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Part of the Festival’s mission is to promote the vibrancy and bright future of chamber music, and this is reflected in our commitment to promoting and producing new music. During the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, we devote a long weekend to focus on the music of living composers performed by faculty and our fellowship students.
Free | Tickets Not Required
WANG LU
onward, wayward
Shuguang Gong, piano • Robert Torres, Luke Rinderknecht, percussion
Shuguang is sponsored by Mary Beth & Michael Feldman.
ANDERS HILLBORG
Six Pieces for Wind Quintet
Ellen Hayun Lee, flute • Natalie Feldpausch, oboe • Frank Tao, clarinet • Christian Whitacre, bassoon • Daniel Halstead, horn
Ellen is sponsored by Ned & Beth Schuller, Natalie is sponsored by Norma Phelps, Frank is sponsored by Doug Collins, Christian is sponsored by Debbie Schall, and Daniel is sponsored by Kent & Natalie Mitchell.
GYÖRGY KURTÁG
Homage to Schumann
Katia Sofia Waxman, clarinet • Julian Seney, viola • Nabeel Hayek, piano
Katia is sponsored by Susan Lavan, Julian is sponsored by Tod & Lyn Rodger, and Nabeel is sponsored by Lorna & Jack Flynn.
KELLY-MARIE MURPHY
Si Veriash a la Rana
Amanda Chi, cello • Joshua Ho, harp
Amanda is sponsored by Margot Stiassni & Chris Sieracki.
HELEN GRIME
Luna
Isabelle Jamois, flute • Natalie Feldpausch, oboe • Frank Tao, clarinet • Daniel Halstead, horn • Yang Gao, piano • Robert Torres, percussion • Luke Rinderknecht, conductor
Isabelle is sponsored by Reid & Liza Thompson, Natalie is sponsored by Norma Phelps, Frank is sponsored by Doug Collins, Daniel is sponsored by Kent & Natalie Mitchell, and Yang is sponsored by John & Margie Sunderland.
ANDREW NORMAN
Gran Turismo
Rachel Yi, Ashley Yoon, Katherine Cheng, Claire Arias-Kim, Theo Bockhorst, Makenzie Hart, Adrian Min Wu, Cecilia Beatrix Martin, violin
Rachel and Claire are sponsored by Lewis & Adria Kaplan, Ashley is sponsored by Sharon Abbott, Katherine is sponsored by Barbara Gauditz, and Theo is sponsored by William & Mary Earl Rogers.
Program notes
WANG LU
onward, wayward (2023)
I composed Onward, Wayward for piano and percussion, which opens with fluid modal harmony and texture, creating a natural drive and clarity. The piece is continuous, yet it brings about dramatically contrasting elements. The tendency of the movement shifts as the piece unfolds. The percussionist and pianist breathe together in the piece and complement each other’s resonances and rhythmic impetus.
Program Note by Wang Lu
ANDERS HILLBORG
Six Pieces for Wind Quintet (2007)
The opening piece of my Six Pieces for Wind Quintet is written in a quasi-tonal style, remotely reminiscent of Stravinsky; it starts out with an eruptive gesture of upward scales, followed by soft, long-spun melodic lines accompanied by a gentle walking bass in the Bassoon.
This scheme is repeated once, but when the opening gesture appears a third time, instead of continuing as before, the music blazes into the 2nd Movement, a ferocious flow where the instruments imitate and echo each other in a furious tempo.
This is followed by a calm movement where the Bassoon again provides a steady walking bass through an idyllic landscape featuring the Flute in a repetitive perpetuum mobile-pattern.
The 4th piece, in contrast, is a wild and heavy orgy with strong focus on pulse and aggressive syncopations, mainly based on octatonic scales (= regular alternation of major and minor seconds).
The 5th piece also uses octatonic scales as basic material, but contrasts to all the other ones in being extremely calm and slow in character.
The last piece starts with wide, sustained chords suggesting vast, open landscapes, and ends with a crazed funky race on the verge of the playable.
Six Pieces for Wind Quintet was written for and commissioned by The Royal Stockholm Opera Wind Soloists in 2007.
Program Note by Anders Hillborg
GYÖRGY KURTAG
Homage to Schumann (1975-1990)
The next in Kurtág’s Op. 15 series was Hommage à R. Sch., completed in 1990 but with its roots also in ur-Op. 15 pieces of the mid-’70s. Robert Schumann’s propensity for loosely organized collections of fantasy pieces is clearly reflected in Kurtág’s later work, and this suite pays direct homage, not only in its title but also in the headings and music for most of its six movements (the instrumentation is also that of Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen [Fairy Tale Stories]).
