[Fredslist] FW: Gala Concert! and conversations with composers and soloists

Wed May 28 19:57:46 EDT 2008

If you have not had the chance to see the orchestra yet, please do try to make it for the last concert of the season June 6th.  The gala is the same night.

The director of the POA, Gabriela Poler-Buzali, is the newest member of Gotham Hispanic.  We welcome her and the many fabulous concerts to follow!!!

Laurel Scarr-Konel
Grant, Herrmann, Schwartz & Klinger LLP
675 Third Avenue - Suite 1200
New York, NY 10017-5704
Tel: (212) 682-1800
Fax: (212) 682-1850
email: lscarrkonel at ghsklaw.com

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From: Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas [mailto:philoamericas at philoamericas.pmailus.com]
Sent: Wed 5/28/2008 1:02 PM
To: Laurel Scarr-Konel
Subject: Gala Concert! and conversations with composers and soloists

Sent by: Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas
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INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTISTS OF
POA'S PERCUSSION FEAST CONCERT

.

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The Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas' 2007-2008 season ends with a bang, literally, as Alondra de la Parra leads the orchestra in its PERCUSSION FEAST concert at Lincoln Center, marking POA's Avery Fisher Hall debut!

The centerpiece of the program will be Silvestre Revueltas'  La Noche de los Mayas - a mystical and rhythmic work that tells the story of a white man traveling through the Yucatán Peninsula who is bewitched into falling in love with a Mayan girl.  Originally a score for a 1939 film, the work conjures images of volcanoes, pyramids and ancient sorcery, and is renowned for its explosive finale featuring an extended percussion section in an array of tribal rhythms and Mayan shamanism.  Based on its past electrifying renditions of Revueltas' Sensamaya, it seems a perfect fit for the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas, and promises to be quite a performance.    Eduardo Gamboa's Fanfarria, a U.S. premiere, will open the concert, while the featured guest soloists will be the renowned Mexican percussion ensemble TAMBUCO, in a performance of Canadian composer Jan Jarvlepp's highly-imaginative Garbage Concerto! 

Don't miss the supercharged PERCUSSION FEAST by Alonda de la Parra and the POA, as they make their Avery Fisher Hall debut!

Click here to get your tickets! <http://philoamericas.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=FLC-pQGhAAUAAAgJAAHryQ>      

FOR GALA CONCERT AND DINNER TICKETS HONORING DR. JOSE ANTONIO ABREU PLEASE CALL 212-564-0508 OR CLICK HERE <http://philoamericas.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=FLC-pQGhAAUAAAnfAAHryQ> 

EDUARDO GAMBOA - Fanfarria

 Martirene Alcántara-G<http://images.patronmail.com/pmailemailimages/897/125897/articles_3.jpg> 	
Martirene Alcántara-G 	
Kliment Krylovskiy: How did your relationship with the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas start? 
Eduardo Gamboa: Even though I knew about the existence of the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas (POA), it was not until 2006 that Martirene Alcántara, a Mexican photographer that lives in Manhattan, put me in touch with Alondra de la Parra.   The next thing I know Alondra included Mercado Garmendia (one of my compositions) as the encore of some concerts in the No-Borders Concert tour this past fall.  It was not until the end of the concert in Bellas Artes, Mexico City, that I finally got to meet Alondra personally.  The audience was so enthusiastic that the encore was played twice that night! This past April, Alondra was the guest conductor of the Orquesta de Sinaloa de las Artes. She played in Culiacán and Mazatáln and the program included my Flute Concerto, featuring soloist Eduardo Gonzalez.   Alondra did a fantastic job and the audience loved her artistry and charisma. I have tremendous respect and admiration for Alondra and I hope she and POA can do the world premiere of one of the compositions I'm currently working on. 

KK: Fanfarria will open the concert at Lincoln Center on June 6th. Without giving too much away, what will the audience hear? 
EG: My Fanfarria is written for brass and percussion.  It's a very short piece but full of energy. The music is festive, to celebrate.  It has punch, so I hope is well received by the NYC audience. I'm sure that Alondra's interpretation with POA will be extraordinary.  I'm very excited to hear my music in such a legendary concert Hall as Avery Fisher Hall. This would be an experience that I woudn't miss for the world. I will be there with my wife Irma, two of her children, Diego our grandson and a lot of friends!

