The Well-Tempered Ear
This Saturday night the Wisconsin Chamber Choir and Grammy winner Sarah Brailey perform a free live-streamed concert of music by women
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post:
The Wisconsin Chamber Choir (WCC, below) with a special guest — Grammy Award-winning soprano and UW-Madison graduate Sarah Brailey – will perform this Saturday, May 15, at 7 p.m.
“Music She Wrote” is a celebration of music composed by a highly diverse group of women from many ages.
Choir members will sing from their individual cars using wireless microphones, listening to the sound of the whole choir via their car radios.
The audience is invited to listen in live on YouTube and to let us know they are interested by sending an RSVP to our Facebook event.
There is no charge to view the livestream, but donations will be welcome.
Here are the links to hear the performance LIVE on YouTube or Facebook:
https://youtu.be/Iaz0wZhuG18 or:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1561155960751974/
The WCC had scheduled a regular concert with an all-female cast of composers for May 2020, which fell victim to Covid-19. As it became obvious that the pandemic would last longer, the WCC started exploring new ways of making and disseminating music.
From September 2020, we resumed activity in the shape of the Parking Lot Choir, generating local media coverage from WKOW-TV and Madison Magazine, whose story was headlined “Forget tailgates, parking lots are for choir practice.”
The result of this first rehearsal run was the widely acclaimed “Car Carols” concert in December 2020, whose format is the model for “Music She Wrote.”
In addition to the Parking Lot Choir, three smaller groups from the WCC assembled at the Edgewood College Amphitheater on Saturday mornings to rehearse (below) in widely spaced formations, wearing specially designed singer masks.
Another such group, made up of our members from southeastern Wisconsin, met in Whitewater on Sunday afternoons. Recordings by those four small groups will be aired during the May 15 broadcast in addition to live singing by the Parking Lot choristers.
The program includes: the Garden Songs by Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn (Felix’s sister, below), which were intended for outdoor performance; and Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women, the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement in the English-speaking world.
In addition to works by African American composers Ysaÿe M. Barnwell (below top) and Rosephanye Powell and by Cuban composer Beatriz Corona (below second), the program includes samples from outside the Western tradition — Lamma Badaa Yatathannaa, sung in Arabic, by Shireen Abu-Shader (below third), who hails from Jordan but received her academic education in the U.S. and Canada; and two pieces by Japanese composer Makiko Kinoshita (below bottom).
Western early music is represented by Italian composers Raffaella Aleotti (below top) and Chiara Cozzolani (below bottom), who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Finally, there is singer-songwriter Judy Collins with her Song for Sarajevo, composed for the children of the war in Bosnia in 1994 and arranged by her longtime collaborator, Russell Walden. (You can hear it in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
For more details, visit: https://www.wisconsinchamberchoir.org/music-she-wrote.
Sarah Brailey (below, in a photo by Miranda Loud), a native of Wisconsin, studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she has just completed her doctorate. A consummate musician and internationally acclaimed soloist, she recently won a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Vocal Solo Album category for her role as The Soul in the world premiere recording of Ethel Smyth’s The Prison.
She is familiar to Madison audiences not only as a performer and co-founder of Just Bach but also as the co-host of WORT’s Musica Antiqua show on FM 89.9 and the director of Grace Presents.
As a graduate student, she joined the WCC for two seasons from 2004 to 2006. We are thrilled to welcome her back! For more information on Sarah, see her website at https://sarahbrailey.com
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Today is Day 2 of the online Bach Around the Clock festival. It starts at 8 a.m. and features keyboard, wind, string and vocal music. WPR’s Jonathan Overby will discuss Bridges to Bach tonight at 7
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By Jacob Stockinger
Here is the schedule for Day 2 of the 2021 virtual, online Bach Around the Clock festival, which is today — Thursday, March 18:
Today’s program will be available starting at 8 a.m. and then throughout the festival.
Click here to view more.
