New Music New Haven

April 14, 2011 Sprague Memorial Hall Thursday at 8 pm

artistic director Christopher Theofanidis featured composer Yehudi Wyner and music of Andy Akiho Adrian Knight Jordan Kuspa Hannah Lash Justin Tierney

Robert Blocker, Dean

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

Andy Akiho

LIgNEouS Domenic Salerni, violin Liesl Schoenberger, violin Edwin Kaplan, viola Shannon Hayden, cello Ian Rosenbaum, marimba

Hannah Lash

Folksongs Rosa Jang, piccolo Kristan Toczko, harp Leonardo Gorosito, percussion

Jordan Kuspa

Hit the Spot linden string quartet Sarah McElravy, violin Catherine Cosbey, violin Eric Wong, viola Felix Umansky, cello Andy Akiho, steel pans

Adrian Knight

The Caligari Project Adrian Slywotzky, conductor Colin Meinecke, viola Mo Mo, cello Emil Khudyev, clarinet Andy Akiho, percussion Michael Namirovsky, piano Adrian Knight, keyboard

April 14, 2011 路 Sprague Memorial Hall

Intermission

Justin Tierney

Zephyrus Eleanor Kendra James, viola Emil Khudyev, clarinet Maura Valenti, harp

Yehudi Wyner

On This Most Voluptuous Night Yehudi Wyner, conductor Amanda Hall, soprano Alexander Read, violin Yeseul Ann, violin Amina Tebini, viola Yoon Hee Ko, cello Dariya Nikolenko, flute Ian Petruzzi, horn Stephen Whale, piano

As a courtesy to others, please silence all cell phones and devices. Photography or recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

PROFILES + NOTES

ANDY AKIHO composer Andy Akiho is an eclectic composer whose interests run from steel pan to traditional classical music. His compositions have won prestigious awards, including a 2010 Horatio Parker Award, a 2009 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, and a 2008 Brian M. Israel Prize. Akiho’s works have been featured on PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer and by organizations such as Meet the Composer, Bang on a Can, and American Composers Forum. He has composed for the Bang on a Can Marathon, Red Line Saxophone Quartet, and the Playground Ensemble. A graduate of the University of South Carolina (BM, performance) and the Manhattan School of Music

(MM, contemporary performance), Akiho is currently a master’s degree student in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he is currently studying with Martin Bresnick. As a percussionist Akiho has performed with numerous professional ensembles. Recent engagements include the South Carolina Philharmonic Orchestra, Ethos Percussion Group, Djoliba Don West African Drum and Dance Ensemble, Gamelan Lila Muni, and Island Close By Steel Band. He has participated in the world’s premier steel pan event, Panorama, and won second prize in the 2002 World Steelband Music Festival solo competition.

Since 2003, he has performed and taught steel pan extensively in New York City. » www.andyakiho.com

LIgNEouS adjective : made , consisting of, or resembling wood ; woody. (from the Oxford Dictionary) LIgNEouS was inspired by my amazingly talented friends of the Yale Percussion Group. It was commissioned by John and Astrid Baumgardner for the 2010 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.

Ingredients : String Quartet, 5 Octave Marimba, Extremely Large Rubber Band, Mole Skin Tipped Birch Mallets, & Perseverance .

Disclaimer : NO MARIMBAS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS COMPOSITION

PROFILES + NOTES

HANNAH LASH composer Hailed by the New York Times as “striking and resourceful…handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at the Times Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Tanglewood. Commissions include the Fromm Foundation, Orpheus Duo, and Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, among many others. She has worked with such artists as the JACK Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Arditti Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart. Lash has received numerous honors, including the Naumburg Prize in Composition. Furthermore was selected for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings, and Blood Rose will be presented by New York City Opera’s VOX this spring. Her string quartet Four Still was performed in Ukraine, and Unclose was premiered in Switzerland.

