New Music New Haven: Aaron Jay Kernis & Christopher Theofanidis, September 28, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

new music new haven

featuring music by

Aaron Jay Kernis & Christopher Theofanidis and works by Yale School of Music graduate-student composers

Hannah Lash, Artistic Director September 28, 2017 • Thursday at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

Yale School of Music

New Music New Haven September 28, 2017 โ ข Morse Recital Hall

Alishan Gezgin b. 1994

Syzygy I. II. Robert Fleitz, piano

Fjรณla Evans b. 1987

Puddles Leo Sussman, flute Manaka Matsumoto, violin Fjรณla Evans, cello Dong Won Lee, piano Elizabeth Faure, electric guitar Alishan Gezgin, accordion

Eli Greenhoe b. 1994

And It Is Now David Yi, conductor Emilia Donato, soprano Shiqi Zhong, percussion Anna Ellsworth, harp Marlea Simpson, viola Chin To Kelvin Ng, double bass Michael Moy, clarinet

Christopher Theofanidis b. 1967

Flow, my tears, for solo violin Chee-Yun, violin intermission

New Music New Haven

Krists Auznieks b. 1992

Godspeed Kyungah Oh, violin Justin Park, cello Seolyeong Jeong, piano

Aaron Jay Kernis b. 1960

First Club Date for cello and piano I. Prelude to a Pizz.

(Overture to a French Pizz.)

II. Puppy Love James Rosamilia, cello Wenting Shi, piano

Theofanidis

Fantasy for violin and piano (2008) Chee-Yun, violin Nansong Huang, piano

As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence electronic devices.

Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

biography Alishan Gezgin Alishan Gezgin is a composer living in New Haven, Connecticut. His past projects include Nous, a multimedia cantata for soprano, string quartet, and electronics premiered inside James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany light installation in Houston, as well as a work for Thai traditional instruments at the Burapha International Music and Performing Arts Festival in Bangsaen, Thailand, where he was a composer in residence. He received a bachelor of music in composition from Rice University and is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree at the Yale School of Music, where he has studied with Martin Bresnick and Hannah Lash. program note Syzygy Syzygy is a short set of piano preludes emerging from astronomical themes, inspired by the recent solar eclipse that crossed the country on August 21, 2017, drawing millions of people to the path of totality.

the MATA Festival, Ung Nordisk Musik, and the American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC Festival.

As a performer, she has presented her own work at Cluster Festival of New Music, (le) poisson rouge, and at the Music Gallery in Toronto. Fjóla has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and KulturKontakt Austria, among others. She has studied composition with Julia Wolfe, cello performance with Matt Haimovitz, and is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts degree at the Yale School of Music as a student of Martin Bresnick and Christopher Theofanidis. program note Puddles In writing Puddles, my intention was to explore how the reverberating auras of the separate instruments interact with one another. By listening to the material that surrounds the notes rather than the actual notes themselves, I wanted to find a way to delve into the puddles of sound that ripple around each musical moment. The piano acts as a sort of instigator, getting the other instruments to sink into its resonating pool.

biography Fjóla Evans Fjóla Evans is a Canadian/Icelandic composer and cellist. Her work draws inspiration from the behaviors of natural phenomena as well as the droning lilt of Icelandic folk music. Commissions and performances have come from musicians such as Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Her work has been featured at

biography Eli Greenhoe Eli Greenhoe is a composer, instrumentalist, and singer from Brooklyn, New York. His music has been read and performed by the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, Manhattan School of Music Symphony, and Eastman Wind Ensemble, among others. Recent and upcoming champions of his work include conductors George Manahan and Bruno

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

Ferrandis, as well as loadbang and members of Yarn/Wire.

