CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Dawn Upshaw
Stephen Prutsman

Zankel Hall
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Dawn Upshaw, Soprano
Evan Hughes, Bass-Baritone
Stephen Prutsman, Conductor and Pianist
Michael Ward-Bergeman, Hyper-accordion

Ensemble ACJW
Elizabeth Janzen, Flute
Carol McGonnell, Clarinet
Eric Reed, Horn
Nathan Botts, Trumpet
Anna Elashvili, Violin
Owen Dalby, Violin
Meena Bhasin, Viola
Claire Bryant, Cello
Kristoffer Saebo, Bass
Jared Soldiviero, Percussion

DOWLAND Songs (arr. Stephen Prutsman)
·· "Come again, sweet love doth now invite"
·· "Can she excuse my wrongs"
·· "Weep you no more, sad fountains"
·· "Now, O now I needs must part"
OSVALDO GOLIJOV "Lúa Descolorida"
MICHAEL WARD-BERGEMAN Treny (World Premiere)
TRAD. Folk Songs and American Songs (announced from the stage)
·· RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER "White Moon"
·· STEPHEN FOSTER "Beautiful Child of Song"
·· BILL CROFUT "A Man of Words"

DAVID BRUCE Piosenki

This concert and the Pure Voice series are sponsored by the Jean & Jula Goldwurm Memorial Foundation in memory of Jula Goldwurm.

Program Notes:

JOHN DOWLAND
(ca 1563–1626) (arr. Stephen Prutsman)
Songs: Come again, sweet love doth now invite; Can she excuse my wrongs; Weep you no more, sad fountains; Now, O now I needs must part

John Dowland was one of the greatest lutenists of his time, and one of England’s greatest composers of song. Though many wonderful songs predate Dowland, it is not an overstatement to call him the earliest songwriter whose work remains known and loved today, beyond the realm of specialists.

Dowland’s songs, for which he wrote both words and accompaniment for lute, are both exquisite in their melodic grace and rich in harmonic expression. A considerable percentage of his work expresses sentiments of sadness, loss, tears, and farewells, possibly a reflection of his own psychic personality. His motto, “semper Dowland, semper dolens” (always Dowland, always lamenting), seems to be more than play on words—he probably pronounced the “ow” in his name as “oh.” In any case, his sorrowful songs predominate in both performance and his own arrangements for solo lute or instrumental accompaniment. Tonight, Dowland’s songs are arranged with piano accompaniment, a setting most often found in a modern song recital.

—Steven Ledbetter

OSVALDO GOLIJOV
(b. 1960)
Lúa Descolorida
Osvaldo Golijov is the heir to both the vibrant musical traditions of his native Argentina and the Russian-Jewish and Romanian-Jewish musical culture of his parents and grandparents—a heritage he has blended with academic training in 20th-century musical techniques. Not surprisingly, as a composer, Golijov has carved out an unprecedented position in the contemporary musical world. He has been open to ideas and gestures from many different traditions, finding in them approaches that touch basic human feelings. Golijov’s earliest works retained the tensions and dissonances that were common among his teachers. More recently, he has pursued what he calls the “roots and emanations of different musics,” drawing upon sound imagery from his own wide-ranging background.

Golijov first came to wide attention through his connection with the Kronos Quartet, who recommended that Dawn Upshaw commission a song from him. The result was their first collaboration, Three Songs (of which “Lúa Descolorida” is the second) for voice and piano in 1999, later expanded for chamber orchestra.

The text for “Lúa Descolorida” comes from a poem, written in the language of the Spanish region of Galicia, by Spanish poet García Lorca’s beloved Rosalia de Castro. Golijov calls the song “a constellation of clearly defined symbols that affirm contradictory things at the same time,” explaining that it is “at once a slow-motion ride in a cosmic horse, an homage to Couperin’s melismas in his Lessons of Tenebrae, and velvet bells coming from three different churches.”

