The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: The Festival Choir of Madison performs Yiddish music Saturday night. The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra performs the child-friendly “Beethoven Lives Next Door” for FREE twice on Saturday morning
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ALERT: Do you have children or grandchildren you want to introduce to classical music? This Saturday morning, March 14, at 9:15 and 11:15 a.m. in the Goodman Community Center, at 149 Waubesa Street on Madison’s near east side, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra will give two FREE public performances of “Beethoven Lives Next Door.” The interactive, multi-media event includes live music and story-telling, and is designed for children age 4-10 and their families. Because space is limited, advance registration is strongly recommended. You can register for one of the performances by going to: https://wisconsinchamberorchestra.org/performances
By Jacob Stockinger
The Festival Choir of Madison will present its second concert of the season, “Ner Tamid: Eternal Flame,” on this Saturday night, March 14, at 8 p.m. at the First Unitarian Society of Madison at 900 University Bay Drive.
The choir (below), under the artistic direction of Edgewood College professor Sergei Pavlov (below, front right) will perform songs drawing on Yiddish folklore, Klezmer innovations, the pain and cultural fusion of the diaspora, and the poignancy of love in the Holocaust.
Spanning geography and time, this array of Sephardic folk songs, Middle Eastern melodies, the high European tradition of the late 19th century, and contemporary settings of ancient texts paints a rich picture of the breadth of Jewish musical tradition.
The performance includes works by Gustav Mahler, Jacob Weinberg (below top) and Alberto Guidobaldi (below bottom) for classical composers, as well as Paul Ben Haim and Josef Hadar, who are more contemporary Israeli and Jewish composers, respectively.
The Festival Choir of Madison (FCM) is an auditioned, mixed-voice volunteer choir of over 50 experienced singers. FCM performs thematic concerts of artistically challenging choral music from around the world for listeners who enjoy traditional, modern, and eclectic works, and for singers who enjoy developing their talents with others.
The choir performs three thematic concerts annually in November, March and May. It also serves as the core choir for the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra’s annual “Messiah” concert. (In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear the Festival Choir of Madison perform “The West Lake” by Chinese composer Chen Yi in 2019.)
Concert admission — general seating — is $10 for students, $15 for senior citizens, and $20 for adults, with tickets available at the door the day of the concert. Tickets can also be purchased online at: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4383496
To learn more about the choir and see details about its May 16 performance of Mozart’s Requiem, visit: www.festivalchoirmadison.org
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Classical music: The Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society seeks amateur photos from the public for a slide show to accompany Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” in June. Plus, Mikko Rankin Utevsky gives a FREE viola recital Sunday night
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ALERT: Blog contributor and all-round musician — violist, conductor and singer as well as critic — Mikko Rankin Utevsky sends the following word:
Dear friends: I’m giving my senior viola recital this Sunday evening, April 10, the culmination of my four years of study here at the UW-Madison. On the program are a pair of powerful and evocative works from 1919: the Viola Sonata of Rebecca Clarke, and the Suite for Viola and Piano by Ernest Bloch. Pianist Thomas Kasdorf joins me for the program, which is at 7 p.m. at Capitol Lakes, off the Capitol Square, at 333 West Main Street. I hope to see you there!
P.S.: Thomas and I are giving another recital – with me singing this time – on Tuesday, May 10, at 7 p.m., also at Capitol Lakes. On the program are assorted songs by Samuel Barber, Kurt Weill, Charles Ives, Robert Schumann, and Claude Debussy, and the “Songs of Travel” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. If you can’t make this one, see you in a month!
By Jacob Stockinger
Multi-media concerts seem to be catching on, perhaps in an attempt to attract new and younger audiences.
Next season the Madison Symphony Orchestra will do two of them: Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” with a hi-definition film made by NASA for the Houston Symphony Orchestra; and a Beyond the Score with “Scheherazade” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, accompanied by photographs plus actors Jim DeVita and Brenda DeVita from American Players Theatre in Spring Green.
Doing mutli-media is nothing new for the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, which is always experimenting and looking for novel approaches to classical music. But the group is expanding how it is done in an impressively populist way.
Here is an announcement from The Ear’s friends at the Madison-based Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, which turns 25 this summer:
SEASONAL PHOTOGRAPHS WANTED FOR A SPECIAL CONCERT AT THE OVERTURE CENTER THIS SUMMER.
Have you taken photos of your favorite time of year?
Visual artist Lisa A. Frank will be creating photographic scenery for this year’s “Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society” concerts at the Overture Center for the Arts.
The program on June 25 will include the “Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi. For this concert, a photo collage of the four seasons – like Frank’s spring image of bird eggs and feathers in a nest and the fall image of gourds – will be projected on a large screen behind the musicians.
