Premieres and the Jules Léger Prize
New Music Concerts presents
Premieres and the Jules Léger Prize
NMC Ensemble|David Swan piano|Dieter Hennings guitar|Kathleen McLean bassoon
Programme:
Alice Ping Yee Ho (Hong Kong/Canada 1960) *Angst II*** (2006) 11’
clarinet, bass clarinet, horn, tuba, tenor and alto saxophones, percussion,
2 violins, viola, cello, bass | David Swan solo piano
Rodney Sharman (Canada 1958) *Incantation** (2007) 10’
Kathleen McLean solo bassoon | Accordes string quartet | Erica Goodman harp
Juan Trigos (Mexico/Canada 1965) Ricercare de Cámara VI*** (1998-99) 15’
flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, 3 percussion, piano
2 violins, viola, cello, bass | Dieter Hennings solo guitar | Juan Trigos, conductor
— Intermission —
Chris Paul Harman (Canada 1970) *Postludio a rovescio*** (2006-07) 8’
flute, oboe, clarinet, mandolin, guitar, percussion, piano, harp, violin, viola, cello, bass
So Jeong Ahn (Korea/Canada 1956) *SUB** (2008) 15’
flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trombone, saxophone,
2 percussion, accordion, piano, violin, viola, cello, bass
2 percussion, accordion, piano, violin, viola, cello, bass
* Canadian Work | ** World Premiere | *** Canadian Premiere
New Music Concerts Ensemble — Robert Aitken direction
Dianne Aitken flute|Keith Atkinson oboe|Max Christie clarinet|Robert W. Stevenson
bass clarinet|Kathleen McLean bassoon|Michele Gagnon horn|Robert Venables trumpet
Ian Cowie trombone|Scott Irvine tuba| Rob Carli, Wallace Halladay, saxophones
Dieter Hennings guitar|Andrew Collins mandolin|Rick Sacks, Trevor Tureski, Mark Duggan, perc.
Joe Macerollo accordion|David Swan piano|Erica Goodman harp|Fujiko Imajishi, Corey Gemmel,
Carol Lynn Fujino, violins|Doug Perry viola|David Hetherington cello|Peter Pavlovsky bass
The concert will include the presentation of the 2008 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music to Chris Paul Harman for Postludio a rovescio. Please join us in the lobby for a post-concert reception generously provided by The Canada Council for the Arts. Special Thanks to Roger D. Moore for his invaluable support of this evening’s event.
Alice Ho is a freelance Chinese Canadian composer/pianist dedicated to new music. She holds a bachelor of Music with high distinction from Indiana University and a Master’s of Music from University of Toronto. She has been the recipient of numerous awards such as the Winnipeg Symphony New Music Festival Composers Competition, Martin Hunter Artists Award, International League of Women Composers Competition, and was a finalist at the 2006 Luxembourg International Composition Prize. In 2006, an independent film “Garage” for which she wrote the score won the top award at the Calgary International Film Festival. Her performance highlights include music featured at the ISCM World Music Days in Hong Kong and Luxembourg, Toronto Harbourfront Centre’s 2007 New World Stage International Performance, and an upcoming premiere on April 21/08 by China National Chinese Orchestra at the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing. Her works have been performed by many major orchestras and ensembles including China National Symphony, Florida Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony, CBC Vancouver Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, Winnipeg Symphony, Amsterdam’s Nieuw Ensemble, Penderecki String Quartet, Luxembourg Sinfonietta, Le Novel Ensemble Moderne, and the Toronto New Music Concerts. Other upcoming performances include a concerto for Chinese Classical Dancer and chamber orchestra for the Newfoundland Sinfonia, and new works for the Victoria Symphony and Toronto’s new music group Toca Loca.
Alice Ping Yee Ho (Canada 1960) Angst II (2006)
Angst II describes an intense state of perpetual anxiety. The dramatic intent of this work explores an imaginative scenario when a troubled individual is inexplicably trapped in an unknown enclosed environment. Feeling confined, one becomes delusional and creates fear of all forms. The sense of isolation and desperation in this drama is portrayed by the bleakness of the music, often a long pause after an intense passage to create an empty space filled with rich ringing overtones. Struggling between dream and reality, the music stylishly augments this dissolution by intense tremolo figures, sudden dynamic changes, and dramatic variation in piano registers. The solo piano writing is conceived in an unusual manner in that it leads and breathes freely, and carries one main gesture throughout. The accompanying ensemble is created as “action” or “reaction” to the soloist; symbolically, they play “chance” to one’s uncertain destiny.