KK: What prompted the writing of this piece?  
EG:This piece was commissioned for the Aguascalientes University's 25th Anniversary in Mexico. The world premiere took place in that same city in 1998 with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Aguascalientes, conducted by Gordon Campbell.  This year marks 10 years of the premiere and what a better way to celebrate it than doing its US premiere. 

KK:The listener always hears the final product without knowing the "birth and growing pains" of musical work.   Can you talk a bit about your compositional process?
EG: My language is visceral and my ear is what has the last word.  I don't plan theoretically my music, nor do I analyze much of what I write; while I compose - usually with the aid of a keyboard - I keep the parts I like and throw away what doesn't convince me.  I grew up in two parallel worlds: the world of popular music and the world of concert music.  This has made me an artist without judgements and has influenced my style to include a lot of rythms of popular Mexican music, Latin American music and Jazz.  I have also written scores which have also let me experiment with diverse instrumentations.

JAN JARVLEPP - Garbage Concerto

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We've all heard of violin concertos, piano concerts, etc., even an occasional tuba concerto.  This concert, however, brings something a bit different. Strikingly enough, as the title suggests, the soloist instrument is, well... trash.  To be more precise, various articles that can be found in the trash - cans, bottles, paper bags, bins, etc.   All brilliantly put together by the composer to serve as musical instruments, and executed by the virtuosic percussion ensemble -the internationally-renowned TAMBUCO.   Below, we catch up with the composer to discuss the work and his music.   A native of Canada, Jan Jarvlepp's music can be described as postmodern - in many ways an antonym of what comes to mind when one mentions contemporary or 20th century music (imagine an atonal concert "cleverly" based on the quadratic formula...).   In this writer's opinion, his music communicates with ease and directness, in the most profound way.  Recipient of numerous awards, grants and prizes, his extensive and varied catalog has been performed widely by some of today's most prominent artists and ensembles.    

Kliment Krylovskiy: POA will feature your Garbage Concerto with TAMBUCO as soloists.  Can you tell us how the idea of this piece came about?  

Jan Jarvlepp: It all started one sunny summer day in 1992 when I evidently didn't have enough to do. I pulled a bunch of tin cans out of the recycling bin in my kitchen and said whimsically, "I could make music with this." Before long I had pulled out 27 cans and tried banging on them with drumsticks. I found that a lot of them sounded similar and some of them just didn't sound very good at all. So I arbitrarily narrowed down the selection to 5 distinct cans. Then I repeated this process with glass bottles and plastic containers by choosing five of each. I even used the recycling bin itself as a bass drum. Before long, I had a "consort" of garbage instruments. My father helped out by designing and building wooden stands for the instruments (out of second hand wood, of course). I told Ottawa Symphony Orchestra conductor David Currie about my experiments and, by happy coincidence, the orchestra was looking for a piece with which to feature their percussionists in a concerto setting. I worked on the piece part time for four years and we successfully applied for a composition commission grant from the Laidlaw Foundation. I wore earplugs daily as I banged on the instruments trying to coax exciting rhythms from the not-particularly-beautiful sound of garbage. It is much easier to compose for professional percussion instruments such as vibraphone and marimba since one can exploit their beauty of sound. The premiere took place in 1996 in Ottawa, Canada at the National Arts Centre with David Currie conducting the OSO and its featured percussion players. The piece has since been recorded by BIS Records (CD-1052) and performed in Europe, Asia, Mexico and North America. For more information visit: www.janjarvlepp.com <http://philoamericas.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=FLC-pQGhAAQAABBBAAHryQ>   

KK: Your story as a composer is quite intriguing.  I understand that you, as your bio states, have in a way "turned your back" to the avant-garde modernism that is preached to composition students in universities across the nation.  What prompted the change?

