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Collegial Concert I

January 31, 2010, 2:30 p.m.

Bruno Walter Auditorium
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza, NYC
Note: Use the Performing Arts Library's entrance at 111 Amsterdam Avenue, just south of 65th Street. (The Lincoln Center Plaza entrance is closed on Sundays).

Free Admission

Program

Paul Chihara - Viola Sonata (1994/2009)(New York premiere of revised version)
I. Allegro amabile
II. Tempo di menuetto
III. Allegro amabile

Kye Ryung Park - Flusso for Viola and Piano (2009)(World Premiere)

Tim Deighton, Viola
Enrico Elisi, Piano

Paul Chihara - Concerto Piccolo for viola quartet (2007)
l. Allegro
ll. Tarantella (World Premiere)

Marshall Fine - Romance for Viola Quartet, Op. 98

The Penn State Viola Quartet: Kalindi Bellach, Jacob Sustaita, Renata Ribiero, Di Lu

Intermission

Frances White - “The Book of Roses and Memory” for viola, narrator and electronic sound

Liuh Wen Ting, Viola
James Pritchett, Narrator

Petr Eben - Loveless Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Viola (1963)

Evelyn Troester, Mezzo-Soprano
Natasha Lipkina, Viola

Roger Steptoe - Sonatine l for Viola Solo

Nicolo Paganini - La Campanella

Brenton Caldwell, Viola
Yi-Fang Huang, Piano

About the Performers

Timothy Deighton is Professor of Viola at Penn State University where he teaches viola, viola literature, pedagogy, and orchestral excerpt classes, chamber music, and directs the Penn State Viola Ensemble. Having long held a fascination for new music, he has commissioned and performed the premieres of more than fifty works for viola, including many composed for his viola and saxophone duo The Irrelevants. An upcoming CD entitled Dialogues will feature some of these works. His first solo CD, featuring music for viola by New Zealand composers, was released in 2002 on the Atoll label. His playing on this disc was described in The Strad as “brilliant and differentiated,” and the New Zealand Listener ranked it one of the Top Ten classical recordings of the year. In the same year the Pennsylvania-Delaware String Teachers Association recognized him as Outstanding String Teacher of the Year. He directed Penn State’s ViolaFest, a three-day event involving more than 200 violists from across North America and abroad. He serves on the boards of both the American Viola Society and the New York Viola Society. In the summers he serves on the faculty of the International Musical Arts Institute in Maine. His performances have been heard on U.S., European, and Australasian radio, and he is a National Recording Artist for Radio New Zealand. His articles have appeared in many national and international music periodicals.

Italian pianist Enrico Elisi regularly performs and gives master classes in Europe, America, and Asia. He has appeared as a soloist with several orchestras in the US, Italy, and Portugal. He was featured as a recitalist in several radio broadcasts, including a German radio station which hosted a two-and-a-half-hour program about Elisi, most recently. With his versatility he has garnered top awards at such diverse venues as the Venice Competition and the Oporto International Competition - which led to a broadcast for Portuguese national television. An active chamber musician, Elisi has collaborated with many renowned artists and has also performed at the Taos and Ravinia Festivals. Elisi is equally at home with the standard repertoire as well as new music. He enjoys working with living composers and has premiered several works at debut recitals in Toulouse, France; Carnegie Recital Hall; as well as other venues in North and South America. He co-founded and directed the Green Valley Chamber Music Festival and previously, he was also the director of the Piano Institute of the Las Vegas Music Festival. Elisi worked extensively with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory. Mr. Elisi also holds two Italian degrees from the Conservatory of Florence and the world renowned "Incontri col Maestro" International Piano Academy of Imola, where he studied with Lazar Berman. Mr. Elisi is on the piano faculty at Penn State University and has formerly served on the faculty of the University of Nevada (UNLV)

The Penn State Graduate Viola Quartet is made up of students in the Mastersand Professional Performance Certificate programs at Penn State. Kalindi Bellach holds a Bachelor Music from NEC, Jacob Sustaita holds a Master of Music from Rice University, Di Lu holds a Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory, and Renata Ribeiro holds a Bachelor of Music from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.

