Cornell Chamber Orchestra
Chris Younghoon Kim, conductor
Judith Kellock, voice
Evan Chambers, fiddle
Susan Waterbury, violin
3 PM, Sunday, October 5, 2008
Barnes Hall, Cornell University
Program
Anton Webern Langsamer satz
(1883-1945)
Damien Mahiet, conductor
Samuel Barber Knoxville : Summer
of 1915 (to words by James Agee)
(1910-1981)
Judith Kellock, voice
Intermission
Evan Chambers Concerto for Irish
fiddle, violin and orchestra (1998)
(b.1953) I.
Jigs
II. Air/Waltz
III. Reels
Evan Chambers, fiddle and Susan Waterbury, violin
Soloists
Judith Kellock, voice
Soprano Judith Kellock
has been described in the press as "a singer
of rare intelligence and vocal splendor, with a voice of indescribable
beauty." A primary influence in her musical life was the late Jan
DeGaetani, with whom she studied for many years. Other teachers
have included Grace Hunter, Hazel O'Donnell, Phyllis Curtin at
Tanglewood, and Wilma Thompson at Boston University. Ms. Kellock
has been featured with the St. Louis Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra,
the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New World Symphony, the Honolulu
Symphony, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Greek Radio Orchestra,
the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, the West Virginia Symphony, the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series, and orchestras throughout
New England. At the Aspen Festival she has been soloist with the
Symphony Orchestra as well as in chamber music and oratorio. Other
festival performances include Monadnock, Arcady Stockbridge Chamber
Concerts, the Music Festival of the Hamptons, and songFest, a
performance and training program in southern California. Highly
acclaimed for her song recitals and chamber music performances, she is
also sought after by composers for her interpretation of contemporary
music. She is a founding member of the new music group Ensemble X,
whose music director is composer Steven Stucky. Ms. Kellock's
residency in Prague included recitals of German Lieder and American art
song with pianist Phillip Moll, as well as master classes and lectures
at the Prague Conservatory. As a recipient of a National Endowment of
the Arts recitalist fellowship, she toured the West Coast with a
variety of programs. Ms. Kellock has sung major operatic roles in
Italy and Greece, toured with the Opera Company of Boston and performed
with the Mark Morris Dance Company at the Theatre de la Monnaie in
Brussels. This summer she performed and recorded The Astronaut's
Tale by Charles Fussell at the Monadnock Festival, and sang the role of
Madame Herz in Mozart's The Impresario at the Music Festival of the
Hamptons, in a version translated and revised by Lukas Foss. She
has recorded for Koch International, Turnabout, Sine Qua Non, Fleur de
Son, Albany and Gasparo labels. Upcoming releases include songs
of Samuel Barber, music of Steven Stucky, Charles Fussell and Judith
Weir.
Ms. Kellock serves on the performing faculty of Cornell
University, and is much in demand as a master class teacher. She
is also on the board of directors of the Lotte Lehman Foundation.
Evan Chambers, composer/irish fiddle
Evan Chambers (b. 1963, Alexandria, Louisiana) is currently Associate
Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan. He serves as
resident composer with the new-music ensemble Quorum. His 2007
orchestral song cycle The Old Burying Ground was performed in Carnegie
Hall in February 2008, and has been recorded for commercial release in
fall of 2008. Chambers' compositions have been performed by the
Cincinnati, Kansas City, Memphis, New Hampshire, and Albany Symphonies;
has also appeared as a soloist in Carnegie Hall with the American
Composers Orchestra. He won first prize in the Cincinnati Symphony
Competition, and in 1998 was awarded the Walter Beeler Prize by Ithaca
College. His work has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, the Luigi Russolo Competition, Vienna Modern Masters,
NACUSA, the American Composers Forum, and the Tampa Bay Composers
Forum. He has been a resident of the MacDowell Colony, and been awarded
individual artist grants from Meet the Composer, the Arts Foundation of
Michigan and ArtServe Michigan. His composition teachers include
William Albright, Leslie Bassett, Nicholas Thorne, and Marilyn Shrude,
with studies in electronic music with George Wilson and Burton Beerman.
Recordings have been released by Albany Records, the Foundation
Russolo-Pratella, Cambria, Clarinet Classics, Equillibrium, and
Centaur. His solo chamber music disk (Cold Water, Dry Stone) is
available on Albany records.
