“They played with exhilarating confidence and verve ... fluid, fluent, and lithely balletic.” – THE STRAD

MUSIC FROM HOUSE is the internationally-acclaimed touring, resident ensemble based at 's National Historic Landmark home, an award-winning creative center for American music. With “all the richness of its offerings (The Times), and its unique focus on past and present American musical creativity, MCH devises ear-opening, mind-expanding adventures within broad historical and cultural contexts. The only American repertory ensemble ranging widely across 150 years of the U. S. musical landscape Music from Copland House (MCH) provocatively unites past and present, and its programs reimagine the entire concert experience through content, format, and presentation. The ensemble’s adventurous and exhilarating concerts link America’s composers to their musical and cultural ancestry and to the wider worlds of literature, theater, painting, history, nature, and science.

MCH has been engaged by Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, Merkin Hall, University of Chicago, Middlebury Performing Arts, 's Miller Theatre, the Caramoor, Tanglewood, Cape Cod, Bard, SONiC, and Ecstatic Music Festivals, and many other leading North American concert presenters. The ensemble has also appeared at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, the Universities of Louisville, Buffalo, and South Carolina, Brandeis and Auburn Universities, and many others, and has collaborated with the European Broadcasting Union and National Public Radio on a special production showcasing American music and aired in over 20 European countries, and has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, and in other leading media. MCH is in its 11th season at its popular mainstage concert series in Westchester County, near .

“Even when Copland is not on the bill, his spirit guides the programming” (The New York Times). Its vibrant concerts have explored the literary voices of Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Billy Collins; journeyed into the jazz clubs of Harlem, the churches of the South, and the fields of the American heartland; and travelled widely to Latin America, Asia, and Middle East. MCH’s active repertoire includes over 300 works by over 100 American composers, reaching back deep into the 19th century and forward to newly- created pieces. It has commissioned over 50 compositions, including Sebastian Currier’s Static, which won the highly-coveted . Following widely-praised CDs on Arabesque (the first complete cycle of Copland's chamber music) and Koch International (devoted, respectively, to music by Currier and John Musto), the ensemble has a growing discography on the COPLAND HOUSE BLEND label, which includes new or forthcoming recordings of chamber works by Pierre Jalbert, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, and William Albright.

Inspired by Copland's peerless, lifelong advocacy of American composers, MCH also offers children's and family programs, master classes, lectures, residencies, creative and career workshops, mentoring programs, and other educational and community outreach activities. Several of its school partnerships were recognized by the Yale Distinguished Music Educator Award.

MCH's exceptional Founding Artists are widely admired for their instrumental command and musical insights in works both old and new: clarinetist-composer Derek Bermel, pianist and Copland House Artistic and Executive Director Michael Boriskin, flutist-conductor Paul Lustig Dunkel, violinist Nicholas Kitchen (of the Borromeo String Quartet), and cellist Wilhelmina Smith (of the Variations string trio). Essential to the ensemble’s dynamic artistry, character, and many successes are its stellar rosters of Principal and Guest Artists.

FOUNDING ARTISTS

Derek Bermel Michael Boriskin Paul Lustig Dunkel Nicholas Kitchen Wilhelmina Smith Piano Flute Violin Cello

PRINCIPAL AND GUEST ARTISTS

Curtis Macomber (violin) ● Jesse Mills (violin) ● Harumi Rhodes (violin) ● Charles Yang (violin) ● Danielle Farina (viola) Kathryn Lockwood (viola) ● Nicholas Canellakis (cello) ● Alexis Pia Gerlach (cello) ● James Wilson (cello) Michael Barrett (piano) ● Margaret Kampmeier (piano) ● John Musto (piano) ● Linda Chesis (flute) Moran Katz (clarinet) ● Carol McGonnell (clarinet) ● Meighan Stoops (clarinet) Kory Grossman (percussion) ● Ian David Rosenbaum (percussion) ● Amy Burton (soprano) Rachel Calloway (mezzo-soprano) ● Eve Gigliotti (mezzo-soprano) James Martin (baritone) ● Jorell Williams (baritone) and many more!

PRESS

NEW YORK TIMES “All exuberance and bright sunshine. What a well-prepared and confidently managed evening it was.”

GRAMOPHONE “The players who make up Music from Copland House sounds like they relish every phrase.”

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE “A grand and stirring performance. The music came through with searing clarity.”

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE “Excellent musicians in vital performances… Copland would have been proud of all of them.”

LOS ANGELES TIMES "A compelling and carefully crafted program, beautifully and seductively played."

GRAMOPHONE “Essential, a simply splendid collection…undoubtedly the finest performances available of most of these works (Copland Chamber Music).”

