The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Oakwood Chamber Players start their “Perspective” concerts on Sept. 10
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Oakwood Chamber Players (below) have long been known for programming new music as well as neglected old music or neglected composers that they perform with top-quality music-making – often with a unifying theme to the programs.
Just look at the details of the following announcement of the new season:
The Oakwood Chamber Players are excited to announce their 2016-2017 concert series, “Perspective.”
Full of interesting viewpoints on life and relationships, the blended use of diverse musical styles with film and theater will help concertgoers see things from another’s point of view.
All concerts will be held in the auditorium (below) at Oakwood’s Center for Arts and Education, 6002 Mineral Point Road, on the far west side of Madison.
Tickets can be purchased at the door: $20 for general admission, $15 for seniors, and $5 for students. More information can be found at www.oakwoodchamberplayers.com
LOOKING ACROSS THE TABLE: CAN WE FIND COMMON GROUND?
Saturday, September 10, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, September 11, at 2 p.m.
Paul Schoenfield (below) – Café Music for piano trio
Michael Colina – Stairway to Midnight Café for mixed instruments
Jean Françaix – Dixtuor for woodwind quintet and string quintet
Edward Elgar – Elegy for string quintet
LOOKING BACK AND FORWARD: CAN THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE CHANGE US?
Sunday, November 27, 2016 at 1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.
Frank Bridge (below) – Sir Roger de Coverly Christmas Dance for strings
Jon Deak – “Passion of Scrooge” for large mixed ensemble with baritone voice
LOOKING WITHIN: CAN WE SEE WITHIN OURSELVES THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE?
Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, January 22, 2017 at 2 p.m.
Byron Adams (below) – Serenade (Homage de Husa) for large mixed ensemble
Arnold Schoenberg – Notturno (Nocturne) for strings and harp (in the YouTube video at the bottom)
Francis Poulenc – Sextet for woodwind quintet and piano
Maurice Ravel/David Bruce – Kaddish for large mixed ensemble
LOOKING THROUGH THE LENS: CAN WE SPEAK WHEN THERE ARE NO WORDS?
Saturday, March 18, 2017 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, March 19, 2017 at 2 p.m.
Gail Kubik – Gerald McBoing Boing for large mixed ensemble, percussion and narrator
Paul Bowles (below) – Music for a Farce (Movie – The Fireman) for clarinet, trumpet, piano and percussion
Dan Visconti – Low Country Haze with film for large mixed ensemble
Gaetano Donizetti – Trio for flute, bassoon and piano
LOOKING CLOSELY AT THE SCORE: CAN WE GET INSIDE THE MINDS OF THE COMPOSERS?
Saturday, May 13, 2017 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, May 14, 2017 at 2 p.m.
Joan Trimble (below) – Phantasy Trio for piano trio
Vincent d’Indy – Chanson et Danses (Song and Dances) for winds
Luise Adolpha Le Beau – Piano Trio
Joachim Raff – Sinfonietta for double woodwind quintet
The Oakwood Chamber Players is a professional music ensemble proudly supported by Oakwood Lutheran Senior Ministries and the Oakwood Foundation.
Tags: baritone, Bassoon, Byron Adams, Christmas, clarinet, d'Indy, dance, Donizetti, Edward Elgar, Elegy, fantasy, farce, film, flute, Frank Bridge, Gail Kubik, Horn, Jean Francaix, Joachim Raff, Joan Trimble, Jon Deak, Kaddish, Luise Adolpha Le Beau, Michael Colina, movie, narrator, nocturne, Oakwood Chamber Players, Paul Bowles, Paul Schoenfield, percussion, phantasy, Piano Trio, Poulenc, quintet, Ravel, Schoenberg, Serenade, sextet, Sinfonietta, singer, song, String quartet, strings, trio, Trumpet, vocal music, voice, woodwind, Woodwind quintet
Classical music: The annual FREE Karp Family Labor Day Concert on Monday night features new music, unknown works and neglected composers
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear is not alone in viewing the official opening of the new fall season as being the annual FREE Karp Family Labor Day concert, which takes place on the holiday Monday night before classes begin at the UW-Madison. (Below and from left, in the 2011 photo, are pianist and violinist son Christopher Karp; violist Katrin Talbot; the late pianist Howard Karp; cellist son Parry Karp (who is married to Katrin Talbot); and pianist wife Frances Karp.)
This year, that means the concert is on this coming Monday night, Sept. 5, at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall on the UW-Madison campus.
