NEWMUSIC NEWHAVEN hannah lash & christopher theofanidis 路 artistic directors
featuring music by
MARTIN BRESNICK & HANNAH LASH and music by Yale graduate composers
October 8, 2015 路 Thursday at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Hannah Lash & Christopher Theofanidis, Artistic Directors
Brian Heim b. 1993
content repackage Elly Toyoda, violin Eric Adamshick, cello Meera Gudipati, alto flute Jesse McCandless, bass clarinet Brian Heim, electronics
Tiange Zhou b. 1990
Study Laws of Motion Yurie Mitsuhashi, violin Marie Oka, violin Joyce Huang, viola Jiyoung Choi, cello intermission
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence all electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Hannah Lash b. 1981
Concerto for Harp and Ensemble Hannah Lash, solo harp Andrew Robson, flute Suliman Tekalli, violin Yefim Romanov, violin Danielle Wiebe, viola Jiwon Kang, cello Samuel Suggs, bass
Martin Bresnick b. 1946
Handwork for Two Pianos (U.S. Premiere) Viney–Grinberg Piano Duo Liam Viney, piano Anna Grinberg, piano
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biography Brian Heim Brian Heim is a composer, programmer, and live electronics performer whose works concern the intersections of art, technology, and philosophy. He holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with Dan Welcher and Yevgeniy Sharlat, and is a second year master’s student at the Yale School of Music, where he has studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Chris Theofanidis, and Hannah Lash. Brian’s music has been read and performed by members of the JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, City of Tomorrow Woodwind Quintet, Wet Ink Ensemble, UTAustin New Music Ensemble, and Zeitgeist. His music was recently heard at New Music on the Point (Lake Dunmore, VT) and the Valencia International Performance Academy (Valencia, Spain). Upcoming projects include a noise music-influenced orchestral work for the Yale Philharmonia and solo works for saxophone, trombone, and piano. In 2015, Brian received both a Morton Gould Young Composers Award and the Leo Kaplan Award from the ASCAP Foundation. biography Tiange Zhou Born in China in 1990, Tiange Zhou is a composer, playwright, and improv dancer. Her music is performed across Asia, Europe, and North America. Her works have been performed at the Highscore Music Festival, Ostrava New Music Days, June in Buffalo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Pocket Opera Project, and the Salt New Music Festival. Zhou has collaborated with musicians from the Mivos Quartet, I.C.E., the S.E.M. Ensemble, the Philip Glass
Ensemble, Sandbox Percussion, and the Talujon Percussion Ensemble. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Manhattan School of Music and spent a year studying at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, Germany. She is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree at the Yale School of Music, where she studies with Aaron Jay Kernis. She previously studied with Reiko Fueting, Nils Vigeland, Casper Walter, Marco Stroppa, and Hannah Lash. Zhou specfically focuses on dramatic musical composition, often in collaboration with visual art, theater, dance and film. program note Study Laws of Motion When viewed in an initial reference frame, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force. The vector sum of the external forces on an object (the note F), is equal to the mass m of that object multiplied by the acceleration vector a of the object: F = ma. When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body. biography Hannah Lash Prize-winning composer Hannah Lash has emerged as a leading voice of her generation. In addition to numerous academic awards, she has received the ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize, the Bernard Rogers Prize, and the
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Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize. She has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the Naumburg Foundation, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, the Orpheus Duo, the Howard Hanson Foundation, Case Western Reserve’s University Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, Great Noise Ensemble, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. Her orchestral music has been singled out by the American Composers Orchestra, which selected Furthermore for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings, and by the Minnesota Orchestra, which selected her work God Music Bug Music for performance in January 2012 as part of the Minnesota Composers Institute. Her chamber opera Blood Rose was presented by NYC Opera’s VOX in the spring of 2011. Lash’s music has also been performed at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, the Chelsea Art Museum, Harvard University, Tanglewood Music Center, the Times Center, and the Chicago Art Institute. Hannah Lash earned a bachelor’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, her Ph.D. from Harvard University, a performance degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music. Her primary teachers include Martin Bresnick, Bernard Rands, Julian Anderson, and Robert Morris. Her music is published by Schott. program note Concerto for Harp and Ensemble My piece, Concerto for Harp and Ensemble, reflects my love of the harp, but also addresses the idea of the harp as an instrument which carries an implication of being an
outsider; mysterious, ephemeral, etc. I thought about what it means to play an instrument that is often thought of in these terms, and how the specialness of the harp could also create a sense of isolation on the part of the player: loneliness. A soloist in a concerto is naturally “other” to the ensemble, and the drama of a concerto often plays out in an almost adversarial relationship between the soloist and the ensemble. I wanted to explore this idea of the loneliness of the soloist in my own concerto, specifically through the lens of the harp’s particular “otherness” which is inextricably linked to what makes it special. The harp’s final cadenza reveals the most personal material in the piece: a slow Ländler-like dance hovers like a memory in the harp, unaccompanied except for occasional small twitches from the ensemble towards the very end. It is as if the harp were revealing a music that the ensemble never participates in — a music that is special, beautiful, other-worldly, and fragile, like the harp itself. biography Martin Bresnick Composer Martin Bresnick was born in New York City in 1946 and is presently Professor of Composition and coordinator of the composition department at the Yale School of Music. He was educated at the High School of Music and Art, the University of Hartford (B.A. ’67), Stanford University (M.A. ’68, D.M.A. ’72), and the Akademie für Musik, Vienna (’69–’70). His principal teachers of composition include György Ligeti, John Chowning, and Gottfried von Einem. Mr. Bresnick has taught at many schools in the United States and Europe, including the San Francisco