Russian violinist Natasha Lipkina received her education in the Central Special School of Music, the Moscow Conservatory, and Indiana University where she studied with Boris Belenky, Igor Bezrodny, and Miriam Fried. Ms. Lipkina has performed as a recitalist in Russia and in countries from the former Soviet Union and has performed with orchestras in Russia, Romania, Germany, Finland, Japan, and the United States. She has won prizes in the Enescu Violin Competition (Romania) and in the Shostakovich Chamber Music Competition (St. Petersburg). She has performed works by Mozart and Schittke on Moscow Radio. While at Indiana University, Ms. Lipkina began to study viola with Atar Arad and made her viola debut in the Dubinsky Quartet later that year. She has since participated in festivals both as a violinist and violist including the Norfolk, Marlboro, Rauma (Finland), Waterloo (Belgium), and Musique et Amitie (Switzerland) festivals, among others.

Ms. Lipkina is also a committed teacher and has been on the faculties of the music department New York University School of Education and the Children's Orchestra Society.

Evelyn Troester earned her Master´s Degree in music through combined study at the University of Music and Performing Arts and the Richard-Strauss Conservatory in Munich, Germany. Her extensive training in Classical and Jazz vocal performance, as well as choral conducting, Classical piano and music education, allows her to feel comfortable in both genres as a performer and teacher. Since the age of 16 she has been working with various music ensembles, such as choirs, a cappella groups, soul and big bands, as well as orchestras, as a musical director, arranger and lead singer. In the spring of 2006 she released her first solo-album MIND, a collection of contemporary and Jazz songs.

Since beginning viola studies at the age of twelve, Brenton Caldwell has performed throughout the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. Brenton has received numerous awards including prizes in the 2009 National Young Artist in Midland, Texas and the Watson Forbes International Viola Competition in St. Andrews, Scotland. As a soloist he has performed with the Curtis and Banff chamber ensembles, and the East Texas Symphony Orchestra. A dedicated chamber musician, he has appeared at the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival, BRAVO! Vail Valley Music Festival as a member of the Vuillaume Quartet, the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East, Music@Menlo, Music from Angel Fire, Banff, Ravinia, Verbier, Tanglewood, and the Pacific Music Festival. Brenton regularly performs alongside esteemed artists such as Roberto Díaz, Gary Graffman, Marc Johnson, Ida Kavafian, Menahem Pressler, Steven Tenenbom, and Eugenia Zukerman. With an ardent devotion to education, Mr. Caldwell has participated in numerous outreach projects and concerts and served as teaching assistant to his long-time mentor Karen Tuttle. Other major viola instructors include Ruth Morrow, Susan Dubois, Jeffrey Irvine, Lynne Ramsey, Roberto Diaz, and Misha Amory. Mr. Caldwell has studied chamber music closely with Pamela Frank, Joseph Silverstein, members of the Beaux Arts Trio and the Cavani, Cleveland, Guarneri, and Orion string quartets. Through master classes, Mr. Caldwell has worked on numerous occasions with Kim Kashkashian and Nobuko Imai. Mr. Caldwell is a fellow of the Academy, a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute. Through the Academy he teaches in the New York City public school system and performs at Carnegie Hall and Juilliard as a member of Ensemble ACJW. A native of Tyler, Texas, Mr. Caldwell earned his Bachelor of Music degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music and an Artist Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he held the Edward B. Garrigues fellowship.

A Juilliard graduate with a Masters Degree on the viola, Liuh-Wen Ting was a member of the Meridian Quartet from 1996 to 2001, and has performed most recently with the Berkshire Bach Society, Cassatt String Quartet, the Manhattan String Quartet, Ensemble l'art pour l'art and ensemble Pi. As a proponent of contemporary music, Liuh-Wen has been on the staff of the Composers Conference at Wellesley College since 1993, and has performed at international festivals such as The Prague Spring Music Festival, Ostrava New Music Days, The Warsaw Autumn Music Festival, and Primavera en la Habana international electro-acoustic music festival. Her solo performance of Morton Feldman’s Viola in My Life with the Janacek Symphony Orchestra was praised by The Czech Music 2001 as "an extraordinary experience". Ms Ting has recorded chamber music for Deutsche Grammophon, Albany, Mode, and Capstone Record. The Book of Roses and Memory was commissioned and premiered at the Time Center Stage in 2008 for the Interpretation Series.

