Depaul Concert Orchestra Michael Lewanski, Conductor
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Ronald Caltabiano, DMA, Dean Friday, February 7, 2020 • 8:00 PM DEPAUL CONCERT ORCHESTRA Michael Lewanski, conductor Mary Patricia Gannon Concert Hall 2330 North Halsted Street • Chicago Friday, February 7, 2020 • 8:00 PM Gannon Concert Hall DEPAUL CONCERT ORCHESTRA Michael Lewanski, conductor PROGRAM Emilie Mayer (1812-1883) Faust-Overture (1880) LJ White (b. 1984) Community Acoustics (2017) - Brief Intermission - Robert Schumann (1810-1856) Symphony No. 4 in D minor (1841, revised 1853) I. Ziemlich langsam - Lebhaft II. Romanze: Ziemlich langsam III. Scherzo: Lebhaft IV. Langsam: Lebhaft DEPAUL CONCERT ORCHESTRA • FEBRUARY 7, 2020 BIOGRAPHIES Conductor, educator, and writer Michael Lewanski is a champion of new and old music. His work seeks to create engaged connections between audiences, musicians, and the music that is part of their culture, society, and history. He is Associate Professor at the DePaul University School of Music, where he has been on the faculty since 2008; he conducts DePaul’s Concert Orchestra, Ensemble 20+ (20th century and contemporary music), and works with other ensembles. He is conductor of Ensemble Dal Niente, a Chicago-based new music group. Michael was resident conductor of the 2017 and 2019 SoundSCAPE Festivals in Italy. His guest conducting engagements have been wide-ranging and stylistically diverse, working with organizations such as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW Series, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, the State Symphony Orchestra of Turkmenistan, Ensamble CEPROMUSIC (Centro de Experimentación y Producción de Música Contemporánea, Mexico City), the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Chicago Chamber Musicians, Mocrep, and many others. He has led hundreds of world premieres. He was the Conducting Assistant for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago from 2010 to 2014. At the 2012 Darmstadt Summer Courses, Ensemble Dal Niente won the prestigious Kranichstein Music Prize under his direction. Michael has an extensive discography as both a conductor and a producer. A native of Savannah, Georgia, he studied piano and violin; he made his conducting debut at age 13, leading his own composition. At 16, he was the youngest student ever accepted into the conducting class of the legendary Ilya Musin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Michael attended Yale University. His post-Yale education included conducting study with Cliff Colnot and Lucas Vis. Michael’s schedule for the 2019-2020 concert season includes concerts with DePaul School of Music Ensembles; a season of performances with Ensemble Dal Niente; guest conducting appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW Series, the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, and the Grossman Ensemble (Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago); recording projects; and festival appearances. LJ White’s music serves ideals of direct, focused and socially relevant expression, assimilating an unrestricted array of influences through strange and evocative sonorities and rhythms, concise gestures, and apposite forms. He has worked with some of the most exciting performers in new music, including Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble SIGNAL, Ensemble Dal Niente, the JACK Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, DEPAUL CONCERT ORCHESTRA • FEBRUARY 7, 2020 BIOGRAPHIES Third Angle Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, Volti, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, the Talea Ensemble, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. White’s recent and upcoming projects include new works for the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra under Steven Schick, the Spektral Quartet, Chamber Project St. Louis, the Breckenridge Music Festival, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Music NOW series. White’s string quartet Zin zin zin zin was included on the Spektral Quartet’s album CHAMBERS, released by Parlour Tapes+ in 2013, and has been hailed by the New York Times as a “confident miniature, rich in implications,” by New Music Box as “a tour-de-force of quartet writing,” and by the Washington Post as “a terrific satire on the inflections that give language meaning.” His work on the evening-length Everything Means Nothing to Me, created in collaboration with the Sleeping Giant Composers Collective and based on songs by the singer-songwriter Elliot Smith, will be released by Third Angle Ensemble on a Jackpot Recordings album in 2019. White’s extended song cycle for four voices with live electronic processing, The Best Place for This, commissioned by the Quince Ensemble with support from a Chamber Music America grant, was performed in