Lash obtained her Ph.D. in music (composition) from Harvard in 2010 and studies at the Yale School of Music. » www.hannahlash.com FOLKSONGS notes Folksongs is a piece about transformation and dichotomy. Its premise is to use very simple, almost homely materials, and to transform and manipulate them in complex ways. The first movement uses a melody that sounds like a traditional Celtic or English pennywhistle tune,

with a rhythmic pattern of non-metrically placed accents in the doumbek, underneath all of which non-tonal and lush harmonies are spun out in the harp. These three strata change places throughout the movement.The second movement draws inspiration from a choir singing homophonic music—the collective force of rhythmic unison. Here the two patterns are rhythmic and melodic: a color and a talea of differing lengths, so that the movement’s completion is not reached until these elements’ ends coincide. The third movement is a piccolo solo, with three punctuating notes at various points from the harp and gong. It is a simple, songful melody: a shepherd playing for himself on a lonely hill. The fourth and final movement is similar to the first in the nonmetrically placed accents in the rhythmic patterns of the harp and tongue-drum. The melodic material is drawn from a simple nine-note scale in an E-based mode. The melodic pattern is stated three times at varying speeds in the piccolo, which is joined by a mensuration canon in the harp in the middle of the movement.

JORDAN KUSPA composer Jordan Kuspa’s music has been praised by the New York Times as “animated and melodically opulent” and “consistently alive and inspired.”

His compositions have been performed by the 21st Century Consort, the Xanthos Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, and the Yale Philharmonia, among many others. Jordan was the winner of the 2011 Pittsburgh Symphony Audience of the Future Competition, the 2010 ISCM– League of Composers Competition, and the 2007 Robert Avalon Young Composers Competition. He was recently selected for the 2011 American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings. At age 16, Jordan founded the Houston Young Musicians, and was also co-founder and artistic director of the Sonus Chamber Music Society. He has continued his community engagement work in schools across Connecticut. Jordan is currently pursuing his doctorate at the Yale School of Music, where he has studied with Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, Ingram Marshall, and Christopher Theofanidis.

HIT THE SPOT notes As instruments go, the steel pan is a baby.

Invented approximately seventy years ago in Trinidad and Tobago, steel pans have until recently been associated almost exclusively with the Caribbean musical tradition from

which they developed. Now, as the global musical culture becomes more fluid and crosspollination of musical styles and traditions is the anorm, the steel pan is emerging as a viable instrument in myriad contexts. One of the pioneers of this pan renaissance is Andy Akiho.

Andy, through both his own compositions and performances of others’ music, has pushed the boundaries of what is considered possible with steel pans. Almost as soon as I first heard Andy play, I asked him if he’d be interested in a new piece from me. Andy suggested the combination of pan and string quartet, which married his area of expertise with mine (I am a cellist). The result, Hit the Spot, is very much indebted to the personality of its dedicatee. In the piece, I have tried to reflect the virtuosity, imagination, and seemingly inexhaustible energy that Andy displays in his music making, and to express the joy that emanates from every performance he gives.

PROFILES + NOTES

ADRIAN KNIGHT composer Adrian Knight is a composer of electronic, orchestral, vocal and chamber music currently living and working in New Haven, Connecticut.

He was born and raised in Uppsala, Sweden.

He has received grants from STIM, the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm and two Morton Gould Young Composer Awards from ASCAP. Recent performances include Comblé with the Yale Philharmonia, The Caligari Project with the Red Light ensemble accompanying the eponymous film, The Tears for harp and electronics with Maura Valenti, The Dividing Line at the Norberg Festival and Yale University Art Gallery; concerts of electronic music in New York City (Robert Goff Gallery, Tenri, Littlefield), New Haven, Charlottesville, Stockholm (Audiorama); and Hartford, and Till Minne Av for sixteen solo strings (2009) at the Yale School of Music.

Knight is currently pursuing a master’s degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, studying with David Lang, Ezra Laderman, Martin Bresnick, and Christopher Theofanidis.

He also teaches electronic music and composition at Yale College. Since 2008, he operates “the smallest record label in the world,” Pink Pamphlet, and has released six albums so far, with – in addition to his own works – music

by Magnus Bunnskog, Christopher Cerrone, Sebastian Lakatos, and Victor Lisinski. He is a member of Fylkingen in Stockholm.

THE CALIGARI PROJECT notes The Caligari Project was commissioned by Red Light New Music for a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene. It was composed in Stockholm in the summer of 2010.

» www.adrian-knight.com » www.pinkpamphlet.net

JUSTIN TIERNEY composer Justin Tierney (b. 1984, New Haven, Conn.) is pursuing an artist diploma in music composition at the Yale School of Music under the guidance of Ezra Laderman, Martin Bresnick, and Christopher Theofanidis.

