Four Yale Opera singers join Waterbury Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
Four singers from Yale Opera will be the featured soloists in the Waterbury Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony this Sunday, November 22 at 3:00 pm. The Waterbury Symphony will present an all-Beethoven program in the Fine Arts Center at Naugatuck Valley Community College (NVCC). Maestro Leif Bjaland, WSO Music Director and Conductor who was previously the director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, will lead the orchestra in the composer’s first and last symphonies.
The Waterbury Symphony Orchestra will be joined by the NVCC College Choir, under the direction of Dr. Richard Gard, with guest soloists Amanda Hall, soprano; Gala El Hadidi, mezzo-soprano; Michael Paul Krubitzer, tenor; and Tyler Simpson, baritone. The program opens with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and is followed by the Symphony No. 9, op. 21 in C major.
A free pre-concert lecture will be held at 2:10 in the Mainstage Theater at NVCC. The Waterbury Symphony Orchestra invites attendees to a post-concert reception (tickets $20) where they can meet Maestro Bjaland, NVCC College Choir conductor, Richard Gard, and the guest soloists. For more information, please contact the WSO office at 203 574-4283 or visit www.waterburysymphony.org.
Tokyo String Quartet to perform Haydn, Beethoven, and Bartok
The Tokyo String Quartet, one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles, will perform three powerhouse works on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 8 pm. Artists in residence at the Yale School of Music for the past 33 years, the quartet appears in recital every semester. Their performance this October will open with Haydn’s Quartet in D major, Op. 76, No. 5, and will continue with Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet in F minor, Op. 95. The evening will conclude with Bartók’s Quartet No. 6, the last work Bartók wrote in his native Hungary before emigrating to the United States in 1939.
The Tokyo Quartet’s performance, which is presented by the Chamber Music Society at Yale, will take place on Tuesday, October 20 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Hall (470 College Street, New Haven). The members of the Tokyo String Quartet are Martin Beaver and Kikuei Ikeda, violins; Kazuhide Isomura, viola; and Clive Greensmith, cello. (more…)
Mezzo-soprano Janna Baty makes faculty artist recital debut
Mezzo-soprano Janna Baty, now in her second year on the faculty of the Yale School of Music, will perform a recital on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Hall. In her first appearance on the Faculty Artist Series, Baty and pianist Karl Paulnack will perform Beethoven’s An die Ferne Geliebte and selected songs from the Spanish composer Fernando Obradors, as well as Apparition, a piece by George Crumb for soprano and amplified piano. In addition, Baty and Paulnack will be joined by flutist Laura Gilbert and cellist Jacques Wood for Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses.
Admission to the concert is free. For more information on the Faculty Artist Series and other performances at the Yale School of Music, visit music.yale.edu or call 203 432-4158.
About the artist
Janna Baty, mezzo-soprano, has appeared recently with the Hamburgische Staatsoper, the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Eugene Opera, Opera North, and Boston Lyric Opera. She appears regularly with the contemporary ensembles Collage New Music, Auros Group for New Music, and Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom she recorded a disc for Naxos of works by Reza Vali. Ms. Baty was winner of the XXI International Music Competition “Dr. Luis Sigall” in Chile. She has sung under Seiji Ozawa, Michel Plasson, Carl Davis, Robert Spano, and Steuart Bedford. Festival appearances include Aldeburgh and Britten (England), Semanas Musicales de Frutillar (Chile), and Tanglewood and Norfolk (U.S.). As recitalist and chamber musician, she has performed in Europe, the U.S., and South America with such distinguished musicians as violist Nobuko Imai, pianists Claude Frank and Peter Frankl, and guitarist Stephen Marchionda. Ms. Baty has worked with composers Bernard Rands, Sydney Hodkinson, Peter Child, Christopher Lyndon Gee, Fred Lerdahl, Yehudi Wyner, and John Harbison, in performances of their music. An alumna of Oberlin College and the Yale School of Music, she joined the Yale faculty in 2008.
Malcolm Bilson inaugurates new fortepiano at YSM
Recital will feature music of Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms
Malcolm Bilson, acclaimed for his pioneering work in the period-instrument movement, will give the inaugural recital on the Yale School of Music’s new fortepiano on Tuesday, February 24 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. The program, which is part of the Horowitz Piano Series, will include Schubert’s Impromptu in F minor; Beethoven’s Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 31, no. 3; Schumann’s Forest Scenes; and selections from Brahms’s Opp. 76, 118, and 119. Tickets are $10 to $18, students $5. The fortepiano was built by R.J. Regier, whose Maine workshop designs and crafts fortepianos and harpsichords based on historical examples.
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Yale School of Music website at music.yale.edu or call 203 432-4158. Box office hours are Monday–Friday, 9 am to 5 pm, in the Sprague Hall lobby.
Malcolm Bilson has been at the forefront of the period-instrument movement for over thirty years. A member of the Cornell Music Department since 1968, he began his pioneering activity in the early 1970s as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late 18th- and early 19th-century pianos. Since then he has contributed to the restoration of the fortepiano to the concert stage and to fresh recordings of the “mainstream” repertory. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bard College and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mr. Bilson has recorded three cycles of Mozart piano works: the piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, the piano-violin sonatas with Sergiu Luca, and the solo piano sonatas. His traversal of the Schubert piano sonatas was completed in 2003, and in 2005 a single CD of Haydn sonatas appeared on the Claves label. In the fall of 1994 Bilson and six of his former artist-pupils presented Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, the first time that these works had been given as a cycle on period instruments. In addition to his activities at Cornell, Professor Bilson is adjunct professor at the Eastman School of Music. He gives annual summer fortepiano workshops in the United States and Europe, as well as master classes and lectures around the world.
Live from Sprague Hall: Faculty Performers Play Beethoven Quintet
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Five stellar faculty from the Yale School of Music – Stephen Taylor, oboe; David Shifrin, clarinet; Frank Morelli, bassoon; William Purvis, horn; and Peter Frankl, piano – perform the Andante cantabile movement from Beethoven’s quintet for winds and piano. The second movement is the high point of this youthful work, which was composed in 1796 with the same key and scoring as Mozart’s mature quintet, K. 452, written twelve years earlier.
January 18, 2008
Horowitz Piano Series
Beethoven: Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat, Op. 16
II. Andante antabile
Stephen Taylor, oboe
David Shifrin, clarinet
Frank Morelli, bassoon
William Purvis, horn
Peter Frankl, piano
