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Music of Our Time, Vol. 4

Gerald

Levinson

1 Chant des metiers, 11 .-54

Pamela Guidetti, Lois Herbine, flutes/ piccolos; Dorothy Freeman, oboe/ English horn; Allison Herz, Terry Guidetti, clarinets; Norman Spielberg, bassoon/contrabassoon; Richard Swartz, horn; Barbara Prugh, John Thyhsen, trumpets; Robert Gale, trombone; Brian Brown, tuba; Sophie Labiner, harp; Michael Sheadel, piano; Susan Jones, William Kerrigan, percussion; James Freeman, conductor

Steven

Stucky

Double Concerto for Violin, Oboe, and Chamber Orchestra, 19:35

I. Lamento. Andante Serioso Cadenza I

II. Scherzo. Vivo Cadenza II

III. Notturno. Largo

Igor Szwec, violin

Dorothy Freeman, oboe/oboe d'amore; Gloria Justen-Schenk, Paul Reiser, Diane Barnett, Emma Kummrow, Sarah Dubois, Alexander Abbe, violins; Geoffrey Michaels, Barbara Creider, Ellen Trainer, violas; Ulrich Boeckheler, Vivian Barton, cellos; Miles B. Davis, double bass; Michael Sheadel, piano; Susan Jones, William Kerrigan, percussion; James Freeman, conductor

Orchestra 2001, James Freeman, artistic director

David

Finko

Fromm Septet, 11:52

Dorothy Freeman, oboe; Arne Running, clarinet; Allison Herz, bass clarinet; Igor Szwec, violin; Lori Barnet, cello; Miles B. Davis, double bass; William Kerrigan, percussion; James Freeman, conductor

David

Crumb

Variations for Cello and Chamber Ensemble. 21:25

Theme

Variation I

Variation II

Variation III

Variation IV

Variation V

Variation VI

Variation VII

Variation VIII

Variation IX

Ulrich Boeckheler, cello

Pamela Guidetti, flute/alto flute; Lois Herbine, flute/piccolo; Dorothy Freeman, oboe/English horn; Allison Herz, clarinet; Norman Spielberg, bassoon; Adam Lesnick, horn; Igor Szwec, Emma Kummrow, violins; Ellen Trainer, viola; Charles Forbes, cello; William Tilley, double bass; Sophie Labiner, harp; Charles Abramovic, piano; Susan Jones, William Kerrigan, percussion; James Freeman, conductor

Chant des rochers Gerald Levinson

Chant des rochers was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture in honor of the 70th birthday of Olivier Messiaen and first performed by the Ensemble Ars Nova, conducted by Marius Constant, at the Festival de Besanijon in 1978. It is scored for eleven wind instru­ments, harp, piano, and percussion. The piece is an homage both to Messiaen himself and to the mountain landscapes of the Dauphine (Hautes Alpes), an awe inspiring region of majestic, craggy peaks and gla­ciers, which Messiaen (and Berlioz before him) felt to be his true spiritual home.

The outer sections of the piece juxtapose various "mountain musics," principally evo­cations of Tibetan ritual music with its pow­erful deep-bass chanting and raucous ensembles of shawms, giant horns, and per­cussion. The central section is a kind of musi­cal puzzle in which a coded birthday mes­sage to Messiaen ("Tout le Dauphine chante le nom d'Olivier Messiaen") is inscribed into the music, using a musical alphabet of pitch and duration (of his invention), accompa­nied by two layers of wind chords marking out permutations of a series of durations whose values constantly add up to 70. Each word is separated from the next by a silence (filled in by soft gong strokes) whose dura­tion is given by the numerological value of the letters of the word, so that in effect (at least fancifully), the message is articulated twice: once in sounds and again in the silences.

This work, written while Messiaen was at the height of his powers, is one of two tributes I have paid him in my music; the other is the Adagio finale of my Second Symphony, dedicated to him in memoriam.

Gerald Levinson, born in 1951 and raised in Connecticut, has been increasingly recognized as one of the major composers of his generation. In 1990 he received the Music Award (for lifetime achievement) of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which cited his "sensitive poetic spirit, imaginative treatment of tex­ture and color," and his "potent and very personal idiom which projects immediately to the listener."