His recent projects include The God Script, a music drama based on the short story “La Escritura del Dios” by Jorge Luis Borges. The fifty-minute work relates the cosmic revelations of an imprisoned Aztec mystic who deciphers the words of God embedded in the spots of a jaguar.

Regarding his aesthetic, Tierney has stated that “the nightly stars can be admired from either a scientific or aesthetic view, yet the coupling of the two modalities creates an appreciation greater than their sum. Attractive mechanics buttressing beautiful surfaces that coalesce into poignant experiences: this is what I strive for as a composer.”

Mr. Tierney has studied composition with Jeffrey Johnson and Douglas Townsend at the University of Bridgeport, John McDonald at Tufts University, and privately with Ryan Vigil.

–Bio by Roberto Toscano

PROFILES + NOTES

YEHUDI WYNER composer Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner has created a diverse body of over sixty works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, solo performers, theater music, and liturgical services.

In addition to composing and teaching, his active and eclectic musical career includes work as a performer, director of two opera companies, and conductor of numerous ensembles in a wide range of repertory. “A comprehensive musician, Mr. Wyner is an elegant pianist, a fine conductor, a prolific composer, and a revered teacher. His works show a deep understanding of what sounds good and is technically efficient” (Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, 2009).

His wife, Susan Davenny Wyner, has been an enormous source of inspiration; a number of Mr. Wyner’s most strikingly beautiful compositions were created specifically for her. Among them are Intermedio (1976), a lyric ballet for soprano and string orchestra; Fragments from Antiquity (1978-81), for soprano and orchestra; and On This Most Voluptuous Night (1982), for soprano and chamber ensemble.

Yehudi Wyner was born in western Canada and grew up in New York City in a musical family.

His father, Lazar Weiner, was the preeminent composer of Yiddish art song as well as a notable creator of liturgical music for the modern synagogue. This early exposure paved the way for a diploma in piano from Juilliard and further musical studies at Yale and Harvard Universities with composers Richard Donovan,

Walter Piston, and Paul Hindemith. A Handel course at Harvard brought Wyner to the attention of Randall Thompson, who became a staunch supporter and friend. In 1953, Mr. Wyner won the Rome Prize in Composition, enabling him to spend the next three years at the American Academy in Rome composing, performing, and traveling. Since then, he has received many honors, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his piano concerto Chiavi in mano, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a grant from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Brandeis Creative Arts Award. In 1998 Mr. Wyner received the Elise Stoeger Award from Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society for his lifetime contribution to chamber music. His Horntrio was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and in 1999 Mr. Wyner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Among Wyner’s most important works is the liturgical piece Friday Evening Service for cantor and chorus, and it this work that initiated his relationship with Associated Music Publishers.

He elaborates, “The circumstances of my initial

contact with Schirmer/AMP [came about] in the spring of 1963, [when] the premiere of my new Friday Evening Service took place at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. The next day, I received a call from a person, then unknown to me, named Hans Heinsheimer [former G. Schirmer Director of Publications].

After identifying himself, he said that Samuel Barber had attended the premiere and urged Heinsheimer to be in touch with me to discuss a possible publishing relationship. Of course I was astonished!�

He has been commissioned by the Ford Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, Michigan and Yale Universities, and many chamber music ensembles including Aeolian, DaCapo, Parnassus, Collage, No Dogs Allowed, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, and 20th Century Unlimited. Recordings of his music can be found on New World Records, Naxos, Bridge, Albany Records, Pro Arte, CRI, 4Tay Records, and Columbia Records.

Since 1968, Mr. Wyner has been a keyboard artist for the Bach Aria Group. In this capacity he has performed and conducted a substantial number of the Bach cantatas, concertos, and motets. He recently retired as the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University, a post he held since 1991.

He also taught at Yale University as head of the composition faculty, at SUNY Purchase as dean

of the music division, as a visiting professor at Cornell and Harvard Universities, and as a member of the chamber music faculty at Tanglewood from 1975 to 1997. He has been composer-in-residence at the Sante Fe Chamber Music Festival (1982), the American Academy in Rome (1991), and the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, Italy (1998).

