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084-01-2S Kyv MEET the MODERNS

084-01-2S Kyv MEET the MODERNS

/996 084-01-2S_ kyv THE BROOKLYN PHILHARMONIC , Music Director January-May 1986, 13th Season r/ MEET THE MODERNS: Program I: DISCOVERIES

, Friday, January 24, 1986 at COOPER UNION, 8:00 pm Saturday, January 25, 1986 at BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC, 8:00 pm LUKAS FOSS, conductor Michael Barrett, piano David Jaffe, mandolin Benjamin Hudson, violin Rosalind Rees, soprano April Lindavald, alto Drew Martin, tenor Walter Richardson, bass The Long Island Symphonic Choral Association Gregg Smith , director

DAVID FELDER Passageways II (N.Y. premiere) HSUEH-YUNG SHEN Humoresque for 15 Players (World premiere) Kenneth Bowen, harpsichord DANIEL ASIA Rivalries (World premiere) Conducted by the Composer DAVID A. JAFFE Would You Just as Soon Sing as Make That Noise? (N.Y. premiere) David A. Jaffe, mandolin Benjamin Hudson, violin Andrew Schloss, percussion intermission ROBERT BEASER Psalm 119 (World premiere) Rosalind Rees, soprano; April Lindavald, alto Drew Martin, tenor; Walter Richardson, bass The Long Island Symphonic Choral Association, Gregg Smith, director Gregg Smith, conductor STEVEN MERCURIO For my Friends (World premiere) Conducted by the Composer MARC BLITZSTEIN Piano (World orchestral premiere) Michael Barrett, piano; Lukas Foss, conductor

The Baldwin is the official piano of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. New This concert is made possible in part with public funds from the City of New York Department of (Urinal Affair, the York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts and with special acknowledgement to the Office of the Borough President of Brooklyn, Howard Golden, President, and Meet The Composer.

The Meet The Moderns programs are pre- sented in association with the Cooper Union, The Brooklyn Philharmonic "Meet The Moderns" IE4(ON Roberta M. Swann, Coordinator, The Great series is specially assisted by a grant from EXXON. Hall. ABOUT THE ARTISTS

