Tag Archives: Chamber Music

We Miss You Max

May 12, 2016 sara Leave a comment

Reger, A Centenary Retrospective

Max Reger lived just half of a lifetime, but he produced at least three lifetimes worth of work in his 43 years. On May 11, 2016 we celebrated the centenary of his death by sharing the magic of his life with our cozy audience in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall.

Jeremy Haladyna, our tenacious advocate for newer music and champion of the UCSB Ensemble for Contemporary Music pushed ahead the quarterly ECM performance so that we could celebrate Max’ life on his very special anniversary.

The program focused on Reger’s chamber works — ECM is a chamber group, after all. We were fortunate to have two special guest artists play with our ensemble, Hiroko Sugawara did a fabulous job of bookending the concert on clarinet, and Christina Esser, mezzo-soprano, sang a selection of Reger’s charming Simple Songs. The lyrics are the sweet and simple part -these are stories about home and family, kittens and mice, laid against some devilishly enticing melodies. As a life-long fan of the hedgehog, I particularly enjoyed Der Igel, a warning to all to beware the Prickly-Coated One. But like the kitten, I stray ahead!

The concert opened with our professor, Jeremy Haladyna, accompanying Hiroko Sugara on the clarinet. Hiroko is not just a member of ECM, she’s a member of the UCSB faculty, teaching Japanese in the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies department. I played clarinet for a few years in middle school band, so I have a little bit of appreciation for how amazing her playing is. She hides a great deal of breath control behind that lovely smile! The two played Reger’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano in B-flat, I Moderato, op 107.

Dana Anex followed with a lovely solo, Prelude for Solo Viola, from Three Suites, op 131d, an excellent example of Reger’s foray into neoclassicism. She was followed by Kathryn Carlson, cellist, playing Peter Sculthorpe ‘s Requiem( for Cello Alone). The two solo pieces were tremendously moving. Haladyna chose to follow these solos with the Simple Songs, a wise move when your ushers don’t have tissue boxes to pass around for the tear-gathering.

I followed Simple Songs with a personal tribute to another “Max”. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies passed away just two months ago on March 14th. Davies was a composer and conductor, in fact, Master of the Queen’s Music from 2004 – 2014. I played Dances from his opera, The Two Fiddlers. Davies passed away on his beloved Orkney Islands, an archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland; my tribute piece is in the style of the Orkney Islands fiddlers. I really shouldn’t say “my” piece — I shared it with Petra Peršolja on piano. According to my mom, we were very well received, but she always says that. I know that we did a decent job because we played right before a brief intermission, and when I peeked through the curtains, nobody was running for the exits!

When the curtain rose after intermission ( Ok, I lie, we don’t really use the lovely and mysterious red velvet curtain. ), Petra Peršolja and Zachary Olea played Arvo Pärt’s Fratres I. I am looking forward to hearing them play more pieces like this together in the future. Zachary is a patient violinist and shows that he has a considerable understanding of what Pärt is trying to convey. Petra is one of our DMA students, and she is a very charismatic performer. She has the grace and ability to make everyone she performs with look as good as she does, even if that means holding back sometimes.

Our ECM classmate, Nick Mazuk, found a piece that he wanted desperately to play, and if nothing else works, desperation gets you everywhere with Professor Haladyna. So along with Dana Anex on viola, and Kathryn Carlson on cello, Nick treated us to selections from Vincent Persichetti’s Serenade No. 6, op. 44, including II. Barcarole, V. Intermezzo, and VII. Dance. It’s always a delicate balance when you put a trombone between two stringed instruments in a modestly-sized concert hall, but I was quite impressed that the strings were able to hold their own, and that Nick was able to exercise his instrument’s dynamic range without blowing the other instruments off the stage. Any of our composition students who happened to be in the audience hopefully were able to learn something last night about how to mix’n’match strings and horns without breaking anything.

At last, we circled back to Reger. Kathryn Carlson and Professor Haladyna played the Sonata in A Minor for Cello and Piano ,Op.116, IV. Allegretto con Grazia. It was truly lovely.

Zachary Olea returned for a second Arvo Pärt piece, Für Alina, this time with Danica Neuhause. I’ve included a link to the Wikipedia entry for the piece — I spent a little more time there trying to understand how the piece is put together. It’s my first recommended reading to you, my little audience, so go for it! What really sent me hunting for explanations was the dynamic tension the two violinists were able to maintain. I’d heard the piece played before with a completely different interpretation. I should mention that Danica very patiently turned pages for our pianists, and it was nice to finally hear her play!

