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Paul Freeman Introduces. . .
Czech National Symphony Orchestra
Paul Freeman, Music Director
Jean-Michel Bertelli, Clarinet
Sy Brandon Celebration Overture
Sy Brandon is Professor of Music at Pennsylvania's Millersville University. He received his AMD in composition from the University of Arizona. Dr. Brandon has received numerous honors and commissions including the Rockefeller Composer's Assistance Program and the Symposium III for New Band Music. His music has been recorded by the Swiss Duo Delimme, the Contemporary Record Society and Trutone Records and has been performed both throughout the United States and abroad.
Celebration Overture was composed in 1995 in honor of WITF-FM's 25th anniversary, and was selected as the winning composition. The work alternates fanfare-like figures with playful rhythms and counterpoint. It consists of two main sections that contrast each other and a middle section that serves as a development of previous materials, derived primarily from the opening brass fanfare and the woodwind counter melody. The modal melodic and harmonic material is interwoven with polyrhythm, imitation, counterpoint, and timbral changes to create a composition reflective of the excitement of this celebration.
Charles Griffes Three Poems of Fiona McCloud
Born in 1884 in Elmira, New York, Griffes died at the early age of 35 in New York City. He was one of the most poetic personal voices in American music. Although the number of works which he wrote is modest in size, their significance is major.
Three Poems of Fiona McCloud is set to a beautiful palate of sound for soprano soloist and orchestra. Reminiscent of the pastel colors of Debussy and often the harmonic textures of Wagner, the work is based upon the following poems:
The Lament of Ian the Proud
What is this crying that I hear in the wind?
Is it the old sorrow and the old grief?
Or is it a new thing coming, a whirling leaf
About the gray hair of me who am weary and blind?
I know not what it is, but on the moor above the shore
There is a stone which the purple nets of heather bind,
And 'thereon is writ: She will return no more.
And wind crying to me who am old and blind!
Thy dark eyes to mine, Eilidh,
O how my soul leaps, leaps to their fire!
Sure, now, if I in heaven,
But a lost echo even of one such kiss,
All of the soul of me would leap afar,
If that called me to thee,
The dark rose of thy mouth
Draw nigher, draw nigher!
Thy breath is the wind of the south,
The wind and the rose and darkness,
Deep silence of the night,
Husht like a breathless lyre,
Save the sea's thunderous might,
Silence and wind and sea,
They are thee, O Rose of my Desire!
Leaping higher and higher,
Thy soul, thy secret name,
Leaps thro' death's blazing pyre!
Kiss me, imperishable fire,
Dark Rose, O Rose of my Desire!
Finalist in the Munich International Competition and winner of the Metropolitan Opera Regional Auditions, Louise Toppin has received critical acclaim for her operatic, orchestral, and oratorio performances in the United States, England and Spain. Her other competition prizes include Lola Hayes Vocal Competition, New York (First prize winner), Opera at Florham, New Jersey, YWCA Competition, New York, 1992 New Jersey Bach and Handel Competition (First Prize) and 1991 Livonia Symphony Competition (First Prize).
She is in wide demand both on the concert and operatic stage in America and abroad. Dr. Toppin holds degrees from the University of North Carolina, Peabody Conservatory and the University of Michigan, where she received her doctorate in music. In 1995 she coached with Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge and more recently with Elly Ameling at the Britten-Pears School in England. Currently she is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.
Composed as a concert overture, Liberty is a deliberately ironic and ambiguous title for a work that reflects the composer's mixed reactions to life in Philadelphia. This Pennsylvania city is just as much a home to the historical symbols of freedom and liberty as it is a window on the social, economic and racial contrasts that characterize contemporary American society. All of the material in the work is derived from a single 3-note motif (C, E, F#) that is not stated fully until the 40th measure when it is proclaimed in a rather declamatory fashion. "Fast Slow Fast" use this motif in a variety of dramatic gestures that articulate the structure of this deliberately concise work.
David Osbon was born in Reading, England in 1963 and studied composition in Great Britain. In 1997 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been awarded many accolades and has written a number of works for orchestra and chamber ensembles.
