UPCOMING EVENTS Noon Concert

Fr i , Fe b 6, 3:10 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Su n , Ma r c h 8, 8 p m , Ja c k s o n Ha l l , Mo n d a v i Ce n t e r Lecture-Recital: Nanyin Music—A Living University Chorus, Alumni Chorus, UC Davis Symphony The Department of Music presents Fossil of Ancient Chinese Music from Fujian, with the Arts College Orchestra. Mendelssohn: Elijah, with Robin Fisher, soprano; Faculty Ensemble of Xiamen University, featuring traditional Catherine Cook, mezzo-soprano; Joseph Palarca, tenor; and Chinese instruments. Free. Eugene Brancoveanu, baritone. D. Kern Holoman, conducting. [$5/7/8 student & child, $10/14/16 adult] POSTPONED Su n , Fe b 8, 7 p m , Ja c k s o n Ha l l , Mo n d a v i Ce n t e r Tu e , Ma r c h 10, 12:05 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Causeway Band Festival Performance, Pete Nowlen, director. Noon Concert: Student Chamber Ensembles. Free. Guest conductors, youth ensembles, and the UC Davis Concert We d , Ma r c h 11, 3:30 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Ives Quartet Band. For participation information, call 530.752.7896. Senior Recital: Christina Cheng, violin. Free. [$4/6/7 student & child, $8/12/14 adult] We d , Ma r c h 11, 7 p m , Ja c k s o n Ha l l , Mo n d a v i Ce n t e r Th u , Fe b 12, 12:05 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building University Concert Band: Winds of Spring, Pete Nowlen, director. Noon Concert: David Deffner, organ. Ten organ chorales of Works by John Philip Sousa, H. Owen Reed, and Charles Rochester Johann Sebastian Bach. Free. Young. [$4/6/7 student & child, $8/12/14 adult] PROGRAM Th u , Fe b 19, 12:05 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Th u , Ma r c h 12, 12:05 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Noon Concert: Pete Nowlen, horn, with Noon Concert: Student Chamber Ensembles. Free. UC Davis and CSU Sacramento horn quartets. Free. Th u , Ma r c h 12, 4:10 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building In Monasterio (1927) We d , Fe b 25, 7 p m , St u d i o Th e a t r e , Mo n d a v i Ce n t e r Student Chamber Ensembles. Free. UC Davis Jazz Band: Swing!, Delbert Bump, director. (1897–1966) Big Band & Jazz Improv Combo. [$6 student & child, $12 adult] Fr i , Ma r c h 13, 3:10 p m , Ro o m 230, Mu s i c Building Colloquium: Sara Doncaster, Brandeis University. Free. Th u , Fe b 26, 12:05 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Noon Concert: UC Davis Hindustani Vocal Ensemble, Fr i , Ma r c h 13, 3:30 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building in F-Sharp Minor, op. 67 (1907) Amy Beach Rita Sahai, director. Free. Guitar Studio Recital: Students of Michael Goldberg. Free. Adagio - Allegro moderato (1867–1944) Adagio espressivo Sa t , Ma r c h 14, 8 p m , St. Ma r t i n ’s Ep i s c o p a l Ch u r c h , Sa t , Fe b 28, 7 p m , St u d i o Th e a t r e , Mo n d a v i Ce n t e r Allegro agitato - Adagio come prima - Presto Rita Sahai (2008–09 artist-in-residence). Sahai, given the title 640 Ha wth o r n e La n e , Da v i s David Nutter, Phebe Gayan Alankar (Jewel of Music), presents classical and original UC Davis Early Music & Baroque Ensembles, Lois Brandwynne, piano North Indian vocal music with guest tabla and harmonium players. Craig & Michael Sand, directors. Stylistic vocal and instrumental [$9 student & child, $18 adult] performance of early music works using replica period instruments. [Suggested donation at door only: $6 student & child, $12 adult] Sa t , Fe b 28, 7 p m , Fr e e b o r n Ha l l , UC Da v i s UC Davis Gospel Choir, Calvin Lymos, director. African and African Su n , Ma r c h 15, 7 p m , St u d i o Th e a t r e , Mo n d a v i Ce n t e r American choral music, including contemporary and traditional Empyrean Ensemble: Hot Off the Press— gospel, spirituals, and hymns. [$6 student & child, $12 adult] All New Works by American , Kurt Rohde, Laurie San Martin, and Mika Pelo, directors. Premiering works by Mario Tu e , Ma r c h 3, 12:05 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Davidovsky, Sara Doncaster, Ed Martin, Petros Ovsepyan, and UC Noon Concert: UC Davis Gamelan Ensemble with artists from Davis’s newest faculty member, Mika Pelo. David Milnes conducts. Bandung, Indonesia. Free. Pre-concert talk at 6 pm, “Demystifying the Music.” We d , Ma r c h 4, 3:30 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building [$9 student & child, $18 adult] Trumpet Studio Recital: Students of Scott Macomber. Free.

