The Phoenix Concerts

PROGRAM NOTES

Très Lent was written as an homage to Olivier Messiaen, particularly to his Quartet for the End of Time, which had a special influence on my work. When I was the pianist for the Da Capo Chamber Players, we frequently performed Messiaen’s quartet over a seven-year period. During this time, I grew to love the many risks Messiaen took—particularly the use of very slow “time,” both in tempo and in the flow of ideas and events. Très Lent is my attempt to make "slow" music work. It is affectionately dedicated to my long-time friend and colleague, who never stops growing as a musician and cellist, Andre Emelianoff. — Joan Tower

"Owl-light," known also as "Blindman's Holiday" and entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf), is the hour of dusk when it is too dark to work but still too bright to light candles. It is the time of day when shadow and haze blur the world around us. A new light, albeit short lived, is born of the union of day and night. Owl-Light, for solo violin, plays with this space between opposites setting quick gestures against sustained tones; pizzicato phrases against legato lines; and airy bowings against the snap pizz. The hymn Steal Away is referenced throughout, its tune emerging gradually over the course of the piece. Owl-Light is about five minutes long. — Gilda Lyons

We Happy Few was written for the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society in 1990, and was begun during a residency at the MacDowell Colony. Both the rhythmic landscape of the beginning and the obsessive pitch material are somewhat evocative of the blues (despite the title). As in many classical piano trios, one motor for the piece is provided by the friendly, sometimes boisterous competition between piano and strings for the right to project the same basic material. As for the “few” in the title, We Happy Few is a celebration of the paradoxical artistic economics of chamber music, wherein less is generally more. Who complains that a late Beethoven string quartet wasn’t written for orchestra? As for the "happy", these lines from Keats may offer an entrance to the work's complex emotional climate:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might...

We Happy Few reaches its happy-tragic conclusion after about 12 minutes. — Eric Moe

The three movement titles of Piano Trio Two are taken from a collection of Zen stories; very short anecdotes which resonate in the memory but do not reveal their secrets easily. “How grass and trees become enlightened” presents a series of extreme contrasts between high and low, loud and soft. The musical material is one of my own original songs, written to an African text, which in this version has started to sprout energetic vegetation. In “Your light may go out”, the violin and cello, very closely intertwined, begin by presenting a dark musical line imprinted with the ghostly image of an English folk tune. The piano, playing chords, adds ever-increasing illumination to the music, until the end, where darkness and brightness meet. “Open your own treasure house” is a joyous dance, built on a scale pattern of my own invention; an imaginary raga, perhaps. Piano Trio Two was commissioned for the 2004 Spitalfields Festival by George Law, in celebration of his 75th birthday. It was first performed by the Florestan Trio. — Judith Weir

BIOGRAPHIES

Robert Frankenberry is a member of the Phoenix Players. To read his biography, please click [here].

Gilda Lyons is a member of the Phoenix Players. To read her biography, please click [here].

Eric Moe (www.ericmoe.net), composer of what the NY Times calls "music of winning exuberance", has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and Meet-the-Composer USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, and the American Dance Festival.

His "one-woman opera" Tri-Stan was hailed by the NY Times last year as "a blockbuster ... a tour de force"; "the evening’s biggest event", a work of "inspired weight [that] subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture". The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled its review, "Moe’s Marvelous Tri-Stan Pokes Fun at Pop and High Art", and concluded, "For an audience, it is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides." The work will soon be available on a Koch International Classics compact disc.

Premieres in 2005-6 include The Sun Beats the Mountain Like a Drum for pipa virtuoso Wu Man and electroacoustic sound; O the flesh is hot but the heart is cold for Volti, a San Francisco contemporary vocal ensemble; and Let Me Tell U About R Specials for flutist Patti Monson and electroacoustic sound. His Sonnets to Orpheus, featured on the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000, is currently available on a Koch CD that also includes his Siren Songs. Another all-Moe CD, Kicking and Screaming, has recently been released by Albany Records, joining his recent Up & At ‘Em on the same label. Compact disc recordings of other works are available from Centaur, New World, and others.