His notable orchestral works include Prologue and Narrative for Cello and Orchestra (1994), commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic for the Manchester International Cello Festival; Lyric Harmony for orchestra (1995), commissioned

by Carnegie Hall for the American Composers Orchestra; and Epilogue for orchestra (1996), commissioned by the Yale School of Music.

His music is published by Associated Music Publishers, Inc.

PROFILES + NOTES

ON THIS MOST VOLUPTUOUS NIGHT notes On This Most Voluptuous Night was commissioned in 1982 by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary. One stipulation of the commission was that the poetry be American, and I at first misinterpreted this to include South American as well and began a quite different composition to texts by Pablo Neruda in English translation. Quite late I learned that this would not be acceptable to the commissioning agency and needed to tack sails very swiftly. A mad search for appropriate and stimulating American poetry ensued and from diverse sources a number of poems and fragments of poems by William Carlos Williams was assembled.

Before this, I had never found Williams’ poetry sympathetic. At first it was the short lyrics that yielded musical thoughts, but the meaning of larger bodies of work, the five books of Paterson for example, eluded me, probably because I was trying to understand it all rather than allowing myself to respond to flashes here and there.

Responding without fully “understanding” was the key to my efforts to invent a musical discourse that would parallel Williams’ poetical intentions. Some aspects of Williams’ credo were clear enough: reliance on plain speech, often vernacular in origin; an American, as opposed to a Continental, diction; the conception of a poem as a “machine made of words,”

not merely a fancy sentiment or emotional confession; the idea of poetry as a shared experience, ordinary and entertaining at a certain level, sometimes familiar and flat to mirror the normal diction of our culture, yet at the same time capable of embedding profound and moving sentiments and observations about our lives.

The title poem which begins this set of songs is one of the rare pieces of purely lyric poetry to be found in Paterson, all the more perfumed and astonishing because of its matter-of-fact surroundings. If I remember correctly, it was my response to this lyric that really got me going.

“The End of the Parade,” with its obvious musical imagery and its suggestion of a disintegrating march, helped me find apposite musical figures. The poem in all its brevity is about a number of things, including the actual process of creating a work of art.

“The Artist” describes an actual incident in Williams’ life, a visit to the old-age home where his mother spent many years of her late life. The structure of the poem with its stepped lines (in groups of three) is a significant Williams invention, typical of his later poems. I made three settings of the poem, intending to use only one. In the end, finding myself unable to make a choice, I found a way to use all three, but how this was done must remain a surprise for the listener.

“Learning with Age” is from an expressive point of view the central song of the set. The mysterious text, resonant with distant allusions, is a summation of much of what Williams believed. Finding a vehicle for the evocative transmission of this text was in a certain way the most taxing of my efforts on the entire composition. The problem was how to embrace a set of metaphysical epigrams in a lyrical, sensuous texture without sentimentalizing the toughness and tragic tenderness of Williams’ final musings.

“Puerto Rico Song” is one of the poet’s last lyrics. Epigrammatical as a haiku, it is a compression of all Williams wished to say, placing God, man, and nature in plain and inexorable relationship. Once again I chose to set the poem three times with the instruments alone providing the first version.

In the preceding comments I have said very little about musical matters, nothing about technical means of formal design. A few remarks here may be helpful. The language is a varied one ranging from strong tonal allusion to highly chromatic or atonal procedure. Nevertheless, at the core of all the invention is a narrow context, a chord or two, a characteristic series of tones, from which most if not all the material of the piece is drawn. Even the vernacular elements are closely derived from this governing context. I have attempted to use those vernacular elements not as “references” but as normal and inevitable speech in much the same way as Williams uses them in his poetry.

Overall I have sought in Voluptuous Night to achieve a kind of “classical” music, presenting rather than editorializing, seeking a measured balance of external allure and internal expressivity, of the “gallant” and the “learned,” of sentiment and structure.

– Yehudi Wyner

PROFILES + NOTES

Orchestra; and Aaron Jay Kernis’ Symphony of Meditations with the Yale Camerata and Yale Philharmonia.