Susan Waterbury, violin
Susan Waterbury, violinist, serves as Assistant Professor of Violin at
Ithaca College School of Music in Ithaca, NY where she teaches violin
and performs with the Ariadne String Quartet. In the 1999-2000 season,
Ms. Waterbury was Artist-in-Residence and Co-Artistic Director for the
Garth Newel Music Center in Hot Springs, VA where she performed chamber
music concerts year-round. From 1995-99 Ms. Waterbury was Associate
Professor of Violin at the University of Memphis where she taught
violin and performed with the Ceruti String Quartet. Formerly,
Waterbury was a founding member of the Cavani String Quartet from
1984-1995, having served as Quartet-in-Residence at the Cleveland
Institute of Music. As a member of Cavani, Ms. Waterbury performed and
taught regularly for concert series and festivals throughout the U.S.
and abroad. This included appearances at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully
Hall, and Lincoln Center in New York City, and the Phillips Collection
and Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. The Cavani Quartet garnered
many awards including First Prize in the 1989 Walter W. Naumberg
Chamber Music, Cleveland Quartet, and Carmel Chamber Music competitions
as well as the 1989 Ohio Governor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement
in the Arts. Waterbury earned a Master of Music degree from the
Eastman School of Music and a Bachelor of Music degree from The Ohio
State University School of Music which named her "Distinguished Alumna
of 1995". She studied violin with Donald Weilerstein, Jens Ellerman,
Michael Davis and Walter Levin (Cincinnati College- Conservatory) and
was coached in chamber music by the Cleveland, Tokyo, Emerson, and
Juilliard Quartets. Waterbury is an active performer,
collaborating regularly with friends on series and festivals throughout
the year. She is currently a member of the new music ensemble, Ensemble
X, based in Ithaca, NY (Cornell University) and has been a regular
guest performer with Present Music (Milwaukee new music ensemble). Past
collaborations include performances with such artists as Paul Katz,
Colorado Qt., Cleveland Qt., Miami Qt., Frank Cohen, Josh Smith, David
Cerone, Anton Nel, Earl Wild, and Ann Schein. Waterbury has recorded on
the Azica, Albany, Pantheon, Polygram, and Cleveland Institute of Music
labels.
Program notes
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Langsamer Satz (1905). Arr. for string orchestra by Gerard Schwarz.
When Berlin composer and teacher Hans Pfizner mentioned his dislike of
Mahler’s music, the young Anton von Webern proudly walked out of room.
That same year, in 1904, he began studying composition with Arnold
Schoenberg. Till the completion of his musicology doctoral thesis two
years later at the University of Vienna, under the guidance of Guido
Adler, the young Webern pursued both curricula concurrently while
dreaming of establishing himself as a conductor. Webern composed the
single slow movement known under the German title of Langsamer Satz in
1905. Completed in June, the work extended in his mind the happy memory
of a holiday he had taken that spring with his cousin and lover
Wilhelmine Mörtl. The piece conveys both urgency and plenitude,
desire and fulfilment. With passion, its opening theme ascends higher
and higher, with increasing intensity, but when it recedes, it falls
down in nonchalant curves, into quiet enjoyment. The middle section
further exposes this duality of character, contrasting moments of
extroverted lyricism with moments of calm tenderness. The last section,
restating the opening theme, carries passion to its extreme, to the
point where dynamics cannot be louder, pitch higher or motion wider—a
point followed only by the soft gestures of a blissful exhaustion. –
notes by Damien Mahiet
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Samuel Barber was one of a number of American composers whose work was
presented frequently in Boston during the period when Serge
Koussevitzky was music director of the Boston Symphony, and one whom
Koussevitzky commissioned on several occasions. Knoxville: Summer of
1915 is the last of the Barber works to have been premiered by
Koussevitzky, and arguably the composer's masterpiece. Though
officially the work was "commissioned" by soprano Eleanor Steber, who
sang the first performance, Barber had completed at least the main
draft of the music before offering it to Koussevitzky and asking his
advice as to the choice of soprano for a first performance. The
conductor was immediately taken with Knoxville, and it was apparently
at his suggestion that Barber offered the score to Steber, who was
utterly delighted with it. (Barber was equally delighted with Steber;
he later composed the title role in his opera Vanessa for her.)
Barber's setting of James Agee's remarkable prose poem depicts a summer
evening in the back yard with the whole family assembled, as seen
through the eyes of a small child. Both text and music appear
deceptively simple; the thoughts of a child methodically cataloguing
all the people and things that form part of its life. The beauty
of Agee's poem is that we can sense the "immortal yearnings" of this
small child through a concrete listing of objects and of relatives "who
quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home...but
will not ever tell me who I am."
Barber's music grows organically from a handful of ideas: the opening
woodwind passage and a tiny three-note cell in the vocal line. The
opening paints the cool summer evening with intertwining woodwinds and,
soon after, a gently pulsing figure in the harp and pizzicato violas
and cellos. The singer begins with a calm phrase that introduces a
three-note figure, a cell that serves as the basis for much of the
melodic line. A sudden Allegro agitato interrupts the calm of the night
with street noises; the whole orchestra is shot through with a rhythmic
three-note figure that can be seen as a new version of the basic cell.
Then the stillness of the night settles in and we return to the mood of
the opening. A lighter Allegretto describes the family gathering on
quilts in the back yard (with still another version of the basic
three-note cell). The stars in the sky evoke wonder and deeper thoughts
concerning these people who are all caught up in the beauty and mystery
of existence. The closing phrase, the final summation, as the child is
put to bed, magnificently broadens and intensifies the melodic line.
