Events for Friday, March 27, 2009

The Music of Lou Harrison

Event Time

8:00 pm

Click names for performer biographies.

Performers

• The Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet
• Formed in 1996, Pacific Rims is comprised of Gunnar Folsom, Paul Hansen, Matthew Kocmieroski, and Rob Tucker, leading players in new, chamber, and orchestral music and dance, theater, and film in the Pacific Northwest. Individually they can be heard performing with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, the 5th Avenue Theatre, and on numerous major motion picture and video game sound tracks, from Die Hard with a Vengence to Valkyrie and from Halo to Warcraft. Pacific Rims performs music from the 1930s to the present, from Cage to Xenakis to Takemitsu to Reich to Roldán. As well as producing their own concerts, they have appeared with the ensembles Sonora, the Seattle Chamber Players, and the Seattle Creative Orchestra; on series such as the Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, the Cornish Music Series, the Auburn Symphony chamber music series; and numerous times at the Seattle Asian Art Museum and at St. James Cathedral, where they helped celebrate Messiaen’s 100th birthday in 2008. Educational performances have included the Seattle Symphony “Tiny Tots” series, Seattle Public Schools, Federal Way Public Schools, and the Imperials Percussion Festival as well as working and performing with percussion students at Music Works Northwest and with student composers and choreographers at Cornish College of the Arts.
• Gunnar Folsom
• Gunnar Folsom studied with Christopher Lamb, Duncan Patton, and Don Liuzzi at the Manhattan School of Music. He is a member of both the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra and the Bellevue Philharmonic. As a freelance percussionist, Folsom performs regularly with the Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Opera, the Tacoma Symphony, the Northwest Sinfonietta, and the Seattle Chamber Players. He has also performed with the Festival Chamber Music Society, John Taverner and the Tallis Scholars, the Ensemble Sospeso in New York City, the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble in Berkeley and Los Angeles, and the Vaasa City Orchestra of Finland in Seattle.
  
  Folsom has held positions at the University of Puget Sound, UPS Community Music Programs, Music Works Northwest, Marrowstone Summer Music Festival, Marrowstone-in-the-City, and Midsummer Musical Retreat. He is currently the percussion coach for the Seattle Youth Symphony and a faculty member of the New England Music Camp in Sidney, Maine. Paul Hansen has been active for thirty years as one of the top percussionists in Seattle’s music and theater circles, having performed with popular talents such as Mr. Rogers, Quincy Jones, Johnny Mathis, and Burt Bacharach. As a concert musician he performs regularly with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, and Auburn Symphony. His Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra was premiered by the Northwest Sinfonietta with Paul as soloist in 2002. He has been a mainstay in Seattle’s top pit orchestras at the Paramount and 5th Avenue theaters with over 70 musicals to his credit. He has also composed film scores for his wife, filmmaker Janice Findley. Hansen serves as Managing Editor for Freehand Music Publishing and is co-founder of the Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet.
• Paul Hansen
• Paul Hansen has been active for thirty years as one of the top percussionists in Seattle’s music and theater circles, having performed with popular talents such as Mr. Rogers, Quincy Jones, Johnny Mathis, and Burt Bacharach. As a concert musician he performs regularly with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, and Auburn Symphony. His Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra was premiered by the Northwest Sinfonietta with Paul as soloist in 2002. He has been a mainstay in Seattle’s top pit orchestras at the Paramount and 5th Avenue theaters with over 70 musicals to his credit. He has also composed film scores for his wife, filmmaker Janice Findley. Hansen serves as Managing Editor for Freehand Music Publishing and is co-founder of the Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet.
• Matthew Kocmieroski
• Matthew Kocmieroski, Drums Along the Pacific festival curator, is principal percussionist with the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra. He regularly performs with the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, and the Auburn Symphony, and is on the faculty of the Cornish College of the Arts. He is the President of the International Guild of Symphony, Opera and Ballet Musicians. In the field of chamber music, he served for ten years as Artistic Director and percussionist of the New Performance Group, and was a founding member of Taneko and the Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet. In the Northwest he regularly performs with the Seattle Chamber Players, and has appeared at the Seattle Chamber Music Society festivals, Icicle Creek Music Festival, Marrowstone Summer Music Festival, Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival, Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, Seattle International Chamber Music Festival, and the Bellingham Festival of Music. Internationally he has appeared at the Bergen, Moscow Autumn, Moscow Cold Alternativa, St. Petersburg Sound Waves, Kiev MusicFest, and Warsaw Autumn festivals.
• Rob Tucker
• Rob Tucker performs frequently with the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, and Pacific Northwest Ballet orchestras. He has performed with the Bellingham Festival of Music, the Seattle Chamber Players, Seattle International Music Festival, and the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival. Tucker is a founding member of the Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet and Quake. He has recorded for New World Records, and can be heard on more than 100 movie sound tracks. He attended the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Southern California, and currently teaches percussion at Western Washington University.
• Seattle Chamber Players
• Hailed for daring and intelligent programming, uncompromising artistry, and spirited performances, the Seattle Chamber Players (SCP) enjoys a growing international reputation. For nineteen years, SCP has been passionately dedicated to introducing rarely performed and previously unheard contemporary chamber music of the highest quality to audiences worldwide. SCP’s four international Icebreaker festivals—New Voices from Russia (2002), Baltic Voices (2004), The Caucasus (2006), and The American Future (2008)—brought dozens of international guests to Seattle and received multiple favorable reviews. The ensemble’s work has been recognized with the First Prize ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming (2007).
  