Yi-Fang Huang, a native of Taiwan, received both Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in piano performance at the Juilliard School as a pupil of Martin Canin, and continued her DMA studies with Susan Starr at Rutgers University. As soloist, chamber music musician and collaborative pianist Ms. Huang has performed in venues including Walt Disney Concert Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Louvre Museum, Grenoble Museum and National Concert Hall in Taiwan, and has appeared with Elmar Oliveira, Cynthia Phelps, Fred Sherry, Wu Han, Ransom Wilson, Tara Helen O’Connor, Sherry Sylar, and David Bilger. She performed at the OK Mozart festival, International Viola Congress, New York Philharmonic: Insights Series, Interlochen Viola Institute, Great Mountains Festival, Sarasota Music Festival, Bowdoin Summer Music Festival and Music Academy of the West. In 2008 Ms. Huang was both guest lecturer and collaborative pianist at the International Viola Congress. She serves as pianist and coach at the Perlman Music Program and the North American Viola Institute, and recently recorded the Loeffler Two Rhapsodies with violist Cynthia Phelps and oboist Sherry Sylar. Ms. Huang remains in demand as both pianist and coach at the Juilliard School, working primarily in the studios of Misha Amory, Hsin-Yun Huang, Steven Tenenbom and Heidi Castleman, with whom she also continues her studies as a violist.

About the Pieces

"The Viola Sonata was originally composed in 1994 at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City where I was very sick and close to dying. I wrote it for my wife Carol (a violist), and it is filled with musical allusions to music that I love (Brahms and Mozart). The original version was in two movements, ending with a sad waltz. Fifteen years later, I have added a happy and lively third movement."

"The Viola Quartet (called Concerto Piccolo – as opposed to Concerto Grosso) was composed in 2007 for the noted viola virtuoso and educator Paul Coletti, for his students in Los Angeles. After hearing a wonderful performance of this Quartet by Tim Deighton’s students at Penn State University, I decided that the Concerto would be enhanced by a fast movement. I therefore composed a passionate Tarantella (in December, 2009) especially for his students and this premiere for the New York Viola Society." Paul Chihara

PAUL SEIKO CHIHARA was born in Seattle, Washington in 1938. He received his doctorate degree (D.M.A.) from Cornell University in 1965 as a student of Robert Palmer. Mr. Chihara also studied with the renowned pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in Berlin, and with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. With Toru Takemitsu, Chihara was composer-in-residence at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1971, and also the first composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Neville Marriner, Conductor. More recently, he has served as the composer-in-residence with the Mancini Institute in Los Angeles.

Mr. Chihara’s prize-winning concert works have been performed in most major cities and arts centers in the U.S. and Europe. His numerous commissions and awards include those from The Lili Boulanger Memorial Award, the Naumberg Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Fellowship, the Aaron Copland Fund, and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New Japan Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New Juilliard Ensemble, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. His commissioned orchestral tone poem CLOUDS was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in their Millennium Concert at Carnegie Hall in 2001. His AMATSU KAZE (for soprano and five instruments) was premiered by the New Juilliard Ensemble at the Why Note Festival in Dijon, France. In February 2002, a concert of his choral music was presented by the Westminster Choir College at Princeton, New Jersey. His “An Afternoon on the Perfume River” received its world premiere by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in February of 2004. Sir Neville Marriner and the world-renowned guitar virtuoso Pepe Romero recently recorded his Guitar Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra. Active in the ballet world, Mr. Chihara was composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Ballet from 1973-1986. While there, he wrote many trailblazing works, including Shin-ju (based on the "lovers' suicide" plays by the great Japanese dramatist Chikamatsu), as well as the first full-length American ballet, The Tempest.

In addition to his many concert works, Mr. Chihara has composed scores for over 100 motion pictures and television series. He has worked with such luminaries as directors Sidney Lumet, Louis Malle, Michael Ritchie, and Arthur Penn. His movie credits include Prince of the City, The Morning After, Crossing Delancey, and John Turturro’s Romance and Cigarettes. His works for television include China Beach, Noble House, Brave New World, and 100 Centre Street. Mr. Chihara also served as music supervisor at Buena Vista Pictures (Walt Disney Co.). Also active in the New York musical theatre world, Mr. Chihara served as musical consultant and arranger for Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies, and was the composer for James Clavell’s Shogun, the Musical.

