The NBSO Season
Classical V “Fresh Air and Fresh Sounds”
Michael Daugherty: Sunset Strip
Francis Poulenc: Concert champêtre for Harpsichord
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 8 in F Major
Saturday, April 14, 2012 8:00pm
Zeiterion Theatre, New Bedford, MA
Paul Cienniwa, Harpsichord | bio
Free Concert Prelude: Join Dr. David MacKenzie for an informal talk on the evening’s program at 6:45PM in the theater.
The Bach harpsichord concerto with Cienniwa was “a joyous romp.”
~The Boston Musical Intelligencer
Michael Daugherty, one of the most colorful and widely performed American composers of his generation, has been described as possessing a “maverick imagination, fearless structural sense and meticulous ear.” Of Sunset Strip the composer says: “I create a musical landscape (of)… sounds and images of Sunset Strip from the 1950s through the 1990s… swank restaurants, beatnik hangouts, Rat Pack nightclubs… Mexican Restaurants, motor inns… gas stations and jazz lounges… I create a feeling of switching lanes back and forth between the present, past and future.”
Cienniwa’s performance was “charming, polished, musically profound and technically brilliant.”
~The Listening Room
Francis Poulenc’s Concert champêtre (Rustic Concerto) was a conscious attempt to turn French music away from stuffy formality and pompous affect. Poulenc wanted his music to be mysterious, whimsical, musing and witty. These characteristics abound in Concert champêtre, where Poulenc creates a robust, musical dialogue between soloist and orchestra. From the jauntiness of the first movement’s opening, through melancholic and sentimental charm of the second, to the driving, muscular energy of the finale Presto, Poulenc’s music is relentless in its search for contrast, color, and interest.
Classical VI “The Music of America”
Jennifer Higdon: blue cathedral
Edward MacDowell: Concerto No. 2 for Piano in D Minor
Aaron Copland: Symphony No. 3
Saturday, May 12, 2012 8:00pm
Zeiterion Theatre, New Bedford, MA
Janice Weber, Piano | bio
Free Concert Prelude: Join Dr. David MacKenzie for an informal talk on the evening’s program at 6:45PM in the theater.
With the compositional craft that won her the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music (as well as a Grammy), Jennifer Higdon begins blue cathedral with whispering strings and a cautious but gradually hopeful melody. Higdon tosses the melody from one woodwind to another, before a solo violin catches hold of it and brings it to the building intensity of the full orchestra, which rises and falls with it many times through the rest of the piece. If this sounds like it could be describing a day, a week or a year in your life, that is because in blue cathedral Higdon wanted “to reflect on the amazing journeys that we all make in our lives, crossing paths with so many individuals singularly and collectively, learning and growing each step of the way.”
“Weber boasts a fabulous, instinctive, natural technique of the kind you can perfect but never acquire if you don’t have it already... Best of all, Weber’s playing has personality; fabulous as the fingers are, you are always listening to someone’s ideas, profound feelings and cascading laughter.”
~The Boston Globe
Hailed as “the greatest American composer” during his lifetime, Edward MacDowell mastered the art of 19th century European compositional principles by studying in Germany and France (where as a student he performed for Franz Liszt).Although unjustly neglected today, his music firmly established the reputation of American composers on the world stage. The Second Piano Concerto, considered his greatest work, was premièred in New York in 1889 to enthusiastic critical praise as being “so full of poetry, so full of vigor…”