The first movement, headed “Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler’s Curious Pirouettes,” alludes to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fictitious character, the namesake of Schumann’s Kreisleriana cycle of keyboard miniatures, with breathless little swirls up and down in each instrument. “Eusebius: the Delimited Circle…” refers to the introverted alter ego of Schumann’s own writings, and is a short canon based on a song from Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente (“the delimited circle is pure”). It leads directly into the third movement, “…and again Florestan’s lips tremble in anguish…,” summoning Eusebius’ extroverted partner with music that takes trembling to the point of violent spasms.
The fourth movement is the only one headed in Hungarian (the rest are in German). “I was a cloud, now the sun is shining…” is a line from the poem Dal(Song) by Attila József, and the moody music serves basically as a prelude to the fifth movement, the fleetly fluttering “In the Night.” The 16th-note figuration suggests the fifth of Schumann’s Hoffmann-inspired Op. 12 Phantasiestücke, also titled “In the Night.”
The final movement is longer than the other five combined. “Farewell (Master Raro discovers Guillaume de Machaut)” brings in Master Raro, Schumann’s balanced foil to Eusebius and Florestan. Raro mediates and merges the previous extremes through the spirit (and some of the techniques) of the late-Medieval composer Machaut. The processional music builds to a great climax, then fades into the depths, with the piano tolling its opening intervals and the clarinetist ending it all with a soft, heavy beat on a bass drum.
Program note by John Henken
KELLY-MARIE MURPHY
Si Veriash a la Rana (2021)
Ben Sevi Severim. Three Hebrew words, translated into English: ‘I love you, my love.’ They are the essence of a Ladino nursery rhyme which teaches children to enjoy their chores by reminding them that they are doing them with their brothers and sisters. ‘Si Veriash A La Rana’ is a song collected in Turkey and the Balkans, and it is the inspiration for this highly virtuosic piece. This arrangement for cello and harp is the second movement of my double concerto for harp and cello, entitled En El Escudo es Todo Uno (In the Darkness, All is One). Originally written for a symphony orchestra with percussion, this arrangement uses the harp to play ankle bells, a rain stick and other extended techniques. Following a meditative opening based on prayer modes, the music launches into a relentless dance-like section presenting the folk song.
Program note by Kelly-Marie Murphy
HELEN GRIME
Luna (2011)
I took my starting point for Luna from a poem by Ted Hughes called Harvest Moon. The piece is cast in one continuous movement but falls into a number of well- defined sections. As I was working on the piece, I started combining the instruments in small groups.. Although there is much interaction between all members of the ensemble, the instrumental groups became a defining characteristic of the piece. The piano and percussion often form a duo, breaking into somewhat virtuosic solo passages scattered throughout. The flute, oboe and clarinet form a sort of unified trio, sometimes playing a unison line or combining lyrical lines in the slower final section of the work. The horn takes on a distinctly soloist role, with solo passages building to a mini cadenza, which eventually leads the piece into its final section.
Program Note by Helen Grime
ANDREW NORMAN
Gran Turismo (2010)
Right around the time I began sketching a motoric, virtuoso piece for violin ensemble, I discovered Futurist art for the first time. And right around the time I discovered Futurist art, I encountered — in a brief but blazing way — an addictive car racing video game that bears the name Gran Turismo. Soon I realized I was experiencing one of those serendipitous moments when the disparate facets of my life fall into an unexpected resonance with one another. The musical ideas, the art, and the video game all shared things in common — most obvious among them a preoccupation with really fast cars. They also shared a certain flamboyant machismo that I associate strongly with the Italian peninsula (it is the Italians, after all, who produced Vivaldi, Marinetti, and Ferrari). There were other striking parallels as well; the way that “forcelines” rigorously divided space and created a dramatic sense of visual rhythm in much Futurist art — notably present in Giacomo Balla’s 1913 and 1914 paintings of speeding cars found on this and the preceding page — resembled the jerky sequencing of imagery in the video game, which in turn became a metaphor for the cut-and-splice method of juxtaposition that permeates the violin piece. In addition, the reiteration of fragmentary motives in the art recalled the repetitive visual vocabulary of the racing game as well as the obsessive motivic hammering of the violin music. The limited color pallet of the Balla paintings seemed fitting to describe a piece scored for a pack of like instruments, and the competition between leader and followers at the core of the video game had many parallels in the Baroque model of soloist versus ensemble that is a prominent modus operandi in the piece. I let these intriguing resonances rev up for a time in my head, and when I finally set my pencil to the start line the piece took off. Much like the music itself, the process was fast and furious and full of stop-on-a-dime changes. It was a creative joyride to work on a piece that, from the opening gesture to the final bar, is headed along only one emphatic trajectory: HIGHER! LOUDER! FASTER!
Program Note by Andrew Norman