Th u , Ma r c h 5, 12:05 p m , Ro o m 115, Mu s i c Building Noon Concert: Zoila Muñoz, mezzo-soprano, and Larisa Smirnova, piano. Spanish music. Free.

12:05 pm, Thursday, 5 February 2009 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 ABOUT THE ARTISTS

A staid New Englander, Quincy Porter was highly respected as a composer, violist, and educator. He studied composition Inspired by the passionate, artistic commitment and unique temperament of American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954), at Yale with , who had taught Charles Ives some 25 years earlier. After a short stint in Paris, he returned to the Ives Quartet creates powerful live-music experiences by presenting fresh and informed interpretations of a carefully New York in 1921 to study with and followed him to Cleveland as a student, then colleague, at the Cleveland curated repertory to American and international audiences. It has established a reputation for passion, precision, Institute of Music. During this time, Porter was absorbed with music, both as a performer (violist in the and provocative programming, bringing underappreciated gems of the string-quartet literature to a wide audience. distinguished De Ribaupierre Quartet) and a composer, and wrote his first two quartets and a number of small pieces. Its repertoire combines established masterworks, neglected scores of early 20th-century America, and specially The latter, perhaps exercises or entertainments, were never published; these pieces, including In Monasterio, were found commissioned new pieces. recently in the Yale archives by Ives Quartet violist Jodi Levitz. Even in his early quartet works, Porter knew exactly how to write for strings. The contrapuntal independence of lines shows the influence of Renaissance polyphony, which he had Much of the Ives’s particular magic is achieved by applying an American musical temperament to established string-quartet studied under Bloch, while the chordal sonorities eschew conventional harmony. conventions of repertoire and performance. This spirit makes the Ives Quartet’s concerts unusually open and effective. The unique perspective of the Quartet, which reflects the rich and varied backgrounds of its members, graces Bay Area Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 67 (1907) Amy Beach (1867–1944) stages during its home season and the concert halls and festival stages of Europe during the summer. In a departure from convention, the Ives Quartet’s players combine both American and European experience and sensibilities, drawing on the Overcoming society’s strictures, Amy Beach became the first successful woman composer in America, “the most performed talent and experience of the international, solo, orchestral, chamber, and recording careers of its artist members. composer of her generation.” Her formidable talents were recognized at an early age and developed in serious piano study with the best teachers in Boston. Her parents allowed her to make her debut at age 16 and to solo with the Boston Symphony Bettina Mussumeli, first violin, received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Julliard School, where she Orchestra at 18, but they opposed a professional career. That viewpoint was reinforced by Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, studied violin with Ivan Galamian, Dorothy DeLay, and Paul Doktor, as well as chamber music with members of an older, prominent physician and amateur musician, whom she married in 1885. Reluctantly, she agreed to limit her the Juilliard, Guarneri, and Cleveland String Quartets. After completing her studies at Julliard, Mussumeli became public performances and, with his encouragement, turned her efforts to composing. Yet she was denied a teacher (deemed co-concertmaster and soloist with the Italian chamber group I Solisti Veneti; performed throughout Europe, Australia, unnecessary for women who supposedly composed by feeling rather than intellect) and learned composition by independent and the Far East; and made numerous recordings for the Erato, RCA, Tactus, and labels. Mussumeli is currently study of European treatises and music. She was, however, allowed to publish her works under her new name, Mrs. H. H. A. on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Beach. After her husband’s death in 1910, she went to Europe as simply Amy Beach to revive a concert career and promote her compositions. She returned triumphantly to Boston in 1914 and devoted herself to concert tours, composing, and Susan Freier, championing women composers. When she died in 1944 in New York City, almost all of her 300-plus works, encompassing second violin, received degrees in both music and biology from Stanford University, where she attended as all genres, had been published and performed. Beach premiered her only Piano Quintet in 1909. Critics found it “truly a Ford scholar. She continued her studies at the Eastman School of Music, where she formed the Chester String Quartet. modern” and “distinctly rhapsodic … in the fashion of our time.” They also politely suggested that the piano sometimes The Chester went on to win the Evian, Munich International, Portsmouth (England), and Chicago Discovery competitions overwhelmed the strings. (She was, after all, showcasing herself!) The equality of the parts indeed is undermined by so much and became faculty ensemble-in-residence at Indiana University at South Bend in 1980. In 1989, Freier returned to her unison string playing against the piano’s Liszt-like figurations and powerful octaves and tremolos, as heard, for example, native Bay Area to join the Stanford faculty and the Stanford String Quartet. She has been a participant at numerous in the opening and closing of the work. But throughout, thematic material is distributed, rather soloistically, to all players. festivals and has performed on NPR, the BBC, and German State Radio. Her recordings can be heard on the Newport In the first movement, after the slow introduction, the first violin presents the first, Brahms-tinted theme and the piano the Classics, Stolat, Pantheon, Laurel, Music and Arts, and CRI labels. second in sonata form with development and recapitulation. The strings in the second movement, in ternary form, have more independence, both in introducing and sharing the melodic material. After a lengthy, if fast, introduction, the last Jodi Levitz, viola, noted professor of viola and chamber music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, was launched movement’s first theme is presented by the violin and the second theme, more slowly, by the viola. There is even a brief fugal on her concert career when she was appointed principal viola soloist with I Solisti Veneti, a position she attained while still treatment of the first theme before the return of the Adagio introduction of the first movement. Typical of Beach’s style, all a student at Juilliard. She has performed as solo violist throughout Europe, South America, the Far East, and the United movements have distinct sections and frequent changes in meter, tempos, and keys. The mercurially chromatic harmonies States. She has recorded works of Cambini, Giuliani, Hummel, Mendelssohn, Rolla, Schoenberg, and Schubert on the suggest another Lisztian influence. —Jane Troy Johnson Concerto, Dynamic, and Erato labels. Levitz holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School of Music.

