Artists and Musicians

Sensational Young Pianist Sara Daneshpour Performs at Highfield Hall, Sunday, June 3, at Highfield Hall in Falmouth, MA

Here is a clip of the brilliant young pianist Sara Daneshpour playing Rachmaninoff:  

Sensational Young Pianist Performs in Season Finale of the Simon Sinfonietta

The Simon Sinfonietta’s 2011-2012 season culminated on Saturday, June 2 with featured soloist Sara Daneshpour performing Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto No. 20, K466. Music Director and Conductor Stephen Simon paired this concerto with two additional works to complete the Sinfonietta’s season of adventure: Stravinsky’s Symphony in C and Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, The Spring. The concert was given at Falmouth Academy in Falmouth, MA. Photograph at left by Stephanie Lane.

Maestro Simon, who introduced the brilliant young violinist Jorge Avila as soloist earlier in the season, once again presented to Cape Cod audiences a rising star from the international music scene. Sara Daneshpour came to national attention when she won First Prize in the American Beethoven Society Young Pianists Competition nine years ago at age 13. Daneshpour went on to win several international competitions and perform in major venues around the world, including the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. The Washington Post wrote of her 2007 solo performance with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, "She created transfixing poetry.” 

Concerto No. 20 of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)  permitted Maestro Simon an ideal setting to showcase Sara Daneshpour’s individuality and her gift for emotional expression. The concerto has been embraced by audiences since its premier in Vienna in 1785 with Mozart himself as soloist, and it is laden with musical power and meaning. Mozart musicologist Friedrich Blume saw this work—with its rich
 orchestration and complex interrelationships between solo performer and orchestra— as a distinctive turning point toward the modern concerto. In the masterpiece Mozart moves boldly beyond the formal strictures of the day to express individuality. He speaks freely with “the language of the heart” and, through the concerto’s stormy passages, he anticipates Romanticism and the winds of change that were to sweep the world. In this painting by Canaletto, we can see Vienna's Haus zur Mehlgrube pictured on the right side of the street. This is the location of Concerto No. 20's premiere with Mozart himself as soloist.  

The concert opened with Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, composed in the late 1930s, a period of great turbulence in the life of the composer, as well as in the world at large. Stravinsky (1882-1971) left Europe
for America in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. He carried with him the first two movements of Symphony in C and completed the third movement in Cambridge, MA, during a lecture stop at Harvard University before moving on to Hollywood where he resided for many years. While Stravinsky’s life journey took him from Czarist Russia to Southern California, the range of his musical brilliance— from 19^th-century musical nationalism to 20^th-century 12-tone serialism—is no less staggering. In its objectivity and emotional detachment, Symphony in C is an excellent example of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, where he rejects Romanticism and looks for inspiration in the classicism of the 18^th century. Stravinsky is pictured at left in a drawing by Picasso.

The program concluded with a delightful composition by one of the purest of Romantics, Robert Schumann (1810-1856).  Composed in 1841 at the dawn of his long-sought marriage with the young musical sensation Clara Wieck, Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38, Spring, is full of youthful intensity and personal lyricism. Trained as a lawyer, working initially as a music critic, and lacking any obvious genius for performance, Schumann did not  achieve international status in his day and he has been both championed and overlooked since that time. What is not disputed is that Schumann’s music expresses emotion with unfettered creativity in a manner that transcends his historical period. In Schumann’s own words, the mission of his music was to “shed light on the depths of the human heart.” The symphony’s premiere took place under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn on March 31, 1841 in Leipzig. 

The Simon Sinfonietta

The Simon Sinfonietta is a chamber orchestra of approximately 40 professional members founded in 2004 by Stephen Simon, the internationally recognized conductor who directed the Kennedy Center’s Washington (D.C.) Chamber Symphony for 26 years. The Sinfonietta includes many of the finest professional musicians within the Providence-Boston-Cape Cod triangle. Proceeds from the Sinfonietta’s performances benefit Falmouth Academy, Historic Highfield,  and the Cape and Islands NPR® Station WCAI. Pictured at left are Maestro Stephen Simon, Bonnie Ward Simon, and Mark Miller, clarinet soloist in the Simon Sinfonietta's March 31 concert.

