Current Listing  |  Previous Performances

Program Notes for Sunday, 3/18/12

Percussionist John Bacon just composed his latest work,  ...wind, water, metal, skin…, for flute and percussion, and he notes: "The piece started from the idea of wind chime melodies and the way that the notes combine into different orderings and repetitions. Along with that is the idea of each of the materials in the title and how to express some of their properties through music. One final idea that is used is how the two players coordinate; sometimes very specifically and other times with more casually."

Mozart composed some of his most revolutionary works during the last decade of his life, including several fantasias, the best known being the 1782 Fantasy in D minor, K.397. While the use of the word 'fantasy' implies that the work does not have a strictly defined structure, in this brief work Mozart managed to combine older, baroque elements in the opening minor key sections, along with the homophonic texture, typical of the classical period, in the allegretto section, while even anticipating the future Romantic era, in his treatment of the elements of the aria-like adagio section.  This deceptively simple work is often performed by young pianists but it requires a developed personal sensibility to be fully effective.

For his newest work, Descriptions of the Moon, UB-based composer Nathan Heidelberger,  has set selected moon-themed texts by an impressive range of well-known authors, including Dante, Galileo, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, e.e. cummings, D.H. Lawrence, and Rainer Maria Rilke, focusing on moonlight. Divided into two sections, the first four songs are marked by a gradual waning of activity, echoing the rhythm of the moon's phases, a pattern that is repeated in the final five songs. The composer writes: "While one hopes that most song cycles represent an equal partnership between a singer and a pianist, the singer, as the possessor of the text and thus the sole communicator of semantic meaning, often seems to take on a dominant role. In Descriptions of the Moon I tried to level the playing field as much as possible. In some songs the vocal line propels the music forward, while in others the piano part does. Sometimes the two performers seem to be on different planes entirely, with little overt connection or synchronization between them."

While in recent years Bernard Rands has composed several critically acclaimed works for voice and various instrumental forces, most notably his lyric 2006 paean to the ancient Greek poet Sappho, titled ...now again.... , his brief Memo 7 was composed for solo female voice. Beginning in 1971, with his Memo 1 for Contrabass, Rands has occasionally continued to compose short works for a single instrument, and Memo 7 for Solo Voice, composed in 2000 is the only work in the series composed for voice.
Elliott Carter, who celebrated his 103 birthday this past December, composed his 1980 tour-de-force, Night Fantasies, for four virtuoso pianists who had long championed his works: Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens and Charles Rosen. Another virtuoso pianist, Eric Huebner, recently named Principal Pianist of the New York Philharmonic, will offer his own interpretation of this very challenging work. Carter describes the work as "a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night....In this score, I wanted to capture the fanciful, changeable quality of our inner life at a time when it is not dominated by strong, directive intentions or desires."