ABOUT THE ARTISTS Noon Concert Tod Brody, flute, grew up in Chicago, where his early studies were with Marie Moulton of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra and Walfrid Kujala of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His collegiate studies were with Paul Renzi at State The Department of Music presents University, and he later studied with Merrill Jordan and Lloyd Gowen. He has also worked in master classes with Alain Marion and Jean-Pierre Rampal. Brody was a member of the Sacramento Symphony for many years, where he frequently Tree Talk was featured as a soloist on both flute and piccolo. A specialist in new music, Brody is principal flutist for the San Alice Benjamin and David Granger, bassoons Francisco ensemble Earplay, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Empyrean Ensemble. He has performed with Ellen Wassermann, piano numerous world premieres and has been recorded on the Arabesque, CRI, Capstone, Centaur, Charisma/Virgin, Magnon, and guest artists and New World labels. He is also the principal flutist for the Sacramento Opera and for Musical Theater, Tod Brody, flute and he appears frequently with the orchestras of the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet. In addition to his Ann Lavin, clarinet activities as a performer and teacher, Brody is director of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of American Composers Laura Reynolds, oboe Forum, an organization dedicated to linking composers and performers with communities, encouraging the making, Victor Avdienko, percussion playing, and enjoyment of new music.

Ann Lavin, clarinet, performs regularly with the Carmel Bach Festival, the San Francisco Lyric Opera, the Symphonies PROGRAM of Monterey and Vallejo, and New Music Works. She has performed with the , the San Francisco Branches for two bassoons and percussion Paul Chihara Opera, the Oakland Symphony, the Fresno Philharmonic, and Symphony Silicon Valley. She is a member of the Laurel (b. 1938) Ensemble, a chamber group of mixed strings, piano, and winds devoted to the performance of rare gems and of Victor Avdienko, percussion contemporary compositions. She has performed at festivals including the Wien Modern in Austria, Shira in Jerusalem, Duettino Eugène Bozza Sebago-Long Lake in Maine, and the Tanglewood Festival. Her principal teachers were Larry Combs, Robert Marcellus, Allegro moderato (1905–91) Daniel Gilbert, and Charles Neidich. She earned her Doctorate of Musical Arts from Stony Brook University. Andantino Allegro ma non troppo Laura Reynolds, oboe, joined the applied faculty of UC Davis in January 2000. She is principal oboist with the California Allegro ma non troppo Symphony as well as a member of the Santa Rosa and Marin Symphonies, where she has appeared as English horn soloist. Reynolds freelances throughout the Bay Area, including performances with the San Francisco Symphony, and is a member Allegretto Robert Broemel of the applied music faculty in the San Francisco Conservatory’s Preparatory and Adult Extension Divisions. Also a chamber Deep Burgundy Broemel music enthusiast, Reynolds was a founding member of Citywinds, a San Francisco-based woodwind quintet dedicated to contemporary repertoire. A former member of the Virginia Symphony, Reynolds has attended the Music Academy of the Sonata for two contrabassoons (orig. for two bassoons) Alan Hovhaness West, the National Orchestral Institute, the Sarasota Music Festival, and the Bach Aria Festival and Institute at Stony Brook. Fuga (1911–2000) A student of Harry Sargous and William Bennett, she received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a Allegro molto Master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Largo Little Duet for two contrabassoons (orig. for bassoon and cello) Georges Bizet Victor Avdienko is a graduate of the , where he earned a Master of Music degree. His teachers include Roland (1838–75) Kohloff and Elden Bailey of the . Prior to that, he earned his degree with top honors from San Jose State University, studying with Anthony J. Cirone of the San Francisco Symphony. As a busy freelance percussionist and timpanist, Two Cuban Dances (arr. for two bassoons by Paquito D’Rivera) Ignacio Cervantes Los Tres Golpes (1847–1905) he can be heard performing and recording with orchestras, chamber groups, and opera companies throughout the Bay Area and Invitacion beyond. As a first-call guest with the San Francisco Symphony, Avdienko has recorded and toured with the symphony regularly Victor Avdienko, percussion since 1996. He has performed with such artists as Elvis Costello, Rosemary Clooney, Joni Mitchell, Sheryl Crow, Stevie Nicks, Mark Isham, Bernadette Peters, Doc Severensen, Sheri Lewis, and Don Henley. Down Beat magazine recognized Avdienko with Sextet Bohuslav Martinů their Student Music Awards as an outstanding jazz/pop/rock drummer, and he was the featured drummer with the Cal Alumni Preludium ( 1 8 9 0 –­ 1 9 5 9 ) Big Band under legendary trumpeter John Coppolla. He was music director, composer, and percussionist for the California Adagio Shakespeare Festival for nine years. As composer and sound designer, he scored King Lear, Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Scherzo Venice, Richard III, Othello, and Henry IV, Part 1, gaining critical acclaim and several awards. Blues Finale Ellen Wassermann began studying piano with her father, Irving Wassermann. She studied with Eduard Steuermann at Tod Brody, flute Juilliard and with John Perry at Oberlin College, where she received her Bachelor of Music degree. Wassermann received a Laura Reynolds, oboe Master’s degree from Peabody Conservatory, where she was a student of Leon Fleisher, and served as staff accompanist and Ann Lavin, clarinet vocal coach. She has won numerous competitions, including first prize in the Mason-Hamlin Competition and first prize in Ellen Wassermann, piano the International Piano Competition. She is very active in the Bay Area in both solo and chamber recitals, and she is currently principal pianist with the Oakland East Bay Symphony. Professor Wassermann has been a member of 12:05 pm, Thursday, 15 January 2009 the music department faculty at California State University, East Bay, since 1972. Room 115, Music Building