For an overview and background, go to: https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2021/03/17/todays-just-bach-concert-starts-the-10-day-bach-around-the-clock-festival-that-runs-through-march-26-all-events-are-free-and-online-here-are-the-lineups/
PERFORMERS and PROGRAMS
• Musette (from Suzuki Book 2); Ossian Rogers, violin; Faolan Rogers, harp; Kara Rogers, piano
• Sheep May Safely Graze, from Cantata 208; Gift Akere, piano
• Sonata No. 3, BWV 1005: Largo; Rebekah May, viola
• Cello Suite V in C minor, BWV 1011: Prelude, Gavottes I and II, Gigue; Cindy Cameron-Fix, bassoon
• Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook: Menuet, BWV anh 114; Tim Farley, clavichord
• Chorale: Now God be with us; Katie Bultman, soprano, and Kenneth Stancer, organ
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Live Evening Keynote Discussion at 7 p.m. Jonathan Øverby, (below) distinguished Wisconsin Public Radio host of “The Road to Higher Ground,” will discuss building The Bridge To and Through Bach with BATC Artistic Director Marika Fischer Hoyt.
Click here to join the Zoom call, starting at 7 p.m. tonight, Thursday, March 18. Viewers are encouraged to submit questions in the chat for Overby to address. |
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This Friday night the Verona Quartet performs an online concert of Brahms and Dvorak for the Wisconsin Union Theater. Plus, longtime music critic Jess Anderson has died
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ALERT: Jess Anderson (below), a longtime local music critic for Isthmus, an active participant in the local music scene and a veteran radio host of an early music program for WORT-FM 89.9, died this past Sunday. He was 85. When more information is known, The Ear will devote a blog post to Jess, who was also a friend.
By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post:
The Wisconsin Union Theater’s Concert Series will continue this season with a performance by the Verona Quartet (below) on this Friday, Jan. 29, at 7:30 p.m. CST. It will be preceded by a question-and-answer session with the Quartet at 7 p.m. CST.
The Quartet will perform two complete works: the String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 51, No. 2, by Johannes Brahms; and the famous String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, the “American,” by Antonin Dvorak. (In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear the Verona Quartet perform the familiar last movement of the string quartet by Dvorak.)
The Verona Quartet rose to international fame by sweeping top prizes at competitions, including the Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award in 2020.
Hailing from four different parts of the world, differences unify the Quartet’s members and music. Its music aims to show how diverse experiences can come together in harmony.
“The Verona Quartet brings fresh approaches to classical music masterpieces,” says Wisconsin Union Theater director Elizabeth Snodgrass (below). “The Quartet has risen to become one of the world’s most sought-after string quartets. We are honored to include them in our Concert Series season.”
Ticket purchase information can be found here. Tickets for this virtual online event are $10 for UW-Madison students, $17 for Wisconsin Union members and students who do not attend the UW-Madison, and $20 for all other patrons.
Ticket buyers will receive an email from approximately 2 hours before the event begins that contains the link to view the performance.
Anyone who purchases a ticket within 2 hours of the event’s start time will receive their link in their confirmation email immediately following their purchase. Only 1 ticket per household is needed to view this concert.
The link will remain active until Friday, Feb. 5, at 9:30 p.m. (CST) to view whenever you would like.
This performance will include the Quartet’s regular violinists Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, and violist Abigail Rojansky.
But due to challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic, Quartet member and cellist Jonathan Dormand will not be part of the event. Instead, cellist Dmitry Kouzov (below top) will perform the string quartet by Brahms and cellist Annie Jacobs-Perkins (below bottom, in a photo by C. Tihms Van Velden) will perform the string quartet by Dvorak.
The Verona Quartet’s performance is made possible by the David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Endowment Fund, with additional support from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.
An additional Concert Series performance will take place on Sunday, Feb. 28, at 7:30 p.m. CDT and features the Meccore Quartet.
For more than 75 years, the Wisconsin Union Theater has served as a cultural center for community members and visitors and provides a variety of performing arts events.
The Theater’s Concert Series began more than a century ago and is one of the oldest uninterrupted series of its kind in the United States.
