NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY WIND SYMPHONY: Symphonic Band Mu

Cambria Master Recordings is pleased to announce The Angels Bowed Down - a new album showcasing soprano Yolanda Rhodes in concert performances of African American spirituals. Ms. Rhodes is supported by pianists Josephine Gandolfi, Deanne Tucker, LeDoris Cordell and the Picasso Ensemble. In her introductory notes, Rhodes comments that "Negro spirituals have a rare beauty that expresses a deeply human experience. These poetic and elegant songs carry with them ancient African melodies and structure; the words of these evocative gems grew out of the brutal conditions of American enslavement." Ms. Rhodes' wonderful vocal interpretations on this recording are further enhanced by her exquisite choice of musical arrangements - no less than by ten different, multi-talented arrangers for this project. Previously, Cambria released Where Freedom Rings - Compositions by Contemporary African American Composers performed by the AACI. All the musicians heard on this release are members of the African American Composer Initiative (AACI); a group of classical and jazz singers and instrumentalists of the San Francisco Bay Area and distinguished guest artists. AACI is dedicated to preserving the rich bounty of music by African American composers, historical and contemporary. Through live concerts of piano, vocal, and chamber music and an extensive website of video performances and publication information, AACI strives to increase awareness of this vast repertoire among the listening public and performing musicians alike, with the hope of sparking further explorations and performances. In addition, AACI regularly commissions and performs new works.

MEDITATIONS AND OVERTONES • Margaret Mills (pn) • CAMBRIA 1195 (54:01)


FEIGIN 4 Meditations on Dogen. Variations on Empty Space. SCHONTHAL Sonata Breve. BEACH 5 Improvisations. COATES Sonata No. 1, “Tones in Overtones”


Ruth Schonthal’s String Quartet No. 3, “In Memoriam Holocaust,” showed up on Volume 40 of the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music on Naxos. It was reviewed in Fanfare 29:5. The three works by which she is represented on this disc are of an earlier making; Gestures dates from 1978, Canticles from 1987, and Self-Portrait from 1991. Before going on, I should mention that the recording at hand is not new; it was recorded in 1993. Surely, it must have been released before now, but if so, it was not sent for review and therefore did not find its way into the Fanfare Archive.


Pianist Margaret Mills has established herself as a specialist in the music of Ruth Schonthal, Lowell Liebermann, Miriam Gideon, Elizabeth Lauer, Richard Wilson, and Anthony Newman. A graduate of Vassar College, Mills furthered her studies in Freiburg, Germany, before returning to the U.S. to take her master’s at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. Her teachers have included Claude Frank, Eugene List, and Jerome Lowenthal. In 1974, she made her Carnegie Hall debut, and in 1981, her first appearance in London’s Wigmore Hall. Mills has enjoyed a long relationship with the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City as a teacher and administrator. She is currently manager of the Artist Performance Series, which presents weekly faculty concerts during the school year. Mills is a member of the Board of Visitors of the New England Conservatory of Music and a member of the International Alliance of Women in Music.


Schonthal’s Canticles was written for Mills. The piece takes its inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights . Though banded on a single track, Canticles is easily broken down into a tripartite work, with each section representing a panel in the artist’s cartoon. Its message: Too much pleasuring thyself in the here and now leads to really bad times on the other side. Schonthal employs a motive based on sequentially ascending fourths, which she uses throughout to create an atmosphere of the chaotic cauldron of the Creation (first panel), the pleasures of worldly delights (second panel), and the dissonant tortures of Hell (third panel). Even without this précis as a guide, one can hear the piece in the abstract, which at many points struck me as having certain technical devices and a soundscape somewhat similar to both Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Copland’s Piano Variations.


Gestures is essentially a sequence of 11 short etudes. Each lasts an average of about 45 seconds. Webern comes to mind, though the style isn’t really Webernesque. The pieces are quite varied in tempo, texture, and harmonic/contrapuntal treatment, with some being sharply dissonant, while others are almost lyrical and conventional in their harmonic settings. According to the composer’s note, the set is arranged in a “somewhat cyclical fashion,” but she does not elaborate on the form it takes.


Unofficially, Schonthal expanded on the title of her Self-Portrait , referring to the piece as a “Self Portrait of the Artist as an Older Woman.” The work came about in response to a letter Schonthal received from a German pianist and admirer seeking more information about the composer’s music and biographical details of her life. Reflecting on the letter writer’s questions, Schonthal wrote Self-Portrait as a kind of nostalgic looking back and summing up of her life’s work up to that point, the age of 67. Far from being done, however, Schonthal continued to compose as late as a year or two before her death in 2006 at the age of 82.


