The 2017–18 Concert Season at Peabody Peabody Modern Orchestra Saturday, January 27, 2018
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THE 2017–18 CONCERT SEASON AT PEABODY Peabody Modern Orchestra Saturday, January 27, 2018 Peabody Symphony Orchestra Wednesday, January 31, 2018 Peabody Wind Ensemble Wednesday, February 7, 2018 Peabody Chamber Orchestra Saturday, February 17, 2018 Faculty Showcase Monday, February 26, 2018 STEINWAY. YAMAHA. [ YOUR NAME HERE ] With your gift to the Piano Excellence Fund at Peabody, you can add your name to the quality instruments our outstanding faculty and students use for practice and performance every day. The Piano Department at Peabody has a long tradition of excellence dating back to the days of Arthur Friedheim, a student of Franz Liszt, and continuing to this day, with a faculty of world-renowned artists including the eminent Leon Fleisher, who can trace his pedagogical lineage back to Beethoven. Peabody piano students have won major prizes in such international competitions as the Busoni, Van Cliburn, Naumburg, Queen Elisabeth, and Tchaikovsky, and enjoy global careers as performers and teachers. The Piano Excellence Fund is a new philanthropic focus, created to support this legacy of excellence by funding the needed replacement of more than 65 pianos and the ongoing maintenance and upkeep of nearly 200 pianos on stages and in classrooms and practice rooms across campus. To learn more about naming a piano and other creative ways to support the Peabody Institute, contact: Jessica Preiss Lunken, Associate Dean for External Affairs [email protected] • 667-208-6550 Welcome back! It seems that January and February are just crammed with every conceivable kind of performance at Peabody. We begin this second half of the Peabody concert season with performances by our major ensembles, as well as special performances by our faculty. I’d like to highlight a number of these programs. We kick off this semester with a performance of the Peabody Modern Orchestra in works by four contemporary composers — Steven Stucky, John Luther Adams, Mason Bates, and Peabody alumnus Robert Martin — conducted by Harlan Parker. New music is an increasingly important and dynamic area of focus here at Peabody — not surprising given the enormous strength of Peabody’s composition program coupled with the density of gifted performers. We continue with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joseph Young (in his debut year as Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Artistic Director of Ensembles) in a program that features Peabody student composition and competition winners. And in addition to a performance by our Wind Ensemble, Marin Alsop returns to the podium to conduct the newly formed Peabody Chamber Orchestra in works by Beethoven and Shostakovich with Peabody faculty member and cello soloist Amit Peled. STEINWAY. In addition to the major ensembles, we feature an Adalman Chamber Series program with faculty members Marina Piccinini, Alexander Fiterstein (also new to YAMAHA. Peabody this year), and Amit Peled, with visiting alumnus pianist Alon Goldstein. Another faculty recital features one of Peabody’s newest faculty members, tuba player Velvet Brown, who presents MOJATUBA — as the name indicates, a fusion [ YOUR NAME HERE ] of Modern Dance, Original Works, Jazz Styles and African Influence. In between all of this I hope you’ll catch the Peabody Opera Theatre’s off-campus With your gift to the Piano Excellence Fund at Peabody, you can add your production at the Theatre Project of Jake Heggie’s Out of Darkness: Two Remain. name to the quality instruments our outstanding faculty and students use The Wall Street Journal has called Heggie “arguably the world’s most popular for practice and performance every day. 21st century opera and art song composer.” The Piano Department at Peabody has a long tradition of excellence dating So, as you can see, January and February offer a chock-full, dynamic, and diverse back to the days of Arthur Friedheim, a student of Franz Liszt, and continuing performance calendar showing off a huge range of musical talent and genres at Peabody, with more to come this spring. Stay tuned! to this day, with a faculty of world-renowned artists including the eminent Leon Fleisher, who can trace his pedagogical lineage back to Beethoven. Peabody piano students have won major prizes in such international Fred Bronstein competitions as the Busoni, Van Cliburn, Naumburg, Queen Elisabeth, and Tchaikovsky, and enjoy global careers as performers and teachers. The Piano Excellence Fund is a new philanthropic focus, created to Dean support this legacy of excellence by funding the needed replacement of more than 65 pianos and the ongoing maintenance and upkeep of nearly 200 pianos on stages and in classrooms and practice rooms across campus. To learn more about naming a piano and other creative ways to support the Peabody Institute, contact: Jessica Preiss Lunken, Associate Dean for External Affairs [email protected] • 667-208-6550 HARLAN D. PARKER CONDUCTOR Robert Martin (b. 1952) They