BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY NEWSLETTER
AND CONCERT INFORMATION
VOLUME XIV, NO. 3
March 2007
THE
BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY
BARRY BRISK, music director
PRESENTS
Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College
Crenshaw Blvd. at Redondo Beach Blvd.
FREE ADMISSION and FREE PARKING
Concert time: 8:15 p.m., pre-concert lecture: 7:30
p.m.
Information: (310) 379-9725 or (310) 539-4649 or http://www.BeachCitiesSymphony.org.
Concerto No. 2 in B Flat Major, Op. 83 by Johannes Brahms
Georgi Slavchev, Piano Soloist
Elegy for Orchestra: In Memoriam Otto Luening (1900-1997) by Joel Feigin
Prelude and Love-Death from Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner
Erin Wood, Soprano Soloist
PIANO SOLOIST GEORGI SLAVCHEV
Georgi Slavchev, our piano soloist for the third concert of the season, was born into a family of concert pianists. His musical guidance has come from some of the most respected musicians in the world today. Studying with Julia Girginova, he became one of the foremost pianists of his generation in Bulgaria. His studies, with full scholarships, continued in the United States and Europe with major teachers including John Perry and Sergei Babayan; he also worked with Paul Schenly, Nelms McKelvain, Auge Tzerko, Lazar Berman, Leon Fleisher, and Arie Vardi. He was conferred degrees “with distinction” from Idyllwild Arts Academy, Rice University, and the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 2005 he received a Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from the University of Southern California, where he was an assistant lecturer and was awarded the “highest distinction of the keyboard department” in his graduation class.
The press has extolled the musicianship of Dr. Slavchev with praises such as “a truly international pianist,” “fascinatingly versatile,” and “among the piano elite.” Furthermore, “he doesn’t ‘only’ play the piano; he simultaneously identifies with the music, breathes life into the compositions, and makes them an experience for the listener in an impressive manner.”
Winner of numerous national, international and concerto piano competitions, Dr. Slavchev has performed at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and been a soloist with orchestras in Europe. He has performed in the United States as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra. His professional career has called him to perform in countries on three continents and he maintains an active schedule as soloist and chamber musician. He has collaborated with conductors including Jahja Ling, Tadeusz Strugala, Ruslan Raychev and Steven Smith, and with instrumentalists Paul Katz (cello) and Ulf Rodenhouser (clarinet).
Eurocam has released two compact discs; the 2005 CD, titled Sonatas and Ballades, features works by Scarlatti, Haydn, Brahms, Liszt, and Shostakovich. His solo and concerto performances have often been recorded and aired on major TV and radio stations in Bulgaria and on classical radio stations in the U.S.
In 2005, in recognition of his sustained international acclaim, the U.S. government declared Dr. Slavchev an “alien of extraordinary ability in the arts,” granting him U.S. residency. This prestigious status is reserved for the small percentage of artists who have risen to the very top of their field globally.
Living in Los Angeles when not on concert engagements, Dr. Slavchev composes pieces and soundtracks using conventional acoustic instruments as well as the latest innovations in the electro-acoustic medium. He teaches at the university level and presents masters classes in both Europe and the U.S. His ability to draw out the precision and emotion of the music in his students has resulted in his students being international competition prize winners.
The Beach Cities Symphony is proud to once again present to our audience a soloist of such world-renown and accomplishment as Dr. Georgi Slavchev. We look forward to his performance of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, and are sure the result will thrill our audience with his “technical brilliance and his ability to shape a work that seems to derive from an almost ideal interpretation." Additional information about Dr. Slavchev is available at http://www.georgislavchev.com/.
COMPOSER JOEL FEIGIN
Our March concert program will include a work by American composer Joel Feigin entitled Elegy, In Memoriam Otto Luening. This work was commissioned by the Santa Barbara Youth Symphony in honor of Luening who was a pioneer of electronic music as well as an accomplished composer and flautist.