Eli has twice (2011, 2013) been a finalist for ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and in 2012 was awarded the ASCAP Boosey and Hawkes Young Composer Award (honoring Aaron Copland). Additionally, he has attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (2011) and the Yellow Barn Festival’s Young Artist Program (2013, 2014, 2015). In 2014, he was in residence at the Hotel Pupik artist colony in southern Austria, and in 2017 he was a resident composer at the Ostrava Day’s festival in the Czech Republic. In June 2017, he was one of three resident composers at the Next Festival of Emerging Artists in New York City. Eli is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree at the Yale School of Music. program note And It Is Now Moment

by Howard Nemerov Now, starflake frozen on the windowpane All of a winter night, the open hearth Blazing beyond Andromeda, the seaAnemone and the downwind seed, O moment Hastening, halting in a clockwise dust, The time in all the hospitals is now, Under the arc-lights where the sentry walks His lonely wall it never moves from now, The crying in the cell is also now, And now is quiet in the tomb as now Explodes inside the sun, and it is now In the saddle of space, where argosies of dust

Sail outward blazing and the mind of God, The flash across the gap of being, thinks In the instant absence of forever: now. used with permission of the University of Chicago Press It took me a long time to set Howard Nemerov’s Moment. I envisioned it in lots of different musical guises — some overblown, some understated. Ultimately, I just wanted to feel musically ready to work with a poem I felt such profound love for so I could treat it with deference and not accidentally obscure it with clumsy music. And It Is Now, scored for soprano and chamber ensemble, puts the poem in a space where I feel it is given the precedence it deserves. The piece is predicated around a dialogue between Moment and the music that surrounds it.

Throughout the piece, the soprano is given temporal space to present the text relatively unbound by the strictures of the surrounding instrumental music. At times the poem triggers events in the ensemble, at other times the two simply coexist, constantly contextualizing each other with each passing section. At its core, And It Is Now is built in a way that listening to Nemerov’s words is an integral part of performing it — a service I believe his beautiful words deserve. biography Christopher Theofanidis Christopher Theofanidis’ music has been performed by many leading orchestras from around the world, including the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Moscow Soloists, the National, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

symphonies, among many others. He has also served as Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony during its 2006-07 season, for which he wrote a violin concerto for Sarah Chang.

Mr. Theofanidis holds degrees from Yale, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Houston, and has been the recipient of the International Masterprize, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship to France to study with Tristan Murail at IRCAM, a Tanglewood fellowship, and two fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 he was nominated for a Grammy award for best composition for his chorus and orchestra work, The Here and Now, based on the poetry of Rumi, and again in 2017 for his Bassoon Concerto. His orchestral work, Rainbow Body, has been one of the most performed new orchestral works of the new millennium, having been performed by more than 150 different orchestras internationally.

Mr. Theofanidis’ has written a ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, a work for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra as part of its “New Brandenburg” series, and two operas for the San Francisco and Houston Grand Opera companies. Thomas Hampson sang the lead role in the San Francisco opera. His work for Houston, The Refuge, features six sets of international nonWestern musicians alongside the opera musicians. He has a long-standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony and Maestro Robert Spano, and has four recordings with them, including his recent concert length oratorio, Creation/ Creator, which was featured at the SHIFT

festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. this year with the ASO, chorus, and soloists. His work, Dreamtime Ancestors, for the orchestral consortium New Music for America, has been played by more than 50 orchestras over the past two seasons. He has served as a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program, and he is a former faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University as well as the Juilliard School.

Mr. Theofanidis is currently a professor at Yale University, and composer-inresidence and co-director of the composition program at the Aspen Music Festival. program note Flow my tears, for solo violin Flow my tears is a seven-minute elegy for solo violin, written in memory of Jacob Druckman, an important early mentor of mine and someone who along with Martin Bresnick charted the direction of our current composition program here at the Yale School of Music. program note Fantasy for violin and piano (2008) My violin fantasy is a transcription of the second movement of my violin concerto which was written originally for Sarah Chang and the Pittsburgh Symphony with Andriss Nelsons conducting. I wrote the main melody of the work on the day my daughter, Isabella, was born in 2005, and this 7-minute fantasy is dedicated to her.

The whole concerto was recently recorded with Chee-Yun as soloist with the Albany Symphony, David Alan Miller

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

conducting, paired with my viola concerto for a release in 2018 on the Naxos label.

Music, his most recent recognitions include fellowships from the American Academy of Fontainebleau and Aspen Music Festival.

biography Krists Auznieks

program note Godspeed

Auznieks’s multimedia opera NeoArctic, a collaboration with techno producer Andy Stott and Icelandic poet Sjon, premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre (Denmark) in fall 2016, a production that won the Danish Reumert Prize as the show of the year and was a nominee for the Grand Music Award of Latvia. It received stellar reviews in the Danish press. Auznieks’ quintet Piano was recognized as one the week’s best classical music moments by The New York Times.

