Letters from Argentina oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, Artistic Director March 31, 2015 • Morse Recital Hall
Cho-Liang Lin, violin • David Shifrin, clarinet Héctor del Curto, bandoneón • Alex Brown, piano Pablo Aslan, double bass • Satoshi Takeishi, percussion
Robert Blocker, Dean
Oneppo Chamber Music Series
Letters from Argentina Tuesday, March 31, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall cho-liang lin, violin • david shifrin, clarinet héctor del curto, bandoneón • alex brown, piano pablo aslan, double bass • satoshi takeishi, percussion Lalo Schifrin b. 1932
Letters from Argentina (Selections) Tango del atardecer Pampas Tango Borealis Danza de los montes Tango a Borges Malambo de los llanos intermission
Ástor Piazzolla 1921–1992
Tangos Michaelangelo 70 Verano Porteño Adiós Nonino Muerte del Angel Oblivion Libertango
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, please silence all electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Notes on the Program
lalo schifrin Letters from Argentina “Like the clear sky, like the rain, like the clouds, music has always been part of the Argentinean atmosphere, ever present in the literature, in the visual arts, and in the history of the country.” These words of composer Lalo Schifrin vividly describe the inspiration of his Letters from Argentina. In these eight vignettes, the composer gleans the nostalgic sounds of his childhood surroundings, fashioning both a musical impression and a wistful point of connection. Schifrin describes recreating an “unreal past in which a memory persists and invites us to a journey full of promises and dreams.” He draws from the auditory imprints of having grown up in the vibrant sonic landscape of his homeland — his father’s violin playing, the drums of indigenous peoples, the impassioned strains of tango that emanate from forbidden cafés and radio speakers, the festive dance music that saturates the streets of entire villages and barrios, the faint strumming of the gauchos’ guitars on tranquil evenings in the pampas — and fashions an imagined reawakening of these experiences. Schifrin brought these musical memories with him to Paris, where he ventured at the age of twenty to study at the Conservatoire. In the nightlife of the city of lights he discovered jazz, and found a way to fuse these two musical styles — Argentinean folk and tango — with this newfound medium. It was in Paris that Schifrin shared the stage with the great Piazzolla, playing piano alongside the composer-bandoneónist. His life changed forever when the legendary Dizzy Gillespie, passing through Paris, met and commissioned music of the young Schifrin, later inviting him to New York
to join his quintet. The rest is history: Schifrin would go on to write numerous Hollywood scores and, most famously, the theme from the television series Mission: Impossible. Though life took him to far-flung places, the composer remained tied to his roots in Buenos Aires. Letters from Argentina, commissioned in 2005, allowed Schifrin the opportunity to depict the music of his heritage through the lens of his life’s experiences as a musician at home in diverse artistic settings, whether a Hollywood recording studio, a jazz club, or a chamber music series in Morse Recital Hall. If anything, his polystylism demonstrates how conversant these seemingly dissimilar genres of music truly are. As the opening Tango del Atardecer begins, the style seems grounded in Argentina, yet like Schifrin himself, it evolves to absorb new influences as the dance progresses. The tango takes place, as its title suggests, in the late afternoon, but after a time the sun descends and evening closes in, announced by ghostly sul ponticello violin and distant drumming. Evening lingers over the Pampas as open-spaced chords in the piano evoke the vastness of these fertile lands, while an ominous drone, suggesting the resonant strum of a guitar, adds an air of nocturnal mystery to the scene. In the subdued Tango Borealis, dawn dances as she wakes from her slumber, and a sense of hazy relaxation pervades the music (this is tango before coffee). The Danza de los montes reflects Schifrin’s New York jazz influence, while frequent shifts in mood give the movement a capricious quality. Could the mountains of the title, more than the Patagonian landscape, perhaps also conjure the skyscrapers of an urban jungle? The Tango a Borges is possibly inspired by, or a tribute to, the Argentine
Notes on the Program
writer. Like its namesake, the piece is adventurous, often humorous, and inventive, with wild flourishes and an air of witty nonchalance. At the start of the closing Malambo de los llanos, a lone rustic violin seems to improvise on a repeated dance motive; perhaps this is a subtle childhood memory of his father practicing at home. Soon, other instruments join in as the piece awakens and comes alive, as though more dancers of a village on the plains were spilling into the streets from their homes in jubilant celebration. The drumming rhythms of the Calchaqí peoples of the northern heath dominate the scene, and we become lost in the carnivalesque frenzy of festivity. Schifrin’s lively piano writing, with traces of colorful chromaticism and the angularity of high modernism poking through, remind us that he did, after all, study with Olivier Messiaen. These musical postcards allow us to momentarily enter the labyrinth of their composer’s memory. Though we can never relate to these musical recollections in quite the same way, they might lead us to turn a forgotten corner in our own mind. Like many works of Jorge Luis Borges, whose concise yet fanciful ficciones often explored the haziness and craftiness of memory, and whose persona inhabits this collection, Letters from Argentina can tell us something about past, present, future, near and far, all at once. As Borges pondered: “Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, “the aesthetic event.”
