08/14/2017 PREVIEW: Move over Yo-Yo Ma: Barney Frank to front First Editions concert in October

Philadelphia Inquirer, David Patrick Stearns – Full Preview

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., addresses an audience during Harvard Class Day exercises on the campus of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass., Wednesday, May 23, 2012. The event is part of the school’s commencement ceremonies. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

“Who’d have thought that retired congressman Barney Frank and longtime Philadelphia orchestra conductor James Freeman would take a journey into jazz? Together?

Freeman’s Chamber Orchestra First Editions, which is beginning its third season, announced Monday that Frank will narrate the Gunther Schuller piece Journey into Jazz for three performances Oct. 6-8 at venues in and around Philadelphia.

“Having just ended one career,” Frank said in a statement, “I am happy to make my debut in another branch of public performance — although this one probably won’t last 45 years.”

Frank and Freeman are old friends from their years as Harvard University students. Frank was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (D., Mass.) from 1981 to 2013. In 1987, he became the first openly gay member of Congress. Freeman had further studies at Tanglewood, and Vienna’s Akademie für Musik, and became professor of music at Swarthmore. He is now professor emeritus.

The piece Frank will narrate, Journey into Jazz, was written by Schuller in 1962, much in the spirit of narrated orchestral works such as Peter and the Wolf, but with music that’s often called “third stream” — an integrated fusion of jazz and classical. Journey into Jazz tells the story of Eddie, a kid who barricades himself in his room, listening to jazz recordings and who eventually joins a group of jazz musicians in a nearby basement.

The program is not out of character for Freeman, who for decades championed a wide range of modern music as conductor/founder of Orchestra 2001. The mandate of First Editions is pairing early Mozart pieces with modern works, which in this concert will also include Gabriel Globus-Hoenich’s newly commissioned work for jazz quintet and a string orchestra. The Mozart works include Piano Concerto No. 12 with soloist Andrew Hauze and Symphony No. 29.

The concerts take place Oct. 6 at Lang Concert Hall in Swarthmore, Oct. 7 at Roberts Hall at Haverford College, and Oct. 8 at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater. The first two concerts are free. The Kimmel Center concert requires tickets…”

Jan Krzywicki, composer

Jan Krzywicki is active as a composer, conductor and educator. As a composer he has been commissioned by prestigious performers, and organizations such as the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Chestnut Brass Company, and performed across the United States by ensembles such as the Colorado Quartet, the Network for New Music, the Pennsylvania Ballet, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Alea III, and others. His music has been heard across the country, at conferences of contemporary music (College Music Society, Society of Composers, Inc., etc.), at various universities, on national public radio, and in Europe, South America and Asia. He is the recipient of a 1996 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Rockefeller Foundation residency (Bellagio, Italy), a Bogliasco Foundation residency (Bogliasco, Italy), ASCAP and Meet the Composer awards, and has been a Fellow at artist colonies such as The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Millay, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work is published by Alphonse Leduc & Cie, Theodore Presser Co., Tenuto Publications, Lyra Music Company, and Heilman Music. Krzywicki’s music is available on Albany Records (two solo CDs) as well as on Capstone Records, North-South Recordings, De Haske Records, and Long Tone Music.

As a conductor he has led chamber and orchestral groups in literature from the middle ages to the present, including a large number of local and world premieres. Since 1990 he has been conductor of the contemporary ensemble Network for New Music having premiered over seventy works by composers such as Bernard Rands, David Rakowski, Richard Wernick, Mario Davidovsky, Augusta Read Thomas and others. With Network he has recorded three CDs for Albany Records., as well as works by Folio and Barker and his own works.

Krzywicki has taught at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), Haverford College, the Philadelphia Musical Academy, the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts, and the New School of Music. He has been a member of the music studies department since 1987.

