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Cancer Survivor's Celebration Day - Saturday, May 3, 2008
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Russian Tales - February 2, 2008
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Sapphire Chamber Consort collaborators perform Igor Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat (A Soldier's Tale) as part of the recent Russian Tales concert in Woodbury, MN.Russian Tales is a program that will feature Russian art music from the 20th and 21st centuries accompanied by stories surrounding their composition. Guest composer and pianist Dimitri Shapovalov returns to his American home, Minneapolis, along with his parents, Irena Reshetnikova and artist Vitaly Shapovalov, who will begin the concert with a chilling story of their immigration from the USSR to Minnesota during the cold war. Surrounding the audience will be Vitaly’s many paintings depicting their lives both in Russia and in the US, and Dimitri will serve as a translator and storyteller while his parents share tales in Russian from their long struggle to gain asylum and eventually citizenship in the US.
After their stories are shared, Shapovalov will accompany soprano Carrie Henneman Shaw on several Prokofiev songs, and conclude the first half of the concert with his world premiere composition entitled Molitva (Prayer), based on the texts of Anna Akhmatova and passages from Isaiah. The second half of the concert will feature a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat or Soldier’s Tale, a work that is often performed in times of global conflict—and in this case is also meant to look back to past global conflict.
Dimitri Shapovalov, guest composer
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Dimitri Shapovalov, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, moved to the United States with his family in 1993. While in Russia, he studied composition with Igor Vorobyov at the Glinka Choir College and continued his studies in the U.S. with Judith Lang Zaimont at the University of Minnesota, and his choral compositions have received premieres from the Carthage Chapel Choir and the Cornell University Chorus. His recent commission from the Sapphire Chamber Consort will be his first composition for a contemporary chamber ensemble featuring solo soprano, clarinet, piano, percussion, and men’s chorus.
Shapovalov, who holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Minnesota, is a published author and translator on musicological topics connected with Russian culture at the turn of the twentieth century. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University in May 2005, and his dissertation, "Russian Solo Song in the Silver Age, 1890-1917," discusses the aesthetic, poetic, and musical context of solo songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Tcherepnin, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev.
Also an accomplished concert pianist, Shapovalov has studied piano since age 11. While at the University of Minnesota he studied with Alexander Braginsky, attending his renowned international master class at the Vienna Hochschule in 1995. Also in that year Shapovalov received the prestigious Mechelcke Prize in piano performance.
As a scholar Shapolvalov has presented papers on Russian music at national and international conferences, including the Prokofiev International Symposium in Manchester, UK, and the American Musicological Society in Washington, D. C. Currently he serves as an Assistant Professor of Music at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where his teaching interests center on piano and vocal music, academic and creative writing, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian culture, music history, and the relationship between art and society. At Carthage Shapovalov is active as a pianist, composer, scholar, and choral conductor. He currently resides in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife Elizabeth.
Jake Endres, guest narrator and actor
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Jake Endres lives and works in the Minneapolis area as a singer-actor, music director, pianist, composer, conductor, voice teacher, writer, director and producer. He has appeared with many area theaters, including The Children’s Theatre Company, Nautilus Music-Theater, Paul Bunyan Playhouse, American Folklore Theatre, Frank Theatre, Park Square Theatre, Theatre Mu, Dorian Opera Theatre, North Star Opera, and Minnesota Dance Theatre. Mr. Endres is also the founder and artistic director of The Theatrical Music Company, an innovative, award-winning performance ensemble based in St. Paul, whose shows have included Knock Knock! It’s Your Husband – 7 American Comic Operas in 90 Minutes and Voice-In-Head: Improv Headphone-Guided Futurismo™. His current projects include producing and music directing Elvis Costello’s The Juliet Letters and touring nationally as the Piano Guy in Rik Reppe’s hit New Orleans show Glorious Noise.
Jesse Neumann-Peterson, dancer
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Jesse is a visual and performing artist local to Minneapolis. He has performed with the Minnesota Opera, Zenon, Flying Foot Forum, Heart of the Beast Theater, and many other companies and independent choreographers. Currently, he is performing as an interpreter of Tino Sehgal's work at the Walker Art Center and is a member of Kairos Dance Theater, an intergenerational performance company along with his seven year old daughter, Makena. Jesse is currently studying photography at MCTC.
Leadership support for Meet The Composer’s MetLife Creative Connections program is generously provided by MetLife Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Amphion Foundation, Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, BMI Foundation, Inc., Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, Jerome Foundation, mediaThe foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Virgil Thomson Foundation, Ltd.
