JUNE 12, 2018 @ 7:30 PM
Ensemble LPR
David Handler, Artistic Director,
Ankush Bahl, conductor
Tessa Lark, violin
David Handler, (1980), Fanfare & Fugue (for a Fish), (2108), (World Premiere)
Thea Musgrave, (1928-), Aurora, (1999), (East Coast premiere)
John Corigliano, (1938- ), The Red Violin: Suite for Violin and Orchestra, (1999),
Tessa Lark, violin
Intermission
Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, (1840-93), Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48, (1880)
I. Pezzo in Forma di Sonatina: Andante non Troppo – Allegro moderato
II. Valse: Moderato – Tempo di Valse
III. Elegie: Larghetto elegiac
IV. Finale: (Tema Russo): Andante – Allegro con spirito
Claude Debussy, (1862-1918), Clair de Lune (1890), L. 75, (arr. Lipton)
**The performance of Ensemble LPR has been made possible by a generous grant from the Hess & Helyn Kline Foundation**
WQXR HOST: Paul Cavalconte
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Ensemble LPR
Named after and headquartered at the acclaimed New York City venue (Le) Poisson Rouge, Ensemble LPR is an assemblage of some of New York’s finest musicians. In 2008 LPR changed the classical music landscape, creating a new, accessible environment in which to experience art music, and in doing so expanded classical and new music listenership. Le Poisson Rouge Co-Founder David Handler brings this same ethos to Ensemble LPR, of which he is Founding Artistic and Executive Director.
Ensemble LPR personifies the venue’s commitment to aesthetic diversity and artistic excellence with an eclectic spectrum of music—from works by the finest living composers, to compelling interpretations of the standard repertoire. The group has worked with esteemed classical musicians, conductors, and composers, including Lara St. John, Taka Kigawa, Simone Dinnerstein, Jennifer Koh, Fred Sherry, Ursula Oppens, Daniel Hope, André de Ridder, Christopher Rountree, Max Richter, and Timo Andres, as well as prominent artists from non-classical backgrounds such as Johnny Greenwood (Radiohead), David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors), Bryce Dessner (The National), Oscar-Nominated composer Mica Levi, John Lurie, and San Fermin.
Ensemble LPR has recorded on Deutsche Grammophon and performed at notable NYC venues including (Le) Poisson Rouge, Central Park’s Naumburg Bandshell, BRIC House Ballroom, and House of Yes.
The group will soon celebrate its fifth anniversary season. The New York Times has heralded Le Poisson Rouge as “[a] forward-thinking venue that seeks to showcase disparate musical styles under one roof” and “[the] coolest place to hear contemporary music.” The Los Angeles Times raves, “[The] place isn’t merely cool…the venue is a downright musical marvel.”
Le Poisson Rouge Co-Founder David Handler brings this same ethos to Ensemble LPR, of which he is Founding Executive & Artistic Director.
Ensemble LPR Mission
Ours is a uniquely exhilarating moment for music.
The old hierarchies of taste have been called into question; the old distinctions of genre have been revealed as obsolete.
Never before has such an abundance of musical riches been so widely available to so many listeners — laypersons and experts alike.
And yet, alone among the major art forms, classical music seems resolutely wed to anachronisms of tradition and ritual that first sprang up in the nineteenth century.
Indeed, a newcomer to classical music might be forgiven for wondering:
Why, in the year 2018, is the work of classical music so little a part of the larger cultural dialogue?
Why, in a city like New York, is the work of orchestras and composers of so little relevance to the lives of people who follow the arts, and to people who do not?
Why, among its peer art forms, is classical music the least nimble and most conservative in its patterns of thinking?
When did a genre dominated by genius and virtuosi become sclerotic, rigid, unresponsive?
Ensemble LPR is that newcomer.