At last, Hiroko retook the stage with her clarinet to close our show with three movements from Reger’s Clarinet Quintet, Op. 146, II. Vivace, III. Largo, IV. Poco Allegretto. Joining her were David Fickes, a talented junior transfer student we welcomed this year into our violin studio, and Zachary Olea (violin), Dana Anex (viola), Kathryn Carlson (cello), and Jeremy Haladyna, to conduct.

Have you ever watched your parking permit expire while you are trapped in a concert hall? It’s usually a gut-wrenching experience waiting for the final three movements of a piece to finish, hoping that the campus ticketeers have not come for your car. But honestly, I would have paid the price of a parking ticket happily just to keep listening to the quintet all night — it was that warm and comforting.

As things turned out, there was no ticket, my parents took me out to dinner, and I got a great night’s sleep, knowing that I had done my small part to make the Regar Year, 2016, a success. To find out about other Reger Centenial Festival events go here and here.

Composition, Review

Weaving the Backstory with Sunny Yang

November 23, 2015 sara 1 Comment

Sunny Yang: Color is Everything

Last Friday, in UCSB’s Geiringer Hall, fans of music, new and old alike, were treated to a master class featuring Sunny Yang, cellist of the Kronos Quartet, On the hotseat, our own music department’s Young Artist Piano Quartet playing Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor.

The Young Artist Piano Quartet is the graduate scholarship quartet in residence at UCSB, and the members are some of our best and brightest. They include:

Leslie Cain – piano

Youjin Jung – violin

Jordan Warmath – viola

Larissa Fedoryka – cello

A master class is a wonderfully terrible experience. The performers strive to impress a luminary, all the while knowing that any peccadillo is going to be fair game for criticism and correction. There’s almost a temptation to leave a breadcrumb trail of errors as a defense mechanism. At the same time, the audience is listening ever so carefully, waiting for problems and trying to pick out which aspect of the performance, which little failure the expert will select to discuss. No matter how hard you try, there is no perfection in a master class. Ever.

Sunny Yang is currently the cellist with the Kronos Quartet. She holds a Master of Music degree, earned at USC as a student of Ralph Kirshbaum. Her first order of business was to put the quartet at ease with her embracing smile. Then she chose to focus on the variety of emotions the piece presents. She asked pianist Leslie Cain to recall one of her sweetest emotions of childhood. Then she asked Larissa Fedoryka about what she was thinking and feeling. Larissa took a moment and replied that she was trying to convey deep sadness. It was then that I realized how difficult it can be to name the emotions we bring to music.

I thought back to elementary school, and our fourth grade lesson on vivid verbs. Each student would try to outdo the next with a more specific word. If Jack went to the store, Alissa walked, Danny trotted, Jace tumbled. When Miguel had juice, Jimmie drank, Natalie swigged, and Cody guzzled. I realized it’s like that with music. What I had been thinking of as merely sad is really drizzled with poignancy or haunted with elusiveness, and happy becomes crystallized with joy, twinkling with tenderness, or cloying with sweetness.

Next, Ms. Yang talked talked about timing, and how each individual player must give time and take time from the others. Again and again she spoke about how to put “color” in the music at the cost of technical perfection. She asked Youjin Jung to play a pair of notes on alternating strings repeatedly. A first tendency is to repeat the notes with equal pressure, equal bow angle, equal time. In reality, we can alternate those same notes in hundreds of different ways.

Ms. Yang complimented Jordan Warmath on her ability to communicate with the cellist and violinist, and discussed the difficulty of including the piano in the the circle. She suggested that while dynamics must be appropriate to the emotion, they are also one of an ensemble’s best ways to signal changes in mood, and that the piano, with its greater dynamic range, can share its dynamics to widen the circle.

What occurred to me as Ms. Yang spoke is that there are a very limited number of traditional fancy foreign words that composers have at their disposal, and that timing, dynamics, and mood can quickly become unreadable if the composer is extremely specific. And suddenly I had the great revelation that we aren’t supposed to be technically perfect — that we, as artists are responsible for supplying the gradations that would have only cluttered up our manuscript. The music is just the outline, we must bring our own story.

When I was little, my coach, Yi Huan Zhou, would tell me micro stories to match the music I was playing. In one, a little girl runs away from home and becomes afraid. In another, the little girl fails her spelling test after staying up all night, then realizes that it isn’t very important at all.