An Evening of Art Songs - November 8, 2007
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This delightful recital featured songs of three local Twin Cities composers.
Edie Hill (website) - The recital opened with selections from Between the Limbs, Music, sung by soprano Carrie Henneman Shaw. On poems of Joan Wolf Prefontaine, the set deals with the continuum of life, young love, and love tempered by time and experience.
Elizabeth Alexander (website) - Soprano Harriet McCleary sang a set of early Carl Sandburg songs, A Garret of Old Playthings, before moving on to Alexander's more recent settings of poets Ann Silsbee, Opal Palmer Adisa and Nancy White, which explore in a visceral way what it is to be loving, honest, and fully alive.
David Moore (website) - soprano Kathy Lee sang selections from Moore's cycle Album, a group of songs written on the discovery of an album of family photographs in an attic. Each song is a musing on a different picture in the album, relatives known and unknown, and the recognition of one's self in the faces of ancestors.
Songs of Assurance - May 2007
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Friday, May 18, 2007 - 7:00 pm First English Lutheran Church (website) 440 Garfield Street Wisconsin Rapids, WI Admission: $20 |
Sunday, May 20, 2007 - 2:30 pm Grace University Lutheran Church (website) 324 Harvard Street SE Minneapolis, MN Admission: Free will donation |
This program was sponsored, in part, by the American Composers Forum and The Schubert Club. |
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Sapphire Chamber Consort, a new presenting organization of classical music, was proud to announce its debut performances, "Songs of Assurance," featuring an interconnected program of 20th and 21st century repertoire hosted by Alison Young of Classical Minnesota Public Radio.
Conducted by James Miller, the program included works by Minnesota composers Abbie Betinis, Gene Gutchë and Edie Hill, and features the world premiere of Sonnet 104 by St. Paul-based composer J. David Moore. Among the performers were local professional musicians well known for championing new concert music, including acclaimed flutist Linda Chatterton, pianist Stephen Self, clarinetist Dan Friberg, soprano Carrie Shaw, mezzo-soprano KrisAnne Weiss, and chorus members formerly of the Dale Warland Singers. The concert was sponsored, in part, by the American Composers Forum and The Schubert Club.
SELECTED PROGRAM NOTES
Sonnet 104: the world premiere
Prolific St. Paul composer J. David Moore is known nationally for his clever and lyrical vocal compositions and arrangements. The recipient of awards and residencies from the American Composers Forum, The Minnesota Opera and The McKnight Foundation (with his ensemble Dare to Breathe), Moore has written and arranged more than 200 choral works. Moore's setting of Shakespeare's Sonnet 104 was written as a gift from co-artistic director James Miller to his wife, Heidi, to celebrate their third wedding anniversary—thus the lines, "Three winters' cold/Have from the forests shook three summers' pride/Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned/In process of the seasons have I seen." A brazenly romantic and youthful modern madrigal influenced by Britten, Vaughan Williams, Sondheim and Pizzetti, it is scored for six-part voices (SSATTB) and French horn.
Benediction and Lullaby: songs by Gene Gutchë
The Schubert Club sponsors the part of the program which includes works by little-known Minnesota composer Gene Gutchë, who died in 2000. July 2007 marks the 100th anniversary of his birth. St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewer John Harvey once lauded Gutchë's "personal idiom of brilliance, vigor, poetic fancy and virile lyricism."
Assurance
Co-artistic director Abbie Betinis wrote Assurance at age 20, as a way to celebrate the steady support she felt from family, friends, and many people she never met, while she underwent chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkins Lymphoma. Her first choral piece (of now more than 40), it premiered April 2001 on "Voices of Healing," a full-length concert of her original work presented as her senior composition recital. The event, for which she received departmental distinction from St. Olaf College, celebrated the miraculous human healing process by presenting works relating to the five stages of grief. In 2002, Assurance was a finalist for the Craig and Janet Swan Composer Prize at the University of Minnesota.
This Floating World: Five Miniatures for solo flute
Premiered January 2004 by flutist Linda Chatterton, Edie Hill's This Floating World comprises five short movements, each inspired by a different haiku of 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. Since premiering the work in 2004, flutist Linda Chatterton has been championing the piece, performing it across the US, most recently in Arizona and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also including it on her forthcoming CD of American flute music. To read more about Linda Chatteron, click here.