Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the Guarneri String Quartet, The
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Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, The Guarneri String Quartet, The Juilliard String Quartet, The Kronos Quartet, The English Chamber Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, The St. Petersburg Philharmonic (Russia), The San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, The Boston Symphony Chamber Players, and many others. He has worked with composers Milton Babbitt, George Crumb, André Previn, Andrew Imbie, Peter Schickele, Charles Wuorinen, Gunther Schuller, Aaron Jay Kernis, and others. In 2002, Abeshouse founded the Classical Recording Foundation to meet the growing need of artists not supported by major labels to record music about which they are passionate. Recently he has been integrally involved in design and project planning for National Sawdust, an artist-led, non-profit venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There, emerging and established artists can share their music with serious music fans and casual listeners alike. KIM RICH NORTON | librettist/lyricist is a graduate of the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, and a member of ASCAP. Her long-time collaboration with Gregg Smith began with creating Pretty Good Company, a cabaret based on the epigrams of Gomer Rees. They subsequently collaborated on three commissioned children’s operas: Rip Van Winkle (premiered in Manhattan in 1990 and featured at the 1990 Adirondack Festival of American Music), The Story-Teller (premiered under Linda Ferreira’s direction in 1996), and The Dream-Eater (premiered in Manhattan in 2001). In Fallen Angels, Gregg set a number of Norton’s poems as a suite for voice, piano, and clarinet. Norton also collaborates with Finnish jazz composer Heikki Sarmanto. Works include: Manon in Manhattan, a jazz opera (staged readings in Finland and Estonia in 2007) and The Winter War Requiem (premiered in Tampere, Finland, in 2009). Song cycles include North Country Suite, Carnival of Shadows, Bridge of Dreams, and Saci Pererê. A drama with music, John the Baptist, will be premiered in Helsinki in 2017. Another composer she has worked with is David Bennett Thomas: Noon Ghost (recorded on Capstone records by Eileen Clark in May 2006) and A Calendar of Haiku (A Song of Seasons) (premiered by the Gregg Smith Singers in Manhattan in 2007). AlbanyRecordsBooklet_20160710.indd 1 8/10/2016 8:18:54 AM delicious numbers works of Gregg Smith for voice and instruments Eileen Clark, soprano, Thomas Schmidt, piano Ari Streisfeld, violin, Evan Ziporyn, clarinet AlbanyRecordsBooklet_20160710.indd 2 8/10/2016 8:18:54 AM Notes on the Music PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER Rosalind Rees notes “Peter Quince at the Clavier was the first major piece Gregg wrote for me.” The singer of American art song and wife of the composer remembers “a performance, probably the premiere, in the auditorium of the New York Historical Society in 1972.” “Peter Quince at the Clavier” is by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). Stevens led a divided existence, much as did composer Charles Ives, his almost-exact contemporary: in Stevens’s case insurance man by day and avant-garde poet by night. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens came from Pennsylvania German stock and spent some years in Lutheran-sponsored schools. He took an accelerated three-year course at Harvard, graduating in 1900, and made his way to New York (just as Ives had in 1898). As president of the Harvard Advocate, a literary magazine, Stevens aspired to becoming a writer. After a few desultory years, he screwed up his courage and wrote home saying he was going to “devote himself to the ‘literary life’ full-time.” His father mailed the letter back, torn into pieces. Stevens got the message, and off to law school he went, graduating in 1903 and passing the bar in 1904. During a decade of lackluster legal work he married and in 1916 was hired by the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Company. The new job (also Stevens’s last; he was still in harness at the time of his death 39 years later) had one major drawback: He had to leave New York and move to Hartford. While his wife was happy with the move, Stevens, on the other hand, found this change “irksome [and] most tedious . .” No one knows why the reserved insurance man suddenly emerged in 1914–16 as a poet to be conjured with. Among the first evidences of this new “maturity” was “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which appeared in the August 1915 edition of Others, a magazine devoted to avant-garde poetry. Who is this Peter Quince? He is a character in a play, one of William Shakespeare’s “mechanicals,” the carpenter selected to direct the play-within-a-play that is such an integral part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Suggested by Stevens’s title, the idea of Quince playing a clavier—not a piano—immediately sets the poem’s tone. It is strange that there is no reference at all to Quince, or a clavier, in the text of the poem, but music is its central theme: “Music is feeling, then, not sound,” Quince/Stevens declares, linking it directly to his desire: “Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk / Is music . .” But then a second major idea emerges: this “thinking” is compared to the “strain” [there’s music again] / “Waked in the elders by Susanna.” 