Yale in New York Presents SERENADE & METAMORPHOSIS at Carnegie Hall Tonight

The Yale School of Music's acclaimed YALE IN NEW YORK series presents "SERENADE & METAMORPHOSIS," the third of four evenings in its 2012-2013 season, tonight, April 12, 2013 at 7:30PM in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall.

Yale in New York surveys some of the important contributions to the canon of string serenades and works for similar string ensembles, a tradition that has evolved over time across musical eras, from Mozart, Dvorák and Strauss, through to Bartók and Stravinsky.

This program pairs Richard Strauss's profound Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings with a world premiere Yale commission by Yale School of Music graduate Matthew Barnson, entitled The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (Memento Mori after Gerhard Richter), scored for the exact same instrumentation as the Strauss. The balance of the program celebrates Tchaikovsky's popular 1880 Serenade for Strings.

Barnson's composing "is fresh and arises from a distinct personality" (San Francisco Classical Voice) and has been featured at ISCM, the MATA Festival in Brooklyn, and Aspen Music Festival, among other venues.

The string ensemble consists of Yale faculty, students, and alumni, led by faculty member and concertmaster Ani Kavafian, along with faculty violinists Kyung Yu and Wendy Sharp. Other notable young alumni include violinists Sunmi Chang, Geoffrey Herd, and Edson Scheid; violists Raul Garcia and Anne Lanzilotti; cellists Laura Usiskin, Hannah Collins, and Jacques Lee Wood; and bassist Aleksey Klyushnik.

MORE ABOUT THE MATTHEW BARNSON WORLD PREMIERE
Matthew Barnson's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (Memento Mori after Gerhard Richter) is a three movement work, dedicated in memoriam to Barnson's grandparents, Garn and Bobbie Barnson, both of whom passed away as it was being composed. It is written for a 23-piece string orchestra, with separate solo parts for the principals of the violin, viola, and cello sections.

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651)
A man is a bubble, (said the Greek proverb), which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations, like bubbles descending a Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from nature and Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing that it was before.

PROGRAM
Richard Strauss:
Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, Op. 142 (1944-45)

Matthew Barnson '12DMA:
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (Memento Mori after Gerhard Richter)
I. Praeludium
II. Ricercar ...All the world is a storm...
III. Passacaglia ...the dream of a shadow...
World premiere (2012)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky:
Serenade for Strings (1880)

PLAYERS
Yale faculty, students, and alumni
Led by concertmaster Ani Kavafian, Yale faculty, violin
Kyung Yu, Yale faculty, violin
Wendy Sharp, Yale faculty, violin
Sunmi Chang, violin
Geoffrey Herd, violin
Jiwon Evelyn Kwark, violin
Holly Piccoli, violin
Edson Scheid, violin
Raul Garcia, viola
Edwin Kaplan, viola
Anne Lanzilotti, viola
Eve Tang, viola
Yi-Ping Yang, viola
Soo Jin Chung, cello
Hannah Collins, cello
Laura Usiskin, cello
Jacques Lee Wood, cello
Alvin Yan-Ming Wong, cello
Nathaniel Chase, bass
Nicholas Jones, bass
Aleksey Klyushnik, bass

MATTHEW BARNSON, composer
www.matthewbarnson.net

ANI KAVAFIAN, Yale Faculty, concertmaster, violin
www.barrettvantage.com/artist.php?id=akavafian

KYUNG YU, Yale Faculty, violin
www.music.yale.edu/faculty/yu.html

WENDY SHARP, Yale Faculty, violin
www.music.yale.edu/faculty/sharp.html

SUNMI CHANG, violin
www.content.thespco.org/people/sunmi-chang/

HANNAH COLLINS, cello
www.peristylium.org/hannahcollins/about/

GEOFFREY HERD, violin
www.genevamusicfestival.com/?page_id=14

ANNE LANZILOTTI, viola
www.annelanzilotti.com/viola/Biography.html

LAURA USISKIN, cello
www.laurausiskin.com/

JACQUES LEE WOOD, cello
www.jacquesleewood.com/

DAVID SHIFRIN, artistic director
www.davidshifrin.com

YALE SCHOOL OF MUSIC
www.music.yale.edu

YALE IN NEW YORK
www.music.yale.edu/concerts/newyork

MATTHEW BARNSON: Utah-born composer Matthew Barnson has enjoyed success on either side of the Atlantic. He has received commissions from the London-based Arditti String Quartet and from the JACK Quartet, their New York counterparts. His music has been featured at the ISCM World New Music Days in Stuttgart, at the special invitation of Wolfgang Rihm, and at Philip Glass's MATA Festival in Brooklyn; he has taken residencies at the Aspen Music Festival, the Centre Acanthes, the Czech Republic's Ostrava Days, and June in Buffalo.

