CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ensemble ACJW
The Academy — A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute

Weill Recital Hall
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 7:00 PM

Ensemble ACJW
Erin Lesser, Flute
Winnie Lai, Oboe
Romie de Guise-Langlois, Clarinet
Seth Baer, Bassoon
Alana Vegter, Horn
Angelina Gadeliya, Piano
Andrew Beer, Violin
Joanna Marie Frankel, Violin
Joanna Kaczorowska, Violin
Brenton Caldwell, Viola
Leah Swann, Viola
Claire Bryant, Cello
Caitlin Sullivan, Cello

VILLA-LOBOS Quinteto em forma de chôros
PIAZZOLLA Las cuatro estaciones porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires)
TCHAIKOVSKY Souvenir de Florence for String Sextet, Op. 70

The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education — is made possible by a leadership gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, The Kovner Foundation, Martha and Bob Lipp, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Judith and Burton Resnick, Susan and Elihu Rose, and Mr. and Mrs. Lester S. Morse Jr., with additional support from the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, The Dana Foundation, Suki Sandler, Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari, Susan and Ed Forst, and The William Petschek Family.

Ensemble ACJW performances are supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Program Notes:

By Steven Ledbetter

HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS Quinteto em forma de chôros, for woodwind quintet
Born March 5, 1887, in Rio de Janeiro; died there November 17, 1959.

Composed in 1928 and revised the scoring in 1953 for standard woodwind quintet, the Quinteto em forma de chôros received its US premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on October 22, 1954, with the New Art Wind Quintet: Andrew Lolya, flute; Irving Neidich, clarinet; Melvin Kaplan, oboe; Tina Di Dario, bassoon; and Earl Chapin, French horn.

Brazilian-born Heitor Villa-Lobos was given cello lessons by his father, and later he attained a rare mastery of the guitar. But as a composer he was almost entirely self-taught. As a young man intended for the medical profession, he preferred to spend his days in the bohemian life of the street musician, developing the ability to improvise guitar accompaniments to the capricious modulations of the popular instrumental music known as the chôros. Between ages 18 and 25, he traveled extensively throughout the country studying the various types of Brazilian popular music, and noting its characteristic features. At first his music was scorned in his own land for its novelty, but in the 1920s it was taken up enthusiastically in Paris, where Villa-Lobos attracted wide interest in many circles of the avant-garde. Throughout his long life he continued to pour forth an unending stream of new works, almost all of them marked by a freshness of melodic line (often marked by Brazilian popular styles), a rhythmic vitality, and imaginative instrumental color.

Villa-Lobos’s works are voluminous and wide-ranging. By far his best-known pieces are some of the series of nine Bachianas brasileiras, in which he sought a consciously nationalistic style, one that would demonstrate his conviction that Brazilian folk music had, at heart, a fundamental affinity for the style of J. S. Bach, to whose music he was deeply attached. The Bachianas brasileiras were composed between 1930 and 1945, when Villa-Lobos was deeply involved in music education for the masses in his native Brazil. In the decade of the 1920s, though, when he was mostly centered in Paris, with frequent return visits to Brazil, he began to write his first really characteristic compositions, including 14 chamber works for various instrumental combinations that captured the elements of the chôros—exotic music in France. (Even so, by the time he arrived in Paris, he had already composed five symphonies, a violin concerto, an opera, and a ballet, as well as a whole series of orchestral tone poems and four string quartets!) It was in 1928 that he composed the Quintet in the Form of Chôros for a wind quintet with the unusual instrumentation of flute, oboe, clarinet, English horn, and bassoon. A quarter-century later he revised the work, substituting the French horn for the English horn, which meant that the piece could be performed by the standard woodwind quintet, guaranteeing many more performances.

The quintet is cast in a single rhapsodic movement alternating a slow tempo that starts darkly and introduces the instruments in brief solos, with a faster and crisper rhythmic activity. Melodic fragments that might be drawn from popular music and bright flourishes of what might be Brazilian bird calls create a kaleidoscopic effect.


ASTOR PIAZZOLLA Cuatro estaciones porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires)
Born March 11, 1921, in Mar del Plata, Argentina; died July 5, 1992, in Buenos Aires.