Letters from Argentina was jointly commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Music Society, and Chamber Music Northwest. Composed in 2005, it was premiered on April 17, 2005, in New York City by members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. ástor piazzolla Tangos Born to into an Italian family on the Argentine coast, Ástor Piazzolla came of age in Greenwich Village in the 1920s: a vibrant, working-class neighborhood of immigrants with an air of an emerging Bohemian art scene. The melodious mélange of noises from the street, the sounds of jazz halls and gramophone records, and of course, the strident, pained sounds of the bandoneón, formed the eclectic mixture from which the young Piazzolla would cultivate his musical style. Once he had his hands on his first bandoneón — the concertina “lap organ” imported from German folk music into the Argentinean tradition — he had found his voice. By the late 1930s, he had settled in Buenos Aires and began to perform frequently in tango orchestras. The genre had grown immensely popular both at home and abroad: it is said that of the few gramophone records sold in the first decades since their invention, one-third were tango recordings. While delving further into the tango world, Piazzolla cultivated a strong interest in classical music, and worked to pay for his own composition lessons with Alberto Ginastera, the preeminent classical musician in Argentina at the time. These lessons, along with his later composition studies
Notes on the Program
in Paris (where he met and recorded with Lalo Schifrin) helped to form the composer’s distinctive approach to the genre: an amalgam of tradition and experimentation, folk and classical, old and new. With his Orchestra Típica, formed in 1946, and then with his Octeto Buenos Aires, which he formed after his revelatory sojourn to Paris, Piazzolla explored new and often controversial avenues of tango. Particularly with his octet, the sound of which was not far removed from Igor Stravinsky’s neo-classical orchestrations, Piazzolla approached tango as a style of chamber music. His lean instrumentation, clarity of texture, brightness of tone, rhythmic playfulness, and occasionally wild diversions in harmony, all came together to form a new style that came to be known as Nuevo tango. The elegance and sensitivity of his orchestration allowed complex counterpoint to emerge from the texture, while he incorporated some of the improvisatory techniques of jazz music. He even drew from Baroque practice in his use of repetitive variations, such as a passacaglia over an unwavering chord progression or bass line, and in the use of melodic embellishment. Nuevo tango was a free tango, and the composer defined it with an equation: Nuevo tango = tango + tragedy + comedy + whorehouse. As the music transformed, so too did the dance, and what began as a very strict sequence of steps began, like Piazzolla’s music, to evolve, reaching out for more freedom of motion and expression. Needless to say, the stalwarts of the tango conventions of the previous centuries were not thrilled with Piazzolla’s new approach. Yet his music was immensely popular, especially in Europe and the United States. He forever changed the genre, and his legacy of popularizing
tango while meshing it with the worlds of classical music, jazz, and even to the avantgarde, will endure. By virtue of that instantly recognizable rhythmic pattern and pulse, a percussive drive, and passionate tone, Piazzolla’s music encapsulates the traditions and origins of tango while elevating the genre to new heights of craftsmanship and art. The selections heard this evening span decades of the composer’s output, and offer a snapshot of the various stages of his career, from La muerte del angel from the 1960s to Libertango, written while in Milan, in 1974. Adiós nonino poignantly memorializes Piazzolla’s father, and was written in 1959 just after learning of his death. This tango was itself based on an early work from 1954. — Notes by Patrick Campbell Jankowski
Artist Profiles
Cho-Liang Lin, violin Violinist Cho-Liang Lin, lauded the world over for his eloquent playing and superb musicianship, is equally at home with orchestra, in recital, playing chamber music, and in a teaching studio. Mr. Lin has appeared as soloist with the orchestras of Detroit, Toronto, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, San Diego; the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; in Europe with the English Chamber Orchestra and the Bergen, Stockholm, and Munich Philharmonics; and in Asia with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Singapore Symphony, and Malaysia Philharmonic. In recent seasons, Mr. Lin has expanded his orchestral engagements to include performances as both soloist and conductor. He completed season-long residencies with the Shanghai Symphony and with the Singapore Symphony, which included engagements as soloist and conductor, participating in chamber music, and giving master classes. An advocate for music of our time, Mr. Lin has enjoyed collaborations and premieres with composers such as Tan Dun, Joel Hoffman, John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lalo Schifrin, Paul Schoenfield, Bright Sheng, and Joan Tower. Also an avid chamber musician, Mr. Lin appears at the Beijing Music Festival, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Aspen Music Festival, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. As music director of La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest since 2001, Mr. Lin has helped develop a festival that once focused primarily on chamber music into a multidisciplinary festival featuring dance, jazz and a burgeoning new music program. In Asia, Mr. Lin serves as Artistic Director of Hong