In the decades-long history of the event, pieces never get repeated.
That may help to explain why this year’s program features the new and the neglected rather than the tried-and-true.
Here is how cellist and patriarch of the Karp family Parry Karp (below) explains it:
“The program includes a world premiere performance of a brand new piece for Cello and Piano by Joel Hoffman (below), to be performed by my brother Christopher Karp and myself. It is entitled “Riffs on a Great Life.”
“The great life he is writing about is our Dad’s, longtime UW-Madison pianist Howard Karp, who died two years ago at 84.
“Robert Kahn (below) was a wonderful composer of chamber music and lieder whom Johannes Brahms admired very much. They initially met in 1885 when Kahn was only 20 years old. Brahms was impressed both by his compositions and his piano playing. We are greatly enjoying learning his Piano Quartet No. 2, which will feature my mother Frances Karp.
Pro Arte Quartet second violinist Suzanne Beia and my wife, violist Katrin Talbot, will join in the performance.
“The “Rhapsody” by Rebecca Clarke (below) is an unjustly neglected masterpiece that unfortunately has never been published. Frances and I are playing it from a copy of the manuscript. It was commissioned by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1923, and is a very romantic and expressive piece.
Also on the program is “Fratres” for cello and piano by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (below), who turns 82 on Sept. 11. According to one source, he has been the most performed living composer in the world for five consecutive years.
The dramatic and insistent piece was used as part of the soundtrack or film score for the movie “There Will Be Blood” with Daniel Day-Lewis. Here is a link to a performance with over one million hits on YouTube:
Tags: Arts, Arvo Part, Cello, Chamber music, Classical music, composer, Daniel Day-Lewis, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Estonia, Family, film, Film score, Howard Karp, Jacob Stockinger, Joel Hoffman, Johannes Brahms, Labor Day, Madison, manuscript, Music, Piano, Pro Arte Quartet, Rebecca Clarke, rhapsody, soundtrack, There Will Be Blood, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viola, Violin, Wisconsin, YouTube
Classical music: What piece of classical music best embodies Hillary Clinton?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Today The Ear has a simple question:
What piece of classical music best embodies Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States?
Maybe an aria — by either a villain or a hero — from an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini or Richard Wagner?
Maybe an instrumental piece?
Maybe a song?
Yesterday, the same question was posed for Donald Trump.
Here is a link if you want to read that post:
Think about it.
Listen to some choices.
And let us know what you think with a COMMENT and a YouTube link to a performance.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: aria, Arts, Baroque, Chamber music, choral music, Classical music, concerto, Democrat, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, Early music, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, hero, Hillary Clinton, instrument, Jacob Stockinger, lieder, Madison, Music, nominee, opera, Orchestra, Piano, President, Puccini, Sonata, song, symphony, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Verdi, villain, Wagner, YouTube
Classical music: What piece of classical music best embodies Donald Trump?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Today The Ear has a simple question:
What piece of classical music best embodies Donald Trump (below), the Republican nominee for president of the United States?
Maybe an aria — by either a villain or a hero — from an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini or Richard Wagner?
Maybe an instrumental piece?
Maybe a song?
Think about it.
Listen to some choices.
And let us know what you think with a COMMENT and a link to a YouTube performance.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tomorrow it is Hillary Clinton‘s turn.
Tags: aria, Arts, Chamber music, choral music, Classical music, Donald Trump, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, hero, Hillary Clinton, instrument, Jacob Stockinger, Madison, nominee, President, Puccini, Republican, Republican Party, Richard Wagner, song, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Verdi, villain, vocal, vocal music, Wisconsin, YouTube
Classical music: Rediscovering old piano technique is altering how the music of the classical Old Masters sounds and how easily it is played
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By Jacob Stockinger
Sure, for a long time musicology has traced how musical styles, forms and instrumentation have changed.
But now some researchers are using computers to investigate – and revive – an older keyboard technique from the 19th century that differs dramatically from the more modern technique generally in use. (Below is a photo by Alexander Refsum Jensenius.)
It turns out not to be as outdated or useless as many assume.
It changes not only how the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin sounds but also the ease with which the performer can play it.
Here is a story from The New York Times that the Ear had stashed from about a year ago.
But he thinks it still seems timely – and fascinating.
And he hopes you do too.