New York-born Joel Feigin studied composition with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau in France and with Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School, where he received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree. The recipient of a post-graduate Mellon Fellowship at Cornell University, he also holds an undergraduate degree from Columbia University. Early in his career, as an Aaron Copland-ASCAP fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, Dr. Feigin received the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize in Composition. Over the years he has been granted residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Millay Colony.
Joel Feigin is an accomplished pianist and accompanist and is often called upon to participate in performances of his own works. Among them have been Veranderungen with Juilliard Quartet violinist Ronald Copes in Santa Barbara and Echoes from the Holocaust with members of the Czech Philharmonic in Prague.
Dr. Feigin is professor of music composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. More about Feigin’s works and biography can be viewed on his website www.joelfeigin.com.
SOPRANO SOLOIST ERIN WOOD
A graduate of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Center for American Artists and recent winner of the George London Foundation’s Kirsten Flagstad Award, soprano Erin Wood "has dramatic soprano potential written all over her” according to John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune. In the fall of 2002, Wood was asked to step in for an ailing Deborah Voigt as Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre with Lyric Opera to fantastic success. With Lyric, Ms. Wood has also been seen as Lisa in The Queen of Spades, Berta in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, First Nursemaid in Street Scene, Mrs. Gleaton in Susannah, Ortlinde in Die Walküre, Gutrune and the Third Norn in Goetterdaemmerung, Lady-in waiting in Macbeth and was a featured artist in the company’s first-ever free concert at Grant Park. She has been featured with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Opera Grand Rapids, Toledo Opera, Music Academy of the West, the Angeles Chorale, the Grant Park and Ravinia Music Festivals, as well as the Milwaukee and Lake Forest Symphonies. Ms. Wood has been seen in recital in Chicago for the Dame Myra Hess Foundation and in New York with the Marilyn Horne Foundation. She received her Bachelors and Masters degrees from UCLA where she is now completing her doctoral dissertation. Before becoming a soprano she sang mezzo leads in many UCLA Opera productions; her professional debut was as Mary in Der fliegende Hollaender with Opera Pacific. Other awards include the Rose M. Grundman Prize from the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation, the Edith Newfield Prize from Chicago’s Musician’s Club of Women, Third Prize in the Metropolitan Central Region Finals, Palm Springs Opera Guild First Prize Winner and Lee Schaenen Foundation and Liberace Foundation scholarships. Recent engagements include covering Leonora in La Forza del Destino for San Francisco Opera and Marianne Leitmetzerin in Der Rosenkavalier for Lyric Opera of Chicago, and her first "Liebestod" at Toledo Opera's 2006 Opera Gala. Erin and her husband Keith keep busy with toddler Elliott, and live in Southern California. For more information about Ms. Wood, go to http://home.earthlink.net/~brunnhilde/.
PROGRAM
NOTES
Elegy
for Orchestra, In Memoriam Otto Luening (1900-1996)
Joel
Feigin
Elegy
for Orchestra In Memoriam Otto Luening (1997) was commissioned by the Santa
Barbara Youth Symphony; it is dedicated to the Symphony and to Edwin Outwater,
who was their conductor at the time. It has since been performed by the Santa
Barbara Symphony as well. A pioneer of electronic music, Otto Luening was a
wonderful composer, flautist, sage, and a very dear friend. It felt especially
appropriate to dedicate this piece to his memory since he was devoted to the
musical education of young people and wrote many works for youth symphony
himself. The Elegy is in the form of a chorale prelude in the manner of Bach:
here, an original chorale-like melody, harmonized in the brass, appears
periodically in the midst of an elegiac but peaceful texture dominated by
woodwind lines. The last section of the piece moves away from this scheme;
finally, a solo violin enters to bring the work to a quiet conclusion.