(You can get a sense of it from the popular YouTube video at the bottom, which features the “Spring” section of the four string concertos that make up “The Four Seasons.)
KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
Lisa Frank (below) invites amateur photographers of all ages to participate in this concert by sending up to 5 of your best shots depicting any aspect of any season.
The images can be in jpeg, tiff or Photoshop format. If your photograph is included, you may be asked to resend a higher resolution image. (Below is a summer photo of a flower and butterfly.)
All featured photographers will receive a video of the final result.
Up to 100 photos will be selected.
Send your photographs by Sunday, April 18 to:
lisafrank@lisafrankphotography.com
And here is a link – with information about programs, performers, venues and tickets — to the new summer season of the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, which celebrates the group’s 25th anniversary or Silver Jubilee:
http://www.bachdancinganddynamite.org
Tags: Actor, amateur, American Players Theatre, Arts, Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, Beyond the Score, bird, blog, butterfly, Chamber music, Charles Ives, Classical music, Claude Debussy, conductor, critic, Ernest Bloch, Four Seasons, gourd, Gustav Holst, Holst, Jacob Stockinger, Kurt Weill, Madison, Madison Symphony Orchestra, media, Mikko Utevsky, multi-media, Music, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Orchestra, Overture Center, photographs, photos, Piano, planet, Planets, populism, populist, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rebecca Clarke, Robert Schumann, Samuel Barber, Scheherazade, singer, song, Spring Green, symphony, The Planets, Thomas Kasdorf, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viola, Violin, Vivaldi, vocal music, YouTube
Classical music: The Madison Symphony Orchestra unveils its 2016-17 season. Plus, the Oakwood Chamber Players perform “Children’s Games” this Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. The program features music by Bizet, Jack Gallagher and Irving Fine.
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ALERT: Today — as of midnight plus one minute — the Madison Symphony Orchestra is announcing its new season for 2016-17. The eight-concert season features many returning soloists, 13 first-time performances for the MSO, two multi-media events and another Beyond the Score that was so popular when it premiered several years ago. Here is a link to check it out for yourself:
http://www.madisonsymphony.org/16-17
By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following note:
THE OAKWOOD CHAMBER PLAYERS PRESENT: Children’s Games
Join the Oakwood Chamber Players (below) as they continue their concert season with the theme of playful whimsy in a concert entitled Children’s Games on Saturday, March 5, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, March 6, 1:30 p.m.
Tickets can be purchased with cash or personal checks at the door – $20 general admission, $15 seniors and $5 students. Visit www.oakwoodchamberplayers.com or call (608) 230-4316 for more information.
Children over 6 years of age will receive free admission to either performance.
The concerts will both be held at the Oakwood Center for Arts and Education, 6209 Mineral Point Road, on Madison’s far west side..
The concert title is drawn from the composition Jeux d’enfants or Children’s Games by French composer Georges Bizet (below). You can hear the original version played by sister Katia and Marielle Labeque in a YouTube video at the bottom.
Originally a 12-movement work written for two pianos, a representative suite has been arranged by the Oakwood Chamber Players for woodwind quintet. It includes the energetic march “Trompette et tambour”; the compelling melodic exchanges in “Petit mari, petite femme”; “La toupie” which depicts the frantic spinning of a top; the lulling berceuse of “La poupee”; and the exhilarating galop dance form in “Le bal.”
The woodwind quintet will also perform contemporary Ancient Evenings and Distant Music by American composer Jack Gallagher (below).
The title of this work is inspired by a poignant toast given by a character in the best-selling romantic novel The Bridges of Madison County by Robert Waller The work includes a prologue followed by eight brief variations based on historic compositional styles enlivened by 20th-century technique.
The woodwind quintet includes two guest artists: flutist Dawn Lawler (below top) and oboist Jennifer Morgan (below bottom).
The ensemble’s performance will also include the engaging, tongue-in-cheek composition “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” by American composer Irving Fine (below) who sets up delightful dueling interplays between two woodwinds (oboe and clarinet) and two string instruments (violin and cello).
Overall, the program will provide a fascinating combination of compelling and entertaining compositions.
This is the fourth of five concerts in the Oakwood Chamber Players 2015-2016 “Play” season series titled Play. Summer Splash on May 14 and 15 will be final concerts of the season.
The Oakwood Chamber Players is a group of Madison-area professional musicians who have rehearsed and performed at Oakwood Village for over 30 years.
The Oakwood Chamber Players are a professional music ensemble proudly supported by Oakwood Lutheran Senior Ministries and the Oakwood Foundation.
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Classical music: The Madison-based new music ensemble Clocks in Motion will perform John Luther Adams’ look at Arctic life in Alaska in “Earth and the Great Weather” on Saturday night for FREE at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Plus, “Sunday Afternoon Live From the Chazen” features an all-Brahms concert.