At festivals, he has had extensive master classes with Rihm, Kaija Saariaho and Toshio Hosokawa. Within the academy, he has studied composition at the Eastman School of Music (where his teachers included Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, David Liptak, Steven Stucky, and Augusta Read Thomas), the University of Pennsylvania (Anna Weesner, James Primrosch), and Yale University (Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, Ingram Marshall, and David Lang).

Barnson's music might be described as an attempt to negotiate between the current American and European schools of musical thought, without compromising either. He uses the challenging language of the European avant-garde as an expressive one, borrowing the dramatic structures, the pulsing rhythmic energy, and at times the tonal references of stateside composers.

In 2002, at the age of 22, he became the youngest recipient of a Barlow Commission, and he received a second in 2007. In addition, he has been awarded such honors as the Howard Hanson Scholarship, the Charles Ives Scholarship, the Virgil Thomson Scholarship, the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, and the Aaron Copland Prize.

Though he has studied principally as a composer, his performing experience has included playing the viola with the Salt Lake Symphony and, under early music specialist Paul O'Dette, Eastman's Collegium Musicum. He has sung with the acclaimed Yale Schola Cantorum as well as with the VOX Vocal Ensemble, under George Steel.

His own vocal works have been performed by such choirs as Seraphic Fire and the New York Virtuoso Singers, and by soloists including Erin Morley, Ian Howell, and celebrated soprano Nicole Cabell. Conductors of his instrumental music have included Sarah Hicks, Peter Eötvös (with members of the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg), and Jacque Mercier (Orchestre National de Lorraine). Recently, his large-scale Percussion Quartet was commissioned and premiered by Third Coast Percussion.

In addition to his quartet for JACK and a new orchestral work, Matthew's plans for the future include a piano work for Dustin Gledhill, to be premiered at Wigmore Hall. He currently resides in New York City.

Yale in New York is the acclaimed series in which distinguished faculty members-many of them famous soloists-share the limelight with exceptional alumni and students on Carnegie Hall's stages, capturing the intense collaboration found on every level at the Yale School of Music. The 2009-10 season showcased the classical legacy of Benny Goodman; undiscovered Prokofiev works; the Oral History of American Music project; and Penderecki conducting Penderecki. The 2010-11 season featured Sleeping Giant, Yale guitarists, the Yale Percussion Group, rarely-performed 20th century concerti grossi, and Robert Mealy's Yale Baroque Ensemble playing experimental 17th century music. The 2011-12 season featured horn player William Purvis, a Prokofiev mini-marathon with Boris Berman, a program with early music specialist William Christie, and an extraordinary finale of music for low instruments. The series is curated by David Shifrin.

FINAL 2012-2013 YALE IN NY PERFORMANCE:

SUNDAY, APRIL 28, 7:30PM • ZANKEL HALL
"PAUL HINDEMITH: PRANKSTER AND MASTER"
Marking the 50th anniversary of the death of the former Yale professor

From 1940 to 1953, German-born composer Paul Hindemith served as a member of the faculty at Yale School of Music, helping to establish Yale as one of the leading music schools in the country, while his teaching formed a foundation for the contemporary study of music theory and composition. Hindemith left a rich and varied legacy of almost 300 major works, many of them concert-hall staples. Yale pays tribute fifty years after his death with a program equal parts profound and whimsical. Yale faculty members Boris Berman and Ettore Causa perform the Sonata for viola and piano, Op. 11, No. 4, and Berman joins members of the Yale Philharmonia for his Kammermusik No. 2, while two rarely performed parodies for string quartet showcase Hindemith's less serious side.

From The New York Times Season Preview, 9/9/12:
YALE IN NEW YORK This four-concert series concludes with a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of Paul Hindemith, "Prankster and Master": a Yale professor for the 13 years before his death and an astonishingly prolific composer and champion of useful music (Gebrauchsmusik) most of whose works have largely fallen into disuse. The current faculty members Boris Berman, pianist, and Ettore Causa, violist, and members of the Yale Philharmonia perform works of Hindemith including the sure-to-be-immortal "Overture to 'The Flying Dutchman' as Played at Sight by a Second-Rate Concert Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 O'Clock in the Morning," for string quartet. April 28. Zankel Hall. (James R. Oestreich)

FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 7:30PM
Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall

Tickets: $15-25. Available at Carnegie Hall Box Office, or by calling 212/247-7800 or online at www.carnegiehall.org. Student and senior discounts available.