Robert Muczynski Symphonic Dialogues, Op. 20
Written at the suggestion of Howard Mitchell, Symphonic Dialogues is dedicated to him and the National Symphony Orchestra. It was composed in 1965 in Tucson. Structurally, the composition is a fast-slow-fast form with three distinct sections. The title Dialogues refers to a number of passages containing an interplay between various instruments or between sections of the orchestra. The slow middle section (Andante) is dramatic in nature and maintains the tension originally established in the first Allegro. The return of the Allegro contains materials from the first part, now greatly altered and developed. Its destination is the closing Presto, with final outbursts of the initial Allegro subject which brings the work to an energetic close.
Soon to celebrate his 70th birthday (March, 1999), Muczynski grew up in Chicago where he studied composition with Alexander Tcherepnin. He served as Professor at the University of Arizona for many years and now resides in Tucson. Robert Muczynski has received numerous awards for his compositions which include many works for orchestra, solo instruments, voice and instrumental ensembles.
Richard A. Klessig Meditation from Don Juan
Klessig studied jazz piano in New York City and graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1992. In 1996, his original ballet score Don Juan was performed by the Oklahoma City Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Dennis Shrock to open Ballet Oklahoma's 25th anniversary season. His love of jazz led him to release his 1997 CD entitled Quiet Jazz for Solo Piano.
Meditation from Don Juan is taken from the third act of Klessig's 1996 ballet Don Juan. The audience hears the music as Don Juan's rejected lover Elvira comes in to plead with him to repent and change his ways. As she pleads, he has a vision of all his former loves, who dance with him one by one and make the same request that he change. The emotional content of the music is meant to reflect the idea of forgiveness. The women forgive him so that he might forgive himself.
J.B. II was composed in 1985 to partially fulfill an Individual Artist Fellowship in music composition awarded by the Tennessee Arts Commission. The work was premiered later that same year by the Knoxville Symphony Chamber Orchestra. After that initial performance, the orchestra incorporated J.B. II into its tour repertoire for the ensuing two seasons.
It has been performed by the New York Chamber Orchestra and throughout the United States. J.B. II is a non-programmatic vision of the Archibald MacLeish play J.B. It is a rhapsodic composition that distills and presents the composer's thoughts and feelings about the end of the play, and particularly the character Sarah's final, poetically beautiful statement about human redemption through faith and unconditional love.
Marvin Lamb holds degrees from Sam Houston State University, the University of North Texas and the University of Illinois. He is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Oklahoma at Norman.
Lamb's music has been performed widely in Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico and in the United States. His orchestral works have been performed by the Atlanta, Dallas, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestras. Among his many awards are Meet the Composer, the National Science Foundation and the Charles Ives Center for American Music.
Richard Felciano Overture Concertante for Clarinet and Orchestra
The Overture Concertante is based on the minor third and the major second three notes which seem to be very deeply ingrained in
the human subconscious. They are used in an exploration of the extraordinary variety available in clarinet sonority, from the deep, warm melancholy of the A-clarinet's low range, through the brilliance of its upper register, to the pure, plaintive, child-like cries of the soprano clarinet in the quiet middle section. The orchestra establishes "pillars" at some distance from one another, the clarinet spans the arch between them. Both are rather tentative at the outset, becoming fully defined at the end, where the orchestra's "pillars" are so close together that there is no time for other than an immediate reply from the clarinet. The result is a ritual call-and-response pattern.
A native of California, Richard Felciano has received awards and commissions from the French and Italian Governments, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the City of Berlin, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ford, Rockefeller, Fromm, and Guggenheim Foundations. His music has been performed widely in music festivals throughout the world. A Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, he is Founder of the Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT).
With distinction, Bertelli studied at the Conservatoire de Musique de Geneve. He is the winner of several international competitions including the International Competition in the USA, organized by the International Clarinet Society in 1986 and the International Clarinet Competition in Toulon, France in 1985.