PENINSULA REVIEWS “Music from Copland House has built a sterling reputation as a repertory ensemble championing American Music. One has to marvel at the extraordinary artistic quality of these fine musicians, for the playing we heard was absolutely fabulous…The energy level was white hot and totally thrilling.”

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE “In short, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying programme, expertly played by the members of Music from Copland House.” PERFORMANCE: 5 SOUND: 5

TIME OUT NEW YORK (5 Stars) On the Verge, Music from Copland House (Koch International Classics) “A new Koch disc of [Currier’s] chamber music—including the award-winning composition, Static—is like an open-throttle tour through a voracious, ironic, zany and profound musical mind capable of terrifying, turn-on-a- dime revelations. These pieces make for exciting listening…the players of Music from Copland House prove ideal interpreters, careering with fastidious abandon among Currier’s many moods—never falling into chaos, but always, appropriately, on the verge.”

ALLMUSICGUIDE.COM “Musto loves jazzy phrases and a "big city" kind of New York cosmopolitan idiom…He could hardly wish for a better advocate in the crack players in Music from Copland House.”

MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL (UK) “The caliber of musicianship here could be a model for chamber music camaraderie. Watching these players interact with each other was a pleasure all in itself.”

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE “Music from Copland House is our paramount keeper of Copland’s flame.”

NEW YORK TIMES "Beguiling and bracing, incisive and exciting."

The Sound of Mavericks at Copland House By PHILLIP LUTZNOV. NOV. 27, 2015

At Copland House, Michael Boriskin at the piano, Nicholas Kitchen on violin and Wilhelmina Smith on cello at a rehearsal. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

The sun was setting outside Aaron Copland’s home in Cortlandt Manor as November winds began to blow. But inside, amid the cozy music room, the rehearsal was heating up as the pianist Michael Boriskin and the ensemble Music From Copland House rendered a rousing version of Charles Ives’s epic Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano.

Ives’s trio, completed in 1911, is a wild ride whose innovative use of the vernacular — songs like “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Rock of Ages” are abstracted and woven into its fabric — places it among the works that might, in another time, have earned Ives the status later conferred widely on Copland as the man who defined an American identity for the concert stage by incorporating popular American idioms in works like “,” “” and “” in the 1930s and ’40s.

People look to Copland as defining that identity, said Mr. Boriskin, the executive and artistic director of Copland House, during a break in the rehearsal. “But how could he define it when Ives wrote all of those American-sounding pieces 20 years earlier? The answer is that Ives was writing in obscurity.”

Teasing out such quirks of history is one aspect of what Copland House is about. Dedicated to the creation and presentation of American music, the organization focuses on illuminating essential truths about the music. In the process, its programming reveals a web of influences and interests that have shaped it.

Copland became an early champion of Ives’s work, presenting some of his songs as early as the 1920s and, Mr. Boriskin said, regarding him as a fellow traveler in the effort to challenge the European musical establishment and establish a recognizably American sound.

In that spirit, the Ives trio, which Mr. Boriskin and his colleagues — Nicholas Kitchen on violin and Wilhelmina Smith on cello — were rehearsing for what proved a well-received concert on Nov. 15, will lead logically to Copland House’s next program, on Dec. 6, titled “American Mavericks.”

“A piece like this could fit beautifully on that program,” the violinist Tim Fain said, referring to the Ives trio. Mr. Fain will be featured at the Dec. 6 concert at the Merestead estate in Mount Kisco, which Copland House uses as its main performance space.

Mr. Boriskin, the executive and artistic director of Copland House, in rehearsal. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times That program will open with piano pieces by an Ives contemporary, Henry Cowell, prominent among them “Aeolian Harp.” Written in 1923, the piece helped extend piano technique in its call for the pianist to reach inside the instrument and strum the strings. And it did so to great effect, Mr. Boriskin said.

“It is a completely exquisite, delicate work,” he said.

Cowell, a California-bred Berkeley graduate, and Ives, a Yalie from Connecticut, whose trio was inspired by his college days, did not always see eye to eye, especially after Cowell pleaded guilty to engaging in a sexual act with a young man. (He spent more than three years in San Quentin.)

But musically, Mr. Boriskin said: “Ives and Cowell are part of the same American experimentalist tradition. These guys were real iconoclasts.”

Similarly iconoclastic is a onetime Cowell student, Lou Harrison, whose “Grand Duo” will follow the Cowell pieces on the program. Like Copland, Harrison promoted Ives’s work, conducting the premiere of his Third Symphony, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. He was also influenced by it: His own program notes liken the fourth movement of “Grand Duo,” a five-movement work written for the 1988 Cabrillo Music Festival, to an “Ivesian hymn-tune-like section.”

“It is as voracious as anything,” Mr. Boriskin said of the work, which he and Mr. Fain plan to record in the spring.