Krzywicki’s musical training began with piano study at an early age. After early composition studies with Joseph Castaldo he then studied at the Juilliard School of Music with Vincent Persichetti and Elliott Carter, at the Ecole de Beaux Arts (Fontainebleau, France) with Nadia Boulanger, and at the Aspen Music Center with Darius Milhaud. He subsequently received a Bachelor of Music degree in Composition from the University of Kansas studying with John Pozdro and Edward Mattila, a Master of Music degree from the Philadelphia Musical Academy, studying under Theodore Antoniou, and pursued studies in medieval music and twentieth century music at Temple University.

Richard Danielpour, composer

Award winning composer Richard Danielpour has established himself as one of the most gifted and sought-after composers of his generation. His music has attracted an international and illustrious array of champions, and, as a devoted mentor and educator, he has also had a significant impact on the younger generation of composers. His list of commissions include some of the most celebrated artists of our day including Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, Dawn Upshaw, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, Gary Graffman, Anthony McGill, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, the Guarneri and Emerson String Quartets, the New York City and Pacific Northwest Ballets, and institutions such as the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Maryinsky, and Vienna Chamber Orchestras, Orchestre National de France, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and many more. With Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Danielpour created Margaret Garner, his first opera, which premiered in 2005 and had a second production with New York City Opera. He has received the American Academy of Arts & Letters Charles Ives Fellowship, a Guggenheim Award, Bearns Prize from Columbia University, and fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Copland House, and the American Academies in Berlin and Rome. He is on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and Curtis Institute.

In 2016, Danielpour had seven world premieres in the U.S. Most notable among them, were his Percussion Concerto (January 2016) with the New Jersey Symphony, his ballet Layla and the Majnun (April 2016) for the Nashville ballet, and most recently, the premiere of Talking to Aphrodite, a song cycle for voice and string orchestra, written in collaboration with Erica Jong and premiered by the Sejong Soloists and Sarah Shafer at Carnegie Hall in December 2016. He is currently working on an 80 minute oratorio, The Passion of Yeshua, which will premiere in July 2018 at the Oregon Bach Festival.

Danielpour is one of the most recorded composers of his generation; many of his recordings can be found on the Naxos and Sony Classical labels. Danielpour’s music is published by Lean Kat Music and Associated Music Publishers.

Natalie Zhu, piano

The recipient of a 2006 Musical Fund Society Career Advancement Award, the 2003 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2003 Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Award, pianist Natalie Zhu is a winner of Astral Artistic Services’ 1998 National Auditions. The Philadelphia Inquirer heralded Astral’s presentation of Ms. Zhu in recital as a display of “emotional and pianistic pyrotechnics”; selections from the recital were later broadcast on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today.”  Natalie Zhu began her piano studies with Xiao-Cheng Liu at the age of six in her native China and made her first public appearance at age nine in Beijing. At eleven she emigrated with her family to Los Angeles, and by fifteen was enrolled at the Curtis Institute, where she received the Rachmaninoff Award and studied with Gary Graffman. She received a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Claude Frank.

Cynthia Raim, piano

A native of Detroit, Cynthia Raim graduated from the Curtis Institute in 1977 after studying with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. Her awards include first prize at the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition, the Pro Musicis Award, first prize at the J.S. Bach International Piano Competition, first prize at the Three Rivers National Piano Competition and the first Distinguished Artist Award of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, given for “outstanding achievement and artistic merit.” Ms. Raim has collaborated with David Soyer, Samuel Rhodes, and the Guarneri and Johannes Quartets, among others. Annually, she gives recitals throughout the world, participating in many leading international music festivals such as Marlboro, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart and Santa Fe.