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Conservatory of Music (1971–72), Eastman School of Music (2002–’03), New College in Oxford (2004), and the Royal Academy of Music in London (2005), among others. In 2006, Mr. Bresnick was elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Bresnick’s compositions range from chamber music to symphonic compositions and computer music. His orchestral music has been performed by major symphonies around the world, including the San Francisco Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Münster Philharmonic, Orque- stra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo, and Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka. His chamber music has been performed in concert by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Da Capo Chamber Players, Bang on A Can All Stars, and MusicWorks!, among others. His music has been heard at numerous festivals, including Prague Spring, Tanglewood, Banff, New Music America, and New Horizons. He has also received commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts (1992), Fromm Foundation (1995), Lincoln Center Chamber Players (1997), Meet-the-Composer (1998), and Chamber Music America (1999). His many prizes include the Elise L. Stoeger Prize (1996), Charles Ives Living Award (1998), the ascap Foundation’s Aaron Copland Prize for teaching (2000), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003). Mr. Bresnick has written music for films, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards in the documentary category. His music has been recorded by Cantaloupe Records, Composers Recordings Incor-
porated, Centaur, New World Records, Artifact Music, and Albany Records and is published by Carl Fischer Music (NY), Bote and Bock, Berlin, and CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven. program note Handwork for Two Pianos (U.S. Premiere) Handwork is many things – a fantasia, a nocturne, a folk-song, a Latin-American dance with much prominent counterpoint and polymetric intrigue. It is sometimes tonal with crunchy Prokofiev-like dissonances. There are obvious Bartokian octatonic passages in the development, followed by a Persian, free-rhythm Santur variation section. A dream-like fragment of a Beethoven minuet briefly appears. The work concludes with a restatement of the opening subject in it’s simple, enigmatic ambiguity. And of course, as in all my music, there’s not an original note in the piece. biography Viney-Grinberg Piano Duo Liam Viney and Anna Grinberg, an Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Queensland School of Music, have performed in festivals, major series, live radio broadcasts, and with orchestras in Australia, the United States, and in Israel. Described as “barnstorming” (The Australian) and “unforgettable… the most compelling case for the beauty and variety of two piano repertory this reviewer has ever heard” (Los Angeles Times), the duo is committed to exploring classics of the two-piano repertoire, but also contributes to the on-
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going expansion of that literature through commissioning composers. Thirteen new works have been written for them to date, and they have performed world and Australian premieres of music by composers such as Matthew Hindson, John Adams, and Arvo Pärt. Recent performance highlights include the Jacaranda Series (Santa Monica), the Canberra International Music Festival opening Gala Concert, and the Queensland Music Festival.
Artistic Directors Hannah Lash Christopher Theofanidis
After a decade in the United States, the duo is now based in Australia, where they lecture and perform as ensemble-inresidence at the University of Queensland. Anna is pursuing a Ph.D. in music performance, and both their academic activities center around the Creative Collaboratorium at the University of Queensland, and include co-editing Boris Berman’s book on Prokofiev’s piano sonatas (Yale University Press), the publication of music performance research in the International Journal of Music Education, and a book chapter in a volume released by Ashgate in 2014.
NMNH Assistants Andrew Robson Heejung Park
Both Anna and Liam earned doctorates in piano performance, from Stony Brook University and Yale University respectively. Anna has served on the music faculties of Yale and Chapman Universities, and both Liam and Anna taught at the California Institute of the Arts. They returned to Yale in 2008 to perform on the Horowitz Piano Series, where critic Ivan Katz wrote, “I cannot imagine a finer performance, as this one had everything, illuminating every bar of the music…the audience went wild.”
Manager Andrew W. Parker Assistant Manager Roberta Senatore Conducting Fellow Heejung Kim
Music Librarians Krists Auznieks Natasha Huang Bora Kim Yefim Romanov Valerie Sly Hanna Yukho Tiange Zhou Stage Crew Eric Braley Maria Chlebus Lydia Consilvio Julia Ghica Reese Farnel Matthew Keown John Kossler Richard Liverano Noël Wan
UPCOMING EVENTS Nigel North, lute october 11 Collection of Musical Instruments 15 Hillhouse Ave | Sunday | 3 pm A Decoration of Silence: 16th-century lute music from Italy, France, and England Tickets $25 • Seniors & Yale staff $20 Students $10
Wendy Sharp, violin october 18 Faculty Artist Series Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 4 pm With Joel Wizansky, piano Music by Dvořák, Prokofiev, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Brahms Free admission
Residency with Uliana Lopatkina october 13–15 Special Events Morse Recital Hall | Tue–Thu A lecture-demonstration, performance, and open conversation with Uliana Lopatkina, principal dancer of the Kirov Ballet. Visit our website for details. Free admission
eighth blackbird october 20 Oneppo Chamber Music Series Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm The acclaimed new music ensemble performs Hand Eye by Sleeping Giant, the composers collective comprised of YSM alumni Tickets start at $26 • Students $13
Peter Oundjian, guest conductor october 16 Yale Philharmonia Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Bartók: Divertimento for String Orchestra; Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D, with Adelya Nartadjieva, violin; Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique Tickets start at $10 • Students $5 $3 surcharge for purchases at the door
Peter Frankl: 80th Birthday Celebration october 21 Horowitz Piano Series Celebrating Peter Frankl’s 80th birthday with music for two pianos and for piano four hands, featuring members of the YSM piano faculty Tickets start at $13 • Students $7
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Robert Blocker, Dean