“The late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realize how far one has to go.

To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light.”

—Katherine Mansfield

Auznieks’ music has been performed at the Beijing National Arts Centre, Shanghai City Theatre, Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, The Kitchen (New York City), Korzo theatre (Holland), Riga Russian Theatre (Latvia), Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Holland), American Music Festival (Albany, New York), and MATA 2017 (New York City).

His music has also been played by Sandbox Percussion (New York City), Antico Moderno (Boston), Yale Philharmonia, and Orkest de Ereprijs (Holland). Commissions include works for the Latvian Radio Choir, Albany Symphony, Yale Percussion Group, pianist David Fung, and Contemporaneous (New York City) and Sinfonietta Riga (Latvia).

Auznieks’s I Exist As I Am, which was broadcast on classical music radios worldwide, represented Latvia at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Finland. Currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical arts degree at the Yale School of

biography Aaron Jay Kernis Aaron Jay Kernis is winner of the coveted 2012 Nemmers Prize and 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and one of the youngest composers ever awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Since 2003, he has taught composition at the Yale School of Music, where he is a professor (adjunct) of composition.

Kernis’s music is featured prominently on orchestral, chamber, and recital programs worldwide, and he has been commissioned by many of America’s foremost performing artists, including sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, violinists Joshua Bell and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and guitarist Sharon Isbin, and by institutions including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Minnesota Orchestra, the Los Angeles and Saint Paul chamber orchestras, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

Kernis has been awarded the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, and he received Grammy nominations for Air and his Second Symphony. His music is widely available on CDs, including those released on the Naxos, Decca, Koch, Dorian, Phoenix, Virgin Classics, New Albion, Cedille, Nonesuch, Arabesque, and Innova labels.

He served as new music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra for ten years and as chairman and director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. In 2011 he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. program note First Club Date First Club Date is a suite of five frequently jazz-related movements for cello and piano and is inspired by my son Jonah’s neartotal immersion into jazz over the last few years. Since the cello is so infrequently found in jazz ensembles, I decided to create a work for him that would traverse many sides of jazz, from ragtime to funk. It was also written for Matt Haimovitz, who premiered the entire work at Tippet Rise in Montana last month.

Two of its five movements will be presented tonight, and I hope to present the rest in the spring in duo with Jonah himself.

The first movement begins like a French overture, with sober double-dotted rhythms. Maybe this presents the severe, somewhat stressed cellist in classical mode who wishes to break out into the blues,

but the opening returns to re-ensnare and re-capture the heart ...

The second is influenced by Jonah’s favorite new jazz band, Snarky Puppy, and their ever-present bass grooves. biography Chee-Yun, violin Chee-Yun’s first public performance at age 8 took place in her native Seoul after she won the Grand Prize of the Korean Times Competition. At 13, she came to the United States and was invited to perform the Vieuxtemps Concerto No. 5 in a Young People’s Concert with the New York Philharmonic. Two years later, she appeared as soloist with the New York String Orchestra under Alexander Schneider at Carnegie Hall and at the Kennedy Center.

In 1989, she won the Young Concert Artist’s international competition and a year later became the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. In Korea, Chee-Yun studied with Nam Yun Kim. In the United States, she has worked with Dorothy DeLay, Hyo Kang (a Yale School of Music faculty member), Daniel Phillips, and Felix Galimir (chamber music) at The Juilliard School.

In addition to her active performance and recording schedule, Chee-Yun is a dedicated and enthusiastic educator. She has held faculty posts and residencies at the University of Cincinnati, Indiana University, and Southern Methodist University, where, in 2007, she was appointed professor and artist-in-residence.

New Music New Haven Staff

Artistic Director Hannah Lash Manager Jeffrey M. Mistri Music Librarian Samuel Bobinski Conducting Fellow David Yi Philharmonia Office Assistant Kristy Tucker Library Antonia Chandler Bora Kim Marta Lambert Gregory Lewis Laura Park Lauren Williams Leonardo Ziporyn Stage Crew Anteo Fabris Jisu Jung Matthew Keown YoungKyong Lee Aaron Israel Levin Gabriel Mairson Dmitrii Nilov Lucas Oliveira Tanner Porter Hillary Simms Sam Seyong Um Daniel Vaitkus Rimbo Wong

Robert Blocker, Dean

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Robert Blocker, Dean