  The ensemble has made multiple appearances in Eastern and Northern Europe, including performances at the Cold Alternativa and Moscow Autumn festivals in Moscow, the St. Petersburg Sound Waves festival, and in concert in Talinn, Riga Vilnius, Turin and Copenhagen. It has played at the Warsaw Autumn festival in 2005 and 2008, and at festivals in Kiev, San José, Costa Rica, and Beijing, where in May 2008, the ensemble opened the Beijing Modern Festival. SCP has been ensemble-in-residence at Cornish College of the Arts four times. In November 2008, SCP was in residence at the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, California.
  
  The ensemble’s first CD, Otis Spann: Music of Wayne Horvitz, is available on the Periplum label, and Reza Vali’s Folksongs (Set No. 15) is available on Albany Records. SCP also appears on recordings of works by Elmir Mirzoev, Nikolai Korndorf, Vladimir Nikolaev, Pavel Karmanov, and others. Recordings of music by Henry Brant and from the Baltic countries are in preparation.
• Laura DeLuca
• Laura DeLuca, clarinet, joined the Seattle Symphony in 1986, and is a co-founding member of SCP. She has appeared as soloist in Seattle Symphony performances of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto and Robert Starer’s Rikudim (Dances) movement from his concerto Kli Zemer. DeLuca has performed extensively on dozens of recordings including more than 70 compact discs with the Seattle Symphony. She is also featured on many movie sound tracks, including the solo clarinet work on the Academy Award–winning feature-length documentaries The Long Way Home and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. Other chamber music activities have included a filmscore premiere by Wayne Horvitz, performances in Portugal with the Moscow Piano Quartet, and Seattle-area appearances in Music of Remembrance, Icicle Creek Festival and Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival.
  
  DeLuca received her formal training at Northwestern University where she studied with the celebrated Robert Marcellus. A committed teacher, she has taught at University of Puget Sound, Marrowstone Summer Music Festival, and Midsummer Musical Retreat.
• Mikhail Shmidt
• Mikhail Shmidt, violin, was born in Moscow, Russia. He began his musical education at the age of five, and at fourteen became the winner of the International Chamber Music Competition “Concertino Prague.” He graduated cum laude from Gnessin Institute of Music in 1987. His major teachers were Halida Akhtiamova and Valentin Berlinsky of the celebrated Borodin Quartet. One of the highlights of Shmidt’s Russian career was collaborating with Alfred Schnittke, one of the greatest composers of our time.
  