Composed in TK, the Cuatro estaciones porteñas received their first complete Carnegie Hall performance in Weill Recital Hall on June 11, 2006, with the Nahn Piano Trio: Chung-Eun (Tina) Choi, violin; Chung-Mee (Mia) Choi, cello; and Hyo-Won Kim, piano. The first performance at Carnegie Hall of any part of Cuatro estaciones porteñas took place in Weill Recital Hall on March 23, 1998, with guitarist Elena Papandreou, in an arrangement by Baltazar Benitez; “Primavera Porteña” was the movement performed.

In the United States the tango was a popular dance genre first introduced from Latin America by Vernon and Irene Castle in 1914 and then used for such popular songs as Sigmund Romberg’s “Softly As in a Morning Sunrise” (The New Moon, 1928). Just as American jazz developed in the yeasty mix of cultures in New Orleans, Argentine tango blends elements of European—Spanish, Jewish, German, and Italian—with New World elements. Tangos in America came to be associated in the popular mind with bordellos and lascivious activity, partly through the films of Rudolph Valentino, a favorite with female audiences in the 1920s for his sultry sensuality. By mid-century, tangos were parodied in Broadway shows (as in “Hernando’s Hideaway” from Pajama Game, 1954). But in Latin America, the tango went through no such decline. It was and has remained a popular form of music making, often approaching the level of light classics.

The Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, but recognized (with Boulanger’s enthusiastic support) that he had found his true voice in the tradition of tango. He was extremely popular in his homeland as a composer of dances and songs, but he also extended the concept of tango to a degree not recognized by many purists, who wished to stick with the old-fashioned tradition. Indeed, it would be fair to compare Piazzolla to a handful of other composers who succeeded in elevating popular dance genres to substantial works of art—Chopin, Johann Strauss the younger, and Scott Joplin. Each of these composers were able to reveal unsuspected riches in a “simple” dance form. The Chopin mazurkas, which evoke an astonishing range of expression from the most exuberant and extrovert to a dark intimacy, perhaps come closest to serving as an analogy to Piazzolla’s achievements with the tango.

The bulk of Piazzolla’s output is in the form of chamber music for a quintet featuring his own instrument, the bandoneon, a type of button accordion, or concertina, developed in Germany about 1840, which became the principal solo instrument connected with the tango in Argentina at the beginning of this century. Piazzolla himself was a leading exponent of the bandoneon, performing and recording frequently with the instrument. But he also composed in larger forms as well. Moreover, his work falls in a free-wheeling area between what we customarily think of as “classical” and “popular,” and it has invited arrangements—sometimes by Piazzolla himself, often by others—for many different kinds of scoring, for anything from guitar solo to full orchestra.

The Cuatro estaciones porteñas (the last word is an adjective referring to a “port city,” but in Argentine Spanish that means only Buenos Aires) cover a remarkable range of moods and sounds, tracing a kind of programmatic circuit of the seasons, beginning in the spring and progressing through to winter. These are not pieces intended for dancing, but rather for serious listening. The programmatic titles (“Buenos Aires spring,” and so on) are general enough to avoid suggesting any specific visual images. The result is purely abstract music, passionate, songful, dark, romantic, rhythmic—imbued with the spirit of everything connoted by the word “tango.”


Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, the district of Vyatka, Russian; died May 18, 1893, in St. Petersburg.

Composed in June and July 1890, Souvenir de Florence was first performed in St. Petersburg, privately on December 7 and publicly on December 10, 1890. In 1892 Tchaikovsky made some revisions, and that version was premiered in Moscow on December 15 of that year and performed at Carnegie Hall on January 13, 1893, with the strings of the New York Philharmonic Society conducted by Anton Seidl.

Scoring: 2 violins, 2 violas, and 2 cellos.

As early as June 1887 Tchaikovsky had made a start on a string sextet for the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society (which had requested a work the preceding October), but he gave it up after a few days. He was not to return to the medium until the early months of 1890 when, while living in Florence and deeply involved with his opera The Queen of Spades, he wrote down the melody that was to become the main theme of the slow movement. This fact alone (and no further programmatic connotation) motivated the title of the finished composition.

He finished the opera on June 20, and five days later he began serious work on the sextet. He was concerned about the medium, a new one for him, and particularly about the question as to whether he might not be conceiving music that demanded an orchestra and then reducing it to six strings. By the time he finished his sketch on July 12, his view of the piece had begun to improve. But he still worried about the scoring as he worked out the final details, which were completed by August 6. Neither the composer nor his closest friends were entirely happy with the third and fourth movements at a private performance in December. Tchaikovsky set it aside for a year then made major revisions to the last two movements and a small adjustment to the first movement, resulting in the form in which we know the piece.