The Wisconsin Union Theater team presents the Concert Series in collaboration with the student-led Wisconsin Union Directorate (WUD) Performing Arts Committee.
The Theater team strives for all of its spaces to be accessible, and those that need accommodations can reach out by email to the Wisconsin Union Theater team at: wisconsinuniontheater@union.wisc.edu
For more information about the Verona Quartet, including how to purchase tickets, visit union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/verona-quartet.
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It’s Thanksgiving Day. Conductor Marin Alsop, NPR, WQXR, WFMT and Wisconsin Public Radio offer music suggestions. What piece would you choose to mark the holiday?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Today – Thursday, Nov. 26, 2020 — is Thanksgiving Day.
Right now, the U.S. has had more than 12 million cases of COVID-19 with more than 260,000 deaths plus all the alarming signs and conditions that many more cases and deaths are coming in the next several months.
We might be sad that we can’t be with the family and friends we usually celebrate with. But we nonetheless have many things to give thanks for during this strange and tragic time.
We can thank the vaccine researchers; the doctors and nurses; and the other health care workers who take care of Covid patients, even those who don’t observe precautions and bring on their own illness.
We can thank all kinds of people on the front lines — food and transportation workers, for example — who help protect us and care for us.
We can thank the friends, family and others who stay in touch and help get us through these trying times.
And we can thank technology that makes isolating a lot less unbearable because we have telephones, radios, TVs, CD players, computers, cell phones and virtual online ZOOM meetings and gatherings and various other events including live-streamed concerts.
For The Ear, music has never meant more or brought more comfort than during this difficult year. He is giving thanks for that as well as for the other people and things just mentioned.
So what music should we celebrate this year’s emotionally complicated and mixed Thanksgiving holiday with?
Well, you can Google sources and go to YouTube to find compilations of music appropriate to the holiday. (See one playlist lasting 90 minutes in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Famed classical radio station WQXR in New York City has five suggestions for being musically grateful: https://www.wqxr.org/story/top-five-expressions-thanks-classical-music/
And WFMT in Chicago is offering 20 suggestions based on holiday food: https://www.wfmt.com/2019/11/25/a-complete-thanksgiving-feast-in-20-food-inspired-pieces/
But here are a couple of other suggestions, some local.
Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) is always a reliable source. And tomorrow is no exception.
If WPR programming stays true to past patterns, music by American composers will be emphasized.
Plus, starting at 10 a.m. WPR will broadcast performances from the Honors Concerts (below) by middle and high school students around the state and who participate in the Wisconsin School Music Association. This year, for the first time, the performances will be virtual. But as in past years, they are sure to be moving and even inspiring.
Other fine suggestions from the world-famous conductor Marin Alsop (below), a Leonard Bernstein protégée, who recently spoke for 7 minutes to NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon.
Here is a link, but you should listen rather than just read the transcript if you want to hear the musical samples: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/21/937448472/this-thanksgiving-put-on-some-music-to-soothe
Do you like any of those suggestions? Were any new to you?
What piece of music would you choose to express gratitude on this particular Thanksgiving?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Classical music: This weekend, prize-winning pianist Joyce Yang solos in Prokofiev’s most popular piano concerto with the Madison Symphony Orchestra. Works by Schumann and Aaron Jay Kernis round out the program
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By Jacob Stockinger
This weekend, prize-winning pianist Joyce Yang (below) will return to Madison to join the Madison Symphony Orchestra in her local concerto debut and perform Prokofiev’s brilliant, bravura and tuneful Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26.
The concert opens with Kernis’ Newly Drawn Sky and concludes with Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61.
Performances will be held in Overture Hall, 201 State Street, on Friday night, Nov. 8, at 7:30 p.m.; on Saturday night, Nov. 9, at 8 p.m.; and Sunday afternoon, Nov. 10, at 2:30 p.m.
Tickets are $19-$95 with discounts available. See below for details.
Speaking about the program, music director and maestro John DeMain (below, in a photo by Greg Anderson) says: “November brings us another Madison Symphony debut, that of the amazing pianist Joyce Yang. She will perform the Prokofiev’s dazzling Piano Concerto No. 3, one of the great and most popular concertos, and certainly a favorite of mine.”
