The New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s (NHSO) 120th season
continues with an exciting celebration! In honor of composer Augusta
Read Thomas’s 50th birthday, Music Director William Boughton conducts
Wind on the Water on Thursday, February 27 at 7:30pm at Woolsey Hall in
New Haven.
The NHSO is giving Ms. Read Thomas a special
birthday gift: the world premiere of her Saxophone Concerto performed by
Frederick Hemke, famed teacher of international recording star David
Sanborn. The concerto, which Ms. Thomas calls “Prisms of Light”,
captures in sound distinct aspects of a ray of light and also
incorporates the jazzy rhythms that fill the saxophone repertoire.
Joining
the Symphony are an internationally acclaimed diva and a hometown
choir. Soprano Tony Arnold is soloist for Absolute Ocean, a work for
orchestra, harp, and soprano set to poems by E.E. Cummings. The Elm City
Girls’ Choir performs Two E.E. Cummings Songs. The program is rounded
out by Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose, inspired by a seventeenth-century
collection of European fairy tales by Charles Perrault entitled Contes
de ma mère l’oye (“Mother Goose Stories”). Each Augusta Read Thomas
piece is being recorded for commercial release on Nimbus Records.
AUGUSTA
READ THOMAS is the pre-eminent female composer of her generation. She
is a University Professor at the University of Chicago and was the Mead
Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from
1997-2006. In 2007, her Astral Canticle was one of the two finalists
for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. In May 2009, she was elected to
membership by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been on
the Board of Directors of the American Music Center since 2000, serving
as Chair of the Board from 2005-2008. Ms. Thomas is a passionate and
devoted teacher, currently serving on the Dean's Music Advisory Board at
Northwestern University. She inaugurated the NHSO’s Young Composer
Project and each of her students was admitted to a conservator or
university composition program. Ms. Thomas recently had four major
world premieres: Cello Concerto No. 3 (March 2013), Harvest Drum
(December 2012), Resounding Earth (September 2012), and Earth Echoes
(October 2012).
Tickets for the performance at Woolsey Hall ($15-69) can be
purchased at 203.865.0831 x10 or
www.NewHavenSymphony.org. KidTix are free for children up to age 18
with a paying adult. Blue Star tickets are free for the families of active duty
military.
FREDERICK HEMKE began studies with Marcel Mule in
September 1955 at the Paris Conservatoire National de Musique et de
Declamation in Paris, France. He earned the Premier Prix in 1956,
becoming the first ever American saxophonist to earn this distinction.
Since 1962, Dr. Hemke has been Professor of Saxophone at the
Northwestern University School of Music in Evanston, Illinois, where he
currently serves as the Louis and Elsie Snydacker Eckstein Professor of
Music and Associate Dean of the School of Music. He has also served as
President of the North American Saxophone Alliance, from which he was
awarded Honorary Life Membership. Dr. Hemke has performed with the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the
Northwestern University Wind Ensemble, and the Kronos Quartet, among
others. Augusta Read Thomas’s Saxophone Concerto was commissioned in
his honor, but his students, several of whom are full time musicians in
the New Haven region.
TONY ARNOLD has been hailed by the New
York Times as “a bold, powerful interpreter”. She is recognized
internationally as a leading proponent of new music in concert and
recording, praised for her sparkling and insightful performances of the
most daunting contemporary scores. Since becoming the first-prize
laureate of the both the 2001 Gaudeamus International Competition (NL)
and the 2001 Louise D. McMahon Competition (USA), Ms. Arnold has
collaborated with the most cutting-edge composers and instrumentalists
on the world stage, receiving consistent critical accolades for a voice
of beauty and warmth, an uncanny technical facility, sterling
musicianship, and her riveting stage presence. “Simply put, she is a
rock-star in this genre” (Sequenza 21.
ELM CITY GIRLS’ CHOIR,
founded in 1993, has received national recognition and has appeared at
Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Walt Disney World. The Choir has
performed with many outstanding choral groups, including The American
Boychoir, CONCORA, New York Virtuoso Singers, and Yale Schola Cantorum,
and with professional orchestras including the Boston Philharmonic, New
Haven Symphony, and Moscow State Orchestra. Based in New Haven, ECGC
has toured extensively throughout North America and Europe, and has
appeared on national television performing with Diana Ross at the
women's finals match of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament. The Elm City
Girls’ Choir is open by invitation to choristers who have sung in the
United Girls’ Choir for at least one year.
Jeff Barnhart and His Hot Rhythm will celebrate the rollicking jazz
style of one of America’s greatest musicians and entertainers, the
legendary Thomas “Fats” Waller, on the Essex Winter Series on Sunday,
March 2 at 3 pm. Waller is known not only for his timeless compositions
such as “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and “Twelfth Street
Rag,” but also for his exuberant and often irreverent style. The
charismatic Jeff Barnhart, on piano and vocals, captures Waller’s spirit
in live performance with his band of top-flight musicians, including
Gordon Au on trumpet; Dan Levinson on clarinet and sax; Bob Barta on
guitar, banjo, and vocals; Vince Giordano on bass, tuba, bass sax, and
vocals; and Kevin Dorn on drums. 