JOURNEY FROM MOZART TO JAZZ, WITH NARRATOR BARNEY FRANK (press release)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press Contact:

Sharene Azimi, Mission Communications

646-784-5547, sharene@missioncomms.com

 

REP. BARNEY FRANK TO NARRATE 1962 CLASSIC “JOURNEY INTO JAZZ” WITH PHILADELPHIA’S CHAMBER ORCHESTRA FIRST EDITIONS

 

Concerts will explore synthesis of classical music and jazz, and, as with all COFE productions, the artistic progress of the teenage Mozart

 

August 14, 2017 – Philadelphia, PA – Running October 6-8, 2017, Chamber Orchestra FIRST EDITIONS (COFE) will launch its third season with a program exploring the synthesis of classical music and jazz – called “third stream music” – featuring a performance of Gunther Schuller’s 1962 classic “Journey into Jazz,” narrated by liberal icon Barney Frank, and the premiere of a composition for jazz quintet and string orchestra by drummer Gabriel Globus-Hoenich.

Third stream music is a term coined by the multifaceted American musician Gunther Schuller (1925-2015) to describe works that combine elements of jazz and contemporary classical art music. His “Journey into Jazz,” which premiered in May 1962 with the composer conducting the National Symphony Orchestra, is a perfect example of that term. With lyrics by Nat Hentoff, then a columnist at The Village Voice, the work captures the spirit of the times as it tells the story of a young boy who discovers jazz. The role of the narrator will be performed by Barney Frank, who gained national recognition as the first openly gay member of Congress and has continued to advocate for progressive causes since his retirement from Congress in 2013.

 

“I look forward to helping present this important piece,” said Barney Frank. “Having just ended one career, I am happy to make my debut in another branch of public performance—although this one probably won’t last 45 years!”

 

Complementing the Schuller piece will be a brand-new example of third stream music composed by Gabriel Globus-Hoenich, a drummer who has been featured with Philly Pops and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

In keeping with COFE’s mission, these 20th and 21st century pieces will be presented alongside early works of W.A. Mozart, including the Piano Concerto No. 12 with pianist Andrew Hauze and the remarkable Symphony No. 29, written when Mozart was only 18.

“This program is a tribute to the extraordinary artistic results young composers can accomplish,” said COFE’s artistic director and founder James Freeman. “Chamber Orchestra FIRST EDITIONS is thrilled to bring to our audiences a program filled with such youthful vigor and intensity.”

A half-hour discussion with Rep. Frank and the musicians will precede each concert.

PROGRAM DETAILS

Chamber Orchestra FIRST EDITIONS presents:

A Journey from Mozart to Jazz, with narrator Barney Frank

  • James Freeman, Conductor

 

W.A. Mozart, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in A Major (No. 12)

  • Andrew Hauze, Piano
  • Heidi Jacob, Associate Conductor

 

Gunther Schuller, Journey into Jazz

  • Barney Frank, Narrator
  • Rittenhouse Jazz Quintet

 

Gabriel Globus-Hoenich, new commissioned work for jazz quintet and string orchestra

 

W.A. Mozart, Symphony in A Major (No. 29)

 

DATES AND TICKETING

Friday, October 6 at 8pm, Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA

Saturday, October 7 at 3pm, Roberts Hall, Haverford College, Haverford, PA

Sunday, October 8 at 3pm, Perelman Theatre, Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA

 

Admission to the Swarthmore and Haverford concerts is free on a first-come, first-served basis.

Tickets for the Kimmel Center may be purchased in advance; regular admission $20, seniors $15, students $10.

215.893.1999

 

ABOUT COFE

Chamber Orchestra FIRST EDITIONS (COFE) presents informal concerts combining premieres of new commissioned works by Philadelphia-area composers with early works by W.A. Mozart.  During a pre-concert discussion, composers, performers, and renowned guest soloists speak about their own development as artists in the light of the early career of Mozart. His development as a musician is uniquely traceable through his music as well as through the voluminous surviving correspondence with his family.

COFE’s orchestra combines a core of superb Philadelphia freelance players with a small and select group of advanced student string players from Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr Colleges.  Participating students have the opportunity to work directly with composers on challenging new repertoire and to collaborate with eminent soloists and some of Philadelphia’s best professional musicians.