 JJ: When I was in university in the 1970s and early 80s, I was forced to write atonal "modern" music which was progressive and complex. Being a naive student fresh out of high school, I was puzzled by this since a lot of this music sounded ugly to me. I was informed that tonal composers such as Shostakovich, Prokovief, Dvorak, Tschaikovsky, Grieg and Sibelius (none of them German) were cheap, second rate composers and not worthy of study in music theory or orchestration classes. When I graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a Ph. D. in 1981, I was totally fed up with complex, atonal avant garde music. The next year I composed a simple, tonal carillon piece called "Night Music" and with that I said goodbye to Modernism for good. I now regard the forced modernism in my university studies to be a sophisticated form of dumbing down and an example of camouflaged subversion of youth at a high intellectual level. This has only led young Americans astray to the point that a truly great symphony or truly great concerto has never been written in the USA . Sure, one can mention Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Aaron Copland's 3rd Symphony, but that is minor stuff compared to what has arisen in small places such as Finland or the Czech Republic. The USA has excelled in other areas where such subversion is absent.   

KK: I assume it is safe to say that in many of your compositions you tap into ethnic-influenced music.  Does this help make your music more accessible? 

 JJ: Folk and popular music styles are definitely accessible because they are spontaneously founded on psychoacoustically sound principles. Inaccessible pop or folk music simply flops. However, I believe that my music is suitable for human consumption before the addition of these external stylistic elements due to being psychoacoustically sound because of my desire to communicate with my fellow human beings. Fortunately I studied psychoacoustics, timbre studies and time perception to a some extent in university.   

KK: I've once heard a person say that Avant-Garde and serialism in America in the 60's and 70's killed classical music.  What can you say on that topic? 

 JJ: Nobody killed classical music. Little old ladies kept on listening to Tschaikovsky and Brahms while bearded university professors wrote transposed retrograde inversions or microtonal clusters which they believed would give them a ticket to future success. Now the future has arrived and it is evident that it was the professors and their victims/students who have committed artistic suicide by failing to communicate with their fellow human beings. They will be forgotten. In one hundred years, I believe that very little 20th century avant garde music will be known by the public and some of what will be known will be of curiosity value only. Probably some psychoacoustically sound works such as Lutoslawki's "Funeral Music" and Ligeti's sensuous "Atmospheres" will be performed from time to time.   

KK: I know that usually composers hate to label their music, but could you talk a bit about your style?  

 JJ: I think that it is fair to call what I do postmodern. At the very least, I belong to the period that follows modernism. But I also enjoy mixing various international influences, pop rhythms and even humor - all of which are hallmarks of postmodernism. Finally, my music is autobiographical because it fuses my European background/classical music side with my North American upbringing/teenage rock music side to produce a postmodern hybrid. I have seen Jimi Hendrix and Rostropovich live and can be influenced by both types of experience. In the Garbage Concerto we have the coming together of classical music's well thought out forms and the excitement of pop music rhythms.     
TAMBUCO percussion ensemble 	
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With three Grammy-nominations under their belt, TAMBUCO has appeared at many of the world's leading stages, performed with numerous orchestras and collaborated with many distinguished artist including the Kronos Quartet.  Renowned for its virtuosity and imagination, TAMBUCO's CD "Rítmicas" was selected  by Audiophile Audition as one of the best CDs of the year Its upcoming performance with POA will feature the group performing on various articles of trash in Jan Jarvlepp's Garbage Concerto.     

Kliment Krylovskiy:  I understand you repertoire is quite varied.  However, being from Mexico, do you make any special emphasis on traditional and ethnic-derived music?  

 TAMBUCO: When performing, Tambuco makes a special emphasis on showing audiences how music is constantly changing, transforming and renewing itself. It is very exciting for us to be one part in the process of music transformation.  As percussionists, we are interested about sound coming from diverse sources: from simple, traditional instruments from one culture, to the finest percussion keyboards made by experienced luthiers, to objects of common, every day use. To the eyes of a percussionist all of these share a common feature: They are all sounding objects that have the potential to transmit a musical idea.  