Closing the concert will be Mark O’Connor’s “Poets and Prophets.” A four-movement trio on which the cellist James Wilson will join Mr. Boriskin and Mr. Fain, the piece moves toward an ending that makes it a natural for pairing with “Grand Duo,” Mr. Fain said.

“Their last movements share a quality of exuberance and intensity that appears restrained only by a force of nature,” he said. “Any moment they might explode.”

Mr. Kitchen and Ms. Smith. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

Born in 1961, seven years after Ives died, Mr. O’Connor is the only composer on the bill who did not know Ives, and the only one who is living. But his work owes much to Ives’s and, for that matter, Copland’s. “Poets and Prophets” draws on the American vernacular, specifically the tones and textures of country music.

The rationale for including the piece revolved partly around its inspiration, Johnny Cash. “He was in a lot of ways personally and artistically the great rebel,” Mr. Boriskin said, “and if you’re talking about mavericks, I think you have to put him up in the forefront of it.”

The rationale extended to Mr. O’Connor himself. Having begun as a teenage fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry, he has branched out to create a singular body of country-inflected concert works that Mr. Fain said allowed him to draw on his experience as both a mature performer of complex musical literature and a young aspirant improvising aboard a raft on the Colorado River.

That kind of expansive sensibility, which in Ives’s or even Copland’s day would have been considered radical, has moved toward the mainstream, Mr. Fain said, propelled in no small measure by Leonard Bernstein, another rebel whose work has been central to Copland House’s programming.

Bernstein and Copland appear together in a photo on a wall in Copland’s home, where, as night fell and rain pelted the picture windows, the November rehearsal moved from the Ives trio to one by a 19-year-old Bernstein. A stylistic mélange, the piece includes elements that would come to define his voice, among them sinuous, bluesy lines that suggest a jazz improvisation.

Even Bernstein, two generations removed from Ives, took critical hits for his explorations in the vernacular. But he persevered, not only in his own writing but in his advocacy of American mavericks, conducting the in the premiere of Ives’s landmark Second Symphony on the radio in 1951.

“That’s the performance where people across the country heard of this unknown composer for the first time,” Mr. Boriskin said.

“American Mavericks” at 3 p.m. on Dec. 6 at Copland House at Merestead, 455 Byram Lake Road, Mount Kisco. Tickets: $25, $20 Friends of Copland House, $10 students. Information: coplandhouse.org or 914-788-4659.

Music Pierre Jalbert, ‘Secret Alchemy’

By Joshua Kosman March 16, 2017

Photo: Aaron Copland House Pierre Jalbert, "Secret Alchemy"

Pierre Jalbert New music The American composer Pierre Jalbert writes music of considerable elegance, but not even that knowledge was enough to prepare me for the breathtaking beauty, lyricism and intricacy of the chamber works on this new disc from the Aaron Copland House in New York state. There are four pieces included here, and each of them creates a distinctive sound world without turning its back on traditional formal strategies — which is part of what makes the music so alluring. The piano quartet that gives the disc its title, for instance, is cast in a familiar four-movement format, yet the music shimmers with an otherworldly strangeness that is mesmerizing. In the two movements of his Piano Trio No. 1, Jalbert contrasts fierce, needling energy with a soulful conclusion steeped in Gregorian chant, and the disc concludes with the quintet “Crossings,” a zesty reverie rooted in the folk music of French Canadian culture. Every work gets a robust and ingratiating performance from the chamber players of the Copland House. — Joshua Kosman

PIERRE JALBERT SECRET ALCHEMY COPLAND HOUSE BLEND

Music from Copland House opens New York series with chamber masterworks by Copland Tue Nov 05, 2019 By George Grella

Music from Copland House performed music of Aaron Copland, Monday night at CUNY’s Elebash Hall.

For those who have been interested in the music at Copland House, but considered the trip up the Hudson to Cortlandt a little too far, there is good news: Copland House concerts now come to Manhattan.

This new series is presented by the CUNY Graduate Center, where it opened Monday night in Elebash Hall, with performances of music by, appropriately, Aaron Copland.

Copland House presents and supports a broad range of American , but why not introduce New Yorkers to the institution with some of the composer’s own chamber music? Monday night, that program was the Sonata for Violin and Piano, Quartet for Piano and Strings, and the Sextet.

This was wonderful music given warm performances, the musicians expressing the sense that they found personal meaning and satisfaction in playing Copland. The Violin Sonata is Copland at his warmest and loveliest, and the Sextet is among his finest compositions. Hearing all this music together reinforces the view that there is no separation between the “modernist” and” populist” sides of the composer—in fact, there are no sides at all and each work is a point on a continuum.

Pianist Michael Boriskin, who is artistic and executive director at Copland House, anchored each piece. Copland has a machine-tooled exactitude to his writing, and Boriskin hit all the marks while also playing with a supple touch and subtle phrasing, always getting the most music out of the score.