--Joel Feigin
Tristan
and Isolde:
Prelude and Liebestod (Love Death)
Richard
Wagner (1813-1883)
When
I was in graduate school taking a course in 20th century harmony, the first
lecture was devoted
to
chords
from Prelude and Liebestod. We discussed its lengthy periods of unresolved
emotional and musical tension and why it was a seminal work for one direction
which music would take toward modernism. Tristan and Isolde, in spite of
being our jump-off point for studying 20th century harmony,
premiered in
1865, six years after Wagner completed it.
The Prelude opens with a short melodic fragment in the lower
strings that ends with a curious sequence of chords.
In place of the harmonic resolution that
composers
used to give melodies a sense of "completion" during the entire
Romantic period, Wagner ends
with a series of chords that are neither consonant nor dissonant, and definitely
not what the listener expects (and hence of interest to 20th century harmony
students). They leave one in a state of suspension, which exactly suits the
psychodrama that the opera will turn into.
The whole sequence is then repeated, based on a different key center,
without the traditional modulation to prepare the listener.
The motive then returns yet a third time, centered around a still
different key.
The net effect is to leave the listener with an unworldly, almost eerie
sense of detachment. Those first audiences to hear that sequence must have been
truly puzzled (as some still are today).
Those strange suspended chords, neither consonant nor very dissonant,
permeate the entire opera.
The
opera plot is simple compared to Wagner's others.
Tristan, the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, is dispatched
to Ireland to escort Isolde back to be his queen in a forced marriage.
En route, Isolde discovers
that Tristan had previously killed her brother in battle and vows vengeance by
poisoning him.
After he drinks the potion, she feels anguish over her own act, or
possibly over the impending enforced marriage, and drinks the remainder herself.
However, her maid had accidentally used the wrong
ingredients
for the fateful draught and prepared a love potion instead. When they awaken,
Tristan and Isolde are hopelessly in love, and caught in a social situation that
would prevent them from ever wholly possessing each other.
The rest of the opera unfolds around King Mark's discovery of the
betrayal by his nephew, Tristan's shame and loss of his will to live, followed
by his death in Isolde's arms.
Isolde's "love death," resulting from grief over her loss of
Tristan, finally unites them mystically
in a world beyond this one.
Tristan
and Isolde was a
landmark in music. Wagner's daring evolution in harmonic language exactly suits
the action of the drama, and would start a movement that broke up the German
musical establishment into factions that praised him and those that detested
him. Among his contemporaries, the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote: "The
Prelude reminds me of an old Italian painting of a martyr whose entrails are
being slowly unwound from his body on a reel." and Berlioz: " I have
read and reread this strange piece of music. . . .
I have to admit that I still haven't the slightest notion of what the
composer was driving at."
But by
the 20th century, Jean Sibelius was remarking: "It leaves one
feeling that everything else is pale and feeble by comparison."
And historian Donald Grout says that the music is able, by its sheer
overwhelming power, to create a state of all-embracing ecstasy.
Listen and discover into which camp you fall.
--Bill Malcolm
Piano
Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Opus 83
Johannes
Brahms (1833-1897)
Brahms'
Second Piano Concerto, begun in 1878 and completed three years later, evokes the
great Romantic composers of the previous era, especially Beethoven and Schumann.
Appearing at a time when the modern movement was already emerging in the works
of French composers like Franck, Fauré, and Debussy, Brahms' magisterial work
honors the past while expanding and elaborating on the scope of the traditional
concerto form. In four movements rather than the usual three, the Second Piano
Concerto is symphonic in style and proportions. The opening Allegro begins with
a solo horn answered by the piano in a musical conversation reminiscent of
Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto. The lively Scherzo movement next
quickens the pace, again through dialogue between soloist and orchestra. After a
haunting cello refrain introduces the tranquil mood of the Andante, the final
Allegretto grazioso builds to a virtuosic display for the soloist and a rousing
orchestral crescendo. Brahms himself gave the first public performance in
Budapest in 1881, and the work met with immediate success.
Brahms
was known for his sarcasm, his lack of tact, his irony--and also for his
generosity, kindness, loyalty, and good humor. He made some serious enemies but
kept a number of lifelong friends and was godfather to at least 15 children.