KNOXVILLE: Summer of 1915
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in that
time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
...It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the
standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds'
hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a
buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a
quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their
weight of festival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them
of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon
them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.
A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting;
stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and
swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past,
the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant
spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed;
still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still
fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is
the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the
hose.
Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes....
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories
hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once
enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have
spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my
aunt, and I too am lying there....They are not talking much, and the
talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars
are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and
they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,...with
voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is
an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at
home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good
to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall
ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the
grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God
bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh,
remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their
taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws
me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one
familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not
now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
Text by James Agee
Copyright 1949 by G. Schirmer, Inc. Used by permission.
- notes by Steven Ledbetter
Evan Chambers (b. 1953)
Concerto for fiddle, violin and orchestra
1: (Jigs)
The Empty Chair/At the Fiddler's Wake
Remember the Dancing/In the Soft Days of Our Youth
Some Good Crack, (A Bit of Wildness)
And It's over the Rocky Hills--
2: (Air/Waltz)
To a Gentle Place.
3: (Reels)
So Tear Into One/Every Day is Christmas
Let's Hit the Hard Stuff/'Till the Stuff Hits Us Hard
This concerto features two soloists playing the same instrument in two
different styles, yet the piece does not pit them against each other in
the kind of titanic struggle one often finds in many concertos. Rather,
the fiddle player and violinist are more like two complementary halves
of a personality--they and the orchestra support each other and take
the leading role in turn without conflict.
The first movement was inspired by the death and funeral of a fiddler
who I never met or heard play. His son described the events surrounding
his wake with such emotion, though, that I wanted to write a piece for
all the fiddlers like him who play for the sheer love of it, those who
won't be seen in the record bins or on television, all the forgotten
ones who live shyly, quietly, without celebrity, holding a musical
center in their communities. The word "crack" in the fourth tune title
is Irish slang for a good time: glowing good fun and companionship. I
had a picture in my mind of the hush that falls over a session when a
respected elder sits down to play--somewhat severe and
old-fashioned-sounding at first, with everyone gradually warming to the
task 'till the music propels itself along on its own energy.
The second movement is a lullaby for my daughter Elena. It was
completed on the day after the death of my friend, mentor, and
colleague, Bill Albright; as a result the final section of the piece
also bears some of the grief I felt at his untimely passing. I once
heard a story about the "gentle places" in Ireland: fairy mounds where
magical beings are said to abide. As I contemplated my unborn child and
the gentle place she inhabited in the months before her birth, I
imagined a still point in the landscape where birth and death merge in
enchantment.
The final movement is a set of four reels. The first, "So Tear Into
One," takes its title and its character from an exhortation often heard
at traditional music sessions. The almost goofily cheery mood and
expansive goodwill of the second tune gives way almost immediately to a
more edgy pair of reels that begin to spiral out of control, as
sessions sometimes do, getting wilder and wilder until the even the
tune itself begins to be go askew and get lost, taken over by frenetic
driving rhythm. The titles of the tunes for all the movements, taken in
sequence, form a poem and an exhortation in themselves—a recognition of
loss and a celebration of life in peace and unrestrained good humor.
- notes by Evan Chambers
Cornell Chamber Orchestra
Violin
Sumona Bhattacharya, Anthropology, '11*
Angela Chiang, Math, '11
Kevin Eckes, Biology, '09
Alex Gribizis, Biology, '12
Elaine Higashi, Biological Engineering, '12*
Kasia Hozer, Psychology, '11
Jonathan Yicon Hsieh, Hotel Management, '12
Charlene Kluegel, Music, '09*
Benjamin Ou-yang, Astronomy, '10
Tia Plautz, Physics, '11
Victor Tzen, Architecture, Grad
Aaron Wexler, Biology, '10*
Viola
Elbert Chang, Chemical Engineering, '11
Gregory Farber, Biology, '12
Rachel Ann Hatch, Animal Science, '11
Christina Hung, Psychology/Economics, '09 *
Ruth Hannah de Kleer, Linguistics/Music, '11 *
David Chang, ‘09
Cello
Sharon Driscoll, Biology and Society, '12
Ellen Haynes, Animal Science, '09 *
Hainlee Hsueh, Electrical Engineering, '09
Brian Lee, Chemical Engineering, '10 *
Theresa Tan, Psychology, '09
Lawren Wooten, Undecided, '12
Bass
?
(In alphabetical order, principals marked by *)
Piano
Jake Jungbin Lee, Engineering, ‘09
Harp
?
Flute/Piccolo
Rebecca Morrow, communications, ‘09
Oboe/English Horn
Greg Weisbrod, Undecided, ‘11
Clarinet
Jonathan Felbinger, Electrical Engineering, Grad
Bassoon
Melanie Adamsky, Biological Sciences, ‘09
Horn
?
Kira Gridley, Biology, ‘11
Trumpet
Anthony Clark, Music, ‘09
Percussion
Adrienne Rosenblatt, Undecided, ‘12
Thomas Weber, Mechanical Engineering, ‘09