Magdalena Filipczak was the violinist in the sonata. The performance sounded full of humanity and empathy, and Filipczak’s keen sound made a clear outline of the sonata’s deceptively simple. structure (Andante, Lento and Allegretto). Boriskin and Filipczak followed a through-line in the piece, bringing out the vast interior journey lying just underneath its surface.

Copland’s personal stamp was also his genius. He used complex elements to produce a clear, plain-spoken language, a sound that appeals to everyone while also being deep in abstract and compositional ways. His music elicits vivid personal responses while never letting on to what he’s thinking and feeling inside. One hears all the familiar elements of the composer’s art—most strongly through the rhythmic design of the Allegro giusto movement—expressed through unfamiliar language, like seeing an Edward Hopper painting interpreted by Francis Bacon. This was a confident and transparent performance.

Copland wrote his (No. 2) in 1933, and it had its premiere in Mexico City in 1934, from the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico, with Carlos Chavez conducting. Leopold Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky scheduled performances, and both later cancelled, saying the work was too difficult to prepare in the time available. Frustrated by this situation, Copland retooled the work, reduced the symphony to a Sextet (string quartet plus piano and clarinet).

What makes the music so difficult is its rhythmic complexity. The first movement in particular has metrical changes nearly every bar. But what was impossible in 1937 is now well within reason. The rest of it is not so difficult, and the Sextet too shatters artificial distinctions of modernism and populism.

The rhythms work perfectly with the short, stabbing phrases and the wide open textures to make music that is completely exciting, grabbing the body and fascinating the mind.

With its concentrated form, and through the sinewy and confident performance Monday night, the Sextet came off as the most appealing of all Copland’s works, even more so than the sensuous pleasures of Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and the Violin Sonata.

Derek Bermel was the excellent clarinetist Monday night (he is also a terrific composer). The musicians played with an eagerness about tackling the challenges of the writing and grabbing hold of the vitality inside. The uncomplicated statement of the middle Lento movement was sympathetic without being plaintive.

Music From Copland House presents works by , Karim Al-Zand, Gabriela Lena Frank, Viet Cuong, and Robert Sirota, 7:30 p.m., December 2. cuny.edu/mch

Music From Copland House New Release: Great Chamber Music Chemistry

By JOHN CLARE •

COPLANDHOUSE.ORG

A quartet of chamber works with Music From Copland House are on a new release, Secret Alchemy, written by Pierre Jalbert. Jalbert is a professor at Rice University, and serves as one of the artistic directors of contemporary chamber ensemble Musiqa. Three world premiere recordings of Secret Alchemy, String Trio, and Crossings, joined by a new recording of his Piano Trio No. 1 are on this Copland House Blend Recording. WBAA's John Clare spoke to Pierre about this stunning release.

RECORDINGS. Aaron Copland Chamber music Music from Copland House, with Borromeo String Quartet, assisting artists (Arabesque, two CDs).

By John von Rhein.

While the Greatest Hits of Aaron Copland's orchestral output ("Appalachian Spring" in particular) are played over and over, we hardly ever get to hear any of his chamber music, which represents a varied and important facet of his catalog. Thus Arabesque deserves our thanks for gathering, for the first time, all of Copland's published chamber music (except for, unfortunately, the Nonet for Strings) on two discs in vital performances by Music for Copland House, the resident ensemble of the late composer's home near New York City, a creative center for American music that's on the National Register of Historic Places.

The chronological survey begins with Copland's 1923 Movement for String Quartet (which he later recycled as the Prelude to his Symphony for Organ and ) and ends with a wistful pair of threnodies for flute and string trio (1971) written in memoriam to Igor Stravinsky and Beatrice Cunningham.

Of the works bracketed by these early and late works, two masterpieces occupy key positions -- "Vitebsk" for piano trio (1928), with its pungent quarter-tones and biting accents; and Sextet for string quartet, clarinet and piano (1933, revised 1937), whose buoyant energy belies its rhythmic complexity. There's also the poetic and plain Violin Sonata (1941-42) and the brooding Quartet for Piano and Strings (1950), one of his few successful forays into 12-tone composition.

The excellent musicians here include Nicholas Kitchen, Jennifer Frautschi and Curtis Macomber violins; Paul Lustig Dunkel, flute; Derek Bermel, clarinet; Michael Boriskin, piano; and the Borromeo Quartet. Copland would have been proud of them all. The recorded sound is airy and lifelike. Recommended to Copland enthusiasts and chamber music lovers alike.