  Since immigrating to the United States in 1989, Mikhail Shmidt has established himself as a leading chamber musician. He was a founding member of the Bridge Ensemble, which recorded and toured successfully in the United States and Europe. As a guest violinist of the Moscow Piano Quartet, he tours Europe annually. Among the highlights of Shmidt’s chamber music activities are his collaborations with such diverse and distinguished composers and musicians as Steve Reich, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Giya Kancheli, Paul Schoenfield, Dmitri Sitkovetsky, Vadim Repin, and many others. Shmidt has recorded on Melodia, Delos, ECM, Tzadik, Six Degrees, and Innova labels.
• David Sabee
• David Sabee, cello, began his studies at age five as a pianist. His cello studies began at age seventeen with Johan Lingeman, former solo cellist of the Concertgebouw Orkest, and continued with Paul Olefsky, a dynamic pupil of Feuerman, Piatigorsky, and Casals. After three years as principal cellist of the Austin Symphony, Sabee moved to New York to join the cello studio of Harvey Shapiro. While in New York, he joined the American Composers Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies, performing world premieres of works by composers ranging from Ralph Shapey and David Del Tredici to Laurie Anderson and Keith Jarrett. A founding member of the Naumburg finalist Tafelmusik, he was appointed by Lukas Foss to the Milwaukee Symphony. He has been a member of the Seattle Symphony since 1987.
  
  As the founder of Seattlemusic, a music production and recording company, Sabee has produced the sound track recording sessions of hundreds of motion pictures. He collaborated with composer Gustavo Santaolalla and director Ang Lee on the score to Brokeback Mountain, winner of the Golden Lion (Venice Film Festival), several Golden Globes, and three Oscars including Best Original Score.
• Paul Taub
• Paul Taub, flute and Drums Along the Pacific festival curator, has been a leading performer of chamber and contemporary music in the Northwest since his arrival in Seattle in 1979. Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts, Taub was trained at Rutgers University and the California Institute of the Arts; his teachers include Marcel Moyse, Samuel Baron, Michel Debost, and Robert Aitken. He is a founding member and Executive Director of the Seattle Chamber Players.
  
  Taub is also an active soloist and recitalist, with extensive work in American, Soviet/Russian, and international contemporary repertoire. He has appeared in venues throughout the U.S. Northwest and Southeast, Western Canada, Southern France, Greece, Costa Rica, and Russia, Ukraine, and Estonia. He has given world and U.S. premieres of music by Henry Brant, John Cage, George Crumb, Janice Giteck, Sofia Gubaidulina, Toru Takemitsu, Peteris Vasks, and many others. He has a solo CD on Periplum of twelve commissioned works, and has also recorded for New Albion, New World, Mode, and CRI. He is a member of the boards of directors of Chamber Music America and the National Flute Association.
• Dr. Elena Dubinets
• Dr. Elena Dubinets, Artistic Advisor, received her MA (1993) and PhD (1996) in music history and theory from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Russia, and soon after that moved to the United States. She is currently Director of Artistic Administration of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Advisor for the Seattle Chamber Players.
  
  Dubinets is the author of two books: Signs of Sounds: Contemporary Music Notation (Kiev, Ukraine, 1999) and, on American experimental music, Made in the USA: Music Is What Sounds Around (Moscow, Russia, 2006). She has also published hundreds of articles and several translations, including a Russian edition of Philip Kotler and Joanne Scheff Bernstein’s Standing Room Only: Strategies for Marketing in the Performing Arts. She is currently working on her third book, Beautiful Land, and Life Is Different Here, about the composers of the contemporary Russian diaspora. Dubinets is involved in promoting artistic exchanges between the European and American new music communities and has co-produced several festivals of European music in the United States and of American music in Europe and Latin America.
• Stephen Drury, piano
• Stephen Drury, piano, named 1989 Musician of the Year by the Boston Globe, has concertized throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today. He has given solo performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., at New York’s Symphony Space, and from Arkansas to California to Hong Kong to Paris.
  
  A champion of twentieth-century music, Drury’s performances have received the highest critical acclaim. He has appeared at the MusikTriennale Köln in Germany, the Subtropics Festival in Miami, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, and the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, as well as at Roulette and the Knitting Factory in New York. Drury has commissioned new works for solo piano from John Cage, John Zorn, Terry Riley, and Chinary Ung. Drury tours frequently with the John Zorn Ensemble, performing in Paris, New York, London, Madrid, Vienna, Brussels, and Cologne, and has conducted Zorn’s music in Bologna, Boston, and San Jose (Costa Rica).
  
  Drury has performed or recorded with the American Composers Orchestra, the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Radio Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Boston Philharmonic, the Boston Pops, the Springfield (Massachusetts) and Portland (Maine) symphony orchestras, and the Romanian National Symphony. In 1999 he appeared onstage with choreographer Merce Cunningham and Mikhail Baryshnikov as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.
  
