559647 bk Jazz Nocturne US 23/11/10 11:48 Page 8 Michael Gurt AMERICAN CLASSICS Michael Gurt teaches at Louisiana State University, the Sewanee Summer Music Center, the National Music Festival and has been Chair of the Louisiana Music Teachers Association. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School. In 1982 he won First Prize in the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, and was a prize winner in competitions held in Pretoria and Sydney, Australia. He has performed as soloist with major orchestras in the United States, South Africa and China. JAZZ NOCTURNE Hot Springs Music Festival Arkansas’ Hot Springs Music Festival pairs world-class mentors with talented pre-professional apprentices on full American scholarship; the two groups play side by side in orchestral, chamber music, solo recital, vocal, choral and opera repertoire. For two weeks, these musicians form a unique community, presenting twenty concerts and over 250 open Concertos of rehearsals for music lovers from across the globe. Over 20,000 people attend Festival events each year, and recordings from its concerts are broadcast nationwide via National Public Radio. the Jazz Age Richard Rosenberg Conductor Richard Rosenberg is the Artistic Director of the National Music Festival. Earlier music directorships include the Hot Springs Music Festival, RESONANCE, the Corpus Christi Symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of California, the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony and the Pennsylvania Ballet. He Johnson • Reser also served on the conducting staffs of the Baltimore Symphony, the Oakland Symphony, the London Classical Players and the Aspen Music Festival, and as Acting Director of Orchestras at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As a Gershwin • Suesse guest conductor, Richard Rosenberg has performed with the Rochester Philharmonic, the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra, Miami City Ballet, and symphony orchestras and ballet companies throughout the United States, Europe and South America. Rosenberg’s teachers include Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Sir Roger Norrington. His numerous orchestrations and his corrected editions of Bach, Schoenberg and the complete orchestral music of Gottschalk and the Créole Hot Springs Music Romantics have received performances by orchestras all over the globe. He appears on ten recordings of American music for the Naxos Records label, and has produced several CDs with jazz legend Dave Brubeck. Festival Symphony Orchestra Richard Rosenberg 8.559647 8 559647 bk Jazz Nocturne US 23/11/10 11:48 Page 2 Gary Hammond JAZZ NOCTURNE Pianist Gary Hammond is a graduate of the University of Washington and the Juilliard School. American Concertos of the Jazz Age His teachers include Randolph Hokanson, Bela Siki, Josef Raieff and Herbert Stessin. He is on the faculties of Hunter College, City University of New York; CUNY; New Jersey City 1 University and Sewanee. He has served as Artist-in-Residence at Emory University, the James Price Johnson (1894-1955): Académies Internationales du Grand Nancy, France; Musiques en Mer, Croatia-Italy; Yamekraw, A Negro Rhapsody (arr. W.G. Still Musikdagar, Sweden; the Colorado College Music Festival, Colorado Springs and the Oregon for piano and orchestra) (1927) 15:32 Coast Music Festival. (First complete recording of the orchestral version) Harry Reser (1896-1965): Don Vappie Suite for Banjo and Orchestra (arr. D. Vappie) 11:07 Once a featured performer in the Preservation Hall Band, banjoist Don Vappie now leads and 2 I. Heebie Jeebies (1925) 2:55 tours with the Créole Jazz Serenaders. Recent recordings include Banjo A La Créole and Swing 3 II. Flaperette (1930) 3:45 Out. With the Créole Jazz Serenaders, his music incorporates the musical legacy of the New Orleans Créole culture. He has transcribed many early jazz recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, 4 Photo: Brad Edelman III. Pickin’s (1922) 4:27 Louis Armstrong and King Oliver. He is a regular guest with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz At Lincoln Center. 5 George Gershwin (1898-1937): A Rhapsody in Blue (arr. F. Grofé for piano and jazz band) (1924) 16:50 Tatiana Roitman Mann (First complete, unabridged recording of the manuscript) Pianist Tatiana Roitman Mann has appeared as a soloist across North America and Europe. She premièred Speak No Evil by E. McKinley at the American Composer’s Forum, and performed 6 For Don by Milton Babbitt in celebration of his ninetieth birthday at Tanglewood’s Dana Suesse (1909-1987): Jazz Nocturne Contemporary Music Festival, where she worked with James Levine, Dawn Upshaw, Yo-Yo (arr. C. Huxley for piano and orchestra) (1931) 4:20 Ma, Charles Rosen and Claude Frank. She holds degrees from the Royal Academy of Music, (First recording of this orchestration) Manhattan School of Music and the University of Minnesota. Dana Suesse: Concerto in Three Rhythms (arr. F. Grofé for piano and orchestra) (1932) 22:54 7 I. Fox Trot: Allegro ma non troppo 9:27 Peter Mintun 8 II. Blues: Adagio 8:48 9 Peter Mintun has become one of today’s most sought after and respected society pianists. III. Rag: Presto 4:39 Among his ever-expanding activities have been the release of four recordings: Deep Purple, Grand Piano, Peter Mintun Piano at The Paramount, and Yours for a Song–Here’s to the Editions courtesy of Richard Rosenberg 2-5, Ira Gershwin 5; Ladies. He has appeared at New York’s Film Forum, Town Hall and the National Arts Club, unpublished materials courtesy of Judith Anne Still and Barry Glover 1, and leads his own Peter Mintun Orchestra at the San Francisco Symphony’s New Year’s Eve Gala at Davies Symphony Hall. Peter Mintun and Robert Stern 6-9 8.559647 2 7 8.559647 559647 bk Jazz Nocturne US 23/11/10 11:48 Page 6 concert in 1927 and was undoubtedly influenced by his met in a rehearsal room three weeks before the concert Jazz Nocturne philosophy. In a 1937 interview, she remarked, and tried to look engrossed with orchestral scores; the American Concertos of the Jazz Age “… there’s certainly no harm in writing [music] in such photo was used in publications worldwide. It was not a form that large numbers of people can enjoy it.” Suesse’s first meeting with Gershwin, and subsequently James Price Johnson (1894-1955): notable. The most popular songs that he wrote include Between her first meeting with Whiteman (1931) she would be a guest in his Riverside Drive apartment Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody, The Charleston, Old Fashioned Love, and If I Could Be and the “Experiment” concert (1932), Suesse’s fame and on his radio broadcast. orchestrated by William Grant Still with You One Hour Tonight. continued to grow with the publication of another short The Carnegie Hall concert on 4th November 1932 Johnson’s symphonic works, according to composer instrumental, Jazz Nocturne. The Nocturne’s first offered (among others) a fox trot arrangement of James P. Johnson, a Gunther Schuller, use “basic Negro musical traditions theme, a restless, major/minor feeling, captured the Ravel’s Bolero, Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody, highly influential that emulated roughly Liszt’s approach in his Hungarian spirit of the Jazz Era; the second theme was an obvious Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite African-American jazz rhapsodies”. Clearly inspired by the success of his candidate for a popular ballad. Since Syncopated Love and Suesse’s Concerto In Three Rhythms. pianist who also wrote friend George Gershwin’s 1924 composition, A Song had been made into such a successful song with Leonard Liebling of The Musical Courier called the popular songs and Rhapsody in Blue, Johnson created his own composition text, Suesse considered making a popular song out of concert “... an arranger’s holiday, and that fact speaks composed classical of similar format and scale in 1927 as his first large- Jazz Nocturne. Her boss, Larry Spier of Famous Music, eloquently for the musical significance of the composers works, was the founder scale semi-classical composition. Johnson felt that as an Inc., wouldn’t hear of it. While Spier was on a vacation, who were experimenting in serious art forms... Miss of the stride piano African-American composer he was perhaps even better the story goes, Edward Heyman created a lyric to the Suesse represents the best type of jazz writing. She idiom, a crucial figure qualified to fuse jazz and classical forms than Gershwin Nocturne’s second strain and submitted it to the rhythms expertly with themes that have character; in the transition from had been. (Johnson and Gershwin had first met when publisher’s acting manager as My Silent Love. Suesse harmonizes adroitly and colorfully; and tells her musical ragtime to jazz. both men were cutting piano rolls for the Aeolian felt she had truly arrived when, in 1933, she went to the story convincingly... The composer played her work Growing up in New company around 1917, and had both written songs for a movies and heard heartthrob Bing Crosby singing My with sure technique and a refreshing measure of feeling Brunswick, New Jersey, show in England in the early 1920s.) The foreword to Silent Love as the opening song in the Mack Sennett and gusto. She had a rousing response from the Johnson studied classical the first publication of Yamekraw describes the intent of short, Blue Of The Night. audience.” and ragtime piano the work as “A genuine Negro treatise on spiritual, Because of the success of My Silent Love, publicity In reviewing a subsequent Suesse/Whiteman techniques, and by his late teens he was performing in syncopated and ‘blue’ melodies by James P. Johnson, for the Whiteman concert at Carnegie Hall took on a concert (16th December 1933), The New Yorker saloons, in dance halls, and at parties in a black expressing the religious fervor and happy moods of the more intense quality.