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Program
Jonathan Bailey Holland (b.1974) Tone Grafting (2008)
Arneis Quartet
Vanessa Holroyd, flute
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) Quintet in G minor, Op. 39
Tema con variazioni
Andante energico
Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio
Adagio pesante
Allegro precipitato, ma non troppo presto
Andantino
Catherine Weinfeld-Zell, oboe
Rob Patterson, clarinet
Rose Drucker, violin
Daniel Doña, viola
Randall Zigler, bass
IntermissionErwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) Concertino (1925)
Andante con fuoco
Furiant. Allegro furioso
Andante
Allegro gaio
Vanessa Holroyd, flute
Daniel Doña, viola
Randall Zigler, bass
Fred Lerdahl (b.1943) Waltzes (1981)
Grazioso
Con brio
Cantabile
Leggiero
Valse triste
Misterioso
Amoroso
Humoresque
Vivace
Lento
Delicato
Waltz fugue
Heather Braun, violin
Daniel Doña, viola
Agnes Kim, cello
Randall Zigler, bass
Guest Artist Bios
Randall Zigler enjoys a highly active and varied career as an orchestral and chamber musician throughout New England and New York, and has been hailed as “a revelation” for his “astounding agility…voiced with a beautiful baritone.”
A founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Zigler has been involved in countless premieres since the group’s inception in 2001. He can be heard on the New Focus, Mode, Sono Luminus, Naxos, Innova, and Minabel labels, and has recorded works by Iannis Xenakis, Mario Davidovsky, Du Yun, Dai Fujikura, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Suzanne Farrin, among others.
As an orchestral musician, Zigler is currently a member of the Boston Ballet Orchestra, a frequent substitute with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, and has served as principal bass of both the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra. He is currently principal bass of Emmanuel Music, with whom he has extensive continuo experience in addition to larger ensemble performances.
Zigler is also a devoted educator, and is on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, as Associate Professor of Double Bass and of contemporary classical music performance. He also serves as the bass coordinator for the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra (BYSO) and has been on the faculty of BYSO’s Intensive Community Program for more than 15 years, with a focus on serving populations historically underrepresented in the study of classical music.
Zigler began bass studies as a high school student in St. Louis, Missouri, and received undergraduate degrees in bass performance and mathematics from Oberlin College. He received a Master of Music degree from Boston University, and has studied with Edwin Barker, Scott Haigh, Tom Sperl, Albert Laszlo, and Carolyn White.
Flutist Vanessa Holroyd is a frequent Principal performer with the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music (Boston, MA), a member of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, and enjoys an active freelance career with a focus on chamber music. Past collaborations include performances with Helga Davis at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Arneis Quartet, Phoenix, A Far Cry, the Craft Quartet and her most recent chamber music project, “Trichrome” with harpist Franziska Huhn and violist, Daniel Doña. She has been privileged to perform and coach as a guest summer faculty artist at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music since 2007, and has participated in chamber music concerts presented by the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Emmanuel Music, Steinert & Sons, Rochester (VT) Chamber Music Society and Winsor Music, in addition to recitals throughout the US and British Virgin Islands with pianist Joy Cline Phinney. For ten years, Vanessa was a member of Arcadian Winds, a Boston-based woodwind quintet specializing in contemporary music and recipient of Chamber Music America’s “Residency Partnership Grant.” With the quintet and other ensembles, Vanessa has premiered numerous works and collaborated on recording projects for Centaur, PARMA, BMOP and ECS Publishing.
An experienced educator and production manager, Vanessa was an adjunct faculty flute instructor for ten years at Phillips Exeter Academy, in addition to serving as the Music Department's Concert Series Manager and Concert Tour Director. While in this role, Vanessa helped to curate and produce concert tours to Vietnam, Canada, California, Boston and New York. For twenty-five years, Vanessa sourced and produced event entertainment through Music Management Inc.(a company she co-owned from 2012 to 2022), an entertainment agency that contracts and produces over 500 events annually and employs hundreds of freelance professional artists.
She is eternally grateful for her teachers: Geralyn Coticone, Robert Willoughby, Michael Parloff, Ransom Wilson and Elssa Green. Thanks in large part to their guidance, she holds a B.A. in Literature from Yale University, a M.Mus. in Flute Performance from McGill University and an Artist Diploma from the Longy School of Music of Bard College.
Described as an "arresting" (Boston Globe) and "strikingly beautiful" (Miami Herald) musician, Catherine Weinfield-Zell served as second Oboe and English Horn with the Florida Grand Opera in Miami, FL from 2012-2016. From 2009-2013, Ms. Weinfield-Zell held the position of both Assistant Principal Oboe and principal English Horn with the Honolulu (now Hawaii) Symphony and the Hawaii Opera Theater. Ms. Weinfield-Zell has also performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera, the San Diego and Charleston Symphonies, the Portland Symphony, the Naples Philharmonic, the new-music ensembles Alarm Will Sound and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Orchestra at Indian Hill, the Boston Philharmonic, the Boston Lyric and Odyssey Opera Companies, and Emmanuel Music. Additionally, she has also performed at the Strings, Opera North, Lake George, Opera in the Ozarks, Breckenridge, Spoleto FestivalUSA, Aspen, Sitka, Alaska, Kent/Blossom, and Britten-Pears Aldeburgh World Orchestra Music Festivals. As a dedicated teacher, Ms. Weinfield-Zell is currently on faculty at Phillips Exeter Academy and formerly held positions at Williams College and Brookline Music School. She is the also the co-founder with her husband, percussionist Michael Weinfield-Zell, of Music at the Substation, a chamber music series at the Turtle Swamp Brewery in Boston. Ms. Weinfield-Zell's principal teachers include Elaine Douvas at Mannes College of Music in New York City, John Mack and Frank Rosenwein at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Ray Still at Northwestern University.
