touring repertorie fall 2004


Leo Brouwer (b.1939)	Hika in Memoriam 'Toru Takemitsu' (1996)
Leo Brouwer was born in Cuba in 1939 and has achieved fame as a composer, conductor and guitarist. The quality, variety and number of his compositions for guitar have made him an important figure. His first compositions were influenced by the nationalism and modernism of Falla, Bartok and Stravinsky. Later the music of Henze and Stockhausen led him to explore a very personal avant-garde style. He has characterized his third and most recent period as hyper-Romantic and has made his goal to communicate as widely and as directly as possible. An admirer and friend of the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, Brouwer marked Takemitsu's death with Hika, a moody piece based on a a Bulgarian theme that Takemitsu loved. Brouwer used the same theme in his Tre Apuntes (1959) and in the eighth of his Estudio Sencillos (1959-1961). Hika is a Japanese word equivalent to the English word elegy. Takemitsu used the title for a 1966 piece for violin and piano.

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)	In The Woods (1995)
Toru Takemitsu wrote exquisite music in the modernist Western tradition, while preserving his fundamental Japanese identity. Inspired by a subtle, contemplative vision of nature, he brought his love of both Japanese and Western music into a remarkable and original synthesis. His orchestral and chamber music scores are performed worldwide by major artists, and his film scores - for directors like Akira Kurosawa and Nagisa Oshima - are integral to Japanese New Wave cinema. A master of orchestral color, sound texture, dynamic sonority and instrumental articulation, Takemitsu was also an amateur guitarist who knew the instrument well. He once told Julian Bream that of all instruments, it was the guitar he loved most. Influenced by Debussy as well as by the delicate, flexible gestures found in the music of Asia, his music is written with painstaking precision yet seems to proceed by means of a gentle improvisatory flow which uses rhythmic freedom to create a feeling of great spaciousness in a short time span. Fascinated by the expressive power of silence, Takemitsu was captivated by the guitar's characteristic sound decay. He considered nature his most important teacher and this is reflected in the titles of many of his compositions, including In the Woods, written shortly before his death. It is in three movements: the first, Wainscott Pond, is a meditation on a picturesque lake in New York region of the Hamptons; the second, Rosedale, is a portrait of a formal garden in North Carolina filled with peonies, poppies, sunflowers, hyacinths and tulips; the third, Muir Woods, is an homage to an ancient redwood forest in Northern California.

Ernesto Nazareth (1863-1934)	Five Dances
Ernesto Julio de Nazareth studied the piano from a very early age and started composing music in his teens, merging European and Afro-Brazilian rhythms and forms. By combining elements from dances such as the Habanera and the Polka with Afro-Brazilian rhythms, Nazareth created the tango Brasileiro - the forerunner of the choro. Odeon is his most celebrated piece in this form. Many important musicians listened to and were affected by his music. Darius Milhaud, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Radames Gnattali and Francisco Mignone all composed works inspired by Nazareth. Villa-Lobos said "he is the true incarnation of the musical soul of Brazil." Nazareth lost his wife and became deaf in his latter life. Both events affected his mental health and he entered a psychiatric institution in Jacarepagnia, Rio de Janeiro. He was found dead on February 5, 1934, a few days after disappearing from the institution - a tragic end for one of the most creative and unique Brazilian composers of all time.

Manos Hadjidakis (1925-1994)	Gioconda's Smile (1965)
Almost entirely self-taught as a composer , Manos Hadjidakis attracted notoriety in 1949 by drawing attention in a lecture to rebetiko (urban folksong), a genre previously scorned by serious Greek musicians. In 1953 his Athens lectures on American composers (Copland and others) did much to expand the horizons of young Greek composers, who had been isolated by World War II and by postwar conditions. He was also active in promoting new Greek music within Greece. His songs, in which he recognized no distinction between serious and light music, enjoy lasting popularity and represent perhaps the most refined musical experience of the general Greek public after 1950. In 1960 he won an Oscar for music he wrote for the film Never on a Sunday. In 1965, his LP Gioconda's Smile (the title refers to Leonardo's painting the Mona Lisa) was released on EMI. In 2004, it was re-released, digitally remastered as an audiophile CD in the EMI Classics collection. His poetic lyrics for two of the songs follow. Contessa Esterhazy Through my open window, I gaze at the clouds and some drops begin to fall - though I can't tell if they're from my eyes or from the sky - falling on the flowers. Countess Esterhazy is cultivating near her window, exactly underneath my room. The Countess' son, a schoolboy reading by the window, sees the drops, turns round, looks up and smiles to me. The Countess closes the window hurriedly, takes him inside and shows him the glum portraits of his ancestors, reminding him that an Esterhazy must never ever smile at the sky. The Virgin In My Neighborhood At that very hour my neighbors – who were curious, amazed and in a hurry - were gathering in the Church, to witness the miracle they'd heard about by word of mouth, The weeping Madonna. I rushed there too, but the throng prevented me from entering. Full of fear and curiosity, everyone was talking about the miracle. This was the only weeping Madonna in the whole city and this was a lot for our small and paltry neighborhood. I entreated them to let me in. I wanted to see. But they just shoved me and trod on me, until I hurt so much I too started weeping. But suddenly, when they saw me weeping, they all formed a circle around me and little by little began to move away from me. They were upset and left me all alone in the center of a constantly growing circle, and I wept and wept, weeping till I turned into a tiny spot in the public square. Meanwhile, they'd gone, they'd vanished in the nearby streets, stammering: “The weeping Madonna”

Dusan Bogdanovic (b. 1955)	Hymn to the Muse (2005)
Born in Yugoslavia in 1955 and active as a composer, guitarist and improviser, Dusan Bogdanovic has explored a unique synthesis of classical, jazz, and ethnic music. He studied composition and orchestration at the Geneva Conservatory with Pierre Wissmer and Alberto Ginastera, received the only first prize offered to a guitarist at the Geneva Competition in 1975, and gave a highly acclaimed debut recital in Carnegie Hall in 1977. He currently divides his time between composing, teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and concertizing. Hymn to the Muse is based on some of the oldest written music our culture has preserved. Mesomedes of Crete was a Greek poet and musician who lived during the second century C.E. and worked in the court of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The Delphic Hymns to Apollo are from the second century B.C.E. were inscribed on the walls of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi. The Epitaph to Seikilos from the first century C.E. is inscribed, meticulously notated in vocal and rhythmic notation, on a tombstone. The pieces exhibit modulation and a generally complex musical style. Dusan Bogdanovic has provided the following note for this world premiere ofhis Hymn to the Muse.