Adds DeMain: “I can’t wait for audiences to experience the hauntingly beautiful Newly Drawn Sky by Aaron Jay Kernis. And of the four symphonies by Robert Schumann, many regard his second as the greatest of them all.”
According to Aaron Jay Kernis (below), who has won the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award and who teaches at the Yale School of Music, “Newly Drawn Sky” is “a lyrical, reflective piece for orchestra, a reminiscence of the first summer night by the ocean spent with my young twins, and of the summer sky at dusk.”
The chromatically shifting three-note chords that begin in the strings and transfer to the winds are a central element in the creation of this work. The works last approximately 17 minutes and was premiered at the Ravinia Festival in 2005 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
To read more about Kernis and his successful career, go to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Jay_Kernis
Sergei Prokofiev (below) himself played the solo part at the world premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3 on Dec. 16, 1921 in Chicago with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although he started work on the composition as early as 1913, the majority of it was completed in 1921 and the piece didn’t gain popularity until 1922 when it was confirmed in the 20th-century canon. (You can hear Prokofiev play the first movement in the YouTube video at the bottom.) The Ear thinks that the work has much Russian Romanticism in it and if you like Rachmaninoff, you will probably like this Prokofiev.
Originally a composer for keyboard, Robert Schumann (below with wife Clara) began writing symphonies around the time of his marriage to his virtuoso pianist and composer wife Clara Wieck, who encouraged his compositional expansions.
The uplifting Symphony in C major was created while the composer was troubled with depression and hearing loss; a Beethovenian triumph over pessimism and despair, the creation of this symphony served as a healing process for Schumann.
ABOUT JOYCE YANG
Blessed with “poetic and sensitive pianism” (The Washington Post) and a “wondrous sense of color” (San Francisco Classical Voice), Grammy-nominated pianist Joyce Yang, who years ago played a recital at the Wisconsin Union Theater, captivates audiences with her virtuosity, lyricism and interpretive sensitivity.
Yang first came to international attention in 2005 when she won the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The youngest contestant at 19 years old, she took home two additional awards: Best Performance of Chamber Music (with the Takacs Quartet), and Best Performance of a New Work.
In 2006 Yang (below) made her celebrated New York Philharmonic debut alongside conductor Lorin Maazel at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center along with the orchestra’s tour of Asia, making a triumphant return to her hometown of Seoul, South Korea.
CONCERT, TICKET AND EVENT DETAILS
The lobby opens 90 minutes prior to each concert.
One hour before each performance, Wisconsin Public Radio host Anders Yocom (below, in a photo by James Gill )will lead a 30-minute Prelude Discussion in Overture Hall to enhance concertgoers’ understanding and listening experience. It is free to ticket holders.
The MSO recommends concert attendees arrive early for each performance to make sure they have time to pass through Overture Center’s security stations, and so they can experience the Prelude Discussion.
Program notes for the concerts are available online: http://bit.ly/msonov19programnotes.
- Single Tickets are $19-$95 each and are on sale now at: https://madisonsymphony.org/event/joyce-yang-plays-prokofiev/through the Overture Center Box Office at 201 State Street, or by calling the Box Office at (608) 258-4141. Fees apply to online/phone sales.
- Groups of 10 or more can save 25% by calling the MSO office at (608) 257-3734. For more information, visit, https://www.madisonsymphony.org/groups.
- Student rush tickets can be purchased in person on the day of the concert at the Overture Center Box Office at 201 State Street. Students must show a valid student ID and can receive up to two $15 or $20 tickets. More information is at: https://www.madisonsymphony.org/studentrush
- Seniors age 62 and up receive 20% savings on advance and day-of-concert ticket purchases in select areas of the hall.
- Flex-ticket booklets of 8-10 vouchers for 2019-20 symphony subscription concerts are available. Learn more at: https://madisonsymphony.org/flex
- Subscriptions for the 2019–2020 season are available now. Learn more at: https://madisonsymphony.org/19-20
Discounted seats are subject to availability, and discounts may not be combined.
