the New England Conservatory of Music and Tufts University. Also active as composer, Ms. Bechtold has appeared as recitalists and soloist in Argentina, Hungary, Japan, and various locations throughout the US.

About the Composers and Their Music Max Lifchitz is active as composer, performer and educator. A graduate of The Juilliard School and Harvard University, his compositional and performance activities have been sponsored by grants and fellowships from the ASCAP, Ford and Guggenheim Foundations; Meet the Composer, Inc.; the Individual Artists Program of the NYS Council on the Arts; and the National Endowment for the Arts. He joined the University at Albany’s teaching staff in 1986 and was honored with the UAlbany’s Award for Excellence in Research in 2005.

The Five Impromptus consists of five contrasting, selfcontained but interrelated movements. As its title implies, the opening piece pokes fun at an imaginary virtuoso violinist who stubbornly keeps playing a technically challenging passage traversing the entire range of the instrument. The second movement clumsily imitates the bouncy rhythms of the Pizzica – an archaic Italian dance forerunner of the Tarantella. The third movement is a humble salute to the American composer William Billings whose hymn Connection was used as inlay in Lynn Bechtold’s 2015 New Year Greetings e-mail. The fourth movement clearly reflects the penchant this composer has had throughout his career for exploiting the various timbric possibilities inherent in the violin. In the manner of a conventional recapitulation, the final movement recalls and recasts materials previously heard throughout the work.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53) was an American composer and folk music specialist. According to writer Martha Hyde, “Ruth Crawford Seeger enjoyed an influential position among early American experimentalist composers.” She was a protege of Henry Cowell, a student (and later wife) of Charles Seeger, and a close associate of Carl Ruggles and Edgard Varese.

Referring to themselves as the ‘ultra-modernists,’ these composers sought to establish an independent school of American music by rejecting the traditional forms and sonorities of European art music. As a group they explored new sound combinations, new means of sound production, new techniques for structuring polyphonic textures, new ways of structuring rhythm and timbre, and new ways of integrating these dimensions with pitch structure.

The four Diaphonic Suites were written in 1930 during Crawford’s time in Europe as the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. They were written shortly after she began studying with Charles Seeger in 1929. The Diaphonic Suite No. 3 was originally written for two clarinets, and it was arranged for Miolina by bassoonist Gilbert Dejean.

Welsh-born composer Hilary Tann (1947-2023) lived in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York where she served as the John Howard Payne Professor of Music Emerita at Union College, Schenectady. Her compositions have been widely performed and recorded by ensembles such as the European Women’s Orchestra, Tenebrae, Lontano, Marsyas Trio, Thai Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. She served as composer-in-residence at the 2011 Eastman School of Music Women in Music Festival, 2013 Women Composers Festival of Hartford, and the 2015 Welsh Music Center. Praised for its lyricism (“beautiful, lyrical work” – Classical Music Web) and formal balance (“In the formal balance of this music, there is great beauty ...” – Welsh Music), her music is influenced by a strong identification with the natural world.

Tann’s A Girl’s Song to Her Mother recalls the open, high moorland of South Wales. The higher treble part is a younger person comforting an older one. It was premiered in 1999 during the Celtic Weekend at the Pan-American Games, held in Winnipeg, Canada.

Self-taught and cross-disciplinary, composer Rain Worthington has followed her own instinctive path.

Her works have been performed in NYC downtown clubs to the uptown stage at Carnegie Hall, with orchestral world premieres in Brazil, Italy, Czech Republic, Croatia, and Armenia. Her career has been the subject of more than two dozen podcasts, articles, and video interviews. An advocate for contemporary concert music, Rain currently serves as the International Alliance for Women in Music Board Advocacy Chair and was Artistic Administrator/Composer Advocate for the New York Women Composers, 2006-2021.

About her Night Stream, Worthington writes: “Reflecting on the flow of life and time, imagined impressionistically as lights

streaming across a rain-streaked window on a late-night taxi ride through city streets.” Concerning In Tandem, she states: “A fluid interplay of give and take between two in motion.”

Lynn Bechtold’s The Red Camel is a work composed in early 2023. The composer writes that “in many NYC parks, there are these cool concrete camels that grace the children’s playgrounds. In most neighborhoods, they are a realistic beige; however, in one park in Harlem along FDR Drive, one of them is painted a brilliant cherry red. I always look for the beautiful red camel when I’m riding along in a taxi and wonder why the one at the end of my block must be the boring beige one.”

Takuma Itoh’s music has been described by the New York Times as “brashly youthful and fresh.” A professor at the University of Hawaii, Itoh created two innovative education programs hoping to raise awareness of Hawaii’s many endangered bird species and forests. Their titles are Symphony of the Hawaiian Birds and Symphony of Hawaii’s Forests. He holds degrees from Cornell University, University of Michigan, and Rice University and has been the recipient of many grants and prizes.

Stillness in the Mist was written especially for this afternoon’s performers while in residence at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute in New Hampshire. The composer explains that “throughout the piece, I aimed to capture the evocative qualities of the shō, a Japanese mouth organ used in gagaku music. This instrument’s distinct timbre, harmonies, and its use of small glissandi became a source of inspiration, and I soon discovered at the residency with Miolina that the violin duo’s sonorities worked exceptionally well to bring out these sonorities of the shō. Also, much like in gagaku music, the piece seeks to capture a contemplative and pulseless sensibility for much of the piece. However, there are plenty of moments of departure where the piece takes its own path, weaving in the traditional sounds with my own musical language.”

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