February 11, 2011 " A Musical Feast" concert:
A Tribute to the Paintings of Charles Burchfield

This Friday, at 8pm, the 'Musical Feast' chamber music program at the Burchfield Penney Art Center features a tribute Charles Burchfield
The Musical Feast series has found itself a very comfortable home in the Tower Auditorium, as the resident music ensemble of the BPAC. Charles Haupt, artistic director of the series, always manages to assemble programs of material that you are unlikely to hear in any other local venue. Friday's program showcases three cellists, two of whom are locally based: Feng Hew, associate principal of the BPO; Jonathan Golove, assistant professor at UB; and Carter Enyeart, distinguished professor of cello at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

In an appealing tie-in for the venue, Enyeart will perform Robert Muczynski's Gallery: Suite for unaccompanied cello, suggested by the watercolor paintings of Charles Burchfield. Muczynski composed Gallery: Suite at the behest of filmmaker Harry Atwood for his film about the American Realists, including Burchfield. Like Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Gallery: Suite, made up of nine short movements, captures the private reverie that occurs when the viewer contemplates a painting.

Accompanied by pianist Claudia Hoca, Golove will premiere his new work, Kreisler's Coat: for cello and piano. Golove was inspired by Schumann's Kreisleriana, which was itself based on the fantastical figure of Johannes Kreisler, a character who appears in a number of E. T. A. Hoffmann's fictional writings. Certain synesthetic comments in Hoffmann's work provided his starting point: "Hoffmann described Kreisler as a 'little man in a coat the color of C sharp minor with an E major colored collar,'" Golove says. "Curiously, 'Sehr rasch,' the seventh of Schumann's fantasy pieces, contains precisely this key relationship…I took Schumann's work as the starting point for my own, at the same time making a further association with a musico-historical figure bearing the Kreisler name, namely Fritz Kreisler, whose violin tone has always evoked for me images of golden colors and sensations of warmth."

Golove and Hoca will also perform Séquence pour un hymne à la nuit, by Alain Margoni, a piece reminiscent of the works of Margoni's teacher, Olivier Messiaen, particularly in its series of mysterious chords that suggest Messiaen's synesthetic approach to harmony. Golove is the soloist in Ruth Wiesenfeld's stories still for cello and pre-recorded tape, to a text by Samuel Beckett, while violinist Charles Haupt and cellist Feng Hew will perform Zoltán Kodály's immediately accessible, folk-music-inspired Duo for violin and cello.
Tickets are $5 for Burchfield Penney members, $10 for non-members. For more information, call 878-601 or visit Error! Hyperlink reference not valid..
By Jan Jezioro
Excerpted from:
 Artvoice: Issue V10N06 (Valentine's Day Issue, week of Thursday, Feb. 10)

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