Major funding for this concert is provided by Madison Magazine, Stephen D. Morton, National Guardian Life Insurance Company, Scott and Janet Cabot, and Peggy and Tom Pyle. Additional funding provided by Foley & Lardner LLP, Howard Kidd and Margaret Murphy, and the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts
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Classical music: The Middleton Community Orchestra and UW duo-pianists showcase the remarkable music of Camille Saint-Saens and Mozart in the popular concert that closes its season
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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 hosts an early music show once a month on Sunday morning on WORT-FM 89.9. For years, he served on the Board of Advisors for the Madison Early Music Festival and frequently gives pre-concert lectures in Madison.
By John W. Barker
The mostly amateur Middleton Community Orchestra (below, in a photo by Margaret Barker) closed its season Thursday night at the Middleton Performing Arts Center with a promising and well-received program.
The centerpiece featured two graduate student soloists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music, pianists Thomas Kasdorf (below right) and Satoko Hayami (below left), who joined in Mozart’s Concerto in E-flat Major, K. 365, for two pianos and orchestra. The two soloists were alert and polished collaborators. (You can hear the energetic and catchy final movement, used in the Academy Award-winning film “Amadeus,” in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Conductor Steve Kurr (below) set a bouncy pace but a rather fast and overpowering one, and with an orchestra — especially strings — quite overblown by the standards of Mozart’s day.
The MCO was blessed by the loan of a very special model of a Model B Steinway instrument, now owned and lovingly restored by Farley’s House of Pianos. This was paired against a Steinway of much later vintage, owned by the hall. But nowhere was there identification about which piano was which as they sat onstage, much less which pianist was playing which piano (and they switched between the two works utilizing them.) This was disappointing for it prevented making an informed comparison of the two instruments.
Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921, below) is backhandedly treated as being on the margins of composer greatness. But his scope was remarkable, as witnessed by the two works that were the program’s bookends.
The opener was his humorous Suite, “Carnival of the Animals.” This set of 14 short pieces was written for one private performance, in chamber terms, one player per part. So the orchestra that was used — of 87 listed musicians, 60 of them were string players — became a crushing distortion. The two pianists were a bit formal, but ideally facile.
Saint-Saens made no provision for any kind of spoken text, certainly not in French. In the middle of the last century, the American poet of high-spirited doggerel, Ogden Nash, wrote wickedly funny verses with offbeat rhymes and puns to go with each movement.
It was these Nash verses that Wisconsin Public Radio host Norman Gilliland (below), who was only identified as the “narrator,” read with a good bit of tongue-in-cheek. Nowhere are these at all identified or credited in the bumbling program booklet. (Many in the audience might have just thought that they were written by Gilliland himself.)
In many of the suite’s movements, Saint-Saens quoted or alluded to hit tunes by earlier composers, for parodistic purposes. Unfortunately, there are no program notes in the booklet, so these tidbits would easily go unnoticed by many listeners.
Saint-Saens composed, among his numerous orchestral works, a total of five symphonies, only three of which are numbered. I had originally been given to expect No. 2, a charming work I love, as the program closer. All but the last of them are early works in a graceful post-Classical style.
But No. 3 was composed much later in his life, and in a more expansive style. This is a frequently performed spectacle, unconventional in plan and in scoring. It adds the two pianists and an organ — hence the nickname the “Organ Symphony.”
Unfortunately, the hall has no organ of its own, so the substitute was a rig of electronic organ with its own booming speakers and exaggerated pedal notes. Again totally unmentioned is that this contraption was played by MCO sound technician Alex Ford (below, with the portable electronic organ keyboard from Austria with its computer-screen stops).
This kind of organ could never be integrated into the full orchestral texture and served only to allow the orchestra to play this grandiose score. Such ambition was backed by really splendid and well-balanced orchestral playing.
As intended, the large local audience, with many children and families, was wildly enthusiastic.
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The Well-Tempered Ear 