  Drury is Artistic Director of the Callithumpian Consort, and he created and directs the Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance at New England Conservatory. He has recorded the music of John Cage, Elliott Carter, Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Colin McPhee, John Zorn, and Frederic Rzewski, as well as works of Liszt and Beethoven, for Mode, New Albion, Catalyst, Tzadik, MusicMasters, and Neuma. He teaches at New England Conservatory in Boston.
• John Duykers, tenor
• John Duykers, tenor, made his professional operatic debut with Seattle Opera in 1966. Since then he has appeared with many of the leading opera companies of the world including The Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Netherlands Opera, the Grand Theatre of Geneva, Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, Frankfurt Opera, Opera de Marseille, Canadian Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Los Angeles Opera, San Diego Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia.
  
  He is well known for his performances of contemporary music, having sung in 96 contemporary operas including 61 world premieres. Among these, in 1987 he created the role of Mao Tse Tung in John Adams’ Nixon in China, premiered with Houston Grand Opera, and has performed it throughout the world. Nixon in China won an Emmy for the PBS “Great Performances” telecast, and a Grammy for the Nonesuch recording.
  
  Philip Glass has written three roles for Duykers, including The Visitor (In the Penal Colony) and the Older Galileo in Galileo Galilei (by Philip Glass and Mary Zimmerman) at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and on the Next Wave Series at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). Duykers recently performed The Narrator in the premiere of Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar with the Ensemble Paralelle at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco.
  
  Independently produced new works include The Tyrant by Paul Dresher and Jim Lewis, with the Seattle Chamber Players, the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, and Cleveland Opera, and Mordake, a new solo work written for Duykers by Erling Wold, which premiered in 2008 at the San Francisco International Arts Festival.
  
  Recordings include Chairman Mao in John Adams’ Nixon in China, Callin’ Home Coyote by Janice Giteck, Perilous Chapel and Rapunzel by Lou Harrison, and several works by Paul Dresher.
• Valerie Muzzolini, harp
• Valerie Muzzolini has held the position of Principal Harp of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra since the age of twenty-three. In demand both nationally and internationally, she has performed as guest Principal Harp of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France and the Nice Philharmonic, and has also appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra. As soloist, she has performed with the Seattle Symphony, the Nice Philharmonic, and the Vancouver Symphony. Muzzolini Gordon has performed at prestigious festivals worldwide, including Tanglewood and Verbier (Switzerland), and has played under the batons of such renowned conductors as Sir Simon Rattle, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Kurt Masur, Seiji Ozawa, and Bernard Haitink. An active chamber musician and avid proponent of new music, she performs regularly with the Seattle Chamber Players, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, and Music of Remembrance.
• Roger Nelson, celesta
• Roger Nelson has been a member of the Cornish faculty since 1979, and performs frequently as a pianist and conductor. He holds a BA degree from Pomona College and an MM in choral conducting from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His early teachers were Adolph Baller and John Steele Ritter.
• Jarrad Powell, percussion
• Jarrad Powell is a composer, performer, teacher, and Drums Along the Pacific festival curator,. His compositions have been performed and broadcast internationally and include pieces for voice, gamelan, and various Western and non-Western instruments; electroacoustic music; and music for theater, dance, and experimental film. His work also includes numerous cross-cultural collaborations, particularly with Indonesian artists, including the innovative theater pieces Visible Religion and Kali. He is Music Director and composer for Scott/Powell Performance, a contemporary dance company formed in 1994 with noted choreographer Mary Sheldon Scott. Their most recent piece, Geography, was a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project. Recent projects also include music for three innovative short films of Robert Campbell, Tilt, Eidolon and Delta of C16H22O4. Powell’s work has been commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Performing Arts Chicago, On the Boards, Music in Motion, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents, and the National Performance Network. He has received grants and awards from the NEA, Arts International, Rockefeller Foundation, Paul Allen Family Foundation, 4Culture/King County, The Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs/Seattle, Artist Trust Foundation, and Creative Capital Foundation. His most recent recordings, Natural Selection and Stonehouse Songs, are available from Present Sounds Recordings. He is currently Professor in the Music Department at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.