LUKAS FOSS (b. 1922)-Composer, conductor, pi- made some 50 recordings of works by twentieth centu- anist, teacher-has been a moving force in the world of ry American composers. In addition to conducting, music for over 30 years. At the age of 18, Foss was wide- Gregg Smith is active as a composer. His works include: ly known as a musical Wunderkind and was already a Festival ofCarols. Bible Songsfor Young Voices, Unicorn, graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he Beware the Soldier and little "operette" based on studied conducting with . Shortly there- Aesop's Fables. They may be heard on Vox Production after he was taken under the wing of Serge records. Koussevitsky, with whom he worked at the Berkshire THE Music Center at Tanglewood. Foss also studied at the LONG ISLAND SYMPHONIC CHORAL under . ASSOCIATION (LISCA) was founded in 1968 by Gregg Smith. This In the area of composition there are some 85 works unique community chorus has gained a for in the Foss catalogue. His earliest compositions date reputation its wide-ranging repertoire, which includes the Monteverdi Vespers, Stravinsky's back to his 15th year. At 19 he composed an oratorio Les the Bach B Minor Mass, based on Carl Sandbag's The Prairie which brought Notes. The Prairie by Lukas him immediate recognition. "He cannot fail to Foss (one of LISCA's several recordings), and raise the jazz standard of music of his generation" wrote Virgil masses by Gregg Smith and the great Finnish com- poser Thomson in the Herald Tribune. At 23 he was the Heikki Sannanto. LISCA gave world premieres of the St. Peter's Church youngest composer ever to be awarded a Guggenheim two masses at at Citicorp and Fellowship. sang them again in Finland, during the 1978 Helsinki Festival. Stylistically Foss's earliest compositions are marked In addition to its Long Island concert series, LISCA regularly New by romantic lyricism, which moved towards a strong performs in York City and ap- peared in neo-classicism. This changed and evolved in turn to Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. the use of aleatoric techniques, described by The Satur- MICHAEL BARRETT is the conductor and music day Review as "Foss's 'neo-classicises' avant garde." His director of the Cathedral Symphony Orchestra at the experiments in ensemble improvisation were the first Cathedral of St. John the Divine in . of their kind. This year, Mr. Barrett has also led the American Sym- His compositions are among the most original and phony and St. Luke's Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie stimulating composed in America," wrote Aaron Cop- Hall. As a pianist, he has appeared as soloist and cham- land. In a recent article in the Village Voice, Tom John- ber musician throughout the U.S., the Pacific islands, son wrote, "Little by he is little knitting together a body and in Europe. Mr. Barrett's interest in the music of of work which may actually speak for contemporary Marc Blitzstein began with a production of "The Cradle culture as a whole more eloquently than any other." Will Rock" in San Francisco which was followed by a As a conductor Mr. Foss is currently Music Director successful New York-Ravinia-London production of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, a position he has held with John Houseman and The Acting Company. This since 1971. In 1982 he became Music Director of the production may be seen on PBS television on Jan. 26 at Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. He was Music Advi- 3:00 p.m., and has recently been released on That's En- sor and Conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony in Isra- tertainment Records. The Piano Concerto came to Mr. el for four years and has guest conducted leading or- Barrett's attention while researching the Blitzstein Pa- chestras both here and abroad. As Music Director for pers in Madison, Wisconsin. Michael Barrett's teachers the Buffalo Philharmonic from 1963-1970, he made include , for whom Mr. Barrett is the city a focus of national attention and a mecca for often engaged as conducting assistant. composers and performers. Lukas Foss began his public career as a concert pian- BENJAMIN HUDSON is the concertmaster of the ist and has appeared with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, as well as with Clarion Cham- and other leading orchestras as a soloist. He is best ber Orchestra and New York Pops. He has appeared as known for his performances and recordings of Bach soloist with 92nd St. Y Chamber Orchestra, the Finn- in D & F minor, Bernstein's The ish Radio Symphony and Helsinki Philharmonic, the ety, and Hindemith's The Four Temperaments, which American Symphony Orchestra, the Hong Kong Phil- he premiered. harmonic and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. A teacher as well as performer, Lukas Foss was pro- He has given recitals in England, Finland, Germany, It- fessor of composition at UCLA. succeeding Arnold aly, Portugal, Spain, and throughout the United Schoenberg, where he established a chamber ensemble States. to teach the art of improvisation. Mr. Hudson is widely recognized for his expertise in contemporary music. He is violinist with Speculum GREGG SMITH. Born in Chicago, composer- Musicae and the Group for Contemporary Music, and conductor Gregg Smith moved to Los Angeles at age was a prize-winner in the Kennedy-Rockefeller Ameri- fifteen. There he studied privately for five years under can Music Competition. He is also first violinist with Leonard Stein, a disciple of , and the Columbia Quartet and a member of the Bach was a doctoral candidate in composition at UCLA. In Chamber Soloists. 1955, while associated with the Los Angeles Japanese Most recently, he was a guest artist with Musica Methodist Church, he organized the renowned Gregg Antigua Cologne, Germany's leading original Baroque Smith Singers, which in 1957 premiered Schoenberg's instrument ensemble. He toured Germany and Hol- Choral Pieces and subsequently collaborated with Igor land with the group and made two recordings for Stravinsky in recording over a dozen of the latter's Deutsche Gramophon. He has also recorded for Co- works. Since then the have toured lumbia, Nonesuch, Musical Heritage, and CRI Re- and recorded extensively. As specialists in modern cords. Mr. Hudson is on the faculty of Columbia music, they have given over 200 world premieres and University. , PROGRAM NOTES