Quintets and Sextets: Music from Copland House: Derek Bermel, Clarinet, Michael Boriskin, Piano, Paul Lustig Dunkel, Flute, Nicholas Kitchen, Violin, Wilhelmina Smith, Cello, Guest artists: Timothy Fain, Violin, Danielle Farina, Viola, Miller Theatre, New York City, 18 February 2005

Copland: Sextet (1933, 1937) Sebastian Currier (b. 1959): Static (2003) (World Premiere) Prokofiev: Overture on Hebrew Melodies, Op. 34 (1919) John Musto (b. 1954): Sextet (2000)

“Terror is not a word that normally comes to performers’ minds when they think of Copland’s music, but the Sextet…still strikes fear into otherwise intrepid musicians.” These program notes don’t lie. Indeed, with the exception of the more benign middle section, the Sextet is filled with plenty to alarm even seasoned musicians. The opening Allegro vivace charges off like a rocket, with angular lines and the rhythms constantly being jerked around as if offstage handlers were manipulating the players, and the final movement, “precise and rhythmic,” is a veritable minefield of hurtling syncopations. But the Copland House ensemble made it all look easy, and none of the composer’s diversions seemed to faze anyone in the least. The second Lento has a contemplative clarinet solo, with Derek Bermel at his best, along with his outstanding colleagues Nicholas Kitchen and Timothy Fain (violins), Danielle Farina on viola, Wilhelmina Smith on cello and Michael Boriskin in fearless form on piano. This Sextet is one of Copland’s most appealing works from a listener’s point of view, and I suspect many who are fatigued by overplayed warhorses like Appalachian Spring might investigate this and more of the composer’s smaller and lesser-known creations. (To make this research easier, Copland House has issued an excellent two-disc set on Arabesque, The Chamber Music of Aaron Copland, with this work and others.)

The news of the night was a world premiere by Sebastian Currier, whose intriguing Static sometimes reminded me of Kurtág, with perhaps some Messiaen thrown in, but Currier’s marvelous, cloud-like creation wouldn’t be mistaken for either. “Remote” contains a series of softly pulsing chords separated by full rests and evokes a timeless stasis, quickly dispelled by the playful “Ethereal” that follows. The third, titled “Bipolar”, begins slowly but soon exults in something like a surreal barn dance before subsiding into the initial haze once again. “Resonant” gives the violin and cello a duet before following with trills, whilst “Charged” has a piccolo leading a wild, shrieking vivace, here with the expert Paul Lustig Dunkel. The final “Floating” returns to the slow-moving chords, this time adorned with harmonics. I confess that to date my exposure to Mr. Currier’s work is limited, but I found this piece riveting, in no small part due to the patient, extraordinarily cohesive performance.

After the interval came a strongly conceived Overture on Hebrew Melodies by Prokofiev, turning the Copland House crew into something vaguely reminiscent of the best klezmer band you’ve ever heard, with enough wit for two or three concerts. The cool and soulful Mr. Bermel was again particularly winning, but the caliber of musicianship here could be a model for chamber music camaraderie. Of course, it comes out in the results, but watching the players interact with each other was a pleasure all in itself.

To close the evening was John Musto’s exuberant Sextet – not only well crafted but clearly a crowd-pleaser (no contradiction), and one could only sit back and enjoy the musicians’ digging in to this meaty score with relish. Following a scorchingly dramatic cadenza by Mr. Bermel, the last movement races faster and faster to a tension-filled ending that is almost guaranteed to have the audience cheering with its virtuosic demands, and here, it worked. And praise for the insightful programming, which paired two complementary works in the first half, and in the second showed the (no doubt completely coincidental) links between Prokofiev’s small gem, and Mr. Musto’s bit of opalescent fire written eighty years later.

̶ BRUCE HODGES

MUSIC REVIEW | MUSIC FROM COPLAND HOUSE An Evening of Extremes, Exuberant Yet Simple

By BERNARD HOLLAND

ome music makes listeners happy and performers anxious. Indeed, much of Thursday's program by Music from Copland House at the Miller Theater beamed cordially outward from the stage while testing the poise, athleticism and sight reading skills of these seven musicians to their limits. What a well-prepared and confidently managed evening it was.

Copland's Sextet for strings, clarinet and piano is a slimmed-down version of the Short Symphony. This is rhythm and meter changing its mind every few seconds; music that never lets us sit comfortably and settle our thoughts.

For the average player accustomed to Beethoven in 4/4 time, the Sextet is bull riding in a rodeo. On Thursday, it was all exuberance and bright sunshine.

John Musto's Sextet was no easy conquest either. Here relentlessness comes in Keith Bedford for The New York Times Music From Copland House different modes: in the first movement, it's busy, cheerful yet with a near performed selections by Copland machinelike steadiness; in the second movement, at a strolling, easygoing, still and Prokofiev on Thursday steady pace; and at the end, in the form of vigorous dancing. evening.