Lowell Liebermann (b.1961) is what you might call a pedigreed East Coast establishment composer, having been groomed at Juilliard under the care of two American East Coasters with impeccable credentials, David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti. Liebermann has enjoyed a good deal of commercial success with works like his flute concerto, flute sonata, and Gargoyles for piano, mainly because he writes with ears on the listener and eyes on the box office.


Liebermann’s Piano Sonata No. 1 is a piece of juvenilia, written in 1977 when the composer was 15. Its four movements are compressed into just less than 10 minutes. A boy Mozart Liebermann was not, but the piece exhibits a sound grasp of keyboard and compositional technique, with a particularly delightful Scherzo that lasts just over a minute.


At less than 14 minutes, the Sonata No. 2, subtitled “Notturna,” isn’t that much longer for having been written in 1983. It was dedicated to well-known pianist Stephen Hough, who premiered it in 1983 at the Wavendon Festival in England. In Liebermann’s own words, “The work’s relentless austerity and sustained mood make any further explication of the subtitle unnecessary.”


Ordinarily, neither the Schonthal nor the Liebermann would be my type of music, but Margaret Mills quickly won me over with probing performances of these scores. Having made a specialty of interpreting and playing the works of these composers, her readings go way beyond note-perfect execution. It’s clear from the outset that her immersion in these pieces breathes real life into them, making a convert even of me. Her touch, pure silver and soft velvet one moment, can change in a heartbeat to fire and brimstone the next, always finding just the right tone of voice and way of phrasing and sustaining a line that turns a measure magical. Listen, for example, to the Lento of Lieberman’s Sonata No. 1, or to the segment of Schonthal’s Canticles beginning at 4:47, for a mesmerizing experience.


I can honestly say that Margaret Mills defied my expectations and, for that, and for enabling me to appreciate the beauties of music I would not have previously thought beautiful, I thank her and strongly urge you to acquire this CD.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Powell, M.: Haiku Setting / 2 Prayer Settings / Settings / L

Recording information: Kensington, California (08/29/2007-08/30/2007).

Cambria Master Recordings is pleased to announce Canadian Panorama, a new release of world premiere recordings by prominent, contemporary Canadian composers in celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday. The recording features The Winds of the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Ronald Royer, with Sarah Jeffrey (oboe), Gabirel Radford (horn) and Kaye Royer (clarinet). The variety of musical styles and influences represented in the works featured on this recording reflect the rich diversity of contemporary Canadian composition and will appeal to a broad audience interested in classical music. A unifying feature of the eight compositions is the inspiration each takes from the musical influences of the past. Four works are commissions by the SPO for this project. The compositions Fundy, Saturday Night at Fort Chambly, and McIntyre Ranch Country are each inspired by different regions of Canada and their local folksong traditions: the East Coast, Quebec, and Alberta respectively. The new works Allemande and Whirligig illustrate the ways in which European classical music has inspired Canadian composers to create new, colorful works. Rhapsody and Travels with Mozart are inspired by the rich cultural diversity of Canada. And finally, Serenade pays tribute to Canada’s vibrant film industry and culture.

Here we have a musical remembrance of life in Los Angeles as experienced by composer Deon Nielsen Price during a 35 year residency. Like electricity created by the impact of the sun's rays as they dance and intersect in the city, this music is meant to be at times graceful and at times energetic; it is also reflective of the cultural diversity of the City of Angels at the beginning of the new century. Deon Nielsen Price studied at Brigham Young University, the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. She has made her career as a music educator in various colleges and schools in and around Los Angeles.

This CD contains both monaural and stereo recordings.
Includes work(s) by John Dowland, Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, Ernest Chausson, Francis Poulenc, Franz Lehár, Robert Stolz. Soloist: James Schwabacher.

Includes aria(s) by various composers. Soloist: Eva Gustavson.
Includes song(s) by various composers. Soloist: Eva Gustavson.

CHABRIER Pièces pittoresques. Bourée fantasque. DEBUSSY Suite bergamasque • Margaret Mills (pn) • CAMBRIA 1128 (65:25)


Sometimes I wonder if the French want to keep Emmanuel Chabrier strictly to themselves. One might be excused for thinking that based on how well kept a secret much of his music seems to be. Yes, a significant portion of his oeuvre has been recorded, but how often are his works other than España and Joyeuse marche performed live or his operas staged? My own moment of enlightenment came a few years ago when I heard a disc of the composer’s songs. They were exquisite beyond description; finesse, refinement, delicacy, subtlety, and musical instinct for the prosody of the verses tell only of surface elements. The beauties of the music are indescribable.