The sextet is one of Tchaikovsky’s last multi-movement instrumental works (only the Sixth Symphony followed) and the last in which he retained the traditional patterns of abstract symphonic form. He worked out a splendidly detailed sonata-form exposition for the first movement, in which the transition grows out of a three-note figure that appears in the main theme and then continues under the surprising shy entrance of the second theme in the first violin. Although formal structure was always something of a struggle for Tchaikovsky, this exposition clearly demonstrates his hard-won mastery over the years.

The slow movement is among the most purely personal passages in Tchaikovsky’s output, and the one place in the score where his love of melodic lines laid out as a duet, intertwining, mutually complementary, comes to full flower. The third movement takes a melody of a Slavonic folkish cast and puts it through its paces, alternating two different versions with varied textures and accompaniments.

For the finale, Tchaikovsky offered another sonata-form movement based on a dancing theme of Slavonic imprint varied with two sections of vigorous contrapuntal development. In writing for the mostly German membership of the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society, Tchaikovsky knew that he would be expected to offer some display of his ability at counterpoint, and he obliged with these two passages, the second of which becomes a full-scale fugato leading to a wildly sonorous close.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Steven Ledbetter, musicologist and program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, writes and lectures widely on many aspects of classical music.

Ensemble ACJW
Featuring Fellows of The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall,
The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with
the New York City Department of Education

Erin Lesser, Flute
A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, flutist Erin Lesser has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout Canada, Europe, China, Brazil, and the US. She is actively involved in the contemporary music world, having worked with such composers as Pierre Boulez, George Crumb, Mario Davidovsky, Tristan Murail, and Philippe Hurel. She is a founding member of Argento Chamber Ensemble, Due East, and Scarborough Trio, and also performs with Wet Ink Ensemble and Trio St. Germain. Festival appearances include the Shanghai Electroacoustic Music Festival, Warsaw Crossdrumming Festival, Holland Festival, Ojai Music Festival (California), International Spectral Music Festival (Istanbul), and Sounds French Festival (New York City). Erin has been a guest artist with So Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, American Modern Ensemble, H. T. Chen Dance Company, and Mabou Mines Theatre, and has been heard on CBC Radio Canada and WQXR’s Young Artists’ Showcase. As part of her fellowship program, Erin teaches in Brooklyn, at Leadership 27.

Winnie Lai, Oboe
Winnie Lai maintains a varied chamber music and orchestra career in New York City, having performed with the IRIS Chamber Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Juilliard Orchestra, National Repertory Orchestra, and Pacific Music Festival Orchestra. She has also collaborated with the Aspen Festival Orchestra and the Music Academy of the West. As a chamber musician, Winnie has played with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Argento Chamber Ensemble, Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, and at the Marlboro Music Festival. Winnie joined the oboe faculty at the Idyllwild Arts Academy Summer Program from 1999 to 2003. She currently teaches oboe and piano privately and is on the woodwind faculty of the Chinese Youth Orchestra of New York. Born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Winnie received Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Elaine Douvas and John Mack. As part of her fellowship program, she teaches in the Bronx, at Luis Llorens Torres Children’s Academy.

Romie de Guise-Langlois, Clarinet
Born in Montreal, clarinetist Romie de Guise-Langlois received her Bachelor of Music degree from McGill University in Montreal and her Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, where she studied under David Shifrin. She recently completed Yale’s Artist Diploma Program, where she won first prize in the Woolsey Hall Competition and received the Nyfenger Memorial Prize for excellence in woodwind playing. In 2003, Romie was the first-prize winner of the McGill University Classical Concerto Competition and received the Canadian Broadcasting Company award. In 2006, she recorded a recital program for Radio-Canada’s Jeunes Artistes d’Espace Musique, and gave recitals and master classes in China. Romie has participated in many summer festivals, studying with André Moisan, Karl Leister, James Campbell, Robert Riseling, Fan Lei, Charles Neidich, and Franklin Cohen. She has appeared at the Banff Festival of Music, the Orford Arts Centre, and Marlboro Music Festival. As part of her fellowship program, Romie teaches in Brooklyn, at Lefferts Park School PS 112.

