TCCP :: Music

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Program Notes

April 16 & 18, 2010 (notes by Graham House)
Alexander Tcherepnin: Woodwind Quintet, op. 107
Chick Corea: Trio
Donald Draganski: Klezmer Music
Ottorino Respighi: Quintetto a Fiati
Justin Rubin: Four Bagatelles
Tristan Fuentes: Dreams

Alexander Tcherepnin: Woodwind Quintet, op. 107 (1976)

Russian-American composer Alexander Tcherepnin occupied a central position as a member of a continuing dynasty of intellectuals which include musicians, artists, composers, art historians and music teachers. His maternal ancestors were Benois family, who were important architects and designers. Tcherepnin’s uncle, Albert Benois, was a pioneering water-colorist. Tcherepnin’s grandfather was the artist, art critic, historian, preservationist, Alexander Benois, a founding member of the art magazine Mir iskusstva. His influence on the modern ballet and stage design is considered seminal. Tcherepnin’s father, Nikolai Tcherepnin, was a prominent composer and conductor in pre-Soviet Russia who served as the principal of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and later as the Director of the National Conservatory of Tblisi before the Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. The Tcherepnin/Benois family have continued to rub elbows with some of the biggest names in arts and letters for several generations. The musical tradition lives on through Tcherepnin’s sons Ivan and Serge and his grandsons Sergei and Stefan, all of them composers. Tcherepnin’s cousin was the British actor and comedian Peter Ustinov.

While Tcherepnin’s early music was influenced by the Russian nationalist style of his father, his breadth of experiences and homes ranging from St. Petersburg to Tblisi, to Paris and finally the United States led to Alexander developing his own, more cosmopolitan style. Tcherepnin eschewed the overt nationalism and melancholy of previous Russian composers in favor of what he called a “Eurasian” style. His approach absorbs many of the rhythms and exotic scales of Eurasia employed with a lean clarity and articulation of form that is shows a strong French influence. His Woodwind Quintet, Op. 107, a very late work from 1976, demonstrates Tcherepnin’s mature style with its very colorful use of exotic scales and deftly shifting meters.

Chick Corea: Trio (1968)

Like his music, Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea is a uniquely American amalgam. Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts to Sicilian and Spanish parents, he was exposed to a wide range of influences from an early age. It was his father, a trumpet player in various jazz and Dixieland bands, who first encouraged Chick to play piano at age four. Several years later he began formal musical studies with concert pianist Salvatore Sullo. The rest of his musical education is a patchwork of a remarkable range of academic and professional experiences. While still in high school he played in the Knights of St. Rose Drum & Bugle Corps, as well as a band that played jazz and Latin dance music. During his brief college career he studied at both Columbia University and The Juilliard School. Among his Juilliard teachers was Peter Schickele, who described Chick as “the most awake student I ever taught.”

A prodigiously talented pianist, Chick Corea has mastered virtually all the various genres of jazz piano and has made forays into the classical repertoire, notably Mozart piano concerti. He is a gifted composer, having written several standards including his best-known hit “Spain,” but also covering stylistic territory as wide-ranging as that of his playing: from jazz, to fusion, to Latin music, to orchestral and chamber works.

About the Trio he writes: “This trio was my first attempt to write a kind of chamber music. At that time, I thought that ‘chamber music’ was just written music played acoustically but with no drums. It has since become one of my favourite forms of music.” This piece is rich in color, rhythmically thrilling and differentiated. In the final section the pianist mutes the piano strings and creates a drum-like impression.

Donald Draganski: Klezmer Music (1985)

Donald Draganski was born in Chicago in 1936 and is a life-long resident of the metropolitan Chicago area. He received his B.M.E. degree in 1958 from De Paul University in Chicago where he studied bassoon under Wilbur Simpson of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He also studied composition with Alexander Tcherepnin. From 1960–62 Mr. Draganski toured Europe as bassoonist with the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. Upon returning to the U.S. he received a degree in Library Science. He worked as a professional librarian for thirty-two years until his retirement in 1998. During those last twenty-five years he held the post of Music Librarian at Roosevelt University, serving faculty and students of Chicago Musical College. As a bassoonist he has over the years played in various woodwind quintets, and at present he plays bassoon with the Evanston Symphony Orchestra. Since 1998 he as been composer-in-residence of the Pilgrim Chamber Players.

