Windham Orchestra LISTEN LOCAL Concert
Sunday, January 24, 3 pm, Latchis Theatre, Brattleboro, Vermont
Join the Windham Orchestra, directed by Zon Eastes, for a celebration of works by local Vermont and regional composers at the third annual Listen Local concert.
Compositions featured in this year’s Listen Local concert include Denis Bathory-Kitsz’s “Fanfare: Heat,” Gwyneth Walker’s “Muse of Amherst,” Robert McGinness’ “The Tragedians,” and David Kidwell’s “Shenandoah: A Symphonic Portrait.”
Tickets: $15 adults, $7 students and seniors
Follow link to Purchase On-line:
Listen Local, Sunday, January 24, 3 pm
Or call the BMC at 802-257-4523.
About the Concert:
Listen Local guest conductor Zon Eastes, returns to the Windham Orchestra podium after a three and a half-year hiatus. Eastes served as the Orchestra’s director for 22 years before taking a position on the west coast as Executive Director of the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council. Prior to that, he served as Managing Director of the Brattleboro Music Center. An advocate for the role of the arts in everyday life, Eastes co-founded the Brattleboro Alliance for the Arts, has consulted with numerous arts organizations, and has served on several community boards.
“The Listen Local idea is completely compelling, so I'm excited to work with the Orchestra for this concert. It's good to be back,” said Eastes. “More and more people seem to be taking stock, looking carefully at lifestyle choices, and awakening positively to the growing availability of high-quality, local resources. So, it just makes sense to present one orchestral program each year built entirely upon the creative and enthusiastic voices of local composers. Sunday's concert will reveal an inviting range of musical cleverness and compositional craft. And, lest the idea of newly composed music challenge anyone's aesthetic limits, don't worry: all the music is accessible upon first hearing.”
As cellist and chamber music coach, Eastes has taught at Dartmouth, Amherst, and Keene State colleges, as well as at the Music School of the Brattleboro Music Center, the Putney School, and Northfield Mt. Hermon School. As freelance cellist, he has performed concerts throughout the United States and China.
Listen Local opens with Denis Bathory-Kitsz’s “Fanfare: Heat,” a dark orchestral dance, full of tension and surprise.
“Exploding onto the stage and then hiding in short solos for oboe and violin and building into fragmentary brass chorales and staggering strings, the fanfare has the sensibility of a post-romantic symphonic dance movement in footsteps of nines and elevens,” says composer Bathory-Kitsz. “No musician is untouched by the ebb and flow of melody and the ultimate torrent of sound. Horns call and rip, strings answer, trumpets cry, trombones slide, percussion pounds, winds scream, bringing the melodies to a huge crushing halt.”
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz (born in 1949), a resident of Northfield, Vermont, is part of the post-Fluxus generation of independent artists, and composes and advocates for the presentation of nonpop music. He has created nearly 1,000 works for orchestras, sound sculptures, soloists, chamber ensembles, electronics, theater, installations, dancers, interactive multimedia, and performance events, as well as writing about music and multimedia arts.
Bathory-Kitsz has co-hosted the award-winning “Kalvos & Damian” nonpop radio show since 2005, and created the We Are All Mozart ‘productivity’ project, composing 100 works in 2007. He has directed the Trans/Media Arts Cooperative, Delaware Valley Festivals of the Avant-Garde, Kaxpiksu State Arts Festival, Vermont Composers Festivals, Amsterdramm, and Ought-One Festival of NonPop; and co-founded the Vermont Composers Consortium and the NonPop International Network.
Next in the program, Dr. Gwyneth Walker’s “Muse of Amherst” is a musical tribute to poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who was a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts. The five movements of this orchestral suite are each inspired by a particular Dickinson poem, which will be read aloud before the musical portrait.