Short-lived Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94) was an unassuming intellectual giant among his French Romantic peers. His biography was written by Poulenc, Stravinsky alluded to España in Petrushka , Strauss conducted the first staged performance of Chabrier’s incomplete opera Briséïs , and Ravel wrote that the opening bars of Le Roi malgré lui changed the course of harmony in France. Chabrier rubbed elbows with the great French painters, writers, composers, and thinkers of the day—Monet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Fauré, d’Indy, Chausson, Mallarmé, Zola, and countless others—and then became enamored of the operas of Wagner, a passion that conflicted with his own musical personality and essential Frenchness of temperament and sensibility, this according to R. Myers in his 1969 book, Emmanuel Chabrier and His Circle.


Though beset by financial worries, Chabrier managed to collect paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Sisley (probably on the cheap when they were new, just as Gertrude Stein snatched up a number of Picassos), which, on the auction block today, would go for millions of dollars. It remains a mystery why Chabrier, so highly regarded by so many of France’s Bohemian and avant-garde arts and letters community, is today so neglected.


Chabrier’s Pièces pittoresques in all likelihood wasn’t, but could have been, a model for Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin . The Pièces pittoresques was written in 1880 while the composer was on a convalescent holiday at the coastal resort of Saint-Pair. The work is composed of 10 miniature tone paintings, of which the sixth, “Idylle,” has enjoyed a life of its own outside of the set. César Franck, present at the work’s premiere in 1881, remarked that “this music links our own time to that of Couperin and Rameau,” a comment Ravel may have been aware of when he set about composing Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1914.


The individual numbers of the Pièces pittoresques are highly evocative and atmospheric. They form no suite, advance no narrative, and present no discernible progression of keys, though there does seem to be a reciprocal correspondence between two major keys and their relative minors: C Major and A Minor, and B?-Major and G Minor; but the set begins in D?-Major and ends in D Major, undermining any attempt to come up with a logical sequence. The pieces are all over the map in terms of the scenes and moods they depict—a “Melancholy” precedes a “Whirlwind,” and an “Idylle” precedes a “Village Dance.” Each is a perfect, polished gem that can easily stand by itself as a cameo character piece.


One of Chabrier’s last completed works, the Bourée fantasque , written in 1891 for the pianist Édouard Risler, cries out for orchestration; indeed, the composer did begin orchestrating it, but left the scoring unfinished. Three full orchestral versions were subsequently made by Felix Mottl in 1898, Charles Koechlin in 1924, and Robin Holloway in 1994. To Risler, Chabrier wrote that he counted 113 different sonorities in the piece, which lasts just over six minutes. Alfred Cortot cited the Bourée fantasque as “one of the most exciting and original works in the whole literature of French piano music.”


Debussy’s Suite bergamasque needs little introduction. It has become one of the composer’s most popular piano works, though according to Paul Roberts, in his 1994 book, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy , the composer came to loathe the earlier piano style in which these pieces were written. Tell that to the millions of music lovers, piano students, and purveyors of background music who have embraced the suite’s third movement, “Claire de lune.”


As in a Margaret Mills companion disc I review in this issue of piano works by Schonthal and Liebermann, the pianist paints all of these musical portraits with a palette of shimmering tonal colors that seem magically to take on the unique characters of each piece. Some players place their own fingerprints on a given score. With Mills, one has the feeling that she allows the score to dictate the mix of touch, tone, pedaling, and washes of color so that the piece reveals its own way of being played rather than its way of being played coming from the player. I’ve heard other pianists in these works, notably Angela Hewitt and Kathryn Stott in the Chabrier and too many to recall in the Debussy, but Mills thoroughly charms and beguiles me in this music. Strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

ECHOES AND ENCORES - EVA GUSTA

MERRILL, Carol: Why Shouldn't I?

Leon Levitch was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. His early education was interrupted by the Nazi invasion of his country. His family managed to evade the Nazis for nine months by hiding in the mountains until they were captured by Mussolini's army and interned in northern Italy. A year-and-one-half later the family was transferred to a concentration camp in southern Italy. In 1944, the Levitch family was among a group of less than a thousand Jews rescued by the United States government. They were brought to the U.S. and interned in a camp at Oswego, N.Y. until the end of the War. They then entered the United States as refugees. In the internment camps, young Leon acquired the skills of piano tuning while devoting himself to composition and the study of music in general. Mr. Levitch completed his education in California. He studied piano with Jakob Gimpel and began studying at Los Angeles City College. Almost immediately he was drafted into the Army. Just before being shipped to Korea, it was discovered that he was really exempt from the draft because he had been in a concentration camp. He was honorably discharged and allowed to complete his education under the G.I. Bill. He continued his studies with Roy Harris at UCLA, but in 1967 he was in a terrible auto accident. While he was in the hospital, Harris came to his bed weekly to continue to teach him. For more than forty years Leon Levitch has supported himself and his family as a piano technician while pursuing his vocation as a composer.

Oneness

Kraft, W.: Encounters