Rob Patterson is Assistant Professor of Clarinet at Boston University's School of Music, founder of the online program The Clarinet Sessions, and Acting Principal of the Modesto Symphony Orchestra. A passionate educator, Rob is on the faculty for the Curtis Institute of Music’s Mentor Network and is a frequent coach with the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra.
Recent masterclass invitations have included the San Francisco Conservatory, Peabody Institute, University of North Texas, University of Texas Austin, University of Toronto, Grieg Academy (Norway), Sibelius Academy (Finland), and Royal College of Music (Sweden). Rob has served on the faculty at the University of Virginia, where he was featured in recital and as soloist with the Charlottesville Symphony.
Rob has served as Acting Principal Clarinet with the Baltimore and Louisville Orchestras as well as Principal Clarinet with the Charlottesville Symphony and Lyrique-en-Mer Festival Orchestra in France. Additionally, he has served as guest Principal Clarinet for the orchestras of Cincinnati, Richmond, Huntsville, Modesto, Pasadena, Peoria, as well as the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra and Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.
Rob’s chamber music performances have taken him across North and South America, Europe and Asia. He has performed contemporary music as a member of the VERGE Ensemble in Washington, DC and was previously a member of the Philadelphia-based Ensemble 39, which was also invited to serve in residence at the Teatro del Lago in Frutillar, Chile.
Mr. Patterson has been the featured soloist in Copland’s Clarinet Concerto with the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra and the Charlottesville Symphony as well as the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the Lyrique-En-Mer (Le Palais, France) Orchestra, Binghamton Philharmonic, Middletown Symphony Orchestra, and the Howard County (Maryland) Concert Players. As a former Strathmore Music Center Artist in Residence, Mr. Patterson presented a series of solo recitals, masterclasses, educational concerts, and a recital at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, including the World-Premiere of John B Hedges’ Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet.
Festival appearances include Mendocino, Festival Napa Valley, The Peninsula Music Festival, Bravo! Vail, Festival Lyrique-En-Mer, Garth Newel Music Center, Music from Angel Fire, and the Yellow Barn Music Festival.
Hailing from Cincinnati, OH, Mr. Patterson earned degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of Southern California. His principal teachers were Yehuda Gilad, Richard Hawley, and Donald Montanaro.
Mr. Patterson is proud to be a D'Addario and Buffet-Crampon performing artist. Please visit www.robwpatterson.com for more information.
Program Notes
Grafting is an ancient horticultural practice dating back more than 4,000 years and is commonly used to help strengthen plants in the process of cultivation and was of key importance in the history of the Arneis wine grape. In this program the colors provided by our dear friends and guest artists will be grafted onto Arneis rootstock offering up different blends outside of the string quartet soundworld. Works by Sergei Prokofiev and Erwin Schulhoff highlight different elements of the avant-garde sweeping Paris and Berlin in the 1920s. Jonathan Bailey-Holland uses the technique of Klangfarbenmelodie to meld the sound of the flute to the string quartet, and Fred Lerdahl offers several perspectives on the Viennese waltz through his unique compositional lens.
-Daniel Doña
In early 1924 Prokofiev was one of many Russian expats living in Paris. His champion Serge Koussevitzky (who commissioned and performed works by most of the day’s greatest composers, including Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, Gershwin, and Bartók, among others) had just commissioned his Second Symphony, and Prokofiev decided to earn some extra money by accepting “a commission to compose a ballet for a roving dance troupe which wished to present a program of several short pieces accompanied by five instruments. I proposed a quintet consisting of oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass. The simple plot, based on circus life, was titled Trapeze.”
The music is successfully circusy. It is also one of Prokofiev’s most radical scores, filled with clashing – even polytonal – harmonies, as well as irregular rhythms; when it turned out that Prokofiev’s score was too difficult for Trapeze’s dancers, the composer turned the work into the Quintet. The piece has often been compared to Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat, in part for its economy of instrumentation. The instrumentation makes for a particularly unblended sonority, giving the piece a rather rough attitude and a playful harshness.
The first movement opens with an oboe solo filled with “wrong” notes. The music stops suddenly in the middle of the movement, changing character for two lively variations before returning to the original oboe theme.
In the second movement the double bass provides a low rhythmic figure on which the rest of the movement is loosely based.
In the third movement, marked Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio, it is easy to imagine acrobats leaping and rolling through the “impractical rhythms” (patterns of 3+4+3 in a 5/4 measure), which so confounded the ballet troupe.