Kong International Chamber Music Festival and the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra’s Youth Music Summer Camp. Cho-Liang Lin’s extensive discography includes recordings for Sony Classical, Decca, Ondine, Naxos, and BIS. His albums have won such awards as Gramophone’s Record of the Year as well as two Grammy Award nominations. Born in Taiwan in 1960, Cho-Liang Lin began his violin lessons when he was five years old with Sylvia Lee. At 12, he went to Sydney to continue his musical studies with Robert Pikler. Inspired by an encounter with Itzhak Perlman while in Sydney, he auditioned in 1975 for Perlman’s teacher, the late Dorothy DeLay, at the Juilliard School. He studied with Miss DeLay for six years. At the age of nineteen, Mr. Lin made his New York debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival and soon after with the New York Philharmonic, and his concert career was launched. In 2000 Musical America named Mr. Lin its Instrumentalist of the Year. He was invited to join the faculty of the Juilliard School in 1991, and more recently he was appointed professor of violin at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He plays the 1715 “Titian” Stradivarius. David Shifrin, clarinet One of only two wind players to have been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize since the award’s inception in 1974, clarinetist David Shifrin is in constant demand as an orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber music collaborator. He has performed with major orchestras including the Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Detroit, and Denver symphonies, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the
Artist Profiles
Philadelphia and Minnesota orchestras, as well as with orchestras in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Taiwan. Shifrin has served as principal clarinetist with the American Symphony Orchestra (under Stokowski), Cleveland Orchestra, Honolulu and Dallas symphonies, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the New York Chamber Symphony. Mr. Shifrin has appeared in critically acclaimed recitals around the world. His recordings (on Delos, DGG, Angel/EMI, Arabesque, BMG, SONY, and CRI) garner praise as well as awards, and he has received three Grammy nominations. A sought-after chamber musician, he appears frequently with such artists as the Guarneri, Tokyo, and Emerson String Quartets and Wynton Marsalis. Mr. Shifrin champions the works of American composers including, among others, John Adams, Joan Tower, Bruce Adolphe, Ezra Laderman, Lalo Schifrin, David Schiff, John Corigliano, Bright Sheng, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. An artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 1989, Mr. Shifrin served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. He is also the artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon.
Héctor Del Curto, bandoneón Winner of the title “Best Bandoneón Player Under 25” in his native Argentina by the age of 17, Héctor Del Curto was introduced to the world of tango by his grandfather, Héctor Cristobal, and joined the orchestra of Osvaldo Publiese. Del Curto is the founding artistic director of Stowe Tango Music Festival in Vermont, and has performed and recorded with artists including Shakira, Astor Piazzolla, Pablo Ziegler, Paquito D’Rivera, Joe Lovano, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Denyce Graves, Fernando Otero, Erwin Schrott, and Plácido Domingo. His first album, Eternal Tango, was featured on BBC News and Public Radio International’s “The World,” while Eternal Piazzolla accompanied a sold-out concert at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge. Praised by The New York Times as a “splendid player,” Del Curto has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Buenos Aires Symphony Orchestra. He received the Golden Note Award from the Italian-American Network and conducted Forever Tango on Broadway, founding the ten-piece Eternal Tango Orchestra. Alex Brown, piano
David Shifrin has been a professor at the Yale School of Music since 1987. He has also served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, University of Southern California, University of Michigan, Cleveland Institute of Music, and University of Hawaii. At Yale, Mr. Shifrin has been artistic director of the Oneppo Chamber Music Series and Yale in New York since 2008.