KK: As a percussion group, how much of your repertoire is pre-20th century?   

 T: Percussion instruments are surprisingly contradictory. They are the newest and perhaps the oldest instruments played. They also form the widest family of instruments, with more instruments than the amount of languages and dialects spoken on earth.  That is why the history and development of percussion can not be measured with the same parameters used to measure the development of "traditional" concert music.  The first concert piece for percussion instruments was written in 1930, less than a century ago, which in terms of concert music might seem very recent. We percussionists however, have learned to perceive and recognize music in a wider universal scope, such as the case of Indonesian Gamelans, West African drummers or Indian music, where percussionists have been playing together for thousands of years.  

KK: Would it be safe to say that most of the music you perform is rhythm or avant-garde sound based?

 T: It would be safer to say that the sound of the music we perform is the sounding portrait of our time, which is very diverse, complex and mixed, reflecting the way we think, feeling and communicate.  The first concert percussion works showed a very strong rhythmic element, but even very early percussion works like Varese's Ionisation, started to show us the tremendous potential that this instrumental family had in the compositional use of new colours, textures, sound mass and expansion of sound in space. 

KK: but do you every play any Bach, for example?  

T: Bach is vitamins for every musician; makes you grow stronger, makes you listen better, makes you become more aware of how music develops. I recommend it as often as possible for a good musical health. It can be performed on any instrument, or taken via the ears. There is a great anecdote of Tambuco and Bach...Back in 1993, for the very first rehearsal of Tambuco, even before performing in public, the very first piece of music we rehearsed was not a percussion piece, it was Contrapunctus I, from Bach's Kunst der Fugue read in four marimbas.  This year in October, Tambuco will celebrate it's 15th anniversary with a concert at the International Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato, Mexico. As a symbolic act to mark this celebration, Tambuco will perfom Contrapunctus I as the opening piece in the program 

KK: When did you first hear about Alondra de la Parra and the Philharmonic Orchestra of the  Americas ? 
T: The music world is very small and good news travel fast amongst us.  I first knew about Alondra because I found out that we had been to the same High School (with a few years of difference between us). Since then I have seen her musical progress and finally, last year, we met in Vermont, at a summer music festival. There I could witness her talent and her profile as a conductor belonging to a totally new generation of musicians, those who conceive music as a whole, tearing down prejudices that separate and label music.  In that same festival, I had the chance to listen to one of POA's energetic concerts, where the strong communication of Alondra and her instrumentalists could be very easily felt and heard. 

KK: Were you familiar with Jarvlepp's work before this collaboration?  What can you say about the concerto?  Does it fit TAMBUCO well?  

T: We have performed Jarvlepp's Garbage Concerto before.  It is one of Tambuco's repertoire pieces with orchestra. The concerto is a very strong statement in two subjects: It is a great example of what I mentioned before about the instrument being merely a tool of communication.  The soloist instruments that you will hear at the concert hall, are the opposite to the Stradivarius violin; they are trash (cans, bottles, paper bags, etc), But these objects share something in common with a great Stradivarius: Both are tools to make an art form that sounds.  Jan Jarvlepp has composed very cleverly for them, being very sensitive to the sound quality of all objects, to the point of turning them in instruments completely capable of developing expressive gestures and a totally virtuoso musical discourse.  It fits Tambuco very well. If in doubt, dear readers, come to the Lincoln Center and find out for yourselves!   I would like to add that if the readers would like to know about Tambuco a little further, we invite them to visit our site: www.tambuco.org <http://philoamericas.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=FLC-pQGhAAEAACCXAAHryQ> .

- Kliment Krylovsky, POA newsletter editor

JOIN US AT THE AMERICAS SOCIETY ON TUESDAY, JUNE 3 FOR AN INTIMATE Q&A DISCUSSION AND PERFORMANCE WITH TAMBUCO AND CONDUCTOR ALONDRA DE LA PARRA

LIMITED SEATS!
TO RSVP CLICK HERE <http://philoamericas.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=FLC-pQGiAAEAAAGpAAHryQ> 

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