Klezmer is an instrumental musical style which parallels Hasidic and Ashkenazic Judaism fused with Romanian and other folk music traditions of central Europe. The repertoire is largely dances and songs for weddings and other celebrations with the lyrics, terminology and song titles typically in Yiddish. What makes this exuberant style of instrumental music so distinctive is its hyper-expressive emulation of the human voice ranging from laughter to weeping.

Donald Draganski’s Klezmer Music for Woodwind Quintet follows typical repertoire, which consisted traditionally of music for weddings, celebrations and other Jewish social functions. The emotional range of traditional Klezmer is expressed in three contrasting movements each written in the style of Yiddish song and dance. The first movement is a medley of tunes or nigunim typical of Hassidic Jews and are adapted from a recording of the Boibriker Kapelle made in 1927. The second movement is an original composition in the form and mood of a slow, improvisational doina, a rural dance of Romania and Moldavia. The third movement, “Butcher’s Dance,” is a Bulgarian hora, a popular dance in which the dancers join hands and form a moving chain. The clarinet plays a particularly brilliant role in klezmer music. In this arrangement, requiring a virtuoso clarinetist, the performer is encouraged to bend the pitch and to ornament freely.

Ottorino Respighi: Quintetto a Fiati

Italian composer Ottorino Respighi is well known for his large-scale orchestral works, particularly his Roman triptych, Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals. Like his composition teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Respighi was a masterful orchestrator whose compositions skillfully exploit the entire palette of orchestral instruments. In contrast to his lush neo-romantic orchestral tone poems, Respighi’s musicological interest was in music of the past, namely the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Three of his most popular suites, entitled Ancient Airs and Dances, are all reworked 16th- and 17th-century pieces for lutes and viols, arranged for modern orchestral instruments.

The Quintetto a Fiati (Quintet for Winds) is an early work that emulates late 18th- and early 19th-century style. The first movement in G minor is cast in the dramatic mold of a Hummel sonata. The second movement is a gentle theme with a clever set of variations à la Beethoven.

Justin Rubin: Four Bagatelles (2008)

A 21st-century renaissance man, Justin Henry Rubin has a broad range of creative activities including composition, painting, organ, piano, multimedia art, as well as writing. Dr. Rubin is on the faculty of the University of Minnesota–Duluth, where he is the Chair of Music Theory and Composition. Studying composition, organ and art history he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from State University of New York–Purchase. Rubin was a 1994 Fulbright Scholar studying organ musicology in Denmark and received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the University of Arizona in 1998. While still a graduate student, Rubin was honored with a BMI Student Composer Award in 1997 for his cantata David and Absolom. Since then Dr. Rubin has been in demand as a composer and performer throughout the U.S. He has been chosen in consecutive years as a Minnesota Orchestra Perfect Pitch Composer by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis for his Passacaglia Tenebrosa (1999) and Symphonietta I (2000). In 2002, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman performed the première of Rubin's Dedication and Fanfare for the opening of the Weber Music Hall in Minnesota.

Bagatelles for Bassoon and Marimba was written in early 2008 in response to an off-the-cuff request by Dr. Rubin’s colleague, Professor of Percussion Gene Koshinski, for a spring tour he was planning with another friend and colleague, Professor Jefferson Campbell. Rubin writes of the piece, “During the 1990s I wrote a series of chamber compositions in which each movement embraced a distinctly different aesthetic perspective, yet I tried to tie these disparate musical vocabularies together within one contiguous work. Although I moved away from this line of thought in the past few years I felt it would be interesting to return to it with this unusual pairing of timbres in order to explore various stylistic ways of approaching the duo.”

Tristan Fuentes: Dreams (2010)

Dreams by Tristan Fuentes is a rambling collage of shifting emphasis and ever-changing focal lengths. The work is divided into several sections: Introduction, Samba Loca, Gretchen (excerpt), Dervish, and Tango Dada.
This unusual new piece is best described in the composer’s own words:

“If you don’t like it, just wait a moment! The musicians play with a stereo system that plays recordings from my library of sounds collected from, in this case, Mexican shortwave radio; German public radio; the streets of Lund, Sweden and La Paz, Bolivia; on the ocean in the hull of a container ship; and rural Nebraska. Some of the oldest sounds in Dreams go back to recordings made in the mid-1980s on analog equipment. There also are sounds that were created in my studio with a synthesizer and various acoustic instruments.

“At times the players are in sync with the sound file; at other times they play with no direct relation to it. They know where they are in the score by learning audible cues and using stopwatches.

“Working on this piece has been an absolute delight—thank you Players!” —TF