Mr. Musto gives us some rapid-fire imitative counterpoint and a klezmer-colored clarinet part that fitted well with its companion piece on the program, Prokofiev's "Overture on Hebrew Melodies." Derek Bermel, who had much to do this evening, was the first-rate clarinetist.

Especially impressive was the other piece here: Sebastian Currier's "Static (2003)." On the heels of Copland, Mr. Currier's six movements slowed our musical clocks to the speed of a passing cloud.

Chords drone, decorated by flute, clarinet and piano figures. There are occasional frantic outbursts, but more characteristic is long, ardent melody in unison playing against florid birdcalls from the piano, both elements reminiscent of Messiaen. "Static" shows a delicate ear for sound colors achieved by simple combinations; they do more with less. This is music with a distinctive voice.

Michael Boriskin was the evening's pianist. Nicholas Kitchen and Timothy Fain were the violinists, Wilhelmina Smith the cellist and Danielle Farina the violist. Paul Lustig Dunkel played the flute in the Currier piece. Admirable musicians all.

Label: Koch International Classics Catalog #: 7691 Spars Code: n/a Composer: Sebastian Currier Performer: Michael Boriskin, Derek Bermel, Curtis Macomber, Nicholas Kitchen, Wilhelmina Smith, Paul Dunkel, Jean-Claude Velin, Marie-Pierre Langlamet

Number of Discs: 1 Recorded in: Stereo Length: 1 Hours 11 Mins.

CURRIER Verge.1 Static.2 Night Time.3 Variations on “Time and Time Again”4 • Derek Burmel (cl);1,2 Michael Boriskin (pn);1,2,4 Curtis Macomber (vn);1 Nicholas Kitchen (vn);2 Jean-Claude Velin (vn);3 Paul Lustig Dunkel (fl);2,4 Marie-Pierre Langlamet (hp);3 Wilhelmina Smith (vc)2 • KOCH 77691 (71:14)

Colleague Robert Carl’s review of string quartets by Sebastian Currier (Fanfare 29:6) whetted my appetite for this composer, but I had not managed to hear his music until this disc came along. Now I can appreciate and indeed echo Carl’s enthusiasm. Currier’s voice is a vital one. He seems to have synthesized many of the isms, techniques, and styles of the last 40 years (including neo-Romanticism and film-score mood painting) into a personal language all his own. His music is predicated on contrast, operating through the juxtaposition of disparate episodes in a mercurial and instinctive but ultimately convincing way.

Each of the four works on this disc is comprised of several short movements. Verge, a trio for violin, clarinet, and piano, opens with a prelude lasting under one minute. Consisting of rapid scale passages, this movement is designated almost too fast (although it is not too fast for Michael Boriskin, a brilliant pianist who has done as much as anyone for contemporary music). The second movement, almost too slow, has a completely contrasting atmosphere, hymn-like and contemplative. All nine movements have such instructions: almost too mechanical, almost too calm, and so on, the composer’s idea being that a line is posited by such indications which may be approached but not crossed. (Typical thinking for a composer who professedly likes to push the envelope.) Currier’s theory produces exciting and committed music-making from members of the Music from Copland House ensemble, of which Boriskin is the artistic director. Verge has been recorded by its commissioning performers, the Verdehr Trio—who else?—yet it would be hard to imagine a better performance than this one.

Night Time (1998) is a five-movement sonata (though not designated as such) for the uncommon but well-suited combination of violin and harp. In the first movement, “Dusk,” the violin sings a pensive melody over a slightly impatient rocking figure from the harp— perhaps suggesting a lullaby. Currier employs the two instruments as protagonists: the impulsive harp keeps trying to jolt the violin out of its reverie, but without much success. The movement finishes quietly, the original mood undisturbed. An effective piece it is, and inexplicably nocturnal. The second movement, “Sleepless,” acts as a scherzo: busy and suitably restless, rather like Ravel’s night moths in Miroirs. It is followed by the freely expressive “Vespers,” notable for atmospheric textures from the harp and a yearning, wide- ranging line from the violin. “Nightwind” is a piece of pure impressionism, fleet-footed and muted; while the last and longest movement, “Starlight,” brings writing of expansive and almost pictorial beauty. Currier’s writing for harp is thoroughly idiomatic in this beguiling work, making it a substantial addition to that instrument’s chamber repertoire.

In his Variations on “Time and Time Again” (2000) for flute and piano, the composer follows Britten’s example (in Lachrymae) by placing the theme at the end, rather than at the beginning. The theme Currier uses is an original piece with something of a bluesy, cocktail-hour feel. Four contrasting variations are separated by a “ticking clock” representation of time passing. A quirky coda of skittish piano figuration and single staccato notes from the flute literally lifts the music up into the stratosphere and silence.