— Alice Ping Yee Ho
Rodney Sharman (born Biggar, Saskatchewan, May 24, 1958) lives in Vancouver, Canada. His music has been performed by ensembles and soloists in more than forty countries and by orchestras in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. He was Composer-in-Residence and Composer/Music Advisor with the Vancouver Symphony from 1997 to 2001 and Composer-in-Residence of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 2004. His chamber opera, Elsewhereless, with libretto and direction by Atom Egoyan, was performed in concert in Amsterdam, and staged thirty-five times since its 1998 premiere in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver. Performances in 2007 and 2008 include premieres of new works for bassoonist Kathleen McLean, cellist Frances- Marie Uitti, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Nieuw Ensemble (Amsterdam, Concertgebouw Saturday Matinee), the Kingston Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Ballet, choreography by James Kudelka.
further information @ http://www.rodneysharman.com
Rodney Sharman (Canada 1958) Incantation (2007)
Incantation (2007) was commissioned by bassoonist Kathleen McLean, to whom it is dedicated. The piece consists of chants and refrains for solo bassoon, harp and string quartet. Almost every note in the quartet and harp part is doubled at the interval of the twelfth, an overtone of the harmonic series. The bassoonist is sometimes asked to create a tone rich in harmonics, imitating the sound of Buddhist overtone chant (Tibetan chant), creating a rich, enveloping sound, enhanced by the quartet and harp parts.
— Rodney Sharman
Composer and conductor Juan Trigos has specialized in music from the 20th century and particularly in contemporary music. He has premiered and promoted an extensive catalogue of new works, both in live performance and recording and through his work with numerous choirs, ensembles and symphony orchestras in Canada, the USA, Europe, and Mexico. Recently he premiered the chamber opera El Conejo y el Coyote (The Rabbit and the Coyote), by Mexican composer Víctor Rasgado, an Italian and Mexican co-production which received six performances at the Festival Humánitas 2007 in Oaxaca City in Mexico.
He is also a very active composer, an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. His music is characterized by a primal “pulsation”, articulated by obsessive rhythmic gears, a “concertante” relationship between the solo and the different instrumental combinations, and a structural role for percussion instruments (including piano). Similarly, the musical discourse is driven by a manipulation of musical codes (“reading codes”) that serve to transform both original materials or those taken from other sources. His recent work has centered on the creation of a new genre, called “Hemofiction Opera”. “Hemofiction”, is a literary aesthetic invented by his father, the Mexican playwright and novelist Juan Trigos Sr.
Juan Trigos (Mexico/Canada 1965) Ricercare de Cámara VI (1998-99)
Juan Trigos is a former student of Italian composer Franco Donatoni whose music defies the stereotype often associated with that school of composition. Trigos is a solid craftsman who assimilated and interiorized the technical ideas of the Italian master, and was able to take them as a point of departure for the development of a very personal and identifiable musical language. In his Ricercari series, Trigos transcends the modernist aesthetic of his teacher by introducing culturally charged elements that work as points of reference for the listener. In the case of Ricercare VI for guitar and chamber orchestra, these elements are drawn out of the flamenco tradition (palmas, rasgueados, microtonal inflections and percussion) but avoid the typical Spanish guitar cliché by presenting them on an abstract and structural level rather than as coloristic or local quotations. The piece is dedicated to the Mexican guitarist Pablo Gómez.
— Alejandro Madrid
Chris Paul Harman was born in 1970 in Toronto where he studied classical guitar, cello, and electronic music with Barton Wigg, Alan Stellings, and Wes Wraggett respectively. As a composer, he is primarily self-taught. Mr. Harman’s works have been performed by many ensembles and orchestras in Canada and abroad including the Asko Ensemble, the CBC Radio Orchestra, the Esprit Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the New Music Concerts Ensemble, the Noordhollands Philharmonisch, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Tokyo Symphony, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Harman has been commissioned by guitarists William Beauvais and Sylvie Proulx, violinist Jacques Israelievitch, oboist Lawrence Cherney, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, Continuum, the Esprit Orchestra, the Guelph Spring Festival, Music Canada 2000, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Nieuw Ensemble (Amsterdam,) the Trio Fibonacci, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, among others. In June 2005, Mr. Harman was appointed Assistant Professor of Composition at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal. Current projects include a new work for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Kent Nagano, for premiere in the 2008-2009 season.
Chris Paul Harman (Canada 1970) Postludio a rovescio (2006-07)
Postludio a rovescio was commissioned in 2006 by the Nieuw Ensemble, and is dedicated to Unsuk Chin. This new work is based on a piece I wrote in 2005 for solo violin called Preludio a rovescio, whose source material is drawn from the Passacaglia for solo violin by Heinrich von Biber. The expression a rovescio means “inside out” in Italian, and refers to the many ways in which I “inverted” structural and gestural elements in Biber’s original work. The Preludio in the title refers to the potential for this work to be played — without interuption — in advance of the Passagalia. Postludio a rovescio is thus an elaboration of my earlier work, retaining the same playful and frenetic character. In spite of the expanded instrumentation, the tessitura of the work remains limited for the most part, to that of the original solo violin music. Lower pitches are used sparingly, either to add momentary “warmth” to the overall texture, or to punctuate important junctures in the work’s structure.
My conception of the orchestration in this work assumes that the most “fragile” elements in the instrumentation, (guitar and mandolin,) should be determinants in the way the other instruments would be treated. Heavier textures are avoided in favour of a more linear approach; a kind of rapid-fire Klangfarbenmelodie where small amounts of material are frequently passed from instrument to instrument. At other times, small subgroupings of instruments provide more homogeneous textures, but these composite textures themselves are never allowed to establish themselves for very long. Paradoxically, the “climax” of the work might be said to occur towards the end in the form of an ungainly 8-bar solo for the piano.