He has subsequently been in demand as a soloist and chamber musician in France, Italy, the USA, Sweden, and Great Britain. The Overture Concertante was written especially for Bertelli and premiered in 1996 in California with Kent Nagano conducting. Since 1995 he has collaborated as soloist for Yamaha Music Europe, playing the Yamaha clarinet, and is principal clarinetist in the Lyon National Opera Orchestra. "There is no denying that Jean-Michel Bertelli is a virtuoso, an irreproachable technician and an imaginative poet." Le Progres (France)
Paul Freeman has distinguished himself as one of the world's pre-eminent conductors. Much in demand, he has conducted over 100 orchestras in 28 different countries including the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and major orchestras in London, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin. Maestro Freeman has served as the Music Director of Canada's Victoria Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic and Associate Conductor of the Detroit and Dallas Symphony Orchestras. He is currently Music Director of the renowned Chicago Sinfonietta and simultaneously serves as Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague. With over 200 recordings to his credit, he has won numerous awards for his unique interpretations of the classical, romantic, and modern repertoire. Dr. Freeman, who studied on a U.S. Fulbright Grant at the Hochschule in Berlin, holds a Ph.D. degree from the Eastman School of Music and LH.D. degrees from Dominican University and Loyola University.
Czech National Symphony Orchestra
Since the Czech Republic's bloodless "Velvet Revolution" of 1989, the country has been riding a rapid wave of democratization, which has affected the music world as well. Orchestras have been forced to become financially independent. In order to survive, they must concern themselves with the procurement of foreign moneys through recording contracts and overseas performances. These developments, in turn, have necessitated the need for higher performance standards.
Out of this chaotic scene Jan Hasenöhrl, an outstanding solo trumpet player, sensed the acute need to reshape the Czech orchestral scene and, in Autumn 1993, invited the top musicians from Prague's major orchestras to form a new orchestra, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The Orchestra gave its first concert, conducted by Vladimir Valek, in November 1993 in Prague's Rudolfinum Dvorak Hall. In 1994 the Czech music world's national treasure, Zdenek Kosler, was named chief conductor. The first recording was made at the beginning of April 1994. Maestro Kosler died in August 1995.
In January 1996 the brilliant American Conductor and Music Director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, Paul Freeman was appointed Music Director and Chief Conductor. Under Maestro Freeman's leadership, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra has shown stunning development. Already he has made over 30 compact discs with the orchestra and has toured Italy and Great Britain. So successful was the November 1997 United Kingdom tour of 19 concerts under Paul Freeman and Libor Pesek that IMG Concert Management has recently signed a 5-year contract to tour the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Europe, Asia, and America. Through its many recordings, concerts and television productions it is fast becoming one of the most important ensembles in the Czech Republic.
Three Poems of Fiona McCloud is published by G. Schirmer. J.B.II is published by Carl Fischer.
The recording of Celebration Overture by Sy Brandon was made possible in part by a grant from Millersville University's Faculty Development Committee. Partial funding for the recording of J.B. II by Marvin Lamb was provided by the Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Baylor University.
Artistic Director: Paul Freeman
Executive Producer: Joan Yarbrough
Producer: Jiri Gemrot · Engineers: Ivan Pommer and Jan Kotzmann
Editing: Mark Franklin, Media Magic, Inc., Victoria, BC
Recorded September-December 1997 ·Czech National Radio Studios, Prague
Cover Art: Charla Freeman Puryear
Paul Freeman Introduces. . .
Paul Freeman introduces the music of Sy Brandon · Charles Griffes · David Osbon · Robert Muczynski · Richard A. Klessig · Marvin Lamb · Richard Felciano (5:45)
Celebration Overture (5:38)
Three Poems of Fiona McCloud (9:15)
The Lament of Ian the Proud, Thy Dark Eyes to Mine, The Rose of the Night
Symphonic Dialogues, Op. 20 (8:05)
Meditation from Don Juan (5:20)
Overture Concertante for Clarinet & Orchestra (14:04)
Jean-Michel Bertelli, Clarinet
Czech National Symphony Orchestra
PAUL FREEMAN, Music Director
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