His principal teachers were George Crumb, George Rochberg, and Richard Wernick at the University of Pennsylvania; Ralph Shapey at the University of Chicago, and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conserva­tory. Later Mr. Levinson served on numerous occasions as translator and assistant to Olivier Messiaen, for master classes, lectures, texts, and program notes. For his music he has received awards from BMI, the New England Conservatory, East and West Artists, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts (two fellowships). Recently his monumental Second Symphony was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. In 1997 his Five Fires was broadcast worldwide by the BBC as one of fifteen semifinalists (from 1300 scores worldwide) in the London-based Master-prize competition for orchestral music. Five Fires was awarded the Prix International Arthur Honegger de Composition Musicale for 1998.

Levinson has taught at Swarthmore College, where he is Professor of Music, since 1977. He spent 1979-80 in Ball as a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar, studying Balinese music and composing, and returned in 1982-83 as a Guggenheim Fellow.

A CD of four of Levinson's works has been released on the CRI label; two other works have appeared on CRI, Albany, and Laurel CDs, and four other works are due to appear soon on forthcoming CDs from CRI and Albany. Levinson's music is published by Theodore Presser Co. (Merion Music) and Margun Music, Inc.

Double Concerto for Violin, Oboe, and Chamber Orchestra Steven Stucky

My Double Concerto for Violin, Oboe, and Chamber Orchestra was com­posed at the request of violinist Karen Clarke and oboist George Riordan, a husband-and-wife duo seeking a companion piece to include in programs with the Bach C-minor Concerto. At George's suggestion I wrote not only for the modern oboe but also, in the last movement, for the oboe d'amore, an instrument of which he is espe­cially fond. (These passages may also be played on English horn.) The score was begun in late 1982, laid aside, then resumed late in 1984 and completed in 1985. The first performance took place in March 1985 at the Florida State University Festival of New Music in Tallahassee. In 1989 I took up the score once again to carry out some small cor­rections and revisions.

Though the music runs continuously, the concerto is in five clearly defined sections. The three main movements—Lamento, Scherzo, and Notturno, in the tempo sequence slow, fast, slow—are separated by two cadenzas. Cadenza I, for solo oboe, is accompanied chiefly by piano and percus­sion. In Cadenza II, the solo violin is set against a quiet background of strings. Despite the presence of cadenzas, however, the work focuses very little on virtuoso display but rather on expressive lines and on textural and timbral interplay between soloists and chamber orchestra.

Steven Stucky (born 1949) is widely recognized as one of the leading American composes of his generation. He has written commissioned works for the Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Baltimore Symphonies, for the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and for the Chanticleer, the Boston Musica Viva, the Camerata Bern, and the Koussevitzky Foundation. The Carnegie Hall Corporation commissioned his orchestral work Angelius to open its 1990 Centennial Season celebration. The 1999-2000 season includes world premieres of American Music (Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen, with baritone Manuel Barrueco) commissioned by the Institute of American Music at the Eastman School of Music. Among his current projects are a percussion concerto for Evelyn Glennie and a recorder concerto for Michala Petri. In addition to composing, Mr. Stucky is active as a conductor, writer, lecturer, and teacher, and he is a frequent guest composer on college campuses throughout the United States. A well-known expert on the music of the late Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, Mr. Stucky won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize for his 1981 book Lutoslawski and His Music (Cambridge University Press). Among his other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986) and a Bogliasco Fellowship (1997). Mr. Stucky has served on the faculty of Cornell University since 1980, chairing the Music Department there from 1992 to 1997, and he has worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1988 as Composer-in-Residence and New Music Advisor.

Fromm Septet David Finko

Fromm Septet, a single-movement com­position, was commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University in 19B2. The work is built on three contrasting themes/images: a mobile, nerv­ous recitation, a "choral" dramatic "anthem;" and a slow, severe "procession." These themes are juxtaposed, combined, twisted, modified, and transformed.

David Finko was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1936. In the early 1950's, the Soviet Union started active preparations for WWIII against the USA and NATO, arid young talented men were pressed into service in the national army and navy. Finko—the only son of a naval archi­tect and the Theory of Elasticity professor— was selected to become a submarine design­ing engineer. He graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Naval Architecture (M.S. in Submarine Design. 19S9 and the rank of lieutenant), made two arctic patrols as a crew member, was trained at several ship yards and at the Submarine Design Bureau #18 in Leningrad, where he was appointed as a submarine designing engi­neer in 1960.

But David Finko also studied piano, violin and music theory since childhood. He graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov School of the Performing Arts (B.A. in Piano Performance, 1958) and from the Leningrad Conservatory (M.A. in Music Composition, 1965). He abandoned his engineering career to become a full-time composer in 1966. He was a member of the Union of Soviet Composers, he wrote many works on com­mission from the Soviet Ministry of Culture and noted performers, and served as an edi­tor of the state music publishing house Soviet Composer.

