Video/Recording Credits: Robert Paustian
American Elegy was composed in 1999 as an expression of grief for the souls lost in the Columbine massacre as well as to honor the survivors. It is an eloquent expression of grief and sadness, as well as an expression of ultimate strength.
Video/Recording Credits: Robert Paustian
Video/Recording Credits: Robert Paustian
Wayne Oquin (b.1977) is among today’s most performed American composers, having premiers on five continents, in twenty countries, and in forty-five states. Upon completing his Doctorate of Musical Arts in 2008, the Julliard School awarded Oquin its coveted Richard F. French Prize for best dissertation and appointed him to its faculty where he teaches music theory, graduate studies, and serves as Chair of Musicianship. Affirmation is a ten-minute reflection on a wide range of often conflicting emotions that encompass the human condition of life and death, love and loss, and darkness and light. At no point are these extremities juxtaposed side by side, but rather, they gradually materialize. While the music travels far in terms of its range of register, harmony, and dynamic, it does so almost imperceptibly as one long arc from beginning to end.
Program Notes: Marcie Phelan
Video/Recording Credits: Robert Paustian
Joseph Turrin (b.1947) is a greatly valued contributor to contemporary American musical life, thanks to his wide ranging activities as a composer, orchestrator, conductor, pianist, and teacher. He studied composition at the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and pursued a career that has always been multifaceted. As a composer, he has produced works in many genres. Scarecrow Overture is taken from Turrin’s 2006 opera The Scarecrow. This opera is based on a short story written by the well known author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Hawthorne’s story, a scarecrow named Feathertop is created by a lonely old witch who brings him to life, teaches him to act human, sends him into town, and watches him struggle with the emotional complexity of human society.
Program Notes: Marcie Phelan
Video/Recording Credits: Robert Paustian
Donald Grantham (b.1947) is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes in composition. His music has been praised for its “elegance, sensitivity, lucidity of thought, clarity of expression and fine lyricism,” in a citation awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In recent years his works have been performed by the orchestras of Cleveland, Dallas, and Atlanta among many others, and he has fulfilled commissions in media from solo instruments to opera.
Read MoreThe composer resides in Austin, TX and is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor of Composition at the University of Texas at Austin. In his own words, the composer describes his composition: “My Tuba Concerto – for Tuba Solo, Orchestral Winds, Percussion and Piano – is in three 4 movements. The first movement, marked ‘Fiery and bold,’ is a virtuosic workout featuring much interplay between the soloist and percussion, particularly the timpani. The second movement is lyric and expressive. Formally, it is a kind of continuous development: New material is added to older material without ever really replacing it, and the entire elements combine and interact throughout the entire movement. The third movement is in a much more popular and jazzy vein, and is dedicated to the memory of Tiny Parham, a jazz musician who flourished in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s and a composer whose music and scoring I particularly admire.”
Program Notes: Marcie Phelan
Alan Baer joined the New York Philharmonic on June 21, 2004, as Principal
Tuba. He was formerly principal tuba with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, and Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. His other performing credits include recordings with The Cleveland Orchestra led by Vladimir Ashkenazy, performances with the Peninsula Music Festival of Wisconsin, New Orleans Symphony, Los Angeles Concert
Orchestra, Ojai Festival Orchestra (California), Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He has also performed as a featured soloist, touring several countries in Europe, including Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and France.
Mr. Baer began his undergraduate work at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with Dr. Gary Bird. He completed his Bachelor of Music degree with Ronald Bishop at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and has done graduate work at the University of Southern California, Cleveland Institute of
Music, and California State University, Long Beach, where he studied with Tommy Johnson. While in Long Beach, Mr. Baer taught at California State University, where he also directed the university tuba ensemble and the brass choir. In Milwaukee, Mr. Baer was adjunct professor of tuba and euphonium at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Tuba-Euphonium Ensemble.