venues across the US in 2017-18, with a commercial recording forthcoming. His choral work Digression on Number 1, 1948, developed over a yearlong residency with Volti in 2014-2015, sets Frank O’Hara’s poetry on the titular Jackson Pollock painting, assembling a variegated fabric of vocal sounds inspired by Pollock’s methods and the painting’s contours. The piece was described by critics as “an evocative form of sonic architecture,” “a fascinating approach to ‘art about art,’” and “imaginative … a polyphony resembling bubbles rising within water which burst and then disappear once they reach the surface… delightful and inventive.” White has won the Craig and Janet Swan Prize, the Margaret Blackburn Composition Competition, an Emil and Ruth Beyer Award from the National Federation of Music Clubs, the Dolce Suono Ensemble Young Composer Competition, the North American Saxophone Alliance Composition Competition, and the American Prize. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Banff Arts Centre, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and his work has been featured at venues and festivals including the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, CULTIVATE at Copland House, the Ecstatic Music Festival, the Resonant Bodies Festival, the Gesher Music Festival, REDCAT, Omaha Under the Radar, and the Composers Conference at Wellesley College. White lives in St. Louis and teaches composition and music theory at Washington University. DEPAUL CONCERT ORCHESTRA • FEBRUARY 7, 2020 PROGRAM NOTES Emilie Mayer (1812-1883) Faust-Overture (1880) Duration: 12 minutes Musicologist Eva Reiger provides a brief biographical sketch of composer Emilie Mayer, whose career as a composer did not begin in earnest until her mid-30s: In 1847 she moved to Berlin, where she studied fugue and counterpoint with Adolf Bernhard Marx and orchestration with Wilhelm Wieprecht. She organized private performances of her music at home and in other houses, as well as in the Königliches Schauspielhaus. Her Sinfonia in B minor (1852), one of her most successful compositions, was given several public performances by Karl Liebig. She went with her brothers to Vienna, and travelled between Berlin, Stettin and Pasewalk, spending considerable money and energy on having her music printed and performed. Later, her financial affairs seem to have deteriorated. Her music was performed in Brussels, Lyons, Budapest, Dessau, Halle, Leipzig and Munich, and was much acclaimed during her lifetime. She was the most prolific German woman composer of the Romantic period, yet most of her music (which is in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek) has remained unperformed since her death. Her output includes chamber music, solo piano works, 8 symphonies, an opera, and a number of overtures. The Faust-Overture from 1880 is one of the last work she wrote that was performed during her lifetime. The Faust of the title is likely Goethe’s; a marking in the score near the end of the work—”she is saved”—is surely a reference to the fate of Gretchen, the young woman seduced by Faust in the Goethe version of the story. The work is in a traditional form: a slow introduction leads to a fast sonata-form section. Its minor-mode first theme is demonic and driven, its second theme bifucated between a charming lilting figure and a church chorale. The development section is turbulent but brief; the recapitulation sees the apotheosis of the church chorale. The long coda eventually achieves a major-mode stability, ending the work affirmatively. Notes by Michael Lewanski DEPAUL CONCERT ORCHESTRA • FEBRUARY 7, 2020 PROGRAM NOTES LJ White (b. 1984) Community Acoustics (2017) Duration: 13 minutes Community Acoustics is inspired by the behavior of natural soundscapes and the organisms that create them. The piece takes its name from the phenomenon of acoustic niche separation (also described as “community acoustics” by scientists,) in which sounds within an ecosystem organize themselves into distinct registral strata and interlocking patterns, enabling communication within species and overall ecosystem function. The piece has two major components: a stream of harmonic simultaneities and other layered pitch material, and a constantly shifting, unpitched environment of sounds evocative of the natural world. Although not all of the sounds in the piece imitate nature (and none need to do so in an overly literal way), the piece as a whole should behave as a natural soundscape exhibiting acoustic niche separation, with value placed on transparency and relative equality of importance among different sound events. Even solos in this piece are not “soloistic,” but are just another part of the fabric, and even expanses of soft white noise are very important with regard to audibility, variation, and interaction with other sounds. This piece also re-examines the typical