Ankush Kumar Bahl – Conductor
Hailed by the New York Times as an “energetic” conductor who leads with “clear authority and enthusiasm,” Ankush Kumar Bahl is recognized today as a conductor with impressive technique, thoughtful interpretations, and an engaging podium presence. Recent and upcoming appearances, including re-engagements, are with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra,Virginia Symphony, Richmond Symphony, Thunder Bay Symphony, London Symphonia, Orchestre National de France, the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico, and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. Prestigious summer festival engagements have been with the Copenhagen Philharmonic at Tivoli, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival, and the Chautauqua Institute. The past few seasons, Bahl has been a frequent cover conductor for the New York Philharmonic and Maestro Jaap van Zweden, having assisted him and other venerable guest conductors both at Lincoln Center and on tour.
Bahl is a proud recipient of four separate Sir Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Awards between the years of 2011 to 2016 as well as the 2009 Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Scholarship. A protege of former New York Philharmonic Music Director, Kurt Masur, he served as Masur’s assistant conductor at the Orchestre National de France, the Royal Concertgebouw, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. It was in this capacity that Bahl was called upon to step in for Maestro Masur for two performances of Brahms and Beethoven with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Tessa Lark – Violin
Recipient of a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Silver Medalist in the 9th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, and winner of the 2012 Naumburg International Violin Competition, Tessa Lark is one of the most captivating artistic voices of our time. She is praised consistently by critics and audiences for her astounding range of sounds, technical agility, captivating interpretations, and multi-genre programming and performance. Also the recipient of a career grant from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the Performing and Visual Arts in 2014, Ms. Lark continues to expand her relationships with orchestras and presenters on stages worldwide.
She has appeared with orchestras throughout the U.S. since making her concerto debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen. As part of Carnegie Hall’s Distinctive Debuts series she performed in February 2017 at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall. Ms. Lark has also been presented by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Perlman Music Program, San Francisco Performances, Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, Ravinia’s Bennett-Gordon Classics series, the Troy Chromatics Series, Chamber Music Tulsa, the Caramoor Wednesday Morning Concert Series, Seattle Chamber Music Society, and the Marlboro, Yellow Barn, Olympic, and Music@Menlo festivals.
PROGRAM NOTES
Fanfare & Fugue (for a Fish), (2108), (World Premiere)
Fanfare & Fugue (for a Fish) is a tribute to Le Poisson Rouge on its tenth anniversary. The piece opens with a bombastic and somewhat warped Fanfare, celebrating the venue’s mission to revive the symbiotic relationship between art & revelry. In the second section, which is entered into without pause, two prevalent musical devices in the “classical” canon (and on the LPR stage) are represented in counterpoint with one another.
There is the retrograde fugue, a traditional style of imitative writing in which the music is presented and then reverses direction from a midway point and is played backwards – a mirror of itself. In this instance the material is “atonal” as it suggests no key, and in fact undermines such suggestion deliberately. The fugue is bowed by the strings in the forward portion and plucked (pizzicato) by the same instruments when it runs backwards. In counterpoint with the fugue is a tonal chorale, centered around a major mode/key and played in a percussive, “minimalist” style by the winds, brass, harp & marimba.
The pulsed, diatonic chorale envelopes and eventually swallows whole the fugue, bringing the piece to a resolute but calm close while the oboe and muted trumpet eerily recall the Fanfare song from the beginning.
My faith in music and in listening inspired the founding of LPR, which ultimately led me back out the other side to the life of an artist once again, saving me in the process. – David Handler
Aurora, (1999), (East Coast premiere)
….yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger;
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards.
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. III ii line 379
This work was commissioned for students of the Colburn School of Performing Arts, and it seemed to me that Aurora – Dawn – or the coming of light, would be an apt title. It would represent the potential and the musical burgeoning of young talent.
The music thus starts mysteriously, even tentatively, with a short melodic theme played by solo viola and accompanied by low soft chords emphasizing the note D. These two elements, in a variety of guises, keys and continuations, build in a gradual crescendo, till after a brief moment of darkness where “ghosts troop home”, dawn finally arrives in the shape of a luminous D major chord. The music becomes “full and joyous” and in a brief coda, where the music seems suspended, all clouds dissolve and the D major turns out to be a dominant and on the very last note resolves to a G. – Thea Musgrave
The Red Violin: Suite for Violin and Orchestra, (1999)
John Corigliano was deeply involved in the creation of the film, directed by François Girard. It is the story of a violin, stained by its maker, a 17-century Cremona craftsman, with the blood of his dead wife, as it is passed through the centuries. The task for Corigliano was to evoke [the different] locales and eras while creating a score that had a coherent musical voice.