Yamaha Artist Alex Brown taught at the University of Panama and appeared at The Blue Note and Birdland in New York and Tokyo, the Heineken Jazz Festival, Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., Telluride Jazz Celebration, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, and Israel’s Red Sea Jazz Festival. Featured in the January 2010 issue of Keyboard Magazine, Brown has been a member of Paquito D’Rivera’s ensemble since 2007,
Artist Profiles
performing on the Grammy-nominated album Jazz-Clazz. Brown earned his Bachelor of Music degree from the New England Conservatory, studying with Danilo Perez and Charlie Banacos and winning student and young composer awards from ASCAP, DownBeat magazine, and BMI. Brown has performed with his own jazz ensemble, major orchestras, Imani Winds, and saxophonist Miguel Zenon as well as Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, winning acclaim for his debut CD Pianist and blending rhythm-and-blues, hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean, classical, and Brazilian influences. Pablo Aslan, double bass Pablo Aslan was born in Buenos Aires, mentored by Ástor Piazzolla, and educated at the University of California (Santa Cruz and Los Angeles) and California Institute of the Arts. He developed a unique flavor of jazz-infused tango in the clubs of New York, where he led New York Buenos Aires Connection, Avantango, and New York Tango Trio. Aslan’s recordings include Tango Grill, nominated for Grammy and Latin Grammy awards, and a collaboration with Paquito D’Rivera, with whom he toured Europe as music director of D’Rivera’s Tango Jazz Septet. Aslan also produced the 2007 Latin Grammy-winning recording Te Amo Tango by Uruguayan bandoneonist Raul Jaurena. Aslan has worked with Yo-Yo Ma, Lalo Schifrin, Osvaldo Golijov, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pablo Ziegler, Shakira, Denyce Graves, and the New World Symphony. He serves as artistic director of Portland’s Reed Tango Music Institute and has produced educational programs for Lincoln Center Institute, Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concerts,
and Arts Connection in NYC, while both lecturing and teaching at Harvard, Yale, and UCLA. Satoshi Takeishi, percussion Studies at Boston’s Berklee College of Music led percussionist Satoshi Takeishi to spend four years in Colombia expanding his interest in the music of South America. While there Takeishi joined Macumbia led by the composer/arranger Francisco Zumaque, combining traditional, jazz and classical music and performing a series of concerts honoring composer Lucho Bermudes with the Botoga Symphony Orchestra. Takeishi began arranging in Miami. He produced Morning Ride for jazz flutist Néstor Torres, and studied and performed with oud master Joe Zeytoonian, learning the rhythms and melodies of the Middle East. Takeishi has worked with Ray Barretto, Carlos “Patato” Valdes, Elaine Elias, Marc Johnson, Eddie Gomez, Randy Brecker, the Paul Winters Consort, Rabih Abu Khalil, the Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band, Herbie Mann, Erik Friedlander, Pablo Ziegler, Dave Liebman, Anthony Braxton, Mark Murphy, and others. He explores multi-cultural, electronic and improvisational music with local musicians and composers in New York.
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Upcoming Events
Tango Workshop
Peter Oundjian, guest conductor
april 1 Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 12:30 pm Lectures and Masterclasses A workshop on tango techniques led by Pablo Aslan, bass; Satoshi Takeishi, percussion; Héctor del Curto, bandoneón; and Alex Brown, piano Free Admission
april 10 Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Yale Philharmonia Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture; Korngold: Violin Concerto, with soloist Benjamin Hoffman; Brahms: Symphony No. 2 Tickets start at $10 • Students $5 $3 surcharge for purchases at the door
Vijay Iyer, guest composer april 2 Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm New Music New Haven Yale alum Vijay Iyer plays his piece Time, Place, Action with the Brentano String Quartet. The concert also includes works by graduate students in composition Tickets $10–$15 • Students $5
El Mundo Ensemble april 12 15 Hillhouse Ave. | Sunday | 3 pm Collection of Musical Instruments Richard Savino, artistic director. Works by Castellano, Handel, Salazar, and more Tickets $25 • Seniors $20 • Students $10
The Yale Cellos Yale Baroque Ensemble april 7 & 8 15 Hillhouse Ave. | Tue & Wed | 5:30 pm Collection of Musical Instruments Members of the Yale Baroque Ensemble perform in recital. Robert Mealy, director Free Admission
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