This concert is being professionally recorded for the University archive. Please remain seated during the music, remembering that distractions will be audible on the recording. Please deactivate cell phones, pagers, and wristwatches. Flash photography and audio and video recording are prohibited during the performance. Notes Notes

Tree Talk presents music for two bassoons, a combination often overlooked by today’s composers and audiences, in a in an effective and sophisticated salon manner. His music explores Spanish-derived traditional music (zapateo, danza, format the instruments so richly deserve: as soloists. Alice Benjamin and David Granger first began performing as duo canción, punto guajiro, criolla), as opposed to the Afro-Cuban rhythmic and melodic style that became prevalent in Cuban soloists in 1998 with three performances of the John Baptist Vanhal Concerto for Two Bassoons with the San Francisco music during the first half of the 20th century. His best-known works are several elegant Danzas cubanas for piano, two of Concerto Orchestra. They have since performed the Vanhal Concerto with the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra in 1999 and which Paquito D’Rivera has arranged for two bassoons. with the Camellia Symphony Orchestra in 2000. Tree Talk began performing in recital with Ellen Wassermann, pianist, with appearances in Santa Rosa, at UC Davis, for the Incline Village Chamber Music Society. Bohuslav Martinu˚ (1890–1959) spent most of his creative life away from his native Czechoslovakia but is widely regarded, after Janáček, as the most substantial Czech composer of the 20th century. As a young man, he developed quickly as a Paul Chihara was born in Seattle in 1938. He studied composition with Robert Palmer at Cornell University and continued violinist, but his studies at the Prague Conservatory were a desultory record of poor attendance and suspension resulting his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in Berlin, and at the Berkshire Music Center in in expulsion for “incorrigible negligence.” More positively, he found Prague’s cultural life captivating, and his first major Tanglewood. He joined the faculty of UCLA in 1966 and was associate professor of music until 1976. Chihara was composer- outpouring of works came in 1910, when he wrote La Mort de Tintagiles and The Angel of Death for orchestra. During the in-residence for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from 1971 to 1974 and, in 1980, held the same position for the San First World War, Martinů sustained himself by teaching the violin but concentrated on composition. In 1923 he traveled to Francisco Ballet. He rejoined the UCLA faculty in 1996 and was a visiting professor in 1999. He has written more than 15 Paris study with Roussel and was never again to live in Czechoslovakia. In 1927 Koussevitzky took an interest in Martinů film scores, worked as a consultant and arranger for stage musicals, and received commissions from the Boston Symphony, and, in 1927, gave him his hugely successful premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. By the 1930s, many aspects the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the , and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Chihara’s of Martinů’s style were established, and his reputation was growing. While the compositions of the 1930s reveal a penchant works reflect his interest in Asian music through emphases on shifts in colors and limited pitch movement. His music often for Baroque forms and procedures, Martinů also began showing an interest in the folk music and culture of his native explores groups of brief phrases that may be repeated and combined or altered by the use of vibrato, accent, microtones, or Czechoslovakia. Early in 1941, he went to the United States and spent a considerable time in or near New York during the unusual performance techniques. Branches is the second of a series of tone pictures dealing with trees. war years. At the end of the war in Europe, Martinů accepted the offer of a composition professorship at the newly founded Prague Conservatory, but he remained resident in America for the next seven years. In part, this failure to return to Europe Eugène Bozza (1905–91) studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won premiers prix for the violin (1924), was explained by a serious fall Martinů incurred while teaching at Tanglewood in the summer of 1946, and it was only conducting (1930), and composition (1934). Also, in 1934 he won the Prix de Rome for La légende de Roukmani. by 1948 that he was producing work again in quantity. Martinů returned to Europe in May 1953, eventually moving to From 1938 to 1948, he conducted at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and in 1951 he was appointed director of the Switzerland in 1957, where he was based until his death. Martinů’s Sextet dates from his first Parisian years, when the “new” Ecole Nationale de Musique, Valenciennes, an appointment he held until his retirement in 1975. He was made a idiom of jazz was influencing the majority of Western European composers. Although some were attracted to the tragic Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1956. Though his large-scale works have been successfully performed in France, feelings that may be expressed by jazz, Martinů preferred to stress its spirit and irony. The Sextet is set in pure divertimento his international reputation rests on his substantial output of chamber music for winds. Bozza’s music displays the fashion and is clearly intended to entertain by drawing inspiration from the fashionable dance rhythms of its day. The Sextet characteristic qualities of mid-20th-century French chamber music: melodic fluency, elegance of structure, and a (whose wind quintet most unusually calls for a second bassoon instead of the horn) received no performance at the time it consistently sensitive concern for instrumental capabilities. was written, and it is likely that Martinů never heard it in his lifetime.