James Freeman, formerly the Artistic Director/Conductor/Founder of Philadelphia’s Orchestra 2001, is COFE’s Musical Director and Founder.  He is Professor Emeritus of Music at Swarthmore College and was trained at Harvard University, Tanglewood, and Vienna’s Akademie für Musik.

 

For more information, visit http://chamberorchestrafe.org

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Gabriel Globus-Hoenich, composer

Montreal native Gabriel Globus-Hoenich’s is a New York City-based drummer, percussionist, composer and teaching artist whose career reflects a deep love for the worlds of jazz, classical music and world music. Globus-Hoenich performs frequently with some of the top players in Latin music, including John Benitez, Axel Laugart and Luisito Quintero. A busy jazz drummer, Globus-Hoenich has performed with a multitude of jazz greats, and has been featured on drum-set with the Philly Pops, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony and Louisville Orchestra, among others. He collaborates frequently with Teddy Abrams and the Sixth Floor Trio, serving as principal percussionist and education director at the trio’s chamber music festival, GardenMusic, in South Miami.  An active composer and arranger, Globus-Hoenich has written for Achilles Liarmakopolous of the Canadian Brass, Grammy-nominated Tiempo Libre and the Louisville Orchestra.

In addition to his work in the orchestral and jazz music worlds, Globus-Hoenich has completed extensive world percussion studies having studied Afro-Brazilian percussion in Salvador, Bahia with Gabi Guedes and Mario Pam, and Cuban percussion with Girardo Piloto, Rociel Riveron and Adonis Panter.

Globus-Hoenich continues to work as a teaching artist for the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, Philadelphia Orchestra, 92nd Street Y, and Marquis Studios. He was formerly a teaching artist with Play On Philly! as well as musician-in-residence at The Please Touch Museum. He is a co-founder of PlasticBand, a community drumming group based in Harlem, New York, and received a Carnegie Hall NeON Arts Grant to build this program.  He is a 2008 graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied with Don Liuzzi and Robert van Sice.

Barney Frank, narrator

AP Photo/Steven Senne

Barney Frank (born March 31, 1940) is a former American politician and board member of the New York-based Signature Bank.[1] He previously served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013. As a member of the Democratic Party, he served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (2007–2011) and was a leading co-sponsor of the 2010 Dodd–Frank Act, a sweeping reform of the U.S. financial industry. Frank, a resident of Newton, Massachusetts, is considered the most prominent gay politician in the United States.[2]

Born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, Frank graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He worked as a political aide before winning election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1972. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980 with 52 percent of the vote. He was re-elected every term thereafter by wide margins. In 1987, he publicly came out as gay, after coming out to family, friends and close associates a few years prior, becoming the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. From 2003 until his retirement, Frank was the leading Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, and he served as committee chairman when his party held a House majority from 2007 to 2011. In July 2012, he married his long-time partner, James Ready, becoming the first member of Congress to marry someone of the same sex while in office.[3] Frank did not seek re-election in 2012, and retired from Congress at the end of his term in January 2013.[4] Frank had expressed interest in serving temporarily in the United States Senate after John Kerry had been confirmed as Secretary of State but was ultimately passed over for Mo Cowan.[5] A memoir of Frank was published in 2015.[6][7]

Wikipedia Page

Andrew Hauze, piano

A conductor, pianist, and organist, Andrew Hauze has taught at Swarthmore since 2006. He directs the College Orchestra and Wind Ensemble, teaches the Musicianship sequence linked with the music theory program, and teaches conducting and orchestration.

Recent projects at Swarthmore included Sounds of Cinema, a screening of silent films and early documentaries with their soundtracks recreated live; Stravinsky’s Soldier and Other Tales, a collaboration between Orchestra 2001 and the Departments of Music & Dance and Theater, and the musical direction of a departmental production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Past projects have included the organization of concert performances of Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dollsfeaturing the premiere of Andrew’s new orchestrations created for the occasion; directing concert performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific for the College’s Sesquicentennial; two performances as pianist in Gershwin’sRhapsody in Blue with the Swarthmore Wind Ensemble(conducted by Swarthmore conducting students); and collaborations with violinist David Kim and pianist Marcantonio Barone (watch: Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto), both with the Swarthmore College Orchestra. Passionate about bringing live music to the Swarthmore community, he curates a series of informal lunchtime concerts in Parrish Parlors, and has helped to organize chamber music flash mobs across the campus.