2 AlbanyRecordsBooklet_20160710.indd 3 8/10/2016 8:18:54 AM and Worldless Music Orchestra. Streisfeld is a member of Shir Ami, an ensemble dedicated to the performance and preservation of Jewish art music. A passionate and committed music educator, he serves on the faculty of New York’s Special Music School, Face the Music, New Music on the Point, and the Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy). Streisfeld attended the Eastman School of Music (BM), Northwestern University (MM), and Boston University (DMA). He has recorded for Mode, Albany, Carrier, Innova, Canteloupe, and New World Records. He lives in New York City with his wife, mezzo- soprano Rachel Calloway, their daughter Eleanor, and mini-dachshund Wesley. EVAN ZIPORYN | clarinetist (b. 1959, Chicago) has performed his own works as a soloist at major venues on six continents. As a composer he has written for Yo-Yo Ma, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Composers Orchestra, Brooklyn Rider, Silk Road Ensemble, So Percussion, Wu Man, and Bang on a Can. He studied at Eastman, Yale, and UC Berkeley with Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, and Gerard Grisey. He has taught at MIT since 1990, where he is currently Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music and Faculty Director of the Center for Art, Science and Technology. His work is informed by his 30-plus-year involvement with traditional gamelan. He received a Fulbright in 1987, founded Gamelan Galak Tika in 1993, and has composed a series of groundbreaking compositions for gamelan and western instruments. These include three evening-length works, 2001’s ShadowBang, 2004’s Oedipus Rex (Robert Woodruff, director), and 2009’sA House in Bali, which was featured at BAM Next Wave in October 2010. Awards include a USA Artist Fellowship, the Goddard Lieberson Prize from the American Academy, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, the MIT Gyorgy Kepes Prize, and commissions from Carnegie Hall, Kronos Quartet, Rockefeller Multi-Arts Program, and Meet the Composer. He co-founded the Bang on a Can All-Stars in 1992, performing with the group and producing their albums for 20 years. Recent recording projects have included collaborations with Maya Beiser, Iva Bittova & Gyan Riley, Anna Sofie anV Otter, Beata Hlavenková, and Waclaw Zimpel. He has also recorded with Paul Simon, Steve Reich Ensemble (sharing in their 1998 Grammy), and Matthew Shipp. ADAM ABESHOUSE | producer/engineer has produced and engineered recordings for labels including Bridge, Telarc, Angel-EMI, SONY, BMG, Naxos, Hyperion, ASV, Arabesque, Cala, Koch International/E1 Music, New World Records, Delos, Albany Records, CRI, Pickwick, Pro Arte, Well Tempered, Centaur, and more, as well as for National Public Radio and the Library of Congress. He has won two Grammy Awards: Classical Producer of the Year and in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo Performance category for producing and engineering Garrick Ohlsson’s Beethoven Sonatas, Vol. 3. The discography of artists that Abeshouse has worked with includes Itzhak Perlman, Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Garrick Ohlsson, Leon Fleischer, Jamie Laredo, Glen Dicterow, Heidi Grant Murphy, 15 AlbanyRecordsBooklet_20160710.indd 4 8/10/2016 8:18:54 AM Orchestra Society of NY, Adina (The Elixir of Love) with Common Wealth Opera, Naiad (Ariadne auf Naxos) with Syracuse Opera, Galatea (Rameau’s Pygmalion), the staged Jonathan Miller St. Matthew Passion at BAM, Bard Summerscape operas, and guested as soloist with Ascension Music, Musica Sacra, Syracuse Symphony, Adirondack Festival of American Music, Newark Cathedral Symphony, and other orchestras and choruses in oratorio, concert, and pops. Clark’s recordings include indie- award winner (best classical vocal) Lemons Descending with Matt Haimovitz on cello (Oxingale Records), Krenek’s Kantate for Soprano and Chorus (Gregg Smith, conductor), Toby Twining’s Chrysalid Requiem (Cantaloupe Records), all the Voices of Ascension CDs (Delos), Kiitos a Vocal Quartet’s All Out of Darkness We Have Light, the soundtrack of the Oscar-winning Dead Man Walking, and solo performances on Raj Bongo, Vox, and Helicon. For a decade, Eileen toured as soloist with Mark Morris Dance Group. She is a member of Toby Twining Music, Voices of Ascension, and a long-time member of Gregg Smith Singers. Her less musical interests include comparative religion, English history, Neolithic sites, freemasonry, astronomy, yoga, hiking, NHL games, environment and peace concerns, her mom Lil, and dogs. THOMAS SCHMIDT | pianist has a multifaceted career as pianist, organist, conductor, and composer. After 20 years as professor of music at Concordia College/Bronxville he was cantor (director of music) at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan for 25 years.