Here is a link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/21/science/playing-mozart-piano-pieces-as-mozart-did.html
See what you think and leave a comment.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Arts, Austria, Beethoven, Beethoven and Mozart, Chamber music, Chopin, chords, Christina Kobb, Classical music, computer, Cornell University, England, etude, Finger, forearm, France, Franz Schubert, hand, Haydn, Hummel, Inge Godoy, Jacob Stockinger, Ludwig van Beethoven, Madison, Mozart, Music, musicology, New York Times, Norway, Norwegian Academy of Music, notes, Oslo, performer, Piano, posture, research, scales, sitting, technique, The New York Times, treatise, United States, university, University of Oslo, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Vienna, Wisconsin
Classical music: The founders and co-artistic directors of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival explain the origins of the upcoming “water music” programs
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By Jacob Stockinger
In the essay below, John and Rose Mary Harbison (below, in a photo by Katrin Talbot), the founders and co-artistic directors of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, explain the origins of the upcoming “water music” programs that mark the 27th festival.
You can hear that famous “trout” theme of the original song used in Franz Schubert‘s “Trout” Piano Quintet, which will be performed at the festival, in the YouTube video at the bottom.
Here is a link to a posting earlier this week with much more information about the concerts, the programs and the performers:
ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION: THE BROOK AT TOKEN CREEK — WHY NOW?
By John and Rose Mary Harbison
In 1932 Dan and Alice Pedersen, Rose Mary Harbison’s parents, came from Chicago to Madison and purchased a small farm on State Highway 19, then a seldom travelled dirt road. (Below is a photo by Jess Anderson of a more recent barn built on the farm property.)
The farm eventually became a producer of organic vegetables for sale, and a place of contemplation, leading to Dan’s life as a Swedenborgian pastor, wartime fireman and early sustainable farmer; and Alice’s as a Sunday school teacher and eventually a much published anti-Vietnam War activist. (Below is a photo by Jess Anderson of a field on the farm.)
But it was just three years into their tenure on the farm that the State of Wisconsin came up with a plan to raise carp for New York markets, and by eminent domain seized four acres of land from the Pedersen farm, building a 400-foot carp pond, and routing the tributary trout stream on the Pedersen farm into it. (Historic photos are from the Token Creek Watershed Association.)
This was a loss from which the couple never really recovered, since it cost the stream, which had originally flowed into Token Creek, much loss of vitality, swiftness and natural flow.
Within a decade the State had lost interest in the original project, but the Pedersens were never able to persuade the necessary agencies to undertake restoration of the trout stream and repair the damage.
The 2012 Token Creek Festival season included a forum, “Listen to the Land,” with an eminent group of ecologists commenting on our attempt to redevelop as prairie a large set-aside field.
As it turned out, the best outcome of this gathering, in spite of the expensive and to this point discouraging track of that project, was the unanimous view of that forum that the restoration of the tributary trout stream, and the elimination of the carp pond, would dynamically and radically upgrade the entire ecology of the area, one that is an extremely important component of the Cherokee Marsh and Lake Mendota watershed. (below is a picnic by Token Creek.)
This year’s festival, “Water Music,” celebrates the unlikely achievement of that goal. Unable to find civic partners, the transformation was a private initiative, brilliantly realized by the river restoration firm Inter-Fluve, and spearheaded by the participants in our opening forum. (Below is a mill on the creek.)
Art and Nature are already familiar partners; Art and Technology increasingly so. One common impulse seems to be to increase harmony and invention; to limit pointless destruction; and to preserve enhance and develop, positively, some of the forces we cannot control, or fully understand.
Tags: Art, Arts, bass, carp, Cello, Chamber music, Classical music, ecology, essay, festival, Franz Schubert, harmony, invention, Jacob Stockinger, John Harbison, lieder, Madison, mill, Music, nature, photo, photograph, Piano, quintet, restoration, Rose Mary Harbison, singer, song, technology, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, Trout, Trout Quintet, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viola, Violin, vocal music, water, watershed
Classical music: For returning students, here is a lesson in the success of persistence
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By Jacob Stockinger
Summer is close to over.
You can feel it the cooler morning air.
You can see it in the earlier sunsets.
And you can notice it with the return of students of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus as well as Edgewood College and other public and private schools.
Recently, NPR – National Public Radio — hosted a story, which Jeff Lunden first reported on All Things Considered, on its Deceptive Cadence blog about the success of persistence.
The Ear won’t say more other than it involves a timpani student, five tries, the Tanglewood Festival at the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a stage crew.
