The Birthday Party

Renowned contemporary composer Charles Wuorinen turned 70 this past June, and many of the leading cultural organizations in New York City (Guggenheim Museum, Riverside Church), Washington, DC (Library of Congress), California, and London have staged special concerts of the composer’s music to celebrate the event.

Charles Wuorinen

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music at the University at Buffalo is also presenting a concert of contemporary music to celebrate the occasion on Tuesday, October 21 at 8pm in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall on the UB Amherst Campus. Violinist Yuki Numata, flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, and pianist Alan Feinberg will join the members of the Slee Sinfonietta under the baton of guest conductor Jeffrey Milarsky, in a program consisting of three recent works by Wuorinen and one work by David Felder.

Charles Wuorinen is one of a large, electric group of high-profile American composers who happened to be born in 1938—a group that includes William Bolcom, John Corigliano, John Harbison, and Joan Tower, among others—who have enjoyed long, successful careers. Of all the composers born in 1938, none enjoyed fame earlier than Wuorinen, who is still the youngest composer to have won the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Wuorinen won the Pulitzer at the age of 32 in 1970 for his composition Time’s Encomium, written for synthesized and processed synthesized sound, the only entirely electronic work ever to win the award.

While most of the other composers born in 1938 have developed, worked in, and moved on to other compositional styles in the course of their careers, Wuorinen has always been strongly identified with post-World War II American serialism, a movement based on the use of the 12-tone scale. Wuorinen may no longer use the term serialism, but as a recent writer has noted, “strict organizational procedures, chromaticism, and rhythmic complexity remain hallmarks of his vast compositional output,” which now numbers more than 260 published works. In 1985, Wuorinen won a MacArthur Foundation Award and he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as being appointed composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, where conductor Herbert Blomstedt programmed several of his major new works. James Levine has also proven to be a recent champion, commissioning and performing several new works with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Pianist Alan Feinberg, the newest faculty member of the UB Music Department, will perform two recent, shorter piano works by Wuorinen: The Haroun Piano Book, stage I (2003) and Heart Shadow (2005). Both pieces are based on materials from the composer’s 2002 opera, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which was composed for a libretto written by the British poet James Fenton, based on the novel of the same title by Salman Rushdie. After being placed under the threat of death by the fatwa issued by a religious fanatic, Rushdie responded by writing an attack on political oppression in the form of a tale for children. The music for the opera has been described as having an ebullient surface, with indications of strong discontent lurking just beneath its façade. Commissioned for the rising young violin virtuoso Jennifer Koh in 2006, Wuorinen’s chamber concerto Spin 5 is scored for violin and 18 players. Violinist Yuki Numata, the winner of the New World Symphony’s Concerto Competition, who has also performed Wuorinen’s Rhapsody for Solo Violin and Orchestra at Tanglewood, will be the soloist. Conductor Jeffrey Milarsky, one of the leading conductors of contemporary music in New York City, has also performed and recorded regularly with the New York Philharmonic and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Rounding out the program is Inner Sky, a 1999 work by UB Professor of Composition David Felder. Commissioned by the Koussevitzsky Foundation, the work is scored for flutist doubling piccolo, alto, and bass flutes, with percussion, piano, and string ensemble as well as computer-processed flute and percussion. Grammy nominated flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, the winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a founding member of the award-winning New Millennium Ensemble, who is also the flute soloist for the well-known Bach Aria Group, will be the soloist for the performance.

For more information, visit www.slee.buffalo.edu.

Buffalo Chamber Players open their season

The Buffalo Chamber Players perform the first concert of their second season at 7pm on Wednesday, October 22, at the Buffalo Seminary on Bidwell Parkway.

Based on the success of their inaugural season, the group has quickly established itself as an integral part of the Buffalo area classical musical scene. Many of the musicians of the Buffalo Chamber Players are also members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, who joined with talented local freelance musicians in the group’s first season to present programs of unusual works. The group remains dedicated to performing works that may have been overlooked on more traditional chamber music programs, due to the unusual combinations of instrumental forces required.

This year’s opening concert adds a new dimension with the area premiere, or at least the “complete” area premiere, of a new work by the multi-talented organist, pianist, choral director, and teacher Roland Martin. The well-known Buffalo area painter Catherine Parker, daughter of the renowned painter Charles Burchfield, commissioned Martin to compose a song cycle based on the poems of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, poems that have inspired her own colorfully dramatic paintings. Martin obliged by setting nine poems by Neruda for soprano, tenor, viola, and piano in a song cycle that he titled A Rose Beside the Water. The work received its premiere last week at a faculty recital at Slee Hall, but due to indisposition of one of the singers, only in an incomplete form. With a little luck, all the artists involved—Cristen Gregory (soprano), Jeffrey Porter (tenor), Janz Castelo (viola), and the composer Roland Martin (piano)—will be in top form for the BCP performance of a work that intrigued many listeners on first hearing, even when performed without all the required resources. Catherine Parker created paintings corresponding to each of the songs in the cycle, and for this performance, the paintings will be projected above the musicians during the performance.

The program includes Mozart’s transcriptions of J.S. Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, K. 404a for violin, viola, and piano. Using models from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Mozart transcribed Bach to develop “his hypothesis as to how Bach’s mind worked,” according to one recent writer, “fashioning a powerful tool to aid in his own development.”

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of French composer Olivier Messiaen, and this concert will commemorate the event by a performance of the fifth movement of his Quartet for the End of Time. Written for the only available resources while the composer was a prisoner of war during World War II, the movement, composed for cello and piano, is entitled Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus. The String Quintet in G Major, op. 77, by Dvorak, is scored for the unusual combination of two violins, viola, cello, and bass. Most string quintets composed in the 19th century doubled either the violas or the cellos, instead of using the bass, perhaps accounting for the relative rarity of performances of this work.

For more information, visit www.buffalochamberplayers.org or call 462-5659.