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ALERT: Is there no end to the great music awaiting you this weekend? This week’s “Sunday Live From the Chazen” features clarinetist John Marco, pianist Eugene Alcalay and cellist Parry Karp of the UW-Madison‘s Pro Arte Quartet. They will perform an all-Brahms program. It will be broadcast LIVE from 12:30 to 2 p.m. on Wisconsin Public Radio (WERN 88.7 FM in the Madison area). The FREE concert is in Brittingham Gallery 3 of the Chazen Museum of Art on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The Ear wishes he could tell you the specific works on the program, but WPR lists nothing about the concert and the Chazen only lists dates and performers plus reservation information (visit http://www.chazen.wisc.edu/search/9254ec53aee7833b552dad8b6f5cda84/ and read from bottom to top. Please, webmasters, update your websites for the new semester in a reader-informative and reader-friendly way! Otherwise, what good is all the high technology?
By Jacob Stockinger
We are not quite yet mid-winter in this season of sub-zero Polar Vortex slippages, and yet we have another chance to Hear the Cold this weekend.
You cay recall that this weekend the Oakwood Chamber Players will give two performances on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon of a “Nordic” program that features works by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, Danish composer Carl Nielsen and Sveinbjorn Sveinbjornsson of Iceland. (For details, here is a link:
But on SATURDAY night — NOT Sunday night as mistakenly listed in some press releases — there is also a chance to hear an unusual work by a contemporary American composer, John Luther Adams (below), who is not to be confused with the Minimalist John Adams, the composer of the operas “Nixon in China” and “Doctor Atomic” among many other works.
Here are more details about he work, drawn largely from a press release by the performing ensemble.
Clocks in Motion (below), Madison’s cutting-edge new music ensemble, will present the Madison premiere of John Luther Adams’ “Earth and the Great Weather,” a collaborative multi-media performance depicting the Arctic physical, cultural and spiritual landscapes of Northern Alaska. (An excerpt, “Drums of Winter,” can be heard at the bottom in a YouTube video.)
Percussion, strings, chorus, digital delay patterns, spoken texts and pre-recorded nature sounds will join forces in this ambitious and innovative work on Saturday, Feb. 1, in Mills Hall at 7:30 p.m.
Admission is free.
Each movement of the genre-defying piece focuses on a different element of Arctic life.
According to the composer, “The landscape from which “Earth and the Great Weather” is drawn is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (below) …one of the last great wilderness regions of North America. It also embraces the homelands of both the Gwich’in Indians and the Inupiat Eskimos.”
The 10 colorful and drastically different movements are meant to envelope the listener in a transcendental sound environment. In this YouTube video below, the composer explains his personal view of music.
Clocks in Motion has assembled a team of professional musicians to present this unique concert experience to the community.
Chelsie Propst (below top), Sarah Richardson, Cheryl Rowe, and Paul Rowe will comprise the vocal chorus, while Carol Carlson, Max Wollam-Fisher, Spencer Hobbs, and Mikko Utevsky (below bottom) will serve as the string quartet.
Steve Gotcher, audio engineer for Audio for the Arts, will control the complex electronic component of the performance. Matthew Schlomer (below, in a photo by Laura Zastrow) will conduct.
Hailed as “nothing short of remarkable” (ClevelandClassical.com), Clocks in Motion is a group that performs new music, builds rare instruments, and breaks down the boundaries of the traditional concert program.
Formed in 2011, the ensemble is currently in residence at the University of Wisconsin School of Music. The individual members of Clocks in Motion’s unique skill sets and specialties contain an impressive mix of musical styles including, rock, jazz, contemporary classical music, orchestral percussion, marching percussion and world music styles.
Among its many recent engagements, the group served as resident performers and educators at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Rhapsody Arts Center, the University of Michigan, Baldwin-Wallace University, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
This project is supported by Dane Arts.
For more information, including repertoire, upcoming events, biographies, and media, visit:
http://clocksinmotionpercussion.com.
Here is a story about the concert (plus other news) on the UW School of Music’s outstanding blog “Fanfare”:
http://uwmadisonschoolofmusic.wordpress.com
And here is a link to a profile of Clocks in Motion that appeared in The Wisconsin State Journal:
Tags: Alaska, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Art, Arts, Baldwin-Wallace University, Brahms, Cello, Chazen Museum of Art, clarinet, Classical music, Clocks, Contemporary classical music, Doctor Atomic, Drums of Winter, Jacob Stockinger, Jean Sibelius, John Adams, John Luther Adams, Madison, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, multi-media, New Music, Nixon in China, percussion, Piano, pre-recorded, Pro Arte Quartet, strings, Sveinbjorn Sveinbjornsson, University of Wisconsin–Madison, wisconsin public radio, Wisconsin State Journal, YouTube
Classical music: Conductor John DeMain takes listeners behind the scenes of the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s inaugural “Beyond the Score” concert of Dvorak’s popular “New World” Symphony this Sunday afternoon. Plus, flutist Kirstin Ihde plays a FREE concert of Saint-Saens, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Bach this Friday at noon.
