Paulsson & Dimmock CD Booklet

Anders Paulsson - soprano saxophone & Jonathan Dimmock - organ World Premiere Recordings* of Music by Judith Cloud, David Conte & Anders Paulsson

David Conte...... Soliloquy*/ Published by E. C. Schirmer Music Company

Anders Paulsson...... Lilies of Peace*/ Copyright Anders Paulsson Music Production 2019

Anders Paulsson...... Hymn for Peace*/ Copyright Anders Paulsson Music Production 2019

Arvo Pärt...... Spiegel im Spiegel/Published by Universal Edition A.G., Wien

*dedicated to and premiered by Anders Paulsson & Jonathan Dimmock

Recorded live in Sofia Church in Sweden on August 15, 2019

Recording engineer: Håkan Sjögren SonoConsult

Microphones: Jörgen Thuresson

Mastering: Thomas Eberger Stockholm Mastering American organist, Jonathan Dimmock (www.JonathanDimmock.com) is well-known internationally as a concert soloist of exceptional merit. He is the Principal Organist at the Legion of Honor Museum, Organist for the San Francisco Symphony, and Music Director at both a church and synagogue in San Francisco. A graduate of Oberlin and Yale, he had the unique privilege of being the only American to serve as Organ Scholar of Westminster Abbey under the tutelage of Simon Preston. Continuing his career in the United States, he served three Episcopal cathedrals: St. John the Divine (New York), St. Mark’s (Minneapolis), and Grace (San Francisco). Jonathan lives in San Francisco, where, for over twelve years, he was Music Director at St. Ignatius Church (the largest Jesuit church in the United States) and where he bases his extensive freelance career. He is one of the few organists in the world to tour on six continents and is especially renowned for his interpretations of the music of Bach and Messiaen.

Jonathan has recorded more than fifty CDs including a Grammy Award-winning CD of Mahler Symphony 8 with the San Francisco Symphony. In addition to hundreds of listings on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and other online music sites, he has been interviewed and featured on numerous radio and television stations including National Public Radio, Radio France, BBC3, ABC (Australia), MTV2 (Budapest), BCC (Barbados), and SABC (South Africa). His teachers and mentors include Olivier Messiaen, Gillian Weir, Jean Langlais, Peter Hallock, Haskell Thomson, William Porter, Thomas Murray, Ton Koopman, Harald Vogel, Naji Hakim, and Frédéric Blanc.

Jonathan’s intellect and creativity are decidedly those of a visionary. His numerous blog writings, his vocation as a teacher, his passion for communicating, and his personal focus have been the impetus for his founding of five nonprofit organizations, including the highly acclaimed American Bach Soloists (ABS), Artists’ Vocal Ensemble (AVE), and, most recently, The Resonance Project – using live music to transform conflict and find common ground. This project (www.Music-Resonance.org) has led him to interview some of the greatest musicians in the world, all of whom share his excitement about the interface between music and neuroscience. The project has garnered attention from the United Nations, the U.S. Dept. of State, and President Obama. Jonathan is deeply committed to sharing the transformative power of music with the whole world. Since his Carnegie Hall debut in 1992, Anders Paulsson (*1961) is widely recognized as one of the finest soprano saxophonists in the world. His musicianship has inspired a succession of over 50 international composers to write solo concertos and chamber music for him.

He has performed concerts in 27 countries and in major music centres like Alice Tully Hall in New York, Berlin Philharmonie, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Wigmore Hall in London, Palau de la Musica in Valencia, Moscow International Performing Arts Centre and Kitakyushu Performing Arts Centre i Japan. In 2012 Anders Paulsson was awarded the Royal Gold Medal Litteris et Artibus for his prominent artistic achievements as soprano saxophonist. Anders has performed over a thousand of concerts as a soloist and released 23 CDs. His pioneering CD recording Swedish Concertos for Soprano Saxophone with music by Anders Eliasson, Rolf Martinsson & Sven-David Sandström has received praise in Gramophone as a real high. He has performed as soloist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Stockholm, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Gothemburg Symphony Orchestra and St. Petersburg Philharmonic and has collaborated with conductors such as John Storgårds, Lü Jia, Okku Kamu, Eva Ollikainen, Johannes Gustavsson, Fabio Mastrangelo & Lan Shui. After classical saxophone studies at the Royal College in Stockholm and with Jean-Marie Londeix in France, a Fulbright ITT International Fellowship enabled him to study with Joseph Allard and Bob Mintzer at Manhattan School of Music, New York City. As a composer, Anders Paulsson was awarded “The Golden Clapperboard” for best original film music in 1994 together with Johan Söderqvist. 2013-2015 Anders Paulsson was Composer-in-Residence at the MIAGI Youth Symphony Orchestra in South Africa: www.miagi.co.za and composed Celebration Suite for their 20th Jubilée of Democracy. Many of his performances have been broadcast on international television and radio and his recordings have received high acclaim from music critics and audiences worldwide. At the Nobel festivities in 1993 Anders Paulsson performed for Nelson Mandela when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and for the Nobel Prize winners of Medicine in 2003. Anders Paulsson seeks to use music to promote international understanding, peace and biosphere stewardship. He is the co-founder of Coral Guardians www.coralguardians.org, an organization that combines music and science to raise awareness about the world’s coral reefs and what is needed to safeguard them for future generations. www.anderspaulsson.com Composer Judith Cloud’s gift for vocal writing was born out of her own rich experiences as an accomplished mezzo- soprano soloist. Born in 1954 in Reidsville, NC, Cloud sang with her musical family in church services, where her first mentor, Dr. Ruth Graham, introduced her to music ranging from Bach to Britten. Later, Cloud entered the North Carolina School of the Arts, where she studied voice, conducting and composition. Her composition studies were with Robert Ward and Roy Johnson. Vocal instruction was with Janice Harsanyi, a champion of 20th-century American composers and an amateur composer, herself.Cloud’s music, built on romantic principals, is at once lyrical, rhythmically challenging and harmonically intriguing. Her catalog includes numerous vocal, choral and instrumental works. Most notable is her cantata "Feet of Jesus” set to poems by Langston Hughes.