This concerto echoes the rich emotional complexity and enjoyment of life of its
composer.
--Toni Empringham
WINNERS WANTED
No doubt you have noticed the posters that grace the lobby at each of our concerts. As with most everything concerning the Beach Cities Symphony Association, these posters are artfully created by a volunteer.
Our poster artist is Anna Jung, who just retired from a long career in engineering. She states that the four posters she has produced so far are "just practice," but the BCSA is grateful for the effort to promote our raffles.
The raffles are just one way we raise money to support the Symphony. Prizes to be raffled off at our March concert include dinner for two at the Second City Bistro in El Segundo and two cooking classes at Bristol Farms in Manhattan Beach. We hope you will pause at the table in the lobby, admire the posters, chat with the volunteer board members, and buy raffle tickets for a chance to be a winner.
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE “FREE“
A Beach Cities Symphony Orchestra concert is free (even the parking) to those who attend— an incredible value, and a unique resource for students looking for live fine arts events to write up for school assignments. What people may not realize, is that the evening is actually running the music meter at just about $100 per minute, almost all of that going to the costs of putting musicians on the stage.
When you consider becoming an Association member, please think about how many minutes of music you would like to provide to your community this season. Our members, as well as advertisers, sponsors, and donors make the music.
JANUARY'S RAFFLE PRIZE WINNERS
In the members’ raffle at our January 26 concert, the CDs were won by Angela Peterson of Hermosa Beach and David Steide of Rancho Palos Verdes. The floral arrangement by Lily’s Flowers and Gifts was won by Al Chavez of Palos Verdes Estates. In the general raffle, Antoinette Anen of San Pedro won the tickets for two to the Aquarium of the Pacific and an overnight stay for two at the Westin Hotel in Long Beach. Frank Miles of Torrance won the gift certificate for dinner for two at the Second City Bistro in El Segundo.
CONTRIBUTE WITHOUT COST TO YOU
Albertsons and Amazon.com contribute a portion of their sales from your purchases to the Beach Cities Symphony. There is no extra charge to you. Simply register your Preferred Savings Card from Albertsons by calling (310) 379-9725 or online at http://www.albertsons.com/cp/ . Your Amazon.com purchases can also help the symphony if you start your purchase by clicking on http://www.BeachCitiesSymphony.org/supporters.htm and clicking on Amazon.com. Thank you for your continued support.
BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY REMAINING CONCERT OF THE 2006-2007 SEASON
May 25, 2007
Barry Brisk: Serenade for Orchestra (World Première)
MTAC Artists of the Future soloists:
Pablo de Sarasate Zigeurnerweisen: Joseph Lee
Henryk Wieniawski Polonaise de Concert in D: John Heffernan
Robert Schumann Concerto in A Minor, 1st Movement: Emmelyn Hsieh
Camille Saint-Saëns Concerto No. 2, Op. 22, 1st Movement: Sharon Kwon
George Enescu: Romanian Rhapsody No. 1
WELCOME TO OUR NEW BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY ASSOCIATION MEMBERS:
Carl Kimbauer
Floyd Newburn Tim and Susan Ottinger
John R. Reith
John Salerno
Thank you for supporting our organization!
Photos
from the March Concert
Click here for photos from the January 2007 Beach Cities Symphony concert.
Membership Renewal
We need your financial support to take us into our 57th year of providing free classical music concerts for the South Bay communities. Please respond as soon as possible, and thank you for being part of our loyal audience. Click here for a BCSA 2006-2007 membership form.
Information
Beach
Cities Symphony Association, Inc.
P.O.
Box 248
Redondo Beach, CA 90277-0248
Beach
Cities Symphony News information: 310-379-9725, 310-539-4649, or
http://BeachCitiesSymphony.org
or info@BeachCitiesSymphony.org.
Editors: Toni Empringham, Margaret McWilliams
Graphics:
David Schwartz, Ralph Dame
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