Solo PIANO Recital by
SE-HEE JIN
(Korea/USA)
Double PORTRAIT:
(USA)
&
John
Harbison
(USA)
Part I: Portrait of Louis
Karchin
Three Epigrams (2008) *
Celebration
Expressions
Upheavals
Ghost Waltz (2008) *
Sonata-Fantasia (2020) **
* * *
Part II: Portrait of John
Harbison
Gatsby Etudes (1999) *
Nocturne (2018) *
Piano Sonata
No. 1 (1987) *
__________
* European premiere
** World premiere
This concert has been made possible
thanks to the generous support of:
* * *
The Performer
Se-Hee Jin has been acclaimed for her keen
musical intelligence and exquisite sensitivity. She holds her Master of Music
and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in Piano Performance and Literature (Minor
in Music Theory) from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with
Natalya Antonova and served as her Teaching Assistant. She also graduated from
Ewha Womans University (Seoul, Korea). Currently, she serves as Teaching
Assistant Professor of Piano at the Oklahoma State University. She has concertised
and taught throughout the United States, China, Italy, Canada and Korea,
continuing her solo recital projects and contemporary music concert series.
As a solo pianist, Jin has been
featured in various recitals, including concerts at the Weill – Carnegie Hall,
Kaufman Music Center, Seiji Ozawa Hall (USA) and Bentley Recital Hall (Canada).
She has participated in the Tanglewood Music Festival as a recipient of the
Leonard Bernstein Fellowship and the Banff Summer Arts Festival in Canada. She
has performed a broad range of repertoire from Baroque to the music of our
times and continuing her solo projects on J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue and Russian Romanticism. She has also continued her
collaborative performances with distinguished musicians in the States and
abroad. Her recent collaborations include duo and chamber performances with
Kenneth Grant (Eastman School of Music), Nancy Ambrose King (University of
Michigan), Kathleen Winkler (Rice University) and Celeste Johnson (University
of Missouri, Kansas City). She has appeared in Backstage Pass on WXXI-FM
Classical 91.5, Women in Music Festival, the Jessie Kneisel Lieder Competition
and Winners’ Concert, Festival of Contemporary Music and various series of
chamber music concerts.
As a founder and artistic director, she
has presented two new music concert series – American Living Composer Series for composer portrait recitals and N Series for piano music written by
composers of two different nationalities. The new music concert series has
presented composer portrait recitals comprised of works in a variety of
settings from solo to chamber ensemble. She has been working closely with John
Harbison (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1987), Charles Wuorinen (Pulitzer Prize winner,
1970) and Louis Karchin. She has presented the concert series at several venues
in New York and Oklahoma areas in the United States. The American Living Composer Series is supported by universities and
the regional Arts Council in the United States.
As a faculty member and guest
artist, Se-Hee Jin has given master classes and solo performances at festivals
and music schools, including Semper Music
International Festival (Italy), the Duquesne University (PA), the Oakland
University (MI), the Middle Tennessee State University (TN), the Cameron
University (OK) and Kookmin University (Korea).
* * *
The Composers
Louis Karchin (b. 1951)
studied at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University. Additional study
included two summers as a Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at the
Tanglewood Music Center. He is now Professor of Music at the New York
University.
Over a career spanning more than
four decades, he has amassed a portfolio of more than 85 compositions, appeared
as conductor with numerous performing ensembles, co-founded new music groups,
including the Chamber Players of the League – ISCM, the Orchestra of the League
of Composers, the Washington Square Ensemble, and the Harvard Group for New
Music. He has also overseen the formation of a graduate program in Music
Composition at the New York University. His works have garnered numerous
distinguished honours.
His first opera, Romulus,
received a fully-staged premiere in May of 2007, in a three-way collaboration
among Works and Process at the Guggenheim, American Opera Projects and the
Washington Square Ensemble, and is now available on a much-heralded 2011 Naxos release. His second opera, based
on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, was awarded two showcase berths,
on Ft. Worth Opera’s inaugural Frontiers
Series in May of 2012, and later that year with the Center for Contemporary
Opera in New York.
Performing organisations championing
Karchin’s music have included the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the
Louisville Orchestra, the Portland Symphony
Orchestra, Da Capo Chamber Players (NYC), Plurimo Ensemble (Venice), Spectrum Sonori (Seoul), Delta Ensemble (Amsterdam), Voices of Change (Dallas) and the New
York New Music Ensemble.
He has been composer-in-residence at
the Composers’ Conference at Wellesley College (Indiana University), the
University of Buffalo, the University of Iowa and the University of Utah. He
has given master classes at Harvard, Columbia, Boston, Brandeis, Cleveland
State and Rutgers Universities, as well as the Juilliard School, Westminster
Choir College, the Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College and Queens College
(CUNY). In 2010, he was a guest composer at the Etchings Festival in Auvillar (France).
His music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation and the American Composers Alliance. CDs of his
works are available on the Bridge, Naxos, New World and Albany
labels.
As a conductor, Louis Karchin is Music Director of the
Orchestra of the League of Composers and with them has conducted New York or
world premieres of works by Elliott Carter, Joan Tower, Charles Wuorinen, David
Rakowski, Arthur Kreiger, Missy Mazzoli, Julia Wolfe and Milton Babbitt, among
many others. He is also a conductor of the Washington Square Ensemble and the
Chamber Players of the League – ISCM.
* * *
John
Harbison (b. 1938)
is one of America’s most distinguished artistic figures. A recipient of
numerous awards and honours, he has composed music for most of America’s
premiere musical institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony,
Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center.