It’s not a particularly important musical story. But it has a lot of human interest and some lessons through the personal experience of Miles Salerni (in a photo at bottom, by Hillary Scott for the Boston Symphony Orchestra).
Here is a link:
Tags: All Things Considered, Arts, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Classical music, fall, Jacob Stockinger, Madison, morning, Music, National Public Radio, NPR, Orchestra, percussion, persistence, private schools, public schools, school, stage crew, students, summer, sunset, symphony, Tanglewood Festival, timpani, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin
Classical music education: The Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra ends as it began — with an impressive display of young talent in both classic and contemporary music
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By Jacob Stockinger
Here is a special posting, a review written by frequent guest critic and writer for this blog, John W. Barker. Barker (below) is an emeritus professor of Medieval history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is a well-known classical music critic who writes for Isthmus and the American Record Guide, and who for 12 years hosted an early music show every other Sunday morning on WORT-FM 89.9 FM. He serves on the Board of Advisors for the Madison Early Music Festival and frequently gives pre-concert lectures in Madison.
By John W. Barker
On Friday evening, the Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra (MAYCO, below in a photo by John W. Barker) gave, in the Atrium Auditorium at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, the concert that concluded its sixth season.
Founded in 2011, it has been a remarkable venture that has given student musicians of high-school level the chance to enjoy full-scale orchestral experience.
But the group’s founder and director, the versatile and multi-talented Madison native Mikko Rankin Utevsky (below), is apparently irreplaceable in this effort; and he has found that he must move on in his career. So, this latest and 10th concert was also the orchestra’s last.
To mark the occasion, Utevsky, who just graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, is an enthusiastic champion of new music, and the orchestra commissioned a new composition, which then received its world premiere on Friday night.
The composer is the 25-year-old, Minneapolis-based avant-garde musician Ben Davis (below) who created a work with the not very helpful title of “is a is a is b is.” (I’m not making that up!) It is scored for a full ensemble of strings, winds and percussion plus an electronic screeching machine.
It is, in truth, not a piece of music at all, but a 20-minute experiment in the kinds of unusual — and not particularly pleasant — sounds that a group of orchestral players can make with their instruments. There are passages of repeated unison notes (the same one over and over) at goodly volume. And the last three minutes or so is an unaccompanied solo for the screeching machine on a single, piercing tone.
Whether this made a worthy valedictory salute to MAYCO’s audience and supporters is, I suppose, a matter of taste.
Fortunately, this new work was cushioned on either side by much more familiar material.
Opening the program was the beloved Overture to the opera The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini. This was brought off with full-steam-ahead momentum by the players under Utevsky’s enthusiastic leadership.
And then, to conclude, came the same work that Utevsky included in the very first MAYCO program: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
The players were clearly quite fired up at the chance to tackle this score and did themselves genuine credit. Utevsky provided fast and forceful leadership that stressed the dramatic power of this music—which was, in its day, as surprising and shocking as a lot of “new” music today, we must remember.
The audience shared with the performers a rousing experience.
Among his other functions, Utevsky also wrote admirably illuminating program notes for the Rossini and Beethoven works—contrasting with those contributed by Davis, which were as nose-thumbing as his composition.
It is sad to think that MAYCO is now a thing of the past. What a wonderful idea it has been, something that testifies to the remarkable quantity and quality of young musical talent here.
If his orchestra is now gone, we must certainly keep our eyes and ears open for what the gifted Utevsky moves on to next.
Tags: American Record Guide, Arts, avant-garde, Beethoven, Ben Davis, Cello, Chamber music, Classical music, commission, composer, Concert, conductor, contemporary music, Education, Fifth Symphony, First Unitarian Society of Madison, History, Isthmus, John Williams, lectures, Ludwig van Beethoven, Madison, Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra, Madison Early Music Festival, MAYCO, Medieval, Mikko Utevsky, Music, Music education, New Music, opera, Orchestra, Overture, professor, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Rossini, symphony, The Barber of Seville, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viola, Violin, world premiere, WORT-FM 89.9
Classical music: This year’s Token Creek Chamber Music Festival celebrates local ecological restoration with “water music”
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By Jacob Stockinger
Here is an overview of the upcoming 27th Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, which starts this Saturday, Aug. 27, and runs through Sunday, Sept. 4.
TOKEN CREEK, WIS. – Years in the planning, summer 2016 marks the completion of a major ecological restoration project on the Token Creek Festival property in the northeast corner of Dane County, part of the watersheds vital to the hydrology of Madison and southeastern Wisconsin.