At 27 minutes, the longest of these works is the prize-winning quintet Static (2003), for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. (Piccolo and are substituted in the fifth movement.) Currier portrays static in both senses of the word: as an unchanging or repetitive state, or as the “white noise” static you might hear on a radio receiver. These two definitions form the starting point for much varied and interesting music, some of it evoking the minimalists (though by no means as static as their work can often seem), and some utilizing tone-cluster chords associated with the 1960s avant-garde. The fourth movement (of six), resonant, forms the emotional crux of the work. It presents static as timelessness, in the form of a slow, drawn out cello melody (occasionally doubled by violin, which ultimately takes the theme into higher realms), wending its placid way through a Messianesque landscape of twittering piano above and hieratic chords below. As in the other pieces, musical incidents from moment to moment are finely drawn; time may have slowed but Currier never loses focus.

Performances are first-class from all concerned—Boriskin and harpist Langlamet strike me as completely in tune with the composer’s pictorial imagination—and the recording quality is warm, clear and revealing. Currier’s writing shows a hypersensitive ear for color alongside an unerring ability to pinpoint a specific idea in musical terms. Among the many impressive discs of contemporary American chamber music currently available, this one stands out.

FANFARE: Phillip Scott

From Rags to Religion in a Holiday Concert Copland House Holiday Concert to Feature African-American Songs, Hymns and Spirituals

By PHILLIP LUTZ

Clockwise from top left, Will Marion Cook, whose work will be featured in the Copland House holiday concert; Aaron Copland’s former home in Cortlandt Manor; Florence Price, one of three female composers represented in the event. Credit Clockwise from top left, New York Public Library; Susan Stava for The New York Times; University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections

For all the richness of its offerings, Copland House, the organization devoted to showcasing American music, was perennially lacking in programming ideas when the December holidays rolled round.

“We could never get a handle on it,” Michael Boriskin, a pianist and the group’s artistic and executive director, said last month.

That changed in October 2011, when Mr. Boriskin experienced what he called a “thunderclap” moment during a rehearsal for Copland House’s annual fund-raising gala. It occurred as he and the baritone James Martin began running through the bracing spiritual “Ride On, King Jesus,” a highlight of the African-American-themed event.

“We weren’t 10 seconds into the piece,” Mr. Boriskin recalled as he settled into a couch at Aaron Copland’s former home in rustic Cortlandt Manor, the Copland House headquarters. “I looked at James and said, ‘This is going to be our holiday program, and you’re going to do it with us.’ ”

And that is what happened. “Hol’ de Light,” a concert of African-American music, was held at the Merestead estate in Mount Kisco in December 2012. On Dec. 14, that theme will return, with additional tunes and a new title, “Wake Up Singin’: A Copland House Holiday Celebration of African- American Songs, Hymns and Spirituals.”

Left: The Copland House Artistic & Executive Director, Michael Boriskin, right, and the baritone James Martin (Tracy Ketcher). Right: Howard Swanson, who wrote music for the Langston Hughes poem “Joy.” Credit Left, Tracy Kercher; Maurice Seymour/Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago It will be the first holiday concert that a Copland House ensemble has performed at Tarrytown’s historic Lyndhurst estate, and the first performance of the holiday program since material from it was featured on the inaugural CD of the new Copland House Blend label.

The program will include the same 18 pieces as the CD, covering nearly 125 years of rags, art songs, serio-comic novelties, and works that draw on religious subjects, some arranged with a modernist bent. The pieces will be reordered somewhat to fit better within a loose narrative framework.

“It’s thematically conceived as a kind of joyous winter journey,” Mr. Boriskin said.

The musical journey will open with the tune from which the show takes its title: “Gonna Wake Up Singin’,” a brief, rousing introduction by Florence Price (1887-1953), one of the first prominent black female composers of symphonic work and one of three women represented in the show.

The evening’s theme will become explicit with the second tune, “On Ma Journey,” a spiritual arranged by Edward Boatner (1898-1981), a legend of concert spirituals in Chicago. Mr. Martin described him in an email as the “Billy Strayhorn of the spirituals movement,” in that he “did more than he gets credit for.” (Mr. Strayhorn’s work is sometimes credited to Duke Ellington.)

A series of spirituals based on the Nativity will follow. Among them are “Little Child of Mary,” “Behold That Star” and “The Christmas Bells” — all composed or arranged by Harry Burleigh, one of several African-Americans born in the years after the Civil War, whose work influenced the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak during his late-19th century residency in New York.

The program’s middle section will offer a few jaunty moments, with pieces like “Pine Apple Rag,” by Scott Joplin, and “Aunt Hagar’s Children’s Blues,” by W. C. Handy, before turning toward the complex, even risqué, with the poem “Joy,” by Langston Hughes.

