Boston Diary

Acknowledgments Publishers: The Ibis Camerata would like to express its deepest gratitude to all Malcolm Peyton: Mobart Music participants of this project. Many thanks to all the composers who Publications, Hillsdale, NY worked closely with the performers during the rehearsals and Gunther Schuller: Associated recording sessions. Special thanks to Mr. Gunther Schuller, who Music Publishers, Inc. produced and edited his work for this recording, and also wrote the John Heiss: Boosey & Hawkes introductory notes. Many thanks to the New England Conservatory for their help and generosity in making Jordan Hall available for this Pozzi Escot: Publication Contact recording. Special thanks to Jordan Hall management, Brian Yankee, International, Cambridge, MA Jonathan Wulp, and Lisa Nigris for their efforts in scheduling the Mohammed Fairouz: Mohammed recording sessions and obtaining permission to include the archive Fairouz Music Editions Ibis Camerata recording, as well as to Ellen Pfeifer, Public Relations Manager who Kati Agócs: Agócs Editions supplied the photos of Jordan Hall and the composers. A special Producers: thanks to the Callithumpian Consort and their Artistic Director Gunther Schuller and Stephen Drury for letting us use the live archive recording of Pozzi Biljana Milovanovic Escot’s Clarinet Concerto. Many thanks to recording engineers Patrick Keating, Cameron Willey, and Corey Schreppel, and the piano Engineers: technician Mark Whitlock for their contribution to this recording. Patrick Keating, Cameron Willey, Boston Diary Corey Schreppel —Ibis Camerata Malcolm Peyton | Gunther Schuller Editing: Patrick Keating John Heiss | Pozzi Escot Cover Photo: Mohammed Fairouz | Kati Agócs Jordan Hall, Courtesy of New England Conservatory. Recorded in Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1176 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2010 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Malcolm Peyton has directed, conducted, and concertized in many new music concerts in Boston and New York, including most recently The Composers Series in NEC’s Jordan Hall. He is also developing new teaching concepts for understanding modern tonal practice. He has received a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and awards from the NEA, Norlin Foundation, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His music has been performed in Europe and the U.S. and is published by Boelke Bomart/Mobart and the Association for the Promotion of New Music. Well-known and celebrated compositions include Apostrophe for chorus, soloists, and orchestra; Fantasies Concertantes for orchestra; String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2; five song cycles including Four Songs from Shakespeare, Songs from Walt Whitman, and Sonnets from John Donne. Malcolm Peyton received his B.A., and M.F.A., magna cum laude, from Princeton University. He studied composition with Roger Sessions and Edward Cone and piano with Edward Steuermann. He received a Fulbright Award studying in Germany with Wolfgang Fortner; a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Award; a Margaret Crofts Scholarship studying two summers at the Tanglewood Music Center with Aaron Copland and Irving Fine; and citations and awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His music has been recorded on CRI and Centaur. Peyton is a former visiting lecturer at Princeton and Boston Universities. The New England Conservatory has had a long and proud history of supporting the new music of the last hundred years or so. This goes back all the way to the time of George W. Chadwick, Cello Piece the New England Conservatory’s President for thirty-one years (1900-1931), at the time My Cello Piece was composed in 1972 for the cellist Ronald one of America’s most distinguished composers. This nurturing of new music has manifested Clearfield. The piece is a series of variations based on an opening statement which throughout the itself over the years not only by the teaching and creating of music by the Conservatory’s faculty, piece become more and more fantastic and exuberant, giving the impression of an improvisation and but also, at various periods, by producing and/or supporting recordings of contemporary ending with reference to the beginning. In 1986, Andres Diaz played it in the Naumburg International music. This CD represents one of the latest such offerings, presenting works by six of NEC’s Cello Competition, in which he won first prize. Cello Piece has enjoyed numerous fine performances composer family, four faculty and one president. by fine cellists but this recording with Rafael Popper-Keizer is truly outstanding. —Malcolm Peyton —Gunther Schuller The composer Gunther Schuller is, famously, a man of many Many of Schuller’s other purely orchestral works draw explicitly on visual influences while invoking the musical pursuits. He began his professional life as a horn Impressionist and late Romantic tone poems of Debussy and Schoenberg. These include An Arc player in both the jazz and classical worlds, working as Ascending (1996), which was inspired by photographs by Alice Weston. readily with Miles Davis