In May 2014 Andrew Hauze was appointed Conductor and Music Director of the Delaware County Youth Orchestra, a selective group of 93 young musicians, most of whom are in high school. Andrew leads three concerts a year with DCYO.

Andrew frequently collaborates as a guest pianist and conductor with Astral Artists.  He has conducted concert arias by Mozart and the Philadelphia premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre in Perelman Theater, and in 2014 he conducted Oliver Knussen’s Hums and Songs of Winnie the Pooh.  He particularly enjoys collaborating as a pianist with Astral Community Engagement, performing with Astral Artists in schools and retirement communities throughout the Philadelphia area.  He serves on the Program and Education & Community Engagement committees, and on Astral’s National Auditions panel.

Andrew has a particular interest in vocal music. He was given his first experience as a vocal coach and accompanist by the late Julian Rodescu, who selected him as a pianist for the Florence Voice Seminar, a post that he held for four summers.  He has conducted productions of Domenick Argento’s “Postcard from Morocco” at the Curtis Opera Theatre, and of Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’amore” and Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” at Swarthmore College.  He has also served as a vocal coach at the Bryn Mawr Conservatory of Music and for the CoOperative Program at Westminster Choir College.

Previously active as an organist and choral conductor, Andrew Hauze holds the Fellowship and Choirmaster certifications from the American Guild of Organists.  In 2009 he received the Associate Prize from the AGO for highest national score on the Associate examination, and in 2011 he received the Fellowship prize and the S. Louis Elmer Award for highest national examination score overall.

Andrew graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2007, where he majored in orchestral conducting. He received his B.A. in music from Swarthmore College and his A.A. from Bard College at Simon’s Rock. His principal teachers have included Dennis Sweigart, Shelly Moorman-Stahlman, Anne Chamberlain, Albert Sly, Marcantonio Barone, Otto-Werner Mueller, and Jeffrey Brillhart.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto, K. 414, and Symphony, K. 201 introduction

The K. 414 Piano Concerto (Vienna, 1782, age 26) that opens this  program, and the much earlier K. 201 Symphony (Salzburg, 1774, age 18) share the same tonic key of A Major. Otherwise, the two pieces seem to me to reflect totally different sides of Mozart’s genius. For both these reasons, their pairing on this program seemed an ideal way to consider some of the aspects of Mozart’s early process and progress as a composer.  In the Piano Concerto, I believe the composer sought to embrace the characteristic style of his time, though with his own unique sense of elegance and perfection.  He needed to win over an audience in Vienna that hardly knew any of his music but was familiar with the works of many of his contemporaries.  We do not know what may have inspired the Symphony, but the sense of innovation that permeates all four movements suggests Mozart was consciously  exploring new ground.

The Piano Concerto is full of charm, grace, and elegance throughout its three movements. As if to emphasize these light-hearted qualities, Mozart indicated that the wind parts (2 oboes, 2 horns, typical for the time) are “ad libitum” – that is, the piece may be played as chamber music, with the piano joined just by four strings, or possibly just string orchestra.

In contrast, the eight-years-earlier Symphony is one of a handful of miraculous works by the teen-age Mozart that seem to have burst forth “out of the blue,” as full-blown masterpieces. It is suddenly more mature, more vital, more experimental than almost any work that preceded it.  For this reason it continues to occupy a place in the repertoire of most major symphony orchestras. Perhaps not surprisingly, the wind parts are not just integral to this clearly symphonic piece; they are essential to it.  – James Freeman