His music catalogue is anchored by
three operas, seven symphonies, twelve concerti, a ballet, six string quartets,
numerous song cycles and chamber works and a large body of sacred music that
includes cantatas, motets and the orchestral-choral works Four Psalms, Requiem
and Abraham. His music is widely recorded on leading prestige labels.
His recent works include Psalm 116, String Quartet No. 6, Presences for cello and string
quintet, A Bag of Tales for piano, The Cross of Snow (in versions
for viols with countertenor, and string quartet with mezzo-soprano), The
Nine Rasas for clarinet, viola and piano and Painting the Floors Blue
for violinist Jennifer Koh. Harbison’s opera The Great Gatsby, a
commission from the Metropolitan Opera, was recently revived at Semperoper
Dresden, after the European premiere there of a new production following
performances in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Aspen, Boston and Tanglewood.
Harbison has been
composer-in-residence with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, the American Academy in Rome and numerous festivals.
He received degrees from Harvard and
Princeton before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is
currently Institute Professor. For many summers since 1984, he taught
composition at Tanglewood, serving as head of the composition program there
from 2005 to 2015, often also directing its Festival of Contemporary Music.
With Rose Mary Harbison, the inspiration for many of his violin works, he has
been co-artistic director of the annual Token Creek Chamber Music Festival
since its founding in 1989. He continues as principal guest conductor at
Emmanuel Music (where for three years he served as acting artistic director).
An accomplished jazz pianist, Harbison founded MIT’s Vocal Jazz Ensemble in 2010 for which he served as coach and
arranger. He is also a pianist with the faculty jazz group Strength in Numbers. In these roles he is adding to his large
catalogue of pop-songs and jazz arrangements.
John Harbison was President of the
Copland Fund for fifteen years and a trustee of the American Academy in Rome.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a Trustee of
the Bogliasco Foundation.
His music is
published exclusively by Associated Music Publishers.
The Works
The Three Epigrams were written at the
request of Italian pianist and composer Fabio Grasso for a concert of the Plurimo
Ensemble in Venice celebrating two Venetian artists: the painter Emilio
Vedova and the composer Luigi Nono. At the time of the commission, one Epigram
had already been composed; this was for the 70th birthday of my colleague and
friend, composer Charles Wuorinen. Entitled Celebration, it seeks to convey an atmosphere appropriately
suited to the occasion. For the second and third Epigrams, it seemed fitting to
pay homage to Venice’s two favourite sons of the late 20th century. Expressions, the second
movement, nods to a similarly titled work of Nono’s and was inspired by Nono’s
own very special use of pointillistic technique (where fragmented melodies pass
from one register to another and often from one instrument to another). The
third movement, Upheavals,
was written after absorbing Vedova’s paintings with their vivid imagery and
violent juxtapositions; elements that found musical representation in
jagged-edged contours and swift shifts of mood.
Written for
composer and pianist Eric Moe, Ghost
Waltz is about a nice, polite ghost who would never try to scare anyone.
The newest work
on the programme, Sonata-Fantasia,
was written for pianist Stephen Drury, who will perform it later this year, but
Se-Hee Jin’s performance tonight will be the work’s world premiere. I wanted to
write a piece with interconnected movements and the Sonata-Fantasia essentially
has four. It starts with a declamatory section with an insistent motive; this
is followed by the suggestion of a fugue, a section with imitative lines that
builds to a climax and ends on a forte low b flat. The climax ushers in
the third part, which is more leisurely, with a melody that becomes embellished
with trills, and this leads to a chorale-like extension, starting off softly
and building to another climax. The final part of the work introduces a new
assertive idea in octaves in the bass; this is later joined with musical
material from the first section to round out the form.
Louis Karchin
My opera The
Greatest Gatsby was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to honour the
25th anniversary of James Levine’s debut. To assist in its preparation, the Met
asked me to suggest a pianist to make a tape, with my participation, of the
entire vocal score. My choice was Judith Gordon. Her splendid account of the
piece, in addition to its practical value, was a pianistic tour de force. As a
measure of my gratitude I made her a piece, the details of which she had
already practiced. The three Gatsby
Etudes do not follow the operatic chronology, but instead pursue some of
its motivate trains of thought. They are pianistically challenging and fun to
play. They connect without pause. They are dedicated, in gratitude and
friendship, to Judy Gordon.
In writing a
short piano piece to mark Linda Reichert’s leadership of Philadelphia’s Prime
new music series, I had two words running through my head: open-mindedness and
persistence. It was a truly inclusive network. Linda’s combination of drive and
patience kept it evolving over many years. Below a serene surface my Nocturne strives to find some of these
qualities, hard to find notes that turn out to belong together, taking their
time, and looking for a releasing last chord.
The Piano Sonata No. 1 was written for
Robert Shannon, Ursula Oppens and Alan Feinberg on a consortium commission from
the National Endowment for the Arts. It was composed at Token Creek (Wisconsin)
in the summer of 1985. The three performers for whom it was written brought
their own sense of proportion, contrast and sonority to the piece, which was
very much my intention. The Sonata invites the performer’s play of personality
and fantasy. The work is in four main sections (the two inner sections being
faster than the outer ones) but the articulations between them are not emphatic
and the piece is conjured up rather than premeditated. Its sixteen-minute span
contains very little literal repetition; virtuosic passages erupt quite
unexpectedly and the music retains the shape of its natural occurrence:
unformalised. Much variety of touch and tone is required, most obviously in two
passages near the end: a whirling elaboration of a big chord that drives the
piece momentarily out of its orbit, and later, a strange staccato hallucination
that seems to drop in from outside, both delaying and necessitating the ending.
John
Harbison