Stephen Harrison, cello, has been on the Stanford faculty since 1983, when he returned to his native Bay Area to join the newly formed Stanford String Quartet. A graduate of Oberlin College and Boston University, he has been solo cellist of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players since 1985, recording on the Delos, CRI, New Albion, and Newport Classics labels with the ensemble. Former principal cellist of the Chamber Symphony of San Francisco, Harrison has served as artist/ faculty and Music in the Mountains program director for the Rocky Ridge Music Center.

Pianist Lois Brandwynne represents the fourth generation in a family of professional musicians. At Mills College, she studied piano with the revered Russian coach Alexander Libermann and the great Dutch pianist Egon Petri, and she studied composition with Darius Milhaud and Leon Kirchner. Awarded two successive traveling music fellowships from UC Berkeley, she then coached with eminent pianists Leonard Shure in New York and Alfred Brendel in Vienna. She has soloed with numerous orchestras, including the San Francisco and Oakland Symphonies and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. She has given recitals in the United States and Europe to critical acclaim. She is a known enthusiast of contemporary music, having premiered many works by American composers. Her work as a chamber musician is equally extensive. In California, she has performed at Music at the Vineyards and the Claremont and Cabrillo Music Festivals. She has given chamber music recitals with eminent concert artists such as violist Walter Trampler, flutist Doriot Anthony Dwyer, violinist Zina Schiff, and cellists Bonnie Hampton and Emil Miland. Brandwynne has appeared with the San Francisco Chamber Players, the Mills Performing Group, and the Robert Bloch String Quartet and has collaborated often with San Francisco Symphony musicians, including concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, in the popular San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music Sundaes series.