Chatham Chorale Premieres New Work by William Cutter and Robert Finch, Commissioned and Directed by Joseph Marchio

by Diana Landau

It’s not unusual for the Chatham Chorale to commission new music. Or for that music to use words by a writer closely associated with Cape Cod—as in 1991, when the Chorale introduced Ron Perera’s setting of The Outermost House by Henry Beston, or when Perera set several Mary Oliver poems for chorus in Why I Wake Early. But when the group presented the premiere of North Beach Journal: A Chatham Rhapsody, with music by William Cutter and text by Robert Finch, on May 19 and 20 at Chatham High School, Finch also was onstage as a member of the Chorale. Definitely a first.

It all started late in 2010, when the Chorale’s board and its musical director, Joseph Marchio, hatched a plan to commission a new work for Chatham’s 300^th anniversary celebration this year. Various ideas were floated, including a competition, but ultimately they found the right musical and literary resources close to home. Finch, whose essays on the natural and human life of the Cape have been widely published and are heard weekly on WCAI radio, offered them for possible use. “At that point we realized, ‘what were we thinking?’” says Marchio, “because Bob already had material that was so pertinent.” 

Then Marchio contacted William Cutter, his friend and former conducting teacher at Boston Conservatory, who knew the Cape well and whose music the Chorale had already performed. “Bill Cutter was always on my  radar to do this, since I had worked with him and thought his choral compositions were terrific,” says Marchio. Would Cutter be interested in setting some of Finch’s words in a piece around twenty minutes long?

Forging a Collaboration

He would indeed. “Bill was excited to be part of the project and was very generous in working with us,” says Marchio. The next step was putting composer and author together. Cutter came down to Chatham for a lunch at the Wild Goose Tavern, and they hit it off right away, recalls Marchio. “I mostly just sat there and enjoyed this wonderful conversation between two artists.” 

“Then I copied a batch of material from various works of mine and sent them off to Bill,” recalls Finch, who has sung with the Chorale for more than three decades. “It didn’t have to be Chatham-specific, so I included all sorts of locales, just looking for passages I thought had some potential musicality. But it was always Bill’s choice.” 

Cutter has been composing since the ninth grade. “Choral singing was really my way into music,” he says, and he prefers writing vocal music “because the musical ideas are already there in the words.” Making time for composing in his packed schedule (he’s the full-time director of choral activities at MIT along with teaching at Boston Conservatory) is the main challenge. “It takes a lot of energy, planning, reading, thinking about the music, then the actual writing: doing musical sketches on the piano, working out compositional ideas at the computer, and so on.”

With this assignment came another challenge: “Bob writes in prose, of course, and that’s very different from setting poetry. The sentences are longer, and the thoughts are more complex,” Cutter explains. He concluded that trying to condense a whole essay wouldn’t work, “so I just went with images and words I thought had strong musical ideas behind them—where I could hear exactly what music that phrase would evoke.” 

North Beach Set to Music

As it turned out, the words that spoke to Cutter were Chatham-centric: he chose excerpts from a Finch essay titled North Beach Journal, which describes the writer’s solitary sojourn at one a friend’s cottage on Chatham’s North Beach, the week before Labor Day of 1979. “For the entire week I saw no one else,” Finch says. “It was an experience of intense psychological isolation” as well as a deep immersion in this stripped-down world of sand, sea, weather, sounds, and light. 

Though Finch could not have know it at the time, North Beach Journal (both the essay and the musical work) today constitute a kind of elegy for those remote beach shacks—some taken by nature, others demolished by the National Seashore. “I was surprised, because I didn’t think Bill would want to set that much text to music,” says Finch, “but it seemed appropriate, especially with the razing of the five cottages this spring. It seemed a way of preserving the memory of part of Chatham’s identity.” 

Cutter’s composition uses four excerpts, including a prologue titled “Monomoy Island” (actually from a different Finch essay). In this brief opening, separate choral voice parts utter fragmentary wisps of phrases, then join together in longer statements, suggesting the “illusory, ephemeral” quality of that protean strip of sand, periodically forming and then submerging into Nantucket Sound. The second movement, “Rowing,” tells of the writer setting off across the inlet from Chatham “about 5 p.m. last Sunday in a small red rowboat” to reach North Beach, and muses about rowing as metaphor: “One is always pulling oneself backward, into the unknown, steering by what one has experienced or left behind.” 

Cutter was strongly drawn to the rowing image—“how the sense of going backward affects your perception,” he notes. “The actual physical rowing I represented in the figuration of the bass line: a rising series of notes with more stress at the start, “because there’s more pressure at the beginning of the rowing gesture.”