During the 1930s, one of the most important feeder streams in the area, and its only cold-water trout stream, was ruined when it was widened to support short-lived commercial interests and development. Now, decades later, in a monumental effort, that stream has at long last been relocated, restored and rescued.
Festival-goers will be able to experience the project firsthand on the opening weekend, when each concert is preceded by an optional stroll along the new stream, with conversation guided by restoration ecologists and project managers.
Celebrating this monumental ecological project, the season theme of this year’s Token Creek Chamber Music Festival is: Water Music. Virtually all of the works programmed evoke brooks and streams and rivers and water in its many forms, with its ritual meanings, associations, allusions, and as metaphor.
In keeping with the theme, the Festival has adopted Franz Schubert (below) as the summer’s featured composer. His poetic, melancholic, ultimately organic and inevitable relationship to the natural world was expressed in composition after composition, wedded to his intense involvement with the poetry of his era, itself so infatuated with birds, fields, clouds and streams.
The second program emphasis continues the festival’s most persistent theme: the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Three strands of Bach’s music previously explored at Token Creek will be taken up again. We will present our third complete cantata performance, O heiliges Geist und Wasserbad, a mysterious and poetic piece from early in the composer’s career, with soloists from the Madison Choral Project (below).
We will conclude our survey of the three Bach violin concertos, this year the E major, co-artistic director Rose Mary Harbison (below top) again as soloist. And we take up our sequence of fugues from The Art of Fugue, co-artistic director and composer John Harbison (below bottom), who has won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “genius grant,” adding three more to his personal odyssey with this work, due to conclude in 2030.
NEW ARTISTS
Token Creek is pleased to introduce several new artists this season, including Grammy Award-nominated mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore, who has been praised for her “glorious instrument” and dubbed an “undisputed star…who has it all – looks, intelligence, musicianship, personality, technique, and a voice of bewitching amber color.”
Ms. Lattimore will offer works of Franz Schubert and John Harbison on the Festival’s opening concerts, By the Brook (August 27 and 28), where she will be joined by pianist Molly Morkoski.
Ms. Morkoski (below), who last appeared at Token Creek in 2013, consistently garners praise for her refined virtuosity and “the bold confidence and interactive grace one wants in a devoted chamber music maker.” In addition to the opening program, Morkoski will also be heard on the season finale in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet (Sept. 2 and 4).
On that same concert, tenor William Hite and pianist Kayo Iwama join forces in Schubert’s devastating and tragic song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller’s Daughter), in which a brook functions prominently as the protagonist’s confidante. (You can hear the legendary baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing “The Miller and the Brook” from the flowing song cycle in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini has called Hite (below) a “breathtaking communicator of spoken nuance” for his ability to reveal the meaning and emotion embodied in the text and the music, solidifying his reputation as an engaging and expressive artist.
http://www.williamhitetenor.com/
Kayo Iwama (below) is associate director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music graduate vocal arts program, the master’s degree program for classical singers, and she also coordinates the vocal studies program at the Tanglewood Music Center. Her frequent concert partners include Dawn Upshaw and Lucy Shelton.
http://www.bard.edu/academics/faculty/details/?action=details&id=1838
VIOLS AND WILLIAM WARTMANN
Finally, the “technically faultless and consistently sensitive and expressive,” consort of viols, Second City Musick (below), based in Chicago, will offer a guest recital on Tuesday, Aug. 30, anchored by John Harbison’s The Cross of Snow.
Craig Trompeter, Russell Wagner, Anna Steinhoff at the Planetarium, Chicago, May 30, 2013
Commissioned by local businessman and philanthropist William John Wartmann (below) in memory of his wife, mezzo-soprano Joyce Wartmann, this evocative new piece, on texts of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, blends the ethereal lushness of violas da gamba with the haunting clarity of the countertenor voice, here Nathan Medley (below bottom), to explore the emotions of grief, loss and love.
At its first performance in Chicago last May, a local critic praised both the work and the musicians: “The Chicago-based ensemble was ideally suited to premiere this profoundly affecting work, and the shared sensibility between composer and performers was noticeable.”
Tuesday’s program will also include works of Henry Purcell, William Byrd, John Jenkins and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Other festival artists this season include vocalists Rachel Warricke, Sarah Leuwerke, Daniel O’Dea, and Nathan Krueger; violinists Rose Mary Harbison, Laura Burns, and Isabella Lippi; Jen Paulson, viola; Karl Lavine, cello; Ross Gilliland, bass; Linda Kimball, horn; and John Harbison, piano.