Later, Golijov realized that the “Lúa Descolorida”’s mood of profound sadness, regret, and shame would fit perfectly in his “Passion According to St. Mark” for Peter response’s of thrice denying his discipleship of Jesus. He thus created an orchestral setting of the piece for strings, and inserted it into the full score of the Passion; the piece became an expressive capstone of that vivid and colorful score.

—Steven Ledbetter

MICHAEL WARD-BERGEMAN
(b. 1970)
Treny (Laments)
Jan Kochanowski lost his beloved young daughter Orszula in 1579. His loss moved him to create Treny, one of the most important works of early Polish literature. The work went against literary conventions of the time; however, it is also strongly rooted in literary traditions that stretch back to Ancient Greece.

Treny is full of despair and darkness. The poem oscillates between recollections of Orszula and Jan’s helplessness in losing her daughter. Jan struggles with the seeming pointlessness of existence, the meaninglessness of life, the quest for wisdom, and suffering. His reflections are so intense that it is easy to overlook the fact that there is something beyond all of his deep, heartfelt cries into the darkness: the love of his nightingale daughter, and her song.

I’ve had the special privilege of performing with Dawn Upshaw many times over the past few years as accordionist for composer Osvaldo Golijov’s work Ayre, which was written expressly for her. I never imagined that I would be in a position to compose a work for her. I met composer David Bruce at a Carnegie Hall Professional Training Workshop for young composers in 2007. We hit it off and exchanged a lot of information, most of it to do with folk music from around the world.

Toward the end of the workshop, David gave me his copy of Kochanowski’s Treny (Laments). I was inspired by the poem, and felt that I would do something musically with it. I had no idea what this project would be until a few weeks later, when I received a call from Mark Ludwig, director of the Terezín Chamber Music Foundation, who offered me a commission for Dawn Upshaw.

For me, this commission has been about continuing the search for the truth of the human spirit, and sharing these discoveries through music. I believe it is through life’s challenges that the truth about ourselves can be learned. We are all too aware of the atrocities of war, concentration camps, and death and suffering. The music and art created in the Terezín camp points us to a truth about ourselves that we can not deny—the truth that we are an inherently creative people, able to create beauty in the least beautiful situations, able to reap inspiring, healing, and transforming ideas from deep within ourselves, despite impossible circumstances. I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to be both a witness and participant in this journey along with my friend Dawn Upshaw, the other musicians performing the work, Mark Ludwig and the Terezín Chamber Music Foundation, and—most importantly—you, the listener.

I hope that my work reflects and resonates with our collective journey, and our journeys as individuals. There is suffering and loss in life, but these come to a definite end.

Beauty and Love are eternal.

—Michael Ward-Bergeman

DAVID BRUCE
(b. 1970)
Piosenki
British-American composer David Bruce studied with George Benjamin and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. He has been actively involved in opera, having composed two mini-operas and the full-length chamber opera Push! (2006), which attracted wide attention. He met Michael Ward-Bergeman in November 2007, and shared with the composer his enthusiasm for folk music from all over the world. Bruce was particularly struck by the sound of the lagerphone, a percussion instrument derived from English folk dancing called “morris dancing,” in which the lagerphone is used rather like a sword. Bruce made his own lagerphone (roughly twice the length of the morris dance instrument, played mostly by pounding it into the floor) as one of the percussion instruments for Piosenki.

“Piosenki” is a Polish word for songs, implying popular music, as opposed to piesn, or art song. In his Piosenki, Bruce has chosen a series of poems filled with images of childhood from the Polish poet Julian Tuwim, whose texts range from “playground rhymes” to a poem showing the four seasons as a cause of “consternation and misery.” Bruce notes that he “tried to select poems that would reflect this range of Tuwim’s rich, complex, and unpatronizing work,” interspersing it with four playground chants and closing off the whole “in celebratory fashion” with a playful rhyme. Piosenki is not “children’s music,” but it is a lively and varied picture of childhood to be enjoyed by all ages.
The musical language of Piosenki reflects folk traditions from all over Eastern Europe. Bruce’s conversations with Ward-Bergeman produced unusual folk instruments in some cases; “Śmierdziel” (“Smelly”), for instance, uses three different instruments in which the player produces sounds of flatulence by rubbing the fingers along a string. The lagerphone that Bruce made himself appears in the final, celebratory piece.