In the suite he also wanted a coherent musical shape, and though the music is highly atmospheric, he achieved that goal. Corigliano’s unabashed Romantic streak is in full voice here.
The suite begins with moody, gestural stirrings in the strings until the solo violin enters with a simple, spacious melody. A chaconne theme breaks in abruptly: a series of thick, pungent chords on the violin that become a recurring link in the piece. [There are] tumultuous, cadenza-like solo flights for the violin…the music is effective. And as always, Corigliano’s scoring skills are impressive.
Eight days before the film’s opening in New York, the enterprising Eos Orchestra and Bell, with the conductor Jonathan Sheffer, gave the premiere. – Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times,07/06/1999
Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48, (1880)
Restrained though it is—made so in part, of course, by the restricted instrumentation—the serenade is nonetheless full of unmistakable Tchaikovskian melancholy (magically illuminated by George Balanchine in his great ballet Serenade of 1934), and many of the rhetorical devices and the techniques whereby they are achieved are familiar from Tchaikovsky’s big symphonies. The introduction, particularly its dramatic and unexpected reappearance at the end of the first movement, even more its interruption of the Finale, is a good example. Characteristic too, and extremely difficult to bring off in performance, is the end of the introduction, with its repeated and ever-slower cadence preparing the allegro. The link is elegantly made in that the repeated D-E of the melody is carried over to become the bass of the allegro.
The second movement is one of the most gracious of Tchaikovsky’s many waltzes, very happily thought out for string orchestra, never more so than when the melody moves into inner voices while the first violins create an almost balletic embroidery above. The Elegy’s softly dissonant beginning is very beautiful, and throughout, Tchaikovsky’s ear for string sonorities is at its most imaginative. The Finale is marked “Tema russo,” and both the melancholy violin tune in the introduction (a Volga boat-hauling song) and the first dance-like theme of the allegro con spirito are folk material. – Michael Steinberg
Clair de Lune (1890), L. 75, (arr. Lipton)
Debussy started work on the Suite Bergamasque around 1890. It is a piano suite of four movements, of which the third – “Clair de Lune” – is by far the most popular and most often programmed, here orchestrated by Bob Lipton.
Though music dictionaries trace the term “bergamasque” to rustic dances from the Italian town of Bergamo, the sound of “Clair de Lune” is anything but rustic. Its sound is elegant and luminous. Moonlight has been an irresistible subject for composers, and this movement is one of its most famous evocations – along with Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata for piano and the melody from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto which became the pop song “Full Moon and Empty Arms.” What we hear in these four beautiful minutes seems to suspend time and movement – hardly the stuff of dance. It remains rooted in its opening key, budging only for an unexpected modulation into E major – distant in harmonic terms, but very close on the scale. – Program Note from Utah Symphony
BIOGRAPHY
John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years. Corigliano’s scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world.
Recent scores include Rhymes for the Irreverent and no comet ever scratched the sky for baritone and piano (2017), One Sweet Morning (2011) a four-movement song cycle premiered by the New York Philharmonic and Stephanie Blythe, Conjurer (2008), for percussion and string orchestra, commissioned for and introduced by Dame Evelyn Glennie; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin (2005), developed from the themes of the score to the film of the same name, which won Corigliano an Oscar in 1999; Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) for orchestra and amplified soprano, the recording of which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition in 2008; Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004), scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles; and Symphony No. 2 (2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music.) Other important scores include String Quartet (1995: Grammy Award, Best Contemporary Composition); Symphony No. 1 (1991: Grawemeyer Award); the opera The Ghosts of Versailles (Metropolitan Opera commission, 1991); and the Clarinet Concerto (1977). In 2015 an orchestral version of Stomp was commissioned by Houston Symphony Orchestra.
In 2015 Los Angeles Opera received wide acclaim, their stunning new production of The Ghosts of Versailles. Tony Award-winning Darko Tresnjac directed a stellar cast including Patricia Racette, Christopher Maltman and Patti LuPone. The production collected 2016 Grammys for Opera Recording and Engineered Classical album.