I think we, as members of an ensemble must also create stories, not just images of joy or sorrow, but entire stories. More importantly, we must share our stories with each other.

When the violinist chooses to interpret a phrase with anticipation, and the cellist, with trepidation, they should be very specific about the emotions they intend to convey, and discuss them by telling a tale. Then the pianist won’t be inspired to jump in with enthusiasm, when cajoling is what’s called for, and the cellist will tiptoe rather than stomp in. Color balancing color.

What I learn in this master class is that color is everything, and that without sharing the emotions we bring to a piece, we have only colored our own thread, we haven’t really woven a collective back story. The colors of our story must entwine with the colors of others if we want to present the audience with a cohesive emotional understanding of our music.

Azeem Ward, Review

The Price is Right

December 3, 2014 sara Leave a comment

For the first time in my short UCSB career, I played to a packed house at the Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall. That’s right, 400+ seats, all FULL! The music department powers-that-be decided to offer free admission to all UCSB students to our music department student performances and recitals this year. It’s really made a huge difference. Last year, the hall was no more than two-thirds full for our first chamber orchestra concert.

Our first concert of the year is usually the best attended due to freshman parents looking for any desperate excuse to see their children. Then the parents get lazy, and subsequent shows fill only half the hall. It was really exciting for us to hear so much applause, so I hope people keep coming. The classics aren’t really such an easy sell to kids raised on rap — which includes most of my friends. If you tell them they have to pay ten dollars, then they stay home and write that nasty paper they’ve been dreading. But once they come and hear a piece they like, they keep coming back.

The show started with Maurice Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses, a study of the poetry of Evariste-Désiré de Parny commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. It’s pretty startling in places, even for those who don’t speak French. A very passionate piece. Molly Clementz, one of our graduate students in voice definitely did it justice. She reminded the audience that the voice is truly an instrument in its own right, not just a pretty thing that floats a story on top of the “real” instruments. Karen Yeh played cello with patient grace, dancing in step with pianist Felix Eisenhauer and Adriane Hill on the flute. The flute seems to be a challenging part; it accents the passion of the other parts, tying everything together for the audience.

Next, my studio mates Camden Boyle and Thérèse Brown joined pianist Maansi Desai in the first movement of Moritz Moszkowski’s Suite in G Minor for Two Violins and Piano, Op. 71. Their appealing interpretation gently allowed the audience to relax and let the music flow. It’s the sort of chamber piece that can fail if there is any kind of competition between the artists for the audience ear. It’s got a very delicate balance between parts, and it reminds me to be thankful that I’m in a violin studio with no gigantic egos. It’s the nicest thing about our department, in fact, that we all want each other to succeed.

We were then treated to Quatuor for Flute, by Pierre-Max Dubois. The quartet was actually a quintet including Rachel Ricard, Azeem Ward, Sylvie Tran, Catherine Marshall, and Adriane Hill. It was a really tight piece with cleverly woven harmonies. The audience clapped after the first movement, but had that completely trained out of them, and remained silent after the second and third. I don’t know how that happened, or why, I guess it was magic.

Finally we heard the UCSB graduate Young Artist Piano Quartet play the first movement from Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 15. My friends all reported liking it. The YAPQ is taking the place of the YASQ this year as the school’s graduate scholarship ensemble. Hopefully they will represent us well, winning international prizes and bringing glory and acclaim to the department. (No pressure, guys). I will link to their website when they have one up. The group includes Youjin Jung on violin, Jordan Warmath on viola, Larissa Fedoryka on cello, and pianist Leslie Cain.

After a brief intermission for restaging (meaning no cookies were served), the Chamber Orchestra took the stage. I was later told that there were people who were unable to find seats for the first part of the show that were seated for the second half. This leads me to believe that some people must have left at intermission. So how crazy is that?

We played Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor and finished with Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky. Both pieces are showy and traditional; they make the audience feel like they are at a party. Some of us in the orchestra had long drives returning from the holiday that morning or the night before, and others are just hitting the post-midterm-catch-up with-everything-before-finals phase of the quarter. So it was nice to see that everyone was able to pull up their energy levels for the show. In my experience the first show of the season is usually not the best of the year. But given how good the first show was, I’d say we are definitely setting the bar even higher this year than last, which makes me very happy.

A Passion for Music