—Steven Ledbetter

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.

© 2008 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Dawn Upshaw, Soprano
Joining rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming communicative power of music, Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today.

Her acclaimed performances on the opera stage comprise the great Mozart roles (Pamina, Ilia, Susanna, Despina) as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Messiaen. From Salzburg, Paris, and Glyndebourne to the Metropolitan Opera, where she began her career in 1984 and has since made nearly 300 appearances, Dawn Upshaw has also championed numerous new works created for her, including John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby; Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin and La Passion de Simone; John Adams’s nativity oratorio El Nino; and Osvaldo Golijov’s chamber opera Ainadamar and song cycle Ayre.

It says much about Dawn Upshaw’s sensibilities as an artist and colleague that she is a favored partner of many leading musicians, including Richard Goode, the Kronos Quartet, James Levine, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, with whom she appears in a season opening with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Hall in October. Ms. Upshaw also joined Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Bernstein program in San Francisco and at Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala, which aired on PBS in October. Ms. Upshaw premieres new music this season by Maria Schneider (commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, where she is an Artist Partner), as well as tonight’s world premiere of Michael Ward-Bergeman’s Treny. In November, she returns to Lincoln Center with violinist Geoff Nuttall in performances of György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments staged by Peter Sellars; in December, she returns to Carnegie Hall for a concert version of Golijov’s Ainadamar with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

In 2007, Ms. Upshaw was named a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, and was the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year “genius grant.” In 2008, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a four-time Grammy Award winner featured on more than 50 recordings, including the million-selling Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Górecki. Ms. Upshaw is artistic director of the vocal arts program at Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Evan Hughes, Bass-Baritone
Bass-baritone Evan Hughes, has garnered attention for his work in recital and on the operatic stage. After winning the grand prize in the Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition, Hughes went on to give his New York City recital debut as a part of the foundation’s On Wings of Song series, broadcast on WQXR. In January 2008, he made his Carnegie Hall debut in The Song Continues … Annual Recital. This fall, in addition to tonight’s collaboration with Dawn Upshaw and Ensemble ACJW, Hughes will perform Piosenki alongside Ms. Upshaw with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

At the Tanglewood Music Festival, Hughes performed Elliot Carter’s Syringa under the baton of Stefan Asbury, honoring Carter’s 100th birthday. Also at Tanglewood, he collaborated with the Mark Morris Dance Group singing Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzer.

Currently studying at The Curtis Institute of Music, Evan will sing several leading roles in The Curtis Opera Theater’s 2008–2009 season, including the title role in Don Giovanni under the baton of Ari Pelto, and Lord Sidney in Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims directed by Chas Rader-Shieber. In the 2007–2008 season, Evan sang the title role in Le Nozze di Figaro, King Rene in Iolante, and José Tripaldi in the Philadelphia premier of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar.

Hughes made his European recital debut in Denmark in collaboration with pianist Mikael Eliasen as a part of the Sommermusik series. He performed several other European recitals in 2008 with the William Walton Foundation at La Mortella in Ischia, Italy, and with the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.

Stephen Prutsman, Conductor and Pianist
Moving easily from classical and jazz to world music styles, pianist, composer and conductor Stephen Prutsman continues to explore and seek common ground in the music of all cultures and languages. Prutsman first began playing the piano by ear before moving on to more formal music studies. In his teenage years and early 20s, he was the keyboard player for several art rock groups, worked locally as a jazz pianist, and was the music arranger for a nationally syndicated televangelist program.