In 2009 she was awarded first place for the Sorel Medallion in Choral Composition with her piece for chorus and guitar, “Anacreontics.” Cloud has created a niche for herself in the pantheon of American composers of art song.

Program notes by composer Judith Cloud on Nina Simone:

I became interested in Nina Simone in the spring of 2018. She was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, my own hometown. I knew little about her while I was growing up. Later I heard she was an activist and the sentiment around town I observed was that there was far from a feeling of pride about who Nina Simone was. If that really was the case (and I have no proof of it) there was a dramatic change with the creation of The Nina Simone Project in 2006. I was still ignorant of this, having lived in Arizona for most of my adult life. But researching Simone led me to an immense feeling of pride for my hometown when I read about the support she had from the white community in the 1940’s. Without that encouragement (very unusual for the south at that time!) and financial support, as well as artistic support from a local piano teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich, “Mrs. Mazzy”, as she was called and who Nina treasured and respected all of her life, Nina Simone would never have reached the world with her unique prodigious musical talent. She was a diva by all counts and her original compositions reflect a balance of words with music that is far superior to what her contemporaries were creating. A bronze sculpture of her by Zenos Frudakis now stands on Main Street in Tryon.

“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” Simone asked in an interview. “That to me is the definition of an artist.” The feminist writer Germaine Greer declared “Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.” What would Nina Simone say today? I think she’d be mad as hell and screaming about revolution, probably still advocating for the use of violence.

I’ve used some of Simone’s energetic and compelling motives in this composition. It is my own tribute to her genius and to how she gave to the world so much even though she was plagued with agonizing physical and mental ailments. That suffering seems to me an undercurrent in each video I have watched of her concerts. What I would give to have been in her presence for one of those concerts! She embodied music as an art form, revering her musical “teachers”, Bach, especially. That she never achieved her main goal of becoming the first female African-American classical pianist of world stature is perhaps not so sad when you think of how many more people she moved with her talent expressed in jazz and folk popular idioms. But she was prone to violence and many people, even those closest to her, were often fearful of her rage. She was misunderstood for so many years and it was only in the last two decades of her life that her moods were somewhat controlled through use of prescription drugs. The musical life that began for Eunice Waymon when she was seven years old playing the piano and organ for services at St. Luke’s C.M.E. Church (where her mother was the preacher) in Tryon, North Carolina. That musical life traversed many cities in many countries. She died at the age of 70 in 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, France.

David Conte´s composition Soliloquy for soprano saxophone and organ was arranged especially for Anders Paulsson and Jonathan Dimmock, adapted from a version for solo organ which was commissioned in honor of organ builder Walter Holtkamp's retirement in 1996. The work is cast in a simple ABA form. The principal idea is an angular, lyrical melody, at once both proud and shy, accompanied by a gently pulsating ostinato. The central section becomes more animated and rises to a declamatory climax. The character of the opening music returns in the final section. David Conte (b. 1955) is the composer of over one hundred works published by E. C. Schirmer Music Publishing, including six operas, a musical, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, chamber music, organ, piano, guitar, and harp. He has received commissions from Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, the Dayton, Oakland and Stockton Symphonies, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the American Guild of Organists, Sonoma City Opera and the Gerbode Foundation. In 2007 he received the Raymond Brock commission from the American Choral Directors Association. His six operas are The Dreamers; The Gift of the Magi; Firebird Motel and America Tropical (both commissioned by San Francisco theater company Thick Description, for whom Conte was Composer-In- Residence from 1991 - 2010); Famous, based on the book Famous for 15 Minutes - My Years with Andy Warhol by Ultra Violet; and Stonewall. Conte's operas have been produced at the Berlin International Opera, USC, University of Minnesota, Hidden Valley (Carmel CA), and many other colleges, universities, and regional companies. He has composed songs for singers Barbara Bonney, Thomas Hampson, Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Catherine Cook, Marnie Breckenridge, and Brian Thorsett, and his work is represented on many commercial CD recordings. His musical, The Passion of Rita St. James, was produced at the San Francisco Conservatory in 2003. David Conte co-wrote the film score for the acclaimed documentary Ballets Russes, shown at the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals in 2005, and composed the music for the PBS documentary, Orozco: Man of Fire, shown on the American Masters Series in the fall of 2007. In 1982, Conte lived and worked with Aaron Copland while preparing a study of the composer’s sketches, having received a Fulbright Fellowship for study with Copland's teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris, where he was one of her last students. He was also recipient of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship and an Aspen Music Festival Conducting Fellowship. David Conte earned his Bachelor’s degree from Bowling Green State University, where he studied with Wallace DePue, and his Master’s and Doctoral degrees from Cornell University, where he studied with Karel Husa and Steven Stucky. He is Professor of Composition and Chair of the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and has taught at Cornell University, Keuka College, Colgate University and Interlochen. In 2010 he was appointed to the composition faculty of the European American Musical Alliance in Paris, and in 2011 he joined the board of the American Composers Forum. In 2014 he was named Composer in Residence with Cappella SF, a professional chorus in San Francisco. In 2016 his American Death Ballads won the NATS Art Song Composition Award, and were performed at the NATS conference in Chicago by tenor Brian Thorsett, and pianist Warren Jones.