Since his emigration to the U.S.A. in 1979, David Finko has taught music at seven U.S. universities including Yale University and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Texas. He has been a U.S. citizen since 1986. Finko has written nine operas, nine concerti, three tone poems, two symphonies and chamber compositions. His music has been performed internationally and has received many awards.

David Finko returned to Russia with Orchestra 2001 for the first performances of the Fromm Septet in St. Petersburg and Moscow in November, 1997.

Variations for Cello and Chamber Ensemble

David Crumb

I have, in the past, often contemplated writing a substantial work for the cello. So it was with great enthusiasm that I began composing Variations, a work commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and premiered in 1993 by cellist Lynn Harrell and the orchestra's New Music Group. The per­formance recorded on this disk, featuring cellist Ulrich Boeckheler and the Orchestra 2001, is a sensitive and portentous reading that captures the music's character and depth of feeling.

In concept, Variations came to me rather quickly. I wanted to produce a virtuoso piece, but not at the expense of musicality. Although I chose to feature a soloist, I was not interested in composing a traditional concerto, a form that seemed dated to me. In the end, I decided on a fairly non-tradi­tional "theme and variations," a form well suited to the development of the musical materials I had in mind. The resulting varia­tions are not overtly sectional, but tend to elide into one another, creating the sense of a large one-movement form. The musical landscape is also shaped by the gradual emergence of the solo cello as an independ­ent voice. In the initial variations, the soloist tends to play against the backdrop of a large instrumental texture and is more or less integrated into it. As the work progresses, the cello is increasingly soloistic until it breaks free of the ensemble altogether in Variation VII (which is. in fact, a cadenza). Much of the music of Variations is generated from a single chord (a diatonic cluster) which is introduced near the beginning of the "theme.'' This sonority is clearly reminis­cent of the opening of Bartok's Swing Quarter No. 4, one of my favorite works. In Variations, as in most of my other compositions, I am primarily interested in working with tonal materials. I strive for a strong sense of comprehensibility in my music, something that I feel is lost in many contemporary styles. But, unlike some com­posers who are now writing in a tonal idiom, I am uninterested in merely reiterat­ing the past, crossing over to the popular, or adopting a minimalist's approach and sensi­bility. I believe in breaking new ground but, in doing so, mending some of the broken threads that link the music of out time to music of the past.

David Crumb is currently an Assistant Professor in Composition at the University of Oregon. His music has been performed by the Baltimore Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Croup, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Orchestra 2001, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and numerous smaller ensembles including Parnassus, Voices of Change, and NEOS Trio. In 1998, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for music composition. Mr. Crumb was educated at the Eastman School of Music, Jerusalem's Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, and the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received the Ph.D. in Composition.

Soloists

Dorothy Freeman, oboe and oboe d'amore, was formerly a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Cologne Opera Orchestra, solo oboe with the Lima, Peru, and Springfield, Massachusetts, symphony orchestras and solo English horn with Pablo Casals' Puerto Rico Festival Orchestra. She received B.Mus. and M.Mus. degrees from Boston University, where she studied with Ralph Gomberg, later accepting a Fulbright Fellowship to continue her studies in Germany. She is well known in the Philadelphia area for her performances of contemporary music with Orchestra 2001 and the Penn Contemporary Players and is also currently a member of the Mozart Society Orchestra, solo English horn with Peter Nero's Philly Pops and the Opera Company of Philadelphia Orchestra, and per­forms frequently with the Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia. She has recorded for CRI and Command Classics. Composers Thomas Whitman, Thomas Oboe Lee, Gerald Levinson, Robert Morgan and Arne Running have written new works especially for her.

Igor Szwec, violin, raised in Philadelphia, is an original member of the Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra, 1964-69. He was a charter member of the National Arts Center Orchestra in Ottawa, Canada, 1969-84, where he also often recorded chamber music and solos for CBC Radio Canada. He returned to Philadelphia m 1984 to work with the Concerto Soloists, and has also been a member of Orchestra 2001 since its inception. He serves as qonqertmaster for the Philly Pops Orchestra, Academy of Vocal Arts. New Jersey Opera Festival, and has performed concerts with such notable artists as Bernhard Greenhouse, lona Brown, Anton Kuerti, Karen Turtle, John Barrows and many others.

Ulrich Boeckheler, a prizewinner in the 1982 Caspar Cassado International Cello Compe­tition, performs regularly as a soloist in the United States and Europe. He has been principal cellist of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Flanders in Belgium and Helmuth Killing's Bach Collegium Stuttgart. His principal teachers were Andre Navarra and Leonard Rose.