Praised in Gramaphone and the Boston Globe for "lively", "driving" and "lovely lyrical" performances, David Russell maintains a vigorous schedule as both soloist and collaborator in the U.S. and Europe. He was appointed to the position of Assistant Principal 'cello with the Tulsa Philharmonic in 2000 and served on the teaching faculty of Oklahoma City University from 2001 to 2003. He has been on the faculty of Wellesley College. As a member of the Grammy-nominated Eaken Trio, formerly in residence at Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, he has toured extensively in France, Germany, Italy and England. He is a busy performer in the Boston area, serving as Principal Cello of Opera Boston and the Hingham Symphony and making regular appearances with such ensembles as Pro Arte Chamber orchestra of Boston, the New England String Ensemble, Cantata Singers and Ensemble and Emmanuel Music.

A strong advocate and performer of new music, he has performed with such ensembles as Phantom Arts Ensemble for American Music, Dinosaur Annex, Collage New Music, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Music on the Edge, AUROS Group for New Music, Firebird Ensemble, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, and the Fromm Foundation Players at Harvard. He is a founding member of Furious Band, an ensemble devoted to the exploration and performance of works by young composers Furious Band was the 2000 contemporary ensemble in residence at the Aspen Summer Music Festival.

Mr. Russell has premiered numerous works by living composers such as Eric Moe, Tamar Diesendruck, Andrew Rindfleisch, John Fitz Rogers, Laurie San Martin, Edward Cohen, Eleanor Cory, Kurt Rohde, Allen Anderson, Roger Zahab, Roshanne Etezady, Jerome Miskell, Alton Clingan, Edwin London, Shi-Hui Chen and Francis Thorne. Recent projects include the premiere of Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon’s chamber opera Comala at the Bellas Artes in Mexico City, performances at Miller Theater at Columbia University, the American Academy in Rome and the Rotterdam Conservatory, U.S. premieres of works for solo cello by Harold Meltzer and Judith Weir, recordings of new works by Eric Moe, Eric Chasalow, Laurie San Martin, Allen Anderson and Edward Knight, masterclasses at the University of California-Davis, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and residencies at the University of South Carolina-Columbia and Tufts University. He teaches at the Cello Seminar, a summer program for study of contemporary cello music associated with Music from Salem and developed by Rhonda Rider.

As she prepares for her 70th birthday in 2008, Joan Tower is looking forward as much as she is looking back on a career that already spans over five decades. Hailed as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time" in The New Yorker magazine, Joan Tower was the first woman to receive the Grawemeyer Award in Composition in 1990. She was inducted in 1998 into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and into the Academy of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University in the fall of 2004. In January 2004, Carnegie Hall's Making Music series featured a retrospective of Tower's work. The event showcased a number of artists who regularly perform her music, including the Tokyo String Quartet, pianists Melvin Chen and Ursula Oppens, violist Paul Neubauer, oboist Richard Woodhams, and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble. Most of these works were then recorded for August 2005 release on the NAXOS recording label. In March 2004, Tower attended the premiere of her new piece, For Daniel, written for the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio at the Tucson Winter Festival, and the New York premiere at the 92nd Street Y. She performed the piano part with members of the Muir Quartet at the 2004 Deer Valley Festival in Utah, to great acclaim, and returned to Utah in 2005 as composer-in-residence with performances of her orchestral tour-de-force Tambor, and several chamber works. A new viola concerto for Paul Neubauer by an orchestral consortium led by the Omaha Symphony and a commission by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will also premiere in the 2005-2006 season.

Judith Weir is one of Britain’s most wide-ranging composers. She studied composition with John Tavener whilst at school in London, and at Cambridge University with Robin Holloway. For six years she taught composition at Glasgow's University and RSAMD and she has also held visiting professorships at Oxford and Princeton. She is an active advocate of new music for school-age and adult amateur performers. Her interest in theatre, narrative and folklore has resulted in three full length operas, “A Night at the Chinese Opera”, “The Vanishing Bridegroom” and “Blond Eckbert”; and theatrical collaborations with Sir Peter Hall, Caryl Churchill and Peter Shaffer. Together with storyteller Vayu Naidu, Judith has created a blend of storytelling and music entitled 'Future Perfect' which has toured England and India; a new instalment of which was premiered in 2005. Works composed for specific artists include “woman.life.song”, a 50-minute song cycle commissioned and performed by Jessye Norman in Carnegie Hall, New York and at the BBC Proms; “We are Shadows”, written for Sir Simon Rattle and the CBSO orchestra and its three choruses (winner of the 2000 South Bank Show Music Award); an extended series of chamber works for Judith’s long-time collaborators, the Schubert Ensemble, recently released on a double CD by NMC; and “The Voice of Desire”, a collection of songs written for Alice Coote.

Roger Zahab is a member of the Phoenix Players. To read his biography, please click [here].

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