DAVID FELDER studied composition with DAVID A. JAFFE (b. 1955) has written over fifty Donald Erb, Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa and David pieces, including orchestral, solo, chamber, vocal Cope, culminating in a Ph.D. from the University of and computer music. He began studying violin at an California at San Diego in 1983. He has received nu- early age and plays a variety of stringed instruments. merous awards, grants and commissions. An avid He received a BA from Bennington College and a collaborator, he has worked with choreographers DMA in music composition from Stanford Universi- Charlie Vernon, Mary Jane Eisenberg and Elizabeth ty. Recent works include Bristlecone Concerto II for Bergmann, and is currently artistic director of a mandolin, violin, chamber orchestra and computer- major collaborative work commissioned by the La generated tape, which premiered in London, and Tel- Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, with funding egram to the President for string quartet and from the NEA Inter-Arts Program. As a composer, computer-generated tape. Jaffe is currently a Re- Felder aims at the integration of virtuosic perform- search Associate at the Center for Computer Re- ance with technological extension and elaboration search in Music and Acoustics, Stanford. through live and/or pre-recorded electronics. Mr. Would you just as soon sing as make that noise?was Felder is a member of the composition faculty of the premiered by the Mostly Modern Chamber Orches- State University of New York at Buffalo. tra, conducted by Laurie Steele, in 1983. It is "a cele- "Passageways II is scored for celesta, flute, bass bration of rituals and cultures, both ancient and trombone and two percussion. Passage Ways II was modern: a kaleidoscope of peoples who find them- composed in 1980 for Ensemble Nova of Santa Cruz, selves forced to coexist, to step on each other's toes, California, with the assistance of a grant from the to clash and eventually to resemble one another. The National Endowment for the Arts. The musical ma- title is from the poem, 'The People, Yes', by Carl terial is abstracted from an electronic model, a Sandburg. The piece is dedicated to Elon Berger, sample-and-hold function carried by the acoustic born January 28, 1983, as a way of saying, 'Who are piano and articulated by the keyboard percussion. you?'of asking, 'Where do we go from here?'and of Contrapuntal lines develop these materials at indi- saying, 'Being born is only the beginning'. vidual rates in the remainder of the ensemble. Push- (D.A.J.) ing the electronic modeling further, a conceptual fil- ter allows two passes of this process, only interrupted DANIEL ASIA (born Seattle, Wa., 1953) studied by a brief piano cadenza, before closing. I think of composition and conducting with , this work as an energetic, even exuberant study, ex- Krzysztof Penderecki and at Yale. citing in its possibility for future elaboration in sub- Mr. Asia's Piano Set II was presented at the Gaudea- sequent work."(D.F.) mus Festival in the Netherlands in 1979, and Musical Elements premiered in Sand II at that HSUEH-YUNG SHEN. Born in 1952 near Wash- same year. In April 1985 the Northwest Chamber Or- ington, D.C., Hsueh-Yung Shen began studying chestra gave the West Coast premiere of Ossabaw Is- piano at age six and composition at eight. While land Dream. Recent performances of his music have growing up in Ithaca, N.Y. he studied with John taken place inAmsterdam, Helsinki, Copenhagen and Kirkpatrick. Most of Mr. Shen's musical training was New York. Recent commissions have included works in composition: his principal teachers were Nadia for the English bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk and Boulanger from 1962 to 1966, and Leon Kirchner the Oberlin Woodwind Quintet. Daniel Asia is the and Lukas Foss at Harvard University from 1969 to founder and present co-music director of Musical Ele- 1973. He received his DMA in composition from ments. He resides in Oberlin, Ohio, where he is Assist- Stanford University in 1980, and he currently teach- ant Professor of Contemporary Music and Wind En- es music theory and directs the basic piano program semble at the Oberlin Conservatory. at Harvard. Mr. Shen is an accomplished timpanist/ Rivalries is in four movements, played without percussionist, having studied with Frank Epstein in pause. "As the title suggests, the piece pits the indi- and Anthony Cirone in San Francisco, and vidual sub-groups of the orchestra against each other he freelances in the Boston area in that capacity. and is concerned with their breakdown, recombina- Humoresque, for fifteen players (1984, revised tion and ultimate union at the conclusion of the 1986). "The scoring of this work is for clarinet, per- work. The music is characterized by busy and intri- cussion, fortepiano or harpsichord, and twelve cately shifting textures, a propulsive rhythmic sense strings. The keyboard part necessitates the use of a and a pervasive jazz flavor, whose center is the 'jazz small orchestra; the clarinet was chosen as the sole trio' of soprano saxophone, piano and bass" (Jan wind instrument for its enormous versatility of col- Levinson). our and range. The character of this work is modeled after certain musico-dramatic works of Peter Maxwell Davies, particularly in the strong individual treatment of the three solo instruments, and the frequent juxtaposi- tion of diverse musical styles. A drama indeed un- folds with the three soloists generally treated as main characters. The strings have at least two sections where they have the main interest, a late-romantic sentimental interlude, and an extended fugal sec- tion. The keyboard part is almost always used as an evocation of earlier common practice styles, albeit somewhat transformed at times." (H.Y.S.) 1