— CPH, January 2007, Montreal
Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music
Established in 1978 by the Right Honourable Jules Léger, then Governor General of Canada, the Jules Léger Prize is a $7,500 national award designed to encourage Canadian composers to write for chamber music groups and to foster the performance of Canadian chamber music by these groups. Three organisations are involved in the prize: the Canadian Music Centre, which administers the prize; the Canada Council for the Arts, which funds and promotes the prize and selects the jury; and CBC Radio Music and Espace Musique de Radio-Canada, which broadcast the winning work on the national stereo networks.
So Jeong Ahn was born in Seoul, Korea and studied composition with Prof. Sukhi Kang at Seoul National University, with Prof. Witold Szalonek at Hochschule der Künste Berlin, and Musicology with Prof. Carl Dahlhaus at the Technical University in Berlin, Germany. Since participating as a guest composer in the courses for electronic music by Prof. Thomas Kessler (1999) and for algorithmic composition by Prof. Hanspeter Kyburz (2000) at the Basel Electronic Studio in Switzerland, she has been engaged in live-electronic music. Her compositions have been performed at various music festivals and concerts in Asia, Europe and North America. She was a prize winner at the Martirano Composition Competition 2007 at the University of Illinois and the Tsang Houei Hsu Composition Award 2006 in Taiwan. Her recent composition Ssa-reng, ui... has been scheduled for the ISCM concert to be held in October, 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania. She has been living in Toronto since 2001.
further information @ www.ahn-sojeong.com
So Jeong Ahn (Korea/Canada 1956) SUB (2008)
Since moving to Canada I’ve noticed that the Toronto SUB-way is not only a wonderful source of a variety of amazingly attractive sounds, but also a place of communication, where people from all over the world meet in a kind of daily ritual performance like a concert. They bring along all their movements and sounds of their cultural background and throw it into this huge sound-pool for a short trip through space and time. Not only the squealing sound on a slight curve during its dynamic rush to the next station, announcements on some loudspeaker or unspecified voices and laughter in a station, the station itself turns into a huge wind machine when two trains simultaneously divide the air. To get in at the last moment, people play accelerandos with their feet and, not noticing their own contribution to the wonderfully complex rhythms, just happily smile on hearing the door-closing chime. My musical idea for this piece is based on such realistic impression of a typical Torontonian “soundscape” whose variety of unexpected sounds greeted me.
— So Jeong Ahn
Soloists
Dieter Hennings, a native of Mexico, is one of the few concert artists devoted to new music on guitar and early music for lute, baroque guitar, and theorbo. Mr. Hennings has been a soloist with the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, the University of Arizona Philharmonia, and the Orquesta Juvenil de Sonora, Mexico. Mr. Hennings has won several prestigious competitions including the 2005 Eastman Guitar Concerto Competition, the 2002 Villa de Petrer, Alicante International Competition, the Ralph Stevens Competition, the 2001 Portland Guitar Competition, and the Claire Schaeffer Competition. Mr. Hennings is an active proponent of new music, particularly that of Latin America, having recently worked with composers Mario Davidovsky, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Juan Trigos and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. This year Hennings has premiered works by composers Jake Bancks, Wes Matthews and Hebert Vazquez. He recently performed Synchronisms No. 10 for guitar and tape by Mario Davidovsky in a concert dedicated to the composer’s work. Last season Mr. Hennings toured through northern Mexico as part of the Festival de Alamos “Dr. Alfonso Luis Tirado”.
Kathleen McLean received her musical training at the Curtis Institute of music and has been associate principal bassoon of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra since 1992. She is a much sought after chamber and orchestral musician recognized internationally and has participated in many chamber music festivals including the Evian International Festival, Vancouver Chamber Music Festival, Scotia Festival and the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival. She performs frequently with New Music Concerts, Amici Ensemble and is a founding member of the Caliban quartet, Toronto Wind Quintet and the Canadian Winds. She was principal bassoon with the Canadian Opera Company and has played principal bassoon with the NAC orchestra. She has been soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic and the Toronto Symphony. Kathleen has had the honour of participating in the World Orchestra for Peace, an ensemble of the finest players drawn from top international orchestras under the baton of Valery Gergiev. She recently toured with them performing in London, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing. She has been instructing bassoon since 1986 and has been on faculty at the University of Victoria, University of Toronto and teaches master classes abroad. Kathleen McLean and Erica Goodman’s CD Nightsongs featuring three new Canadian works for bassoon and harp (including Sharman’s Incantation with Accordes) will be released in May.
Saskatoon native David Swan gained national exposure at the age of sixteen as winner of the first Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition for the Performance of Canadian Music. After completing doctoral studies at the University of Indiana, he settled in Toronto, where he has freelanced continuously since 1986. His varied activities include ensemble and solo performances, accompaniment, recording and teaching, and he retains a special interest in 20th century repertoire. He served for many years as organist of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Toronto, and appears regularly with New Music Concerts.
Posted Wednesday, April 9, 2008