The third and longest movement, “This House,” is a densely composed sketch of a day midway through Finch’s stay, his frail dwelling cocooned in Chatham’s famous fog and his mind immersed in the unseen life of the sea: plankton, moon jellies, barnacles, and sea-worms—to which he feels akin, “anchored to this house, throwing out feathered legs and tentacles of myself….”

The calm and stately final movement reflects the writer’s unexpected response upon returning to the mainland: “the intense joy, the simple wonder I felt encountering other people again, and the recognition that, however great my love of nature, my home was in the  human community.” For Joe Marchio, “this elegant, almost Bachian chorale pulls things together at the end, so that all the wonderfully creative and complicated writing concludes with a simple statement.”

The Composer at Work

Cutter’s design for the work reflected the journey described by the text. “I always think about the tonal relationships between the movements [how a section composed in one key transitions into the next],” he says. “I’m also aiming for variety in tempi and character. The first movement I wanted to be impressionistic, the middle two have ever-increasing rhythmic motion, and the last one is a hymn.” 

It helped Cutter to know in advance exactly what instrumental resources he had to work with. North Beach Journal will be performed on a program with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s great cantata for peace, Dona Nobis Pacem, in an alternate reduced orchestration of strings and piano—in part, Marchio notes, because a larger orchestra wouldn’t have fit in the intimate space of the hall. Says Cutter, “When I do have a limited color palette, it forces me to think more imaginatively about how can I use the strings for four movements yet give each one a very different texture.” He also took advantage of the soprano soloist that the Vaughan Williams employs.

Finch is fascinated by how composers like Cutter hear and interpret the written word. “They hear possibilities the writer isn’t even aware of,” he observes. “Some of this has to do with polyphony—their ability to break up the text into several overlapping voices. Or to use harmony and pitch intervals to bring out certain meanings or create mood.” But beyond such specifics, “I think he has really captured the sense of mystery and isolation of the Outer Beach.” 

Bringing the Music to Life

While the ultimate effect for listeners should be magical, preparing a new work for performance is more of a sweaty business. “It’s exciting and challenging to prepare a work that has never been heard before,” says Joe Marchio. “There are no recordings of it, none of the usual tools we normally call on for practice. All we have are ourselves and the music. The Chorale will put the inaugural stamp on this piece, though of course we hope it gets performed many more times.” 

About this he has no doubt: “I think it’s an extraordinary work.” When he first handed out scores to the Chorale, says Marchio, “I told them, don’t judge the piece until you’ve had a chance to learn it and perform it. But even from just sight-reading the first movement, I think the group really took a liking to it.” Another handicap was not being able to hear the orchestral parts, “which are really equal in importance to the choral writing—much more so than in most choral works,” he says. “I’m so excited to hear everything finally come together.”

For Bob Finch, it was a special though not always comfortable experience to rehearse North Beach Journal. “There’s something weird about singing your own words,” he admits. He will evade this dilemma by serving as narrator instead. “We decided that it would help the audience to have a little scene-setting at the start of each movement,” says Marchio, so Finch will read his own narration while his compatriots do the singing. He has attended every rehearsal, however—so who knows? He just might get carried away in performance and raise his own strong voice in the bass section.

Diana Landau is a writer and book editor, and a soprano in the Chatham Chorale. Her musical accomplishments include performing in an avante-garde opera premiered recently in New Orleans. More on this to come!

Chatham Chorale under Joseph Marchio Presents World Premiere Honoring Tercentennial of Chatham, MA

The Chatham Chorale's gift in recognition of the Tercentennial of Chatham, MA, is the commissioned work premiered in three performances at Chatham High School on Saturday and Sunday, May 19 and 20. The Chatham Chorale's music director Joseph Marchio presented the new work, titled North Beach Journal: A Chatham Rhapsody, along with Ralph Vaughan Williams' magnificent musical plea for peace, Dona Nobis Pacem, and Gustav Holst's beautiful instrumental piece, St. Paul's Suite.

