559180 bk Corigliano US 2/15/07 11:37 AM Page 8 AMERICAN CLASSICS Also available: John CORIGLIANO String Quartet Snapshot: Circa 1909 A Black November Turkey Jefferson FRIEDMAN String Quartet No. 2 8.559302 Corigliano Quartet 8.559180 8 559180 bk Corigliano US 2/15/07 11:37 AM Page 2 John Corigliano (b. 1938): Music for String Quartet Composer’s Note the sense that the feelings that were sparked by them Jefferson Friedman (b. 1974): String Quartet No. 2 conjured up the music that references them. I wrote The medium of the string quartet is the most personal String Quartet No. 2 while I was studying with John named after him, Corigliano’s work has been performed and intimate of all to me, and so String Quartet No. 2, Corigliano. In many ways, this piece, and all that has by some of the most visible orchestras, soloists and like all of my quartets, is a diary entry. Much of the followed from it, would not have been possible without chamber musicians in the world, and recorded on the music I write is programmatic in one way or another, him, and so it is a great honor and pleasure to share this Sony, RCA, BMG, Telarc, Erato, Ondine, New World, but when I sit down to write a quartet, I try to write recording with him and his namesake. CRI and Naxos labels. something that is as close to who I am as a person and a Corigliano’s music most often builds his composer. There are certainly moments in this piece that characteristic expressive melody into large-scale represent specific events to me, but they only matter in Jefferson Friedman structures of compelling logic and transparency. His reputation as a conservative is inaccurate: attentive listening reveals a maverick imagination, an artist who Corigliano Quartet has taken traditional notions like “symphony” or “concerto” and within them found a language all his Hailed as one of today’s most exciting and dynamic string quartets, own, drawn as much from his American forbears as the Corigliano Quartet has won the acclaim of audiences and critics from the explorations of the post-war European avant across the United States. The Quartet is dedicated to the presentation garde. “You must understand the importance of the of new American music and its dedication and passion for new works past,” says Corigliano, “but if you don’t realize the has made it one of the most sought after interpreters of contemporary importance of the present and the future, you don’t music today. For its efforts in bringing contemporary music to a nourish that — and our art form does not — then it’s wider audience, the quartet was presented with the ASCAP/CMA like a tree that grows no new shoots. Without new Award For Adventurous Programming. Founded in 1996, the shoots the tree dies.” Corigliano Quartet rapidly climbed the ranks of the chamber music The composer was born in 1938 into a distinguished world. One year after its formation, the group drew the attention of musical family: his father, John Corigliano, Sr., served Isaac Stern, who invited them to the Isaac Stern Chamber Music as concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for Workshop at Carnegie Hall. The next year, the Corigliano won the almost thirty years, encompassing the tenures of both Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition and followed that up by Toscanini and Bernstein. The younger Corigliano first winning both First Prize and Grand Prize at the 1999 Fischoff came to prominence in 1964 when, at the age of 26, his Chamber Music Competition. The group has performed in many of Sonata for Violin and Piano was the first and only the nation’s leading music centres, including Carnegie Hall, Weill winner of the chamber-music competition of the Spoleto Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center and the Library of Cortona, Italy, 2005 Festival of Two Worlds in Italy. Support from Meet the Congress. Recent performances have taken the Corigliano to Photograph by J. Henry Fair Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, the Guggenheim Foundation followed, as well as Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC. They John Corigliano is one of the finest and most widely important commissions. For the New York have also made appearances in Italy, Mexico, and Korea, where they gave the Korean première of Corigliano’s recognized American composers. Among the dozens of Philharmonic he composed his Vocalise, Concerto for Farewell Quartet. They have been heard in numerous radio broadcasts, including NPR’s All Things Considered and citations, doctorates, and other honors he has received Clarinet and Orchestra and Fantasia on an Ostinato; Performance Today, and WFMT-Chicago’s Live From Studio One. The Quartet has held residencies at the Juilliard are included all of the most important music awards — for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he School, where the members served as teaching assistants to the Juilliard String Quartet; Indiana