January 23-26, 2010
Monday, January 25 – Gallery Nord
Tuesday, January 26 – Trinity University, Ruth Taylor Recital Hall

7:00 pm Pre-concert talk
7:30 pm Concert

Program:

1. Superstar Etude
2. Trio in Red
3. Still Movement with Hymn
4. Two Movements with Bells

Winner of the coveted 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and one of the youngest composers ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, AARON JAY KERNIS is among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation. With his "fearless originality [and] powerful voice" (The New York Times), each new Kernis work is eagerly awaited by audiences and musicians alike, and he is one of today's most frequently performed composers. His music, full of variety and dynamic energy, is rich in lyric beauty, poetic imagery, and brilliant instrumental color.

His works figure prominently on orchestral, chamber, and recital programs around the world. He has been commissioned by many of America‘s foremost performers, including sopranos Renee Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, violinists Joshua Bell, Pamela Frank, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and James Ehnes, pianist Christopher O'Riley and guitarist Sharon Isbin.

Commissions have also come from such musical institutions as the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra (for the inauguration of its new home at the Kimmel Center), Walt Disney Company, Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, San Francisco and Singapore Symphonies, Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center Great Performers Series, American Public Radio; Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, and Aspen Music Festival. His work was heard last season on programs of orchestras from Philadelphia to Amsterdam (Concertgebouw, Amsterdam Sinfonietta), Santa Barbara to France (Orchestra National De France), Detroit, Seattle, and throughout Europe. Upcoming and recent commissions include a new work for James Conlon’s first season as Ravinia Festival Music Director, a work for the BBC Proms, a song cycle for the opening of the new San Francisco Conservatory, for trumpet soloist Philip Smith with the New York Philharmonic and a consortium of American’s “top 10” college wind ensembles, the Seattle Symphony, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

One of America's most honored young composers, Mr. Kernis received the coveted Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition (2002) for the cello and orchestra version of "Colored Field," the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2 ("musica instrumentalis"), and Grammy Award nominations for both "Air" and his Second Symphony. He has also been awarded the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, an NEA grant, a Bearns Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, and three BMI Student Composer Awards. He has become an especially familiar and much-admired presence in Minnesota's Twin Cities; in September 1993, he was appointed Composer-in-Residence for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Public Radio, and American Composers Forum, and he returned in the fall of 1998 as New Music Advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra, a position he held till 2009. As an educator he is Director of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composer Institute, an extraordinary national for young composers, and teaches composition at Yale School of Music.

His works have been recorded on Nonesuch, New Albion, and Argo, Britian’s esteemed label, with which Mr. Kernis had an exclusive recording contract. Previously issued CDs include a widely acclaimed CD with Hugh Wolff conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Mr. Kernis's Symphony No. 2, "Invisible Mosaic III," and "musica celestis" was nominated for a Grammy, and won France's Diapason d'or Palmares for Best Contemporary Music Disc of the Year. Other recordings include a disc of his Pulitzer-Prize winning String Quartet No. 2 ("musica instrumentalis") and Musica Celestis, both on Arabesque with the Lark Quartet. Other releases on Argo featured works for violinists Pamela Frank and Joshua Bell with David Zinman and the Minnesota Orchestra, and his Double Concerto with guitarist Sharon Isbin, violinist Cho-Liang Lin and Hugh Wolff leading the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Originally released on Virgin/EMI was his cello version of "Colored Field" and "Air," created for the