Robert Broemel played principal bassoon in the Lyric Opera and Grant Park Orchestras in Chicago before becoming principal bassoonist with the Indianapolis Symphony, a position he held for 28 years. Now retired from performing, he currently is studying theory and composition.

Alan Hovhaness (1911–2000) was born in Massachusetts to parents of Armenian and Scottish descent. He began composing in early childhood and took a youthful interest in meditation and mysticism. His early “first-period” works show little of this influence but reflect Renaissance music and, especially in works composed before 1936, employ a ABOUT THE ARTISTS harmonic language reminiscent of late Romanticism. In 1943 Hovhaness rethought his style, influenced by his meditative activities and the disappointments he had experienced that summer at the Berkshire Music Center, where his music was criticized by Bernstein and Copland. The music of this second period is rhythmically and contrapuntally more active, Alice Benjamin, bassoon, received her Master’s degree from the Juilliard School. Subsequently, she was a finalist in the but it is significant that the stylistic attitude and the harmonic and melodic vocabulary remain more or less the same. Metropolitan Opera bassoon auditions and performed with the Met orchestra for three years. Also a member of the New Jersey Hovhaness attained a considerable reputation in the 1950s, a decade during which he traveled widely and embarked on a Symphony, Lake George Opera, and Chautauqua Symphony and Opera, she conceived of and founded the New York Bassoon third stylistic period, which combined elements of the first two periods as well as various experimental and non-Western Quartet, a quartet of women graduates of the Juilliard School. She presented solo, duo, and bassoon quartet recitals in Carnegie procedures. These international tendencies continued into a fourth period, beginning about 1960, in which East Asian Recital Hall. Upon moving to California to join her husband-to-be, William, she was awarded the principal bassoon chair in elements, particularly Japanese and Korean, predominated. The fifth period, ca. 1971, was marked by a return to Western the San Jose Symphony, a position that she held for 16 years. Currently, Benjamin performs with the San Francisco Ballet and influences; these works are particularly rich in scoring and chordal sonority, longer in duration than their predecessors, Opera, California Symphony, and Berkeley Opera as a substitute player. She also plays principal bassoon with West Bay Opera, and generally more spacious and less active. and Pocket Opera, and is a member of the Midsummer Mozart Orchestra.

Georges Bizet (1838–75) might have surpassed many composers active in France in the last third of the 19th century had David Granger, bassoon, received his Bachelor’s degree in 1973 and his Master’s degree in 1975 from the Manhattan it not been for his untimely death at the age of 36. Carmen, first performed three months before his death, has become one of School of Music. Granger was principal bassoonist of the Sacramento Symphony from 1981 until 1996. In 1983 he began the most popular operas of any era. teaching at UC Davis, and in 1985 he became coordinator of the music department’s student chamber music program. Granger works as a freelance musician performing in orchestras throughout Northern California. He currently holds Ignacio Cervantes (1847–1905), Cuban composer and pianist, studied with Gottschalk, with the Cuban composer and positions as principal bassoonist of the Napa Valley Symphony, Sacramento Philharmonic, Modesto Symphony, and Fremont pianist Nicolás Ruiz Espadero, and later at the Paris Conservatoire with Alkan and Marmontel. Cervantes was one of the Philharmonic and is a member of the Oakland East Bay and Marin Symphonies. Granger attended Indiana University’s Early pioneers of native Cuban concert music, strongly influenced by Gottschalk’s piano style and musical ideas. While adhering Music Institute and received a Performer Diploma in Baroque bassoon in 2004. He is a founding member of Passamezzo to European Romantic pianistic and harmonic procedures, he employed Cuban rhythms and melodic and cadential devices Moderno, an early music instrumental ensemble, which released its first CD this past August.