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A Musical Feast Celebrates Burchfield

Charles Haupt

Music inspired by visiting Charles Burchfield exhibit

On April 15 at 7pm, A Musical Feast presents a free concert in the Peter and Elizabeth Tower Auditorium of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, co-sponsored by UB’s Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music. After several successful seasons at the Kavinoky Theatre on the D’Youville College campus, the group was named the resident music ensemble of the new Burchfield-Penney Art Center in the spring of 2009.

The program for the April 15 concert is inspired by the current exhibition at the museum, Heat Waves in a Swamp featuring the works of the museum’s namesake, Charles Burchfield. The travelling exhibit, which is up through May 23, was organized by the Hammer Museum at the University of California at Los Angeles, in collaboration with the Burchfield-Penney.

Barry Crawford is the flute soloist in composer David Felder’s November Sky. The 1992 work is the third in the composer’s Crossfire series, a group of works featuring the playing of a virtuoso soloist interacting with his/her own electronically altered sonic image. NeXT computers were used to process a huge library of archetypal flute sounds, made by the soloist using only an acoustic flute. This library of acoustic flute sounds was then used to create the four channels of computer-processed flute sounds employed in November Sky.

Pianists Claudia Hoca and Phyllis East will perform a piano four-hand version of the orchestral fantasy Capriccio Italien, Op. 45, by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The composition, reminiscent of Italian folk music and street songs, was inspired by an extended 1880 winter vacation that Tchaikovsky took in Rome, where he experienced the Carnevale season in full swing. The composer himself arranged the piano four-hand version, and it was published before the orchestral version in September, 1880. Arrangements of orchestral works for piano were often the only method that allowed many listeners, and performers for that matter, to enjoy works composed for orchestra, before the advent of music recording.

Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, Op. 163, D. 956 is one of the masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire. Composed during the summer of 1828, only two months before his death, it was Schubert’s final instrumental composition, and the transcendental beauty of the work is generally recognized as his most deeply sublime composition. The work will be performed by Charles Haupt (violin), Shieh-Jian Tsai (violin), Feng Hew (cello), Robert Hausmann (cello), and Virginia Barron (viola).

Admission to the event is free, but seating is limited. To reserve a seat, call 878-6011. For more information, visit www.amusicalfeast.com or www.burchfieldpenney.org.

jan jezioro

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