Seth Baer, Bassoon
Bassoonist, orchestral and chamber musician, and teacher, Seth Baer is a graduate of The Juilliard School. He graduated with honors from Princeton University while studying bassoon with Frank Morelli. At age 19, Seth won a substitute position with The Philadelphia Orchestra, which he maintains today. He has performed with top ensembles in the New York and Philadelphia regions, including the Pennsylvania Ballet, Opera Orchestra of New York, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. As a chamber musician, Seth has performed at Bargemusic and is a member of the Fountain Chamber Music Society, with which he maintains a residency at The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. He is a member of Solisti New York, the resident orchestra at the OK Mozart festival in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Seth has taught classes at Juilliard and the Mannes School of Music; he is on the faculty of Montclair State University and the summer Performing Arts Institute of Wyoming Seminary. As part of his fellowship program, Seth teaches in Brooklyn, at PS 116.

Alana Vegter, Horn
French hornist Alana Vegter is a recent graduate of The Juilliard School. A student of Julie Landsman, she was a recipient of the full-tuition Bidú Sayão Scholarship. While pursuing her undergraduate degree in Chicago at DePaul University, she was a regular member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the training orchestra of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Alana has concertized in music halls around the world, including Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Kitara in Sapporo, the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, L’Auditori in Barcelona, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. She has performed in both orchestral and chamber music settings with the Juilliard Orchestra and at the Spoleto Festival USA, Pacific Music Festival, the Verbier Festival, and the Aspen Music Festival with conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Valery Gergiev, James Conlon, Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Herbert Blomstedt. As part of her fellowship program, Alana teaches in Brooklyn, at Ditmas 62.

Angelina Gadeliya, Piano
Ukrainian pianist Angelina Gadeliya has performed throughout the US, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and Ukraine. She has appeared as soloist with the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony, Sinfonia of Colorado, Oberlin Chamber Orchestra, and South Dakota Symphony, and has performed in venues including Alice Tully Hall, Weill Recital Hall, the New-York Historical Society, Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, among others. For the past two summers she has been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. In June 2007 she was invited to perform as part of the Emerson String Quartet’s Beethoven Project in Weill Recital Hall. Angelina received her Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin, her Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School, and a Professional Studies Diploma from the Mannes College of Music. She is currently pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at SUNY–Stony Brook, where she studies with Gilbert Kalish. As part of her fellowship program, Angelina teaches in Brooklyn, at PS 130.

Andrew Beer, Violin
A native of Canada, violinist Andrew Beer has performed extensively throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, and his performances have been broadcast on NHK Japan, Vietnamese television, CBC Radio-Canada, Minnesota Public Radio, and WQXR in New York. As a soloist, he has performed with leading orchestras in Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Boston, and Catania (Sicily), and he has appeared in chamber concerts with members of the Emerson String Quartet as well as Midori. Humanitarian and outreach concerts have also played an important role in Andrew’s musical output, and through such endeavors he has been awarded a Congressional commendation and has performed for dignitaries including Queens Rania and Noor of Jordan, Princess Haifa al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and First Lady Laura Bush. He holds degrees from the Vancouver Academy of Music, Stony Brook University, and the New England Conservatory of Music, where he spent three years working with Donald Weilerstein. As part of his fellowship program, Andrew teaches in Brooklyn, at PS 282.

Joanna Marie Frankel, Violin
A 2007 recipient of a Career Grant from the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation, and of The Juilliard School’s prestigious William Schuman Prize for artistic excellence, violinist Joanna Frankel performs as guest soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician throughout the US and abroad. Highlights of Joanna’s upcoming seasons include solo recitals in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC; chamber music appearances at La Jolla’s SummerFest; and her European recital debut tour, which will include solo recital engagements at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw as well as at various additional distinguished concert halls across Eastern Europe. Joanna made her Carnegie Hall recital debut in January 2007. A recent scholarship graduate of The Juilliard School in New York, Ms. Frankel has collaborated with mentors Jascha Brodsky, CJ Chang, Robert Chen, Masao Kawasaki, Joseph Kalichstein, and Cho- Liang Lin. As part of her fellowship program, Joanna teaches in Brooklyn, at PS 167.