1 ROBERT BEASER (born 1954, Boston, Mass.) STEVEN MERCURIO studied at the earned his doctorate at Yale, where his teachers in School of Music, and Juilliard, composition included Goffredo Petrassi, Jacob from which he received his Master of Music Degree Druckman and . In 1974, at the in 1982. In 1980 he was awarded the composition age of 22, Mr. Beaser won the Prix de Rome and has award from Boston University's School of Music for since received numerous other awards and grants, as his original work, Long Day's Journey into Night, for well as commissions from Paula Robison, , large percussion ensemble. In 1983 he received a Richard Stoltzman, the St. Louis Symphony and the grant from the Florence Locheim Stohl Foundation Festival for Contemporary Music, Orleans, France. to begin work on For lost Loved Ones, a piece for The world premiere of his orchestral cycle, The Seven large orchestra. Mr. Mercurio is presently assistant Deadly Sins, was given by at the conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic under New York Philharmonic's Horizons '84 Festival, Mr. Lukas Foss. He is also assistant conductor of the Pic- Beaser is co-music director of the contemporary colo Teatro dell'Opera of Brooklyn, whose 1985-86 music group, Musical Elements. season includes Menotti's Amid and the Night Visi- Psalm 119 was completed in September 1983 in tors, Puccini's Le Villi and Mozart's Impresario. Katonah, New York. The composer writes: "Psalm Harold 119 was written in response to a commission from Al- compiled by Ellen 9. exander Broude/ABI Music Publishers, who request- ed a sacred psalm-setting for SSAATTBB chorus a cappella and soloists. In the King James Version, the psalm is divided into 22 eight-line stanzas, each cor- responding to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The relative length and repetitiveness of the text prompt- ed me to selectively abridge and reorder the words so as to bring them into clearer focus. In its musical set- ting the dialectical quality peculiar to Psalm 119 is preserved, while the piece is drawn into three contig- uous sections forming an overall Aa Bb aA arch. Within this structure the psalm becomes something of a narrative journey, through which the text and music evolve in waves towards an ultimate destina- tion of affirmation and praise. Upon the return of the musical `aA' section, the alleluia appears, and, after an extended episode, collapses back into the open- ing, ambivalent appeal to the redemptive power of faith." (R.B.) ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL VIOLIN I BASS TROMBONE Benjamin Hudson, Joseph Bongiorno, Jonathan Taylor concertmaster principal Theodore Toupin Yuval Waldman Joseph Tamosaitis John Rojak Lenard Rivlin FLUTE TUBA Sander Strenger Kathy Fink Andrew Seligson Diane Bruce David Wechsler PERCUSSION Grigory Zaritsky OBOE Richard Fitz VIOLIN II Henry Schuman James Preiss Ronald Oakland, Robert Botti David Frost principal CLARINET Louis Oddo Dale Stuckenbruck Steven Hartman HARP Eugenie Seid Kroop Albert Regni Karen Lindquist Martin Stoner Carol Havelka BASSOON PIANO Kenneth Bowen VIOLA Frank Morelli Bethany Horton Janet Hill, BANJO principal FRENCH HORN Scott Kuney Ronald Carbone Francisco Donaruma LIBRARIAN Karl Bargen Thomas Beck David Frost Russell Rizner Stephanie Fricker MANAGER David Wakefield PERSONNEL CELLO Jonathan Taylor Richard Sher, TRUMPET principal Wilmer Wise David Calhoun Philip Ruecktenwald Michael Rudiakov L

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