and Gil Evans as with Toscanini; Only one of Schuller’s large orchestral pieces takes the generic title of “symphony”: his colorful he was principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony from Symphony (1965), written for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and premiered that year. Written for the age sixteen and later of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Louisville Orchestra and winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Of Reminiscences and Reflections until 1959. is Schuller’s large-scale memorial to his wife of 49 years, Marjorie Black. One of his first works In the 1950s he began a conducting career focusing largely performed by a major orchestra was his Symphony for Brass and Percussion, played in 1949 by on contemporary music, and thereafter conducted most of Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic. the major orchestras of the world in a wide range of works, including his own. He was central in As in his concertos, Schuller’s chamber music is for a range of both traditional and non-traditional precipitating a new stylistic marriage between progressive factions of jazz and classical, coining the forces, from the four string quartets, brass and woodwind quintets, to works for solo instrument or term “Third Stream” and collaborating in the development of the style with John Lewis, the Modem voice with piano and mixed-ensemble pieces. These works appear frequently on the programs of local Jazz Quartet, and others. and internationally known ensembles throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. His String Quartet No. 3 An educator of extraordinary influence, he has been on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music (1986) is prominent in the repertoire of, and has been recorded by, the Emerson String Quartet, and and Yale University; he was, for many years, head of contemporary music activities (succeeding the Juilliard Quartet has championed his String Quartet No. 4 (2002). Aaron Copland) as well as a director of the Tanglewood Music Center, and served as President of the Not to be overlooked are Schuller’s original jazz compositions such as Teardrop and Jumpin’ in the New England Conservatory. He has published several books and recently embarked on the writing of Future, works that epitomize the composer’s Third Stream approach combining the total-chromatic his memoirs. language of Schoenberg and the structural sophistication of the contemporary classical composer Composition has had a continual central presence in Schuller’s musical life: he has written more than with the ensemble fluidity and swing of jazz. 180 works dating back to the beginning of his career when, at age nineteen, he was soloist in his own Schuller has been the recipient of many awards, including the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his composition Horn Concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Eugene Goosens. His works range written for the Louisville Orchestra Of Reminiscences and Reflections, the MacArthur Foundation from solo works to concertos, symphonies, and opera, and many fall outside of any genre (for which “genius” award (1991), the William Schuman Award (1988), given by Columbia University for reason there can be no such thing as a brief and comprehensive overview of his output). “Lifetime Achievement in American Music Composition,” and ten honorary degrees. He received the Gunther Schuller’s orchestral works include some of the classics of the modern repertoire written for Ditson Conductor’s Award in 1970. In 1993, Down Beat magazine honored him with a Lifetime the major orchestras of the world. Prominent among these are several masterful examples in the Achievement Award for his contribution to jazz. “Concerto for Orchestra” genre, though not all of them take that title. Most recently, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and James Levine premiered Where the Word Ends in February 2009. John Heiss is an active composer, conductor, flutist, and teacher. His works have been performed worldwide, receiv- ing premieres by Speculum Musicae, Boston Musica Viva, Collage New Music, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Aeolian Chamber Players, Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, and Alea III. He has received awards and commissions from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Fromm Foundation, NEA, Rockefeller Foundation, Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, ASCAP, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His principal publishers are Boosey & Piano Trio Hawkes, E.C. Schirmer, and Elkus & Son. My Piano Trio was composed in 1984 on commission from the Macalester Trio, at the time in residence at Macalester College, just north of St. Paul, Minnesota. Heiss has been principal flute of Boston Musica Viva and has performed with many local ensembles, Knowing of my keen interest and various long involvements in jazz, they requested that I write one including the BSO. His articles on contemporary music have appeared in Winds Quarterly, Perspectives “jazzy” movement.

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