The first movement, “Invocation,” is based on the poem, “This is my Letter to the World.” The music is intended as an invitation, a greeting, an opening message characterized by simplicity and tenderness, as evoked by the poem. The second movement, “Spring,” inspired by “A Light Exists in Spring,” describes a special light in March, which is so delicate that it quickly passes.
“Nobody!” or "The Frog Pond” is homage to the frog and other insects referenced in the poem. “Wild Nights!” is an expression of passion and the fourth movement is marked “passionately,” and is played with abandon. All of the Orchestra comes together in the last movement, “Indian Summer,” in celebration of the fullness of life.
Dr. Gwyneth Walker (b. 1947) is a graduate of Brown University and the Hartt School of Music. She holds B.A., M.M. and D.M.A. Degrees in Music Composition. A former faculty member of the Oberlin College Conservatory, she resigned from academic employment in 1982 in order to pursue a career as a full-time composer. She now lives on a dairy farm in Braintree, Vermont.
Gwyneth Walker is the recipient of the Year 2000 "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Vermont Arts Council as well as the 2008 "Athenaeum Award for Achievement in the Arts and Humanities" from the St. Johnsbury (VT) Athenaeum.
Walker's catalog includes over 180 commissioned works for orchestra, band, chorus and chamber ensembles.
Robert McGinness’ “The Tragedians” is an evocative and loosely programmatic composition. “Tragedians,” from Shakespeare's Hamlet, are a troupe of traveling actors who are called in to do the “play within a play,” in which we see a representation of Claudius murdering a similar representation of Hamlet's father, the King, with poison.
“The piece begins with a representation of traveling music using a repeated motive based on both an E minor triad and a C major seventh chord,” explains McGinness. “It appears in multiple transpositions and builds as the players approach the castle. Then there is a flurry of activity as the actors set up their play and get ready. Next we hear multiple motives playing against each other, like the actors onstage in the performance itself. Finally there is a return of the first motive, now transformed to evoke the lingering pain of the King's death.”
A resident of Amherst, New Hampshire, Rob McGinness began composition in high school at The Putney School, in Putney, VT. While at Putney, his composition The Tragedians was written and performed by the Sage City Symphony of Bennington, VT. After graduating from Putney in 2009, McGinness now attends The Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he continues to pursue composition, while working on a degree in Vocal Performance.
David Kidwell’s “Shenandoah: A Symphonic Portrait” is a musical depiction of the magical Shenandoah mountains of his native Virginia and the mountain people who once lived there, including emulations of folksong and roots music.
In the first movement, Kidwell uses a closing chord that is an homage to composer Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. The last movement contains elements of the folk song Oh Shenandoah.
“I have attempted to bring some of the rich tradition of the mountain folk music to the piece, both by using ethnic instruments such as the fiddle, guitar, and dulcimer, and by incorporating some of the genre's style and flavor into my own musical aesthetic,” says Kidwell. “The folksong "Oh Shenandoah" is quoted in its entirety in the fourth movement, but all of the remaining melodies are original folksong emulations (which in fact were all derived by various methods from the "Oh Shenandoah" melody itself).”
David Kidwell is an active composer whose works have been performed throughout the United States. Music critic Clifton J. Noble wrote, "The ways he manipulates the melody, his unerring harmonic sense and perceptive scoring speak with the honest originality that is the hallmark of America's most revered composers."
Kidwell was raised in a music-loving family in Virginia, where he played piano, organ, trumpet, and violin. After musical studies in Virginia and Connecticut, he moved to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where he has been Music Director and Conductor of the Holyoke Civic Symphony since 1997. Kidwell is also the conductor of the Guilford Festival Orchestra in Vermont, an ensemble known for its performances of both contemporary music and chamber orchestra repertoire.
Tickets: $15 adults, $7 students and seniors
Follow link to Purchase On-line:
Listen Local, Sunday, January 24, 3 pm
Or call the BMC at 802-257-4523.
To learn more about the Orchestra visit: www.windhamorchestra.net |