The poem’s syntax, described by Mr. Boriskin as idiosyncratic, is matched by Howard Swanson’s musical setting, which borrows from the mid-20th- century avant-garde. Both follow the protagonist through a series of conflicting emotions before he finds what the title promises “in the arms of the butcher boy.”

Despite the piece’s brevity — it runs less than a minute — Mr. Martin and Mr. Boriskin, in separate interviews, both said it presented one of the program’s biggest technical challenges, placing a premium on the performers’ dexterity and simpatico relationship.

“We have spent hours on that piece,” Mr. Martin said by telephone from his native Mississippi.

After “Joy,” the mood will darken with “Troubled in Mind,” by Will Marion Cook, another Dvorak associate, who, in a departure from the theater pieces for which he was known, fashioned what Mr. Martin likened to a popular spiritual. The aim, he said, was to convey a “cry for help from the troubles of the world.”

As quickly as it darkens, the atmosphere will brighten with the spiritual “Hol’ de Light,” arranged by the Harlem Renaissance fixture Hall Johnson, before moving to the penultimate offering, “Amazing Grace.” As arranged by Hale Smith, who died in 2009 following a career that straddled classical and jazz composition, the well-worn spiritual sounds like a kind of modern ballad, with fragile harmonies that heighten the meditative qualities of the piece. “It’s almost as though you’re thinking of the words and not singing them,” Mr. Boriskin said.

By the time “Amazing Grace” appears on the program, just ahead of the show’s rollicking closer — “Ride On, King Jesus,” arranged by Mr. Johnson — the scope of the program should be evident.

Because the American musical landscape is so varied, Copland House rarely revisits similar subject matter in its Westchester concerts. But African- American music offers “such a rich, yet still underexplored, heritage,” Mr. Boriskin said in an email, that it warrants the attention the organization is lavishing on it.

The 2012 holiday show led to an all-Hughes program last April at Merestead that featured Mr. Martin and music by contemporary figures, like John Musto and , as well as historical ones, like William Grant Still. When this year’s holiday show concludes, Copland House will have presented three major shows with African-American themes in Westchester within two years.

The holiday show will then go on the road, to Mississippi, where Mr. Boriskin and Mr. Martin, who both attended the and have known each other for nearly 20 years, are scheduled to perform in Tupelo and Jackson.

“We want these concerts to place this music in a wider context,” Mr. Boriskin said, “so that it can fit more prominently on our cultural radar and our social radar.”

“Wake Up Singin’: A Copland House Holiday Celebration of African-American Songs, Hymns and Spirituals” is at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 14 at Lyndhurst, 635 South Broadway, Tarrytown. Tickets: $25 adults and $14 children.

Daniel Asia, Contributor Music I (Mostly) Hold Dear: The Music of Pierre Jalbert

Pierre Jalbert writes music that is direct, speaks to the mind, heart, and soul, engages with notes and rhythms, traverses a musical landscape, and expresses a wide range of emotion. His music is connected to the past and continues that past into the present and future most notably through his engagement with the Catholic and mystical legacies.

Pierre Jalbert hails from Vermont, and the name is pronounced with a hard “J”. He studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and then at the University of Pennsylvania during its years of Crumb, Wernick, and Rochberg, a trinity (although not like the Holy Minimalists of Pårt, Gorecki, and Tavener) whose predilections were toward the mystical, the hard-edged, and a reformed . Jalbert’s music is a welcome combination of all of these influences.

In this regard, do remember that no matter how iconoclastic a composer may be, he is only the sum of all that he has heard and experienced in his life, and what he chooses to accept or reject. Then it is a matter of digging deep into one’s soul to find what is there to express, and having the willingness to do this day after day. It includes the development of a personal craft and a language that is expressive.

Jalbert has developed such a craft and language that is broad and expansive, yet exquisitely defined. It includes the most tonal of materials, as in the most known common chords, to atonal elements (set based sonorities) as well as the extended techniques of glissandi, prepared sounds on the keyboard, and harmonics, among others. His rhythms can go from pulsatingly minimal to slowly atmospheric. Each work and movement is paced just so and always of the right length; there aren’t any non-essential notes thrown in for the hell of it. This is very hard to do, by the way, and separates the journeyman from the master. Some composers write a lot and figure that history will separate the chaff from the wheat; others write slowly and meticulously. Jalbert is of the latter type, and thus each piece is a finely wrought statement.

On a new disc, Secret Alchemy- Music from Copland House, three of the four pieces average sixteen minutes and the fourth comes in at twelve minutes. All are multi-movement works, which means large- scale architecture is to be found, and of a very satisfying sort. They are played expertly and the sound is to perfection. Standouts are violinist Curtis Macomber and pianist Michael Boriskin who appear on most of the pieces. This is a good place to start to become familiar with Jalbert’s fine music.

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