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ALERT: This Friday’s Free Noon Musicale, held from 12:15 to 1 p.m. in the Landmark Auditorium at the historic the First Unitarian Society of Madison‘s Meeting House, 900 University Bay Drive, will feature flutist Dawn Lawler and pianist Kirstin Ihde in music of Camille Saint-Saens, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Johann Sebastian Bach.
By Jacob Stockinger
Ever since he arrived in Madison from Houston 20 years ago, maestro John DeMain has never ceased to innovate and try new things to boost the fortunes of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Madison Opera, where he is the music director and the artistic director, respectively.
His many efforts have included new audition procedures for players; opening up rehearsals to the public; helping to procure and build the Overture Center; expanding educational programs and community outreach programs; and tirelessly promoting his efforts through Wisconsin Public Radio and WORT-FM, Wisconsin Public Television and commercial TV network affiliates.
He also tried a special New Year’s concert that didn’t work out, and going to triple performances, which did work out.
So it seemed only natural that The Ear should asked DeMain about his latest effort in both music education and concert performance: Doing the “Beyond the Score” version of Antonin Dvorak’s popular “New World” Symphony this Sunday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. in Overture Hall. (Tickets are $15-$60 and are selling fast towards a sell-out; they can be bought through the Overture Center box office or by calling at (608) 258-4141.)
Here is a link with more details about the production and concert:
And here is an email Q&A with John DeMain (below, in a photo by Prasad) about the background and future of the Beyond the Score series, which was pioneered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
How and when did the idea for this kind of concert or special event come to you?
Actually some of our patrons witnessed “Beyond the Score” in Chicago several years ago and brought it to our attention. We immediately investigated the program and found it fascinating and wonderful. We felt it was something that Madison should have.
The “Beyond the Score” concert on Sunday afternoon is almost sold out. What do you attribute its popularity to? When did it start, and how has it been received by the public and the musicians at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra?
I think the public loves the “New World” Symphony by Dvorak (below) and is anxious to get deeper into this great symphony and it’s connection to America. “Beyond the Score” is in its ninth season in Chicago and has been wildly successful with their audience. This year they’re adding three more symphonies to their canon of works for this program.
Why did you decide to program this event, and can you give us some background to it? Do you think it will help build new audiences? Deepen the appreciation of current audiences? How so?
I hope this will attract new listeners and deepen the experience of our current audience. This is not a musicological or theoretical analysis of the symphony, although many examples are cited to illustration certain aspects of the music. Rather it is a multi-media presentation that is highly entertaining as well as informative look into the creative process.
What makes this symphony American, Czech and Beethovenian all in one? This is what “Beyond the Score” examines as it conjures up the wonderful historical context in which this work was written. (Below is a photo of the manuscript score of the “New World” Symphony.)
If this format is popular and well received here, might the MSO (below) do another one next season, or maybe even more performances? What other works are available in that format and have you considered?
We hope that if the performance is well received here and that other underwriters step forward, we can possibly see more of these in the future. Currently, there are 22 works in the “Beyond the Score” canon.
Are there parts about the Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony program that particularly attract you, or parts that you want to draw the public’s attention to?
I know that after the intermission, when we perform the symphony in its entirety, the audience will listen to it in a whole new way. (Below is a YouTube video, with more than 1.5 million hits of the soulful slow movement, which borrows from Negro spirituals, of the “New World Symphony as performed by conductor Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. It is The Ear’s favorite movement of this wonderful symphony.)
Editor’s note: Here are the official program notes by University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor and Madison Symphony Orchestra trombonist J. Michael Allsen for the “New World” Symphony:
http://facstaff.uww.edu/allsenj/MSO/NOTES/1314/4A.BTM_Dvorak.html
Tags: Antonín Dvořák, Arts, Bach, Camille Saint-Saëns, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Classical music, Dmitri Shostakovich, First Unitarian Society of Madison, flute, Herbert von Karajan, Jacob Stockinger, Johann Sebastian Bach, John DeMain, Ludwig van Beethoven, Madison, Madison Opera, Madison Symphony Orchestra, multi-media, New World, New World Symphony, Overture Center, Piano, Sergei Prokofiev, symphony, Trombone, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Vienna Philharmonic, wisconsin public radio, Wisconsin Public Television, YouTube
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The Well-Tempered Ear 