In the early 1990s, Prutsman was a medal winner at the Tchaikovsky and Queen Elisabeth Piano Competitions; from 2004–2007, he was Artistic Partner with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. As a composer, Prutsman has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on over 40 arrangements. He has also composed and arranged pieces for such artists as Leon Fleisher (his former teacher), Dawn Upshaw, the St. Lawrence Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma, Spoleto USA, and the Silk Road Project. Outside of the classical music world, Prutsman has collaborated with Tom Waits, Joshua Redman, Rokia Traoré, and Asha Bhosle.

In 2007, Stephen was appointed associate artistic director of the Cartagena International Festival of Music in Colombia. In years past, his dedication to the creation of new musical environments led him to create music festivals in such far-flung places as the island of Guam and the border town of El Paso. He regularly curates and hosts chamber music programs with the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, and often performs with his trio Nobilis in diverse locations throughout the developing world.

Michael Ward-Bergeman, Hyper-accordion
Michael Ward-Bergeman is a passionate performer, songwriter, and composer. His sensitive and creative approach to music making has led to performances and collaborations with world-class musicians and composers from across a wide range of genres. Ward-Bergeman aims to remain faithful to the spirit that unites many of the world’s richest music traditions while continuing to develop his own voice. On the accordion, he has created innovative performance techniques that work in harmony with his inspired use of 21st-century music technology. His vision has reached its culmination in his creation of the hyper-accordion, an acoustic accordion with extended range and expressive capabilities.

Ward-Bergeman has enjoyed a close friendship and working relationship with composer Osvaldo Golijov over the past decade. His work with the hyper-accordion has been featured in many of Golijov’s compositions, including the Grammy Award–nominated Ayre, written for soprano Dawn Upshaw; Tekyah, written for BBC Two’s Holocaust: A Music Memorial Film from Auschwitz; Azul, a cello concerto written for Yo-Yo Ma; and pieces included on the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth. In April 2007, Ward-Bergeman premiered his composition Three Roads featuring vocalist Christina Courtin at Carnegie Hall.

Ward-Bergeman is a founding member of the American roots music trio Groanbox Boys. They have released three recordings and toured extensively throughout the UK, to much critical acclaim. In January 2009, the group will collaborate with composer David Bruce and New York City’s Metropolis Ensemble on a program to include an accordion concerto by Bruce for Ward-Bergeman, a new work for Freedom Boot and ensemble written by Ward-Bergeman, and a full set of original music by Groanbox Boys.

Ward-Bergeman is committed to sharing his music making with as wide an audience as possible. To this end, he has performed in pubs, bars, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, metro stations, village halls, churches, festivals, and concert venues, and on street corners throughout the world.

Ward-Bergeman is a graduate of Berklee College of Music and currently resides in London, UK.

For more information, visit mjwb.co.uk.

Ensemble ACJW
Ensemble ACJW is the performing arm 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. Ensemble ACJW performs at Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School in addition to bringing performances and educational events to the Saratoga Springs community through a partnership with Skidmore College. The Ensemble comes together in different sizes and configurations, having the opportunity to play intimate chamber music as well as larger conducted chamber orchestra works.

The Academy is a two-year fellowship that provides the finest post-graduate musicians with performance opportunities, advanced musical training, intensive teaching instruction and experience, and the skills and values necessary for careers that combine musical excellence with education, community engagement, and advocacy. The program reflects the belief that the artist of tomorrow will require both the ability to perform at the highest level and the capacity to give back to the community, inspiring the next generation of musicians and music lovers.

The Academy was launched in January 2007. The fellows in the program were selected because of their extraordinary level of musicianship, deep commitment to education and community engagement, and leadership qualities. Fellows are graduates of leading music schools including The Curtis Institute of Music, Eastman School of Music, The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College The New School for Music, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Stony Brook University, and Yale School of Music. Please visit acjw.org for more information about the program.

Elizabeth Janzen, Flute

Carol McGonnell, Clarinet

Eric Reed, Horn

Nathan Botts, Trumpet

Anna Elashvili, Violin

Owen Dalby, Violin

Meena Bhasin, Viola

Claire Bryant, Cello

Kristoffer Saebo, Bass

Jared Soldiviero, Percussion