Will Take My Island (2009) Steven Stucky (1949–2016) Chamber Concerto (2009) INTERMISSION John Luther Adams (b. 1953) Become River (2013) Mason Bates (b. 1977) Sea Blue Circuitry (2011) Silicon Blues Marine Snow Greyhound Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall Concert A. Friedberg Miriam | 7:30 pm | ORCHESTRA MODERN Please disable all electronic devices including phones and tablets during performances. The use of cameras and sound recorders during performances without the express prior written permission of Peabody is strictly prohibited. For your own safety, look for your nearest exit. PEABODY 2018 27, January Saturday, In case of emergency, walk, do not run to that exit. 2 PROGRAM NOTES They Will Take My Island A key to Stucky’s success was that he Robert Martin wrote the kind of parts performers love to Born 1952. play. Each line is idiomatic and sonorous, demanding individual artistry while They Will Take My Island is a single avoiding grueling toil. In the Chamber movement piece for ten players. The Concerto, the clarinet’s first solo turn, instrumentation is comprised of two for example, shows Stucky’s keen quintets: one made up of wind instruments understanding of that instrument’s (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) ability to leap and swell. Flutes join in, and the other consisting of string playing related material, and then instruments (two violins, viola, cello, bassoons, until the separate woodwinds and double bass). In the late autumn of amass into a flurry of swooping lines that 2008 Max Lifchitz, conductor, composer, quickly dissolve in a sputtering staccato and pianist, asked me to compose a array. There is ample virtuosity on display, piece in honor of the 30th anniversary individually and collectively, but there of the group and concert series he are also understated colorations that founded, the North/South Consonance. simply showcase the characteristic tones I regard Max Lifchitz as one of the most of particular instruments, such as when important and accomplished musicians the horns dwell in their dark low range in of our day, and I was delighted to accept. the somber Largo section near the end. The title is from a painting by Arshile The Chamber Concerto progresses in six Gorky (Vosdanig Manoog Adoian). As connected sections, alternating slow and Paul Griffiths, music critic of The New fast. Each successive slow section is slower York Times, observed: and longer, and each new fast section is faster and shorter, so that the piece arcs “Martin’s interest was apparently not toward its most extreme and intense so much in the subject matter of that material at the end. Stucky provided particular picture as in the general this illuminating outline of the piece: notion of what gives an abstract image wholeness and presence.” Moderato, fluido: Pastoral, introductory. Allegro energico: Mostly brilliant and — Robert Martin scherzando. Prominent soloists, especially oboe. Lento: Lyrical. Prominent soloists, Chamber Concerto especially flute. Steven Stucky Vivo: Scurrying. Born November 7, 1949, in Hutchinson, Kansas. Largo: Darker, ultimately even perhaps Died February 14, 2016, in Ithaca, New York. tragic. The emotional center. Prominent soloists, especially horns. Steven Stucky’s most celebrated music Presto: Very short but brilliant finale. explores individual sounds within larger bodies. He wrote a number of concertos ©2018 Aaron Grad for one or more solo instruments, plus two concertos for orchestra, the second of which earned Stucky the 2005 Pulitzer Prize; the first was a finalist for the award in 1989. He returned to that winning genre, on a slightly smaller scale, in the Chamber Concerto commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in 2009. 3 Become River Sea Blue Circuitry John Luther Adams Mason Bates Born 1953. Born 1977. Steven Schick and I were having dinner The grooves of Sea Blue Circuitry hiccup together. I was just beginning work on from measure to measure as rapidly a large-scale piece for the Seattle as data quietly flashing on the silicon Symphony. So when Steve asked me if innards of a computer, yet the piece is I might be interested in composing a entirely unplugged. While some of my new piece for the St. Paul Chamber recent works fuse orchestral textures Orchestra, I must have hesitated. and electronica, this piece explores ways Deftly, Steve asked me to tell him a of recreating the precision of electronica little about the Seattle piece. I went on through the instruments alone. at length about the music I’d begun to Breathy flute interjections, chirping imagine, finally concluding: trumpets, and even an old typewriter “It’s called Become Ocean. The title bring to life the quicksilver music of the comes from a poem that John Cage opening “Silicon Blues. ” The morphing wrote in honor of Lou Harrison.” beat, at the movement’s climax, begins to lengthen persistently, and by the time Cage observes that the breadth and variety we enter “Marine Snow,” a pulsing of Harrison’s music make it “resemble a prepared-piano figure becomes a distant, river in delta.