The text of North Beach Journal: A Chatham Rhapsody, was written by Robert Finch who has lived on and written about Cape Cod for forty years. The essays of Finch's A Cape Cod Notebook, which was awarded the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing, have a loyal NPR listening audience. William Cutter, a  member of the conducting faculty of The Boston Conservatory, composed the music. Cutter personally selected several sections of Finch's subjects which capture mystery and isolation, and which he felt lend themselves well to strong musical themes. Robert Finch will narrate passages prior to each musical movement. For more information about the creation of this work, please see Diana Landau's excellent article.

A second important work included in the program is Ralph Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem (Give us Peace) written in 1936 when tensions in Europe were on an acute incline. Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) intended his work as a plea to stave off war and  incorporates text by American poet, essayist and journalist, the humanist Walt Whitman. Cape Cod's Beloved Soprano Joan Kirchner will sing the stirring plea for peace after which follow the violent, unsettling, though musically colorful passages, followed by a mood turned glorious before the soprano ends the work with a hopeful prayer for peace. For more on Dona Nobis Pacem, please see this additional background submitted by Charles Bihler.

The program opened with Gustav Holst's St. Paul's Suite. This is the first piece Holst (1874-1934) wrote for the orchestra of St. Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, in dedication of a music wing, where he wrote most of his works and where he enjoyed many years in his post as music director.

Pianist-Scholar on the Go: Robert Wyatt

An interview on NPR about the early roots of jazz, a lecture at Highfield Hall, an all-Gershwin recital in the Beveridge Webster Concert Series in Hanover, NH, and a recital/lecture at the 92nd Street Y in New York...all in the first ten days of May? Yes, this is a quick snapshot of just part of the busy professional life of Steinway Artist and music scholar Robert Wyatt. (For additional upcoming performances, please click here: Robert Wyatt's Calendar) 

Mindy Todd of WCAI interviewed Robert Wyatt on May 1 in a fascinating program titled "Roots of Jazz." You can catch Robert in person at Highfield Hall (where he serves as Music Director) in his "From the Roots Up: A Jazz Retrospective" at 10 am on Saturday, May 5. For more information on this program, a second program at Highfield Hall this weekend with music by Gershwin and Bernstein, and other great lectures and concerts coming up at the historic mansion, please click here: Music at the Mansion

Next stop for Robert Wyatt is Hanover, NH, where he will deliver an all-Gershwin recital later on Saturday evening, May 5, as part of the Beveridge Webster Concert Series hosted by Kendal at Hanover.And then, Robert is off to New York to perform at one of the city's most precious venues. Following is the press release from the 92nd Street Y.

Steinway Artist and music scholar Robert Wyatt will present “Gershwin: the Man and the Music” at 92YTribeca on Thursday, May 10, from 12-1 pm. Wyatt will bring his subject to life through narration, archival material, and live performance. A close associate of Todd Duncan and Anne Brown for several years, Robert Wyatt will also share first-hand accounts of this talented duo, who played the roles of Porgy and Bess in the original 1935 production.  

Robert Wyatt, who has been critically acclaimed for his sensitive and colorful interpretation of Gershwin, brings to this New York performance not only his artistic abilities, but also his scholarship. In 1987, he discovered several unpublished piano preludes by George Gershwin and, through continuing research, Wyatt has secured his position as one of the nation's foremost Gershwin scholars. In 2004, Oxford University Press published his work The Gershwin Reader, co-edited with John Andrew Johnson. 

This event will be held at 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street (below Canal), New York, NY. Tickets are $18 and can be purchased online (http://www.92y.org/Tribeca/Event/Gershwin--The-Man-and-Music.aspx) or at the door.

For more information about Robert Wyatt, please visit http://www.robert-wyatt.com.

About 92YTribeca:

92YTribeca is 92nd Street Y’s downtown arts and culture venue in New York City. Opened in October 2008, 92YTribeca presents music, comedy, film, theater, talks, classes, family events, and Jewish community and holiday programs in a versatile, street-level, modern space at 200 Hudson Street. In addition to the mainstage and screening room, the venue houses an art gallery, lounge, bar, café, seminar and meeting rooms, and free Wi-Fi around the space. With programs developed by a professional curatorial team in partnership with staff, local artists and arts organizations, new-media companies, fellow presenters, and community and cause-based organizations, 92YTribeca aims to engage a diverse community of young people from around the New York area with smart, relevant programming that encourages participation and conversation. For more information, visit www.92YTribeca.org. 92nd Street Y is a world-class nonprofit community and cultural center that connects people to the worlds of education, the arts, health and wellness, and Jewish life.