HERE ARE FESTIVAL PROGRAMS AT A GLANCE:
Program 1: By the Brook – Schubert, Bach and Harbison
Saturday, Aug. 27: 6:45 p.m. – optional guided stream stroll*; 8 p.m. – concert
Sunday, Aug. 28: 2:45 p.m. – optional guided stream stroll*; 4 p.m. – concert
*(The stream stroll is free, but reservations are recommended)
Program 2: Music for Viols, Then & Now
Tuesday, Aug. 30, at 7:30 p.m.
Program 3: Water Colors = Two Schubert Masterworks
Friday, Sept. 2 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, Sept. 4 at 4 p.m.
Concert tickets are $32 (students $12). The preview stream stroll on opening weekend is free to concertgoers, but advance reservations are recommended.
Reservations can be made in several ways:
- Online: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/token-creek-chamber-music-festival-2016-tickets-26070692142
- Website (printable order form): www.tokencreekfestival.org
- Phone: 608-241-2525 (voicemail only, please leave a message)
- Email: info@tokencreekfestival.org
- U.S. mail: P.O. Box 5201, Madison WI, 53705
Performances take place at the Festival Barn, on Highway 19 near the hamlet of Token Creek (10 minutes north of Madison) with ample parking available. The venue, indoors and air-conditioned, is invitingly small—early reservations are recommended.
More information about the Token Creek Festival and all events and artists can be found at the website, www.tokencreekfestival.org or by calling 608 241-2525.
Tags: accompaniment, accompany, allusion, Art of Fugue, Arts, association, Bach, Bard College, baritone, Baroque, bass, birds, Byrd, Cantata, Cello, Chamber music, Chicago, choral music, Classical music, clouds, commission, composer, concerto, countertenor, Dane County, Dawn Upshaw, development, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Early music, ecology, fields, Franz Schubert, fugue, genius grant, Grammy, grief, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horn, Jacob Stockinger, Jenkins, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Harbison, John Jenkins, Kayo Iwama, lieder, loss, Love, Lucy Shelton, MacArthur Fellow, Madison, Madison Choral Project, Margaret Lattimore, metaphor, Mezzo-soprano, Molly Morkoski, Music, natural world, nature, New York Times, organic, Piano, poetic, Poetry, premiere, Pulitzer Prize, Purcell, restoration, Rose Mary Harbison, Second City Musick, sing, singer, solo, Sonata, song, song cycle, stream, streams, Tanglewood Festival, tenor, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, Trout, Trout Quintet, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viol, Viola, Violin, vocal music, vocalist, water, Water Music, watershed, William Hite, William Wattmann, Wisconsin, YouTube
Classical music: On the eve of his performance at The Proms, meet Ivan Fischer – a modest maestro who gets great results from his orchestra
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By Jacob Stockinger
In less than a week from now, on this coming Friday night, Hungarian maestro Ivan Fischer (below) will make his debut at the famed British BBC Proms with the Budapest Festival Orchestra.
In an age of jet-set, millionaire celebrity maestros, The Ear finds that the modest Fischer – a pianist by training who is also the music director of the Konzerthaus in Berlin, Germany — shows a refreshing lack of ego and ambition.
Fisher — who has also challenged the conservative right-wing government of Hungary –seems to have a healthy perspective on making music, which depends on taking the long view, with the acclaimed Budapest Festival Orchestra (below), which he founded and still leads.
Fischer is also extremely thoughtful and articulate in words as well as music, as you seen in his insightful remarks about the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven in the YouTube video at the bottom.
Fischer is also well know for his recorded interpretations of Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, Antonin Dvorak, Peter Tchaikovsky, Bela Bartok and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
In short, Ivan Fischer seems a model non-superstar musician.
The Ear hopes you agree.
Here is a terrific profile that appeared in The Guardian newspaper in the UK:
Tags: Arts, Bartok, BBC Proms, Beethoven, Berlin, Brahms, Bruckner, Budapest, Budapest Festival Orchestra, choral music, Classical music, concerto, conductor, Dvorak, Germany, Hungary, interview, Ivan Fischer, Jacob Stockinger, Johannes Brahms, Liszt, Ludwig van Beethoven, Maestro, Mahler, Music, Orchestra, Piano, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninov, symphony, Tchaikovsky, The Guardian, UK, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin, YouTube
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