Corigliano’s music is performed widely on North American and international stages. In recent years his music has been featured in performances throughout the US and Europe, Caracas, Melbourne, Shanghai, Beijing, Russia, Tokyo, Krakow, Toronto, Bosnia, and beyond. His eightieth birthday is celebrated in 2018 with performances far and wide.
www.johncorigliano.com
David Handler is a composer and violinist and the co-creator of the iconic New York City venue Le Poisson Rouge (LPR). Trained in the classical conservatory tradition, Handler composes acoustic and electronic music that has been described by The New York Times as “eerie and superbly wrought…exploring polarities of light and dark, the sacred and the profane.” He has collaborated with leading classical and popular artists, and has received premieres and commissions from BAM, Central Park’s Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, and Lincoln Center. In 2007, recognizing the art world’s need for popularity and nightlife’s need for substance, Handler co-founded LPR, reinvigorating the musical landscape for artists and audiences and reviving the concept of the salon for classical music. The venue has received awards and accolades from Rolling Stone, Billboard, The New York & LA Times, and ASCAP. Collectively LPR and the newly formed LPR Presents host over 500 concerts per year in Manhattan and beyond, including performances by Thom Yorke, Paul Simon, Yo-Yo Ma, Lady Gaga, Iggy Pop, Lorde, Beck and Philip Glass, among others.
Handler is the Founder and Artistic and Executive Director of the acclaimed orchestral collective Ensemble LPR, and creator and host of the online radio show Music to Live By. He recently joined Philip Glass, Nico Muhly and Rufus Wainwright on the roster of St. Rose Management. Speaking Engagements include University of Missouri – Kansas City, New York University, Syracuse University, Hunter College, The New School, and The Manhattan School of Music. Advisory boards include CavanKerry Press and The David Lynch Foundation.
Ten years on, LPR continues to thrive and Handler’s own artistry has been deepened by his role as a creative disruptor, the doors he has opened for fellow performers, and the unheard music he has introduced to audiences. As Handler returns full-time to his work as a composer, it’s clear that his best is yet to come. Handler is a citizen of the United States and Ireland, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.
www.david-handler.com
Thea Musgrave – Rich and powerful musical language and a strong sense of drama have made Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave one of the most respected and exciting contemporary composers in the Western world. Her works are performed in major concert halls, festivals, and radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic.
In culmination/honor of her distinguished and varied catalogue and career over 60 years, the BBC presented Total Immersion: Thea Musgrave with three concerts of her chamber, choral, and symphonic works performed and recorded at the Barbican in a single day — February 15, 2014.
Known for the clarity of her invention, the skill of her orchestrations, and the power of her musical communication, Musgrave has consistently explored new means of projecting essentially dramatic situations in her music, frequently altering and extending the conventional boundaries of instrumental performance by physicalizing their musical and dramatic impact: both without programmatic content (such as the Clarinet Concerto, the Horn Concerto, the Viola Concerto, and Space Play), and others with specific programmatic ideas (such as the paintings in The Seasons and Turbulent Landscapes, the poems in Ring Out Wild Bells, Journey through a Japanese Landscape, and Autumn Sonata, and the famous Greek legends in Orfeo, Narcissus, Helios, and Voices from the Ancient World); — all extensions of concerto principles. In some of these, to enhance the dramatic effect, the sonic possibilities of spatial acoustics have been incorporated: in the Clarinet Concerto the soloist moves around the different sections of the orchestra, and in the Horn Concerto the orchestral horns are stationed around the concert hall. Thus the players are not only the conversants in an abstract musical dialogue, but also very much the living (and frequently peripatetic) embodiment of its dramatis personae.
Her 10 large-scale and several chamber operas of the past 40 years beginning with The Voice of Ariadne (1972) and followed by Mary, Queen of Scots (1977), A Christmas Carol (1979), Harriet, the Woman Called Moses (1984) and Simón Bolívar (1992) are in every sense the true successors to these instrumental concertos.
www.theamusgrave.com