In the fourth movement, an Adagio, the instrumentation really shows off its singular colors; sonorities shift and build throughout the movement.
The fifth movement, another Allegro, is more lighthearted, like a quick march that seems to dissolve into running at moments. After a short pause, a clarinet run ends the movement.
The final Andantino, like the first movement, is longer and slightly more lyrical. After a dirge-like minuet, a 6/8 trio follows, more playful and lilting. Then the minuet returns, more impassioned, and the Quintet ends with a raucous passage marked tumultuoso e precipitato.
— Jessie Rothwell is a writer, musician, and piano teacher who lives in Washington, D.C.
Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was born in Prague into a German-speaking merchant family. His great-uncle Julius was a composer and pianist, and Erwin's mother hoped her son would follow in his footsteps. The child learned to play the piano, and in 1901 his reputation as a prodigy won him an audition with Antonín Dvorák, who recommended a career in music for the boy. After further private study, Schulhoff was ready for the Prague Conservatory, which he entered in 1904. He also spent an important period in Leipzig, from 1908 to 1910, where he studied at the conservatory with Max Reger, a leading German composer in the post-Brahms tradition, and with Robert Teichmüller, a pianist with a taste for Russian and other exotic eastern music.
After four years in the Austrian army during World War I, Schulhoff broke with the late Romanticism espoused by his conservatory teachers. He moved to Dresden, where he met several important artistic figures, including the painter Otto Dix, whose violent, despairing images captured the trauma inflicted by the war, and with them founded the "Werkstatt der Zeit" (Workshop of the Times). Under its banner, Schulhoff began a series of concerts showcasing the latest developments in expressionist music, whose atonal idiom appealed to him as an alternative to what he had learned. He also got to know another painter, George Grosz, and the two listened to records from Grosz' collection of American jazz, another influence embraced by the composer. Following his return to Prague in 1923, Schulhoff began to compose works synthesizing all of these influences - Czech music, Russian and eastern music, late Romanticism, expressionism, and jazz - into a compelling, personal style.
Schulhoff wrote the Concertino in a mere four days, between May 28 and June 1, 1925. The first movement begins with bass and violin playing an eastern-sounding motto and the flute offering an improvisatory theme as counterpoint. Schulhoff introduces brief contrasting episodes but always returns to the opening motto. The second movement derives from a Czech folk dance, the furiant, with a rhythm combining characteristics of 2/4 and 3/4. A folk song from the Carpathian Mountains in what is now the western Ukraine provides the basis of the Andante, its melody given to the flute. In the finale, the flutist doubles on piccolo and the bass provides the rhythm for another lively folk dance.
After the Germans annexed Czechoslovakia, Schulhoff tried to emigrate to the Soviet Union (he had participated in the International Congress of Revolutionary Musicians in Moscow in 1933 and joined the Communist Party shortly thereafter) and to the West, but without success. The Nazis arrested him in June 1941; he died of tuberculosis in the Bavarian fortress of Wülzburg just over a year later.
-John Mangum
Waltzes (1981), a cycle of twelve virtuoso waltzes for violin, viola, cello, and bass, was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, where the first nine waltzes were premiered in 1981. Soon thereafter I composed the final three waltzes. The work is dedicated to Scott Nickrenz.
The character of Waltzes arose from three impulses: first, to compose a work that was suitable for summer-festival listening; second, to provide a challenge for brilliant string players accustomed to 19th-century repertory; and third, to simplify the intricacies of my contemporaneous string quartets (1978 and 1982). The piece includes occasional references to the music of past composers, transformed to fit my syntax and style and the playful character of the work. The instrumentation, for “low” string quartet, is reminiscent of Schubert’s Vienna; the lack of a second violin often forced high writing for the viola and cello. The part-writing and motivic treatment, which are quite classical in spirit, are woven out of a harmonic and voice-leading system of my own invention, one that I have used in one form or another in a number of pieces. This system is “tonal” in an extended sense and allows for orderly progression across the extremes of consonance and dissonance.
The individual movements, all in some variant of ABA form, break down as follows:
1. Grazioso. A congenial wind-up waltz.
2. Con brio. Two Chopin waltzes gone mad.
3. Cantabile. A cello melody reminiscent of a tune in Swan Lake.
4. Leggiero. String harmonics give a special twist to a passage in Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales.
5. Valse triste. No Sibelius here, just soulful phrases slowly tossed between the violin, viola, and cello.
6. Misterioso. Five against two within 3/4 time, in the ghostly guise of a presto minuet.
7. Amoroso. Another nod to Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales, with passionate intent.
8. Humoresque. A wild fantasy, with pizzicato and legno effects, climaxing in a quote from my Second String Quartet, accompanied by glissando harmonics.
9. Vivace. A cross-accentual whirlwind.
10. Lento. The double bass speaks from the depths.
11. Delicato. An intimate duet for viola and cello, converting a 2/4 turn from Schumann's Carnaval into a waltz rhythm.
12. Waltz-fugue. A veritable grande valse brillante, alternating with two fugal sections that culminate in quadruple inversional counterpoint.
Fred Lerdahl