Mr. Chihara’s works have been widely recorded. His compositions appear on many labels including BMG Records, Reference Recordings, CRI, Music and Art, Vox Candide, New World Records, The Louisville Orchestra First Editions Records, and Albany Records.

Mr. Chihara is a Professor of Music at UCLA and Chair of Visual Media (graduate film music).

Flusso in Italian means "flow." Flusso for Viola and Piano is inspired by music that flows like water without a fixed shape. It is slow, mysterious, and haunting. The opening gesture of open-fifths in the piano adds to the mood and is continued throughout the piece.

As a resident of both Asia and the United States, Kye Ryung (Karen) Park has worked to integrate many aspects of multi-cultural musical elements into her own artistic identity. Her music has been played at numerous music festivals and conferences including International Festival of Women Composers, Nevada Encounters of New Music, Pan Music Festival, June in Buffalo and College Music Society. Recently her piano Suite Reminiscences (2009) was broadcast on radio, KGCS. After earning her bachelor's degree in music composition at Seoul National University, she got her master's and PhD degrees in music composition and theory from UCLA.

The Romance op. 98 has a special place in Fine's considerable oeuvre for the viola (more than 75 works, out of a total of 200). Commissioned in 2000 by the Penn State Viola Ensemble, it is a personal statement of Fine's loyalty to his wife Michelle, also a violist (who was later to divorce him). Following hard on the heels of the phantasmagoric Sixth Sonata op. 97, it makes a welcome contrast of earnest intimacy.

The whole premise of the Romance is an association Fine made between Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and the Rolling Stones' rock ballad "Wild Horses". Whether real or imagined, this thematic likeness is relentlessly exploited within the traditional Romance form. Indeed, the work is so traditional as to have a Minore episode, modulating enharmonically from G-flat to F-sharp minor. Debussy is not the only connection here; there are also moments reminiscent of Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius, Bartok, and Shostakovich. Juxtaposing these quick fixes is what gives the Romance its exalted mysticism.

Marshall Fine, (b. 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio) is the son, student, and colleague of Burton Fine, former Principal Violist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (with whom he began violin studies in 1963). He continued his studies in viola, composition, and conducting, receiving his DMA in 1990 from the University of Memphis. His other teachers include Julian Olevsky, Francis Bundra, Judith Nelson, composer Donald Freund, and conductor Alan Balter. He is Assistant Principal Violist of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, a charter member of the IRIS Orchestra on both viola and violin, and has served as principal viola of the Savannah Symphony and Dallas Opera orchestras. In 1995 he was named Memphis Composer of the Year.

Dr. Fine is a versatile performer and conductor who plays violin and viola with equal facility--one of the few composer/ performers today to do so on a string instrument--and is one of the most prolific writers for viola in history, including a solo concerto, a duo concerto, six sonatas with piano, and several Baroque concert transcriptions. He has appeared as soloist, recitalist, or conductor in his own works. His music is neoromantic, maintains touch with all serious and popular styles--two examples, Tango in Time of War and his 2004 commission A Flower of the Infinite Garden, were both premiered by IRIS--and seeks to integrate them into a whole, viable, personal style.

"The book of roses and memory is a kind of "sequel" to my earlier piece, The Old Rose Reader. It came about because violist Liuh-Wen Ting told me that she longed to play The Old Rose Reader. Neither of us felt right about having me merely make an arrangement, however. Following the example of composers such as Berlioz or Feldman, I decided to make a new composition that would use materials from the original piece, but also include new ideas, and a live narrator to read the text. I was particularly excited because there were many beautiful stories in the original text, by James Pritchett, that I was not able to use in the first piece.

The book of roses and memory is a kind of reflection on The Old Rose Reader. Its almost as if the viola of the second piece is somehow remembering the violin of the first. The sense of the violin, irretrievably lost, haunts The Book of Roses and Memory. Meanwhile, the narrator tells new stories that themselves reflect themes of memory and loss, while the violist alternately mourns for what is lost and contemplates what is discovered. The book of roses and memory was commissioned by, and is dedicated to, Liuh-Wen Ting”.