As a chamber musician, he has participated in the Marlboro, Sarasota and Grand Teton music festivals as well as festivals in France and Mexico. For many years his collaboration with pianist Susan Starr has been successful both in concert and recording studio, he is a member of the Starr-Kim-Boeckheler Trio and was invited to be part of the distin­guished jury for the XXIII International Cello Competition "Dr. Luis Sigall" in Chile. During 1998, Boeckheler was on an extended tour in the United States with Mikhail Baryshnikov and his White Oak Chamber Ensemble.

Conductor

James Freeman is Artistic Director and Conductor of Philadelphia's contemporary music chamber orchestra and ensemble. Orchestra 2001, which he founded in I9BS. He is also Daniel Underbill Professor of Music at Swarthmore College and Chair of the Department of Music and Dance. He was trained at Harvard University (B.A, MA, Ph.D.), Tanglewood. and Vienna's Akademie fur Musik. He counts among his principal teachers pianists Artur Balsam and Paul Badura-Skoda and his father, double bassist Henry Freeman. As both a conductor and a pianist, he has commissioned and given the first performances of many new works by American composers. In 1990 he was given the Philadelphia Music Foundation's award for Achievement in Classical Music. Other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the German Government.

He spent the spring of 1991 as a Fulbright Scholar, guest conductor and lec­turer on recent American music at the Moscow Conservatory. In the fall of 1993, 1994 and 1997 he returned to Moscow with Orchestra 2001 to give three remarkable series of concerts of music by Philadelphia area composers. Mr. Freeman has recorded for Nonesuch, Columbia, Turnabout, Acoustic Research, CRI and MMC. His recordings with Orchestra 2001 for CRI have been universally praised. As a double bassist he performed for 20 years during the summer as a member of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra and continues to play with the Philadelphia Opera Orchestra. As a scholar his articles on contemporary music and 19th-century opera have appeared in leading journals.

During the past two years, Mr. Freeman's guest conducting assignments have taken him to Ljubljana (the National Symphony of Slovenia), Taipei (the National Symphony of Taiwan), the Colorado Music Festival, and with Orchestra 2001 to St. Petersburg. Moscow. Copenhagen, and the Huddersfield (England) International Contemporary Music Festival.

Orchestra 2001

James Freeman. Artistic Director

Orchestra 2001 is one of America's most important and widely respected 20th-centu­ry music ensembles. The vitality, imagina­tion, and dedication to performances of the highest quality that have characterized the ensemble's concerts and recordings ever since its founding in 1988 have won for it a devoted and constantly growing audience in its home city of Philadelphia, enthusiastic praise from critics in Europe and America, and recording contracts with CRI and Centaur Records. As Philadelphia Inquirer critic Peter Dobrin wrote. "The group occupies a place of such importance that a

classical music community without it seems unimaginable." In 1993, 1994, and 1997 the ensemble was invited to serve as the Moscow Conservatory's Ensemble-in-Residence during its Festival of American Music. Our concerts in Russia have led to a remarkable series of on-going collaborative projects with Russian musicians. In November 1997 Orchestra 2001 was the featured ensemble at St. Petersburg's International Festival of Contemporary Music and at the Christmas Concerts of Denmark's Association of International Schools. In 1998 composer George Crumb requested that Orchestra 2001 be the featured ensemble at the Huddersfield, England, Contemporary Music Festival's celebration of his music.

Founded and directed by conductor/ pianist/bassist James Freeman, Orchestra 2001 is generally a one-on-a-part ensemble. Our core personnel numbers fifteen play­ers—flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, string quintet, piano, harp, and two percussion—but many concerts involve singers and additional players, often making the ensemble into a 35-piece chamber orchestra. Our repertoire is devoted almost entirely to music of the 20th century, espe­cially by American composers and with par­ticular emphasis on recent music by Philadelphians. An important aspect of our mission focuses on bringing this music to new audiences.

We have established two different con­cert series: one at center-city Philadelphia venues and another at Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College, where Orchestra 2001 is Ensemble-in-Residence.

Recordings

Volumes I, II, and III in this series of recordings by Orchestra 2001 of music of our time are as follows:

Distant Runes, CRI CD 723

Joseph Schwantner, Distant Runes and Incantations

George Crumb, Lux Aeterna Thea Musgrave, Orfeo /// Thomas Whitman, Aubade David Finko, Viola Concerto