University, where several Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize for his Second wrote Poem in October; for the New York State Council they served on the faculty as Visiting Lecturers; Dickinson College, and the New York Youth Orchestra Chamber Symphony, a Grawemeyer, and an Academy Award for on the Arts he wrote the Oboe Concerto; for flute Music Program. Under the mentorship of Atar Arad, the group formed while its members were students at Indiana. his score to François Girard’s 1997 film The Red Violin. phenomenon James Galway he composed the Pied In addition to Naxos, the Corigliano has recorded for CRI, Albany, Aguava New Music and Bayer Records. For One of the few living composers to have a string quartet Piper Fantasy. The Boston Symphony Orchestra more information on the Corigliano Quartet, please visit their web site, www.coriglianoquartet.com. 8.559180 27 8.559180 559180 bk Corigliano US 2/15/07 11:37 AM Page 6 section, which also introduces a cadence derived from Jefferson Friedman: String Quartet No. 2 commissioned and introduced his Promenade Overture, comparably lavish and powerful sense of vocal theatre. A the Prelude and the trio of the Scherzo. An ornamental as well as the Second Symphony; the National Symphony Dylan Thomas Trilogy revisits and combines three of recitative-like section in the three lower strings follows, American composer Jefferson Orchestra commissioned the evening-length A Dylan Corigliano’s earlier settings of this poet (Fern Hill, Poem and in time the first violin joins them in a unity of Friedman received his M.M. Thomas Trilogy. in October, and Poem on His Birthday) into a “memory playing. This highly free section, in which all four degree in music composition Perhaps the most important symphonist of his era, play in the form of an oratorio,” scored for boy soprano, players play in unison with interspersed chords, in May 2001 from the Corigliano has to date written three symphonies, each a tenor, baritone, chorus, and orchestra. Mr. Tambourine demands that the quartet play exactly together, in spite Juilliard School, where he wholly separate landscape unto itself. Symphony No. 1, Man; Seven Poems of Bob Dylan boldly refashions texts of the music’s constantly changing tempo. An studied with John Corigliano, (1991) commissioned by Meet the Composer for the by the iconic songwriter into a compelling monodrama, impassioned climax leads to a long descending passage, and his B.A. from Columbia Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was composer- by turns savage, yearning, and hallucinatory: begun as a which gradually changes into the nonsynchronous University, where his in-residence, channeled Corigliano’s personal grief over song cycle for piano and soprano in 2000, Corigliano ambient-sounding threads of the first movement, and teachers included David the loss of friends to the AIDS crisis into music of rescored the piece for full orchestra and amplified with the addition of practice mutes and an exact Rakowski and Jonathan immense power, color, drama, and scope: performed soprano in 2004. retrograde of the opening music, the quartet fades into Kramer. His music has been worldwide by over 150 orchestras and twice recorded, Equally active as a creator of chamber music, silence. performed throughout the this symphony earned him the prestigious Grawemeyer Corigliano’s catalogue includes (besides the Violin This quartet was commisioned by Lincoln Center United States and abroad, Award. His Second Symphony, a rethinking and Sonata and the String Quartet) the virtuoso showpieces for the Performing Arts, Inc. most notably at the Kennedy expansion of the haunted, surreal, and glitteringly Etude Fantasy and Fantasia on an Ostinato for solo Center for the Performing virtuosic String Quartet, was introduced by the Boston piano; Phantasmagoria, a suite of themes from The A Black November Turkey Arts, Lincoln Center’s Alice Symphony Orchestra in 2000 and earned him the 2001 Ghosts of Versailles, for cello and for piano (as well as Tully Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Pulitzer Prize. The Third Symphony may be his most for orchestra;) Fancy on a Bach Air for solo cello A Black November Turkey gets its strange title from Recital Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and the American ambitious and remarkable yet: scored simultaneously for (recorded on Sony by Yo-Yo Ma); and the unique Richard Wilbur’s equally strange poem. Originally an a Academy in Rome. His catalogue includes solo and wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles, Chiaroscuro, for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. cappella choral work, the text is a savage barnyard chamber works, a chamber opera, two orchestral works, Corigliano’s excessive, crazed, and grandly barbarous Of late, he’s ventured into cabaret, setting Mark allegory set against an inane patter of clucking chickens and three string quartets.