Joanna Kaczorowska, Violin
In recent seasons, violinist Joanna Kaczorowska has performed at Carnegie Hall with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble; with conductor David Robertson at Carnegie Hall; and with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Other recent engagements include appearances with Itzhak Perlman at the Music @ Menlo and Aspen Music festivals, a tour to Rome with Mr. Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony, and chamber music concerts throughout Europe and the US with members of the Emerson String Quartet. Joanna has given the world premiere of Albert Carbonell’s Verbum at the Festival for Contemporary Performance in New York and the New York premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Sueños de Chambi at Steinway Hall. Joanna is currently a visiting assistant professor of violin at SUNY–Stony Brook. She holds a doctorate from SUNY–Stony Brook and master’s degrees from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and the Poznań Music Academy. Her teachers included Philip Setzer, Pamela Frank, Charles Treger, and Jadwiga Kaliszewska. As part of her fellowship program, Joanna teaches in Queens at PS 63.

Brenton Caldwell, Viola
Since beginning viola studies at the age of 12, Brenton Caldwell has performed on three continents. He has appeared as a soloist with the Curtis and Banff chamber ensembles and the East Texas Symphony Orchestra. A dedicated chamber musician, Brenton has performed alongside artists such as Roberto Díaz, Gary Graffman, Ida Kavafian, Menahem Pressler, and Steven Tenenbom. Festival appearances include Banff, Verbier, Angel Fire, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, Tanglewood, and the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival. With an ardent devotion to education, Mr. Caldwell has participated in numerous outreach projects and served as teaching assistant to his longtime mentor Karen Tuttle. Other major influences include Susan Dubois, Jeffrey Irvine, Lynne Ramsey, Roberto Díaz, Misha Amory, and Pamela Frank. A native of Tyler, Texas, Brenton is a graduate of the Cleveland and Curtis institutes of music. As part of his fellowship program, Brenton teaches in Queens, at PS 62.

Leah Swann, Viola
An avid chamber musician, orchestral performer, writer, and organizer of interdisciplinary collaborations, violist Leah Swann recently completed her Graduate Diploma at the New England Conservatory, where she studied with and was Teaching Assistant for Martha Katz. In recent years, Leah has performed under James Levine, Bernard Haitink, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, frequently appearing as a substitute with the New World Symphony and as principal with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. As a recipient of an Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in 2006–07, Leah designed and taught music and violin classes in South Boston, completing over 200 hours of community service. Leah has worked with chamber musicians from the Cleveland, Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, Takács, and Ying quartets, and received a BA degree in English from Yale University, where she was awarded a fellowship to study primate behavior in Bali, Indonesia, and won Honorable Mention in the Atlantic Monthly’s Nonfiction Competition. Leah currently freelances for Strings magazine. As part of her fellowship program, Leah teaches in Queens, at Long Island City High School.

Claire Bryant, Cello
Cellist Claire Bryant has appeared as a soloist with the Kuopion Orchestieri of Finland, the National Symphony of Honduras in Tegucigalpa, the San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, and the South Carolina Philharmonic Orchestra. An active chamber musician, she has collaborated with Donald Weilerstein, the Peabody Trio, Roger Tapping, Maria Lambros, and members of the St. Lawrence, Orion, Mendelssohn, and Pacifica string quartets. She is a founding member of the TETRAS Quartet, a string quartet dedicated to the study, performance, and promotion of repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries. She is the founder, producer, and artistic director of the acclaimed chamber music series With Strings Attached, which has raised over $10,000 for arts education in her native state of South Carolina. Claire received her Bachelor of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and her Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School. She now serves as the Faculty Assistant for Bonnie Hampton at The Juilliard School in the College and Pre-College Divisions. As part of her fellowship program, Claire teaches in the Bronx at the Grove Hill School, PS 157X.

Caitlin Sullivan, Cello
Cellist Caitlin Sullivan is gaining widespread recognition as a solo, chamber, and orchestral musician. She is a winner of numerous prizes and awards, and has performed extensively with groups as diverse as the Argento New Music Project and Symphonic Eurythmy, and in venues ranging from Trinity Church to Jazz at Lincoln Center. As a winner of the 2006 Artists International Audition, Ms. Sullivan gave her Carnegie Hall recital debut last December. Committed to outreach and music education, Ms. Sullivan has been a Teaching Artist for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and a faculty member of the Belvoir Terrace summer performing arts camp in Lenox, Massachusetts; she has also taught in the Pre-College Division of The Juilliard School. Ms. Sullivan received her bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Steven Doane, and her master’s degree from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Timothy Eddy. As part of her fellowship program, Caitlin teaches in Manhattan, at PS 153.