Video/Recording Credits: Robert Paustian
John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) remained active as both a composer and conductor to the very end of his life and wrote several superb marches in 1930 and 1931. A special commission was formed in Washington, D.C., in 1930 to coordinate the upcoming national celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of George Washington’s birth, and Sousa was engaged to compose a special march for the occasion. He completed the score to the George Washington Bicentennial March in June of that year, and while on tour with his Sousa Band in November, he made a stop in Washington, D.C., to conduct a preview of the new march with the U.S. Marine Band for President Herbert Hoover and his guests in front of the White House. The Sousa Band continued to perform the march on its 1930 and 1931 tours before the actual bicentennial in 1932. Sousa himself took part in the climactic ceremony held at the Capitol Plaza on February 22, 1932, where he conducted the combined premier bands of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. This would be the last time he would conduct the Marine Band in public. Just a few weeks later, after finishing a rehearsal in preparation for a concert with the famed Ringgold Band of Reading, Pennsylvania, Sousa unexpectedly passed away on March 6, 1932.
Program Notes: Marcie Phelan
Video/Recording Credits: Robert Paustian
John Mackey (b.1973) holds a Master’s of Music degree from The Julliard School and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Corigliano and Donald Erb respectively. Mr. Mackey particularly enjoys writing music for dance and symphonic winds, and has focused on those mediums for the past several years. Mr. Mackey has received numerous commissions for his writing, including works for The American Bandmasters Association, the Dallas Wind Symphony, and a concerto for New York Philharmonic Principal Trombonist Joseph Alessi. John
Read MoreMackey composed this work as a tribute to his mother Elizabeth and her suffering with rapid-onset dementia. The composer watched his mother lose her ability to form a sentence that anyone could understand, but marveled at her never losing recognition of her favorite works of music. As both an accomplished flutist and soprano, she would hum along with her favorite melodies that she once performed so deftly. The work takes the listener though this journey of slipping deeper and deeper into the loss of cognizance. This story seems sad, and it is. Nobody wants to hear a piece that tells a story like this, and nobody wants a piece that starts “coherent” and becomes lost and confused as it progresses. So, Places we can no longer go tells the story of this disease, but does so in reverse. It starts in the present, or maybe even in the future, and over the course of musical time, goes in reverse, as confusion turns to clarity, and grief turns to comfort. A.E. Jaques wrote the literal text for the soprano voice, struggling to recall memories before they are gone.
Program Notes: Marcie Phelan
Described as possessing a “shimmering soprano” (The New York Times) with “sparkle and precision” (The Washington Post), Connecticut native Kristen Plumley has performed with many opera companies throughout the country, including New York City Opera (Barbarina in Le Nozze di Figaro), Virginia Opera (Norina in Don Pasquale and Zerlina in Don Giovanni), Chautauqua Opera (Sophie in Werther), Lyric Opera of Cleveland (Despina in Così fan Tutte), Amarillo Opera (Musetta in La Bohème), Greensboro Opera (Adina in L’Elisir d’Amore and Gilda in Rigoletto), Opera Festival of New Jersey (Nannetta in Falstaff and Amor in Orfeo ed Euridice, Boheme Opera (NJ) (Adelein Die Fledermaus), Opera Memphis (Yum-Yum in The Mikado) and Nevada Opera (Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore).
Read MoreOn the concert stage Kristen has performed a broad spectrum of works, from classical pieces (Mozart’s Coronation Mass and Haydn’s Mass in Time of War at Carnegie Hall, Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) to An Evening of Gilbert and Sullivan with the symphony orchestras of St. Louis, Richmond, Memphis and Minnesota. She also greatly enjoys pops concerts, and her favorite is Sci-Fi Spectacular (music from science fiction movies and television shows, hosted by Star Trek series luminaries such as George Takei, Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis), which she has performed with the Cleveland, Indianapolis, Seattle, Baltimore, Edmonton and Ottawa Symphonies, under the baton of Maestro Jack Everly. In 2011 Kristen performed in the North American premiere of Handel’s first opera, Almira, with operamission in New York City. Kristen is currently involved with the Infinite Lights Ensemble, a group of musicians who write and perform new works, especially Jewish liturgical music. She makes time to pay it forward by being president of the Ridgewood Friends of Music, which supports the music programs in Ridgewood’s public schools, and greatly appreciates the support of her husband, Jeff, and fourteen-year-old twins, Annie and Henry