Margaret Butler
Nicholas Canellakis
Daniel Ching
Amaury Coeytaux
Jeffrey Cornelius
Marji Danilow
Lily Francis
Joshua Gindele
LP How
Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio
Joseph Kalichstein
Jaime Laredo
John Largess
Kathleen McIntosh
Tara Helen O'Connor
Sharon Robinson
David Tolen
Liang Wang
Sandy Yamamoto
The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival
2008 — Week 7
VIVALDI
Concerto for Two Oboes in D Minor, Opus 42, No.2
Liang Wang and Margaret Butler, oboes; Daniel Ching, L.P. How, Sandy Yamamoto & Amaury Coeytaux, violins; John Largess & Lily Francis, violas; Joshua Gindele & Nicholas Canellakis, celli; Marji Danilow, double bass; Kathleen McIntosh, harpsichord
"Nobody is perfect. You need somebody to notice what you're doing wrong, somebody you really trust." Liang Wang, first oboe of the New York Philharmonic and member of the Curtis School of Music graduating class of 2003, describes, with characteristic humility, how he continues to rely on his mentors John Delancy and Richard Woodhams.
For Liang Wang, good oboe playing not only requires the technical ability to carve the right reed for the right piece of music, but as he told series producer, Louise Frank, "you have to know what a good sound is and you have to know what you like in order to go after it."
French violinist Amaury Coeytaux was born in 1984. A child prodigy, he made his first public appearance with an orchestra at age 11. By the age of 16, he had graduated from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris with top honors. In 2003, Amaury came to the U.S. to continue his studies with Pinchas Zukerman and Patinka Kopec at the Manhattan School of Music. This was his first time at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and he was most impressed by the good care the Festival provided him during his stay.
Pinchas Zukerman has a real interest in mentoring and encouraging emerging musicians. Amaury Coeytaux, is one of those who has benefited from studying with the master.
DEBUSSY
Syrinx for Solo Flute
Tara Helen O'Connor, flute
CRUMB
An Idyll for the Misbegotten for amplified flute & percussion
Tara Helen O'Connor, flute; Gregg Koyle, David Tolen, Jeffrey Cornelius, percussion
Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival Artistic Director, Marc Neikrug, speaks with program host, Kerry Frumkin, about the purposeful juxtaposition of Claude Debussy's Syrinx for Solo Flute and George Crumb's An Idyll for the Misbegotten for amplified flute & percussion on this week's program. They also discuss George Crumb's musical style, which falls somewhere between Impressionism and Minimalism.
Tara Helen O'Connor is a great proponent of Crumb's music. Tara serves on the Faculty of the Music Conservatory at Purchase. Read more about her.
MENDELSSOHN
Piano Trio in C-minor #2
The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio: Joseph Kalichstein, piano; Jaime Laredo, violin; and Sharon Robinson, cello
Community, intimacy, and familiarity… In this clip festival Artistic Director, Marc Neikrug, and Program Host, Kerry Frumkin, talk about how these elements come together in the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio's performance of Mendelssohn's 2nd Piano Trio.
Pianist, Joseph Kalichstein has played chamber music seriously for over 30 years. He loves the treasures to be found in the repertoire, and says, "you open the music and you're already inside greatness." And as he describes in the following clip, he also loves how finding artistic compromises while playing together brings out the best in his musical colleagues.
"The history is not behind some glass door that you dare not touch..." So says Joseph Kalichstein when describing the experience of performing in the St. Francis Auditorium which is located within Santa Fe's New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, just off the plaza in downtown Santa Fe.
In addition to being a fine cello player, Nick Canellakis turns out to be a good film maker, too! Here, in three parts, is a movie he made with Jose Blumenschein for the 2004 Holiday Party at the Curtis Institute of Music. This is a satire of both The Shining and Curtis. Nick stars in the film, along with violist, Lily Francis. In the movie he's positively creepy, which is entirely different from the way he is in real life...
- The Shining of the Curtis - Part 1
- The Shining of the Curtis - Part 2
- The Shining of the Curtis - Part 3
George Crumb
Learn about this idiosyncratic American composer on his website: georgecrumb.net. That's where we found the program notes about An Idyll for the Misbegotten.
An Idyll for the Misbegotten
(programme notes in CD booklet, New World Records 357-2)
A ... human-centered view of nature is evident in ... the nine-minute An Idyll for the Misbegotten for amplified flute and percussion, composed in 1985. "I feel that 'misbegotten' well describes the fateful and melancholy predicament of the species homo sapiens at the present moment in time," writes the composer.
Mankind has become ever more "illegitimate" in the natural world of the plants and animals. The ancient sense of brotherhood with all life-forms (so poignantly expressed in the poetry of St. Francis of Assisi) has gradually and relentless eroded, and consequently we find ourselves monarchs of a dying world. We share the fervent hope that humankind will embrace anew nature's "moral imperative."
Once again, the theatrical element is paramount. Crumb suggests, "impractically," that the music be "heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August". The scoring, employing two of man's oldest instruments, conjures up a primitive, timeless aura; there is a brief quotation from Debussy's Syrinx, interpolated into a passage for the flute that also calls for the performer to speak a few lines by the eighth-century Chinese poet Ssu-K'ung Shu, while still playing the instrument ("The moon goes down. There are shivering birds and withering grasses.")
Over a pianissississimo tremolo in the bass drum, the flute intones a Pan-like song that gradually grows ever more agitated. Sensing this, the drums respond to the flute's emotional state; they burst the bonds of the tremolo to punctuate the melodic line in barely controlled outbursts and send the flute skittering along in a flight of flutter-tongued fantasy. The hysteria soon subsides, the drums recede, and at the end nothing is left but the flute, musing softly on a pair of tritones – the devil's interval. In George Crumb's universe, the black angels are never far away.
- Michael Walsh