AMANDA HALL soprano The young American soprano Amanda Hall has earned recognition for her performances of demanding roles on both the operatic and concert stages. In 2010-11 she sings Violetta in La traviata with Western Plains Opera Company, joins the roster of New York City Opera for its production of A Quiet Place, sings the role of Donna Anna in Don Giovanni as a guest artist with Yale Opera, appears as soloist in Verdi’s Requiem with Lynn University, and in Haydn’s The Creation with the Idaho State Civic Symphony. She sings her first performances as Fiordiligi in Cosí fan tutte in her debut with Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

Her 2009-10 season included singing the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro and Micaëla in La Tragédie de Carmen with Yale Opera; soloist in Verdi’s Requiem with the Yale Symphony Orchestra; Dvorák’s Stabat Mater with Connecticut’s Cappella Cantorum; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Waterbury Symphony

Among Ms. Hall’s recent successes are family performances of the title role in Susannah and the role of Belinda in Dido and Aeneas, both as an apprentice artist at Central City Opera, and performances of Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte with Yale Opera. She appeared as Giulietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi with the University of Southern California Opera and has performed several roles with La Sierra University Opera Theater. Equally comfortable on the concert stage, Ms. Hall has performed Mozart’s Alleluia and Handel’s Messiah with the Crystal Cathedral Chorus and Orchestra, the Requiems of Mozart and Rutter with the Loma Linda Chorus and Orchestra, Orff ’s Carmina Burana with Opera de Tijuana, and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with Riverside Little Opera.

Amanda Hall is a graduate of the opera program at the Yale School of Music. She previously earned her Master of Music degree from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Arts degree from La Sierra University. She has twice been a regional finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and has been the recipient of Opera Buff ’s Performance Scholarship, AEIOU Opera Scholarship, Thornton Merit Scholarship, and the Leni Fe Bland Vocal Scholarship. She was also the winner of the La Sierra Sinfonia Concerto Competition and a finalist in the Palm Springs Opera Guild Competition.

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

artistic director Christopher Theofanidis

Thursdays at 8 pm Free admission

managing director Krista Johnson librarian and production assistant Roberta Senatore assistant Joseph Peters music librarians Yeseul Ann Wai Lau Holly Piccoli Liesl Schoenberger Kaitlin Taylor Elizabeth Upton Sara Wollmacher stage crew Landres Bryant Paul Futer Michael Levin Samuel Levine Cameron McPhail Brian Reese Ruben Rodriguez Hermelindo Ruiz Andreas Stoltzfus Jerome Stover Craig Watson David Wharton

APR 28 TRINITY LUTHERAN CHURCH Aaron Jay Kernis, featured faculty composer: String Quartet No. 2, musica instrumentalis, performed by the Jasper Quartet. New music by Adrian Knight and Justin Tierney, and new choral works by Reena Esmail and Jordan Kuspa, performed by the Yale Camerata, directed by Marguerite L. Brooks.

Yale School of Music 203 432-4158 concerts@yale.edu music.yale.edu/media

concerts & media Dana Astmann Monica Ong Reed Danielle Heller Richard Henebry operations Tara Deming Christopher Melillo piano curators Brian Daley William Harold recording studio Eugene Kimball Jason Robins

COMING UP

Two Beethoven Symphonies April 15 | Fri | 5 pm | Sprague | Free The conducting fellows lead the Yale Philharmonia in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor and the “Pastoral” Symphony No. 6 in F major.

Woolsey Concerto Competition April 16 | Sat | 9 am | Sprague | Free The annual Woolsey Concerto Competition, featuring instrumentalists and vocalists selected to perform before a panel of distinguished judges. The event runs from 9 am to 4 pm, with a break for lunch. Each contestant will perform for ten minutes.

Yale Cellos April 20 | Wed | 8 pm | Sprague | The Yale Cellos. Aldo Parisot, director. Music

by Bach, Grieg, Brubeck, Kilar, Valentini, Stravinsky, Rostropovich, Bright Sheng, and Vivaldi, plus the world premiere of a new work by Ezra Laderman.

Tickets $10–$20 | Students $5

The Scarf | Dido and Aeneas April 29 & 30 | Fri & Sat | 8 pm | Sprague Yale Opera presents a double bill of Lee Hoiby’s The Scarf and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Mark Streshinsky, director; musical preparation by Douglas Dickson and Timothy Shaindlin. Dido features the Yale Baroque Ensemble, directed by Robert Mealy.

Tickets $10–$15 | Students $5