Frances White composes instrumental and electronic music. She studied composition at the University of Maryland, Brooklyn College, and Princeton University. She has received awards, honors, grants, commissions, and fellowships from organizations such as Prix Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges (France), the International Computer Music Association, Hungarian Radio, ASCAP, the Bang On A Can Festival, the Other Minds Festival, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Dale Warland Singers, the American Music Center, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Meet the Composer, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. She recently completed The ocean inside, a work commissioned by the Third Practice Festival at the University of Richmond for the acclaimed ensemble eighth blackbird. She is currently at work on three commissions: one from the Fromm Foundation to write a piece for the viol consort Parthenia; the second from the MAP Fund to write a work for trombonist Monique Buzzarté, and the third from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to write a dramatic piece for pianist/baritone Thomas Otten.

Ms. White's music can be heard on CD on the Wergo, Centaur, Nonsequitur, Harmonia Mundi, and Bridge Records labels. A CD devoted to her electroacoustic chamber works, Centre Bridge, was released in August of 2007 on the Mode Records label. Ms. White's music was featured as part of the soundtrack of three of Gus Van Sant's award-winning films: Elephant, Paranoid Park, and Milk.

Ms. White studies the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute), and finds that the traditional music of this instrument informs and influences her work as a composer. Much of Ms. White's music is inspired by her love of nature, and her electronic works frequently include natural sound recorded near her home in central New Jersey.

James Pritchett has a varied background; he has worked in the fields of music, writing, computers, digital sound, publishing, and information technology. As a musicologist, he is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the music of John Cage. His 1993 book The music of John Cage (Cambridge University Press) is the only critical study of Cage’s entire compositional output.

As a software designer/programmer, James Pritchett has collaborated with composers at the computer music studios of Brooklyn College–CUNY and Princeton University. He has worked on several projects with composer Frances White, including the interactive computer music installation Resonant Landscape (1990), and, more recently, The old rose reader (2004), for which he wrote the text and created the video.

Since 1999 James Pritchett has worked at the national headquarters of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic in Princeton, New Jersey. Pritchett is a technology development manager at RFB&D, where he supports the analysis, research, design, and development of accessible book technologies. He is currently working on another collaboration with Frances White, this time a retelling of the fairy tale The princess in the chest.

Petr Eben was counted among the best known Czech composers. He was well-known as a composer and organist, as well as a master of the art of improvisation. He was born in 1929 and spent his childhood in ?esky Krumlov where he also studied piano, violoncello and organ. Because his father was a Jew he had to leave school in 1943 and spent the rest of the war years in concentration camp in Buchenwald. That was to color Eben's life and the human, Christian attitude by which he was to live out his days. In one of his early works he reflected on this period and said of the work : “ It is a remembrance of the dead in the mass graves and . . . a testimony of the wonderful faith of human beings. Faith and hope cannot be killed, the spirit cannot be defeated by external events. It was this same philosophy, this same faith and inner strength that sustained him through a further 40 years of political oppression under the Soviet rule. After hard years of occupation he entered the Prague Academy of Music to study piano and composition. He went to church every Sunday with his family -this did not help his career in a communist state.

In 1955-90 Eben was teaching at the department of musical science at Charles University before being designated professor of composition at the Academy of Performing Arts. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution he was appointed Professor of Composition and president of the Prague Spring Music Festival, among other important positions in Czech musical life. While holding the presidency, with typical modesty he refused to allow his own music to be played at the festival. Awarded his country's highest honor for artists by President Václav Havel, following his retirement and in spite of the onset of debilitating illness, he continued for many years to travel abroad to festivals in his honor. Petr Eben went on composing, mainly organ and choral pieces for church festivals, while living quietly in Prague. He died in 2007.

"Loveless Songs" were written in 1963. Composer himself mentioned that he wanted to create work that studies these many feelings that can follow some love stories - devastation, emptiness, loneliness, anger and hope - after all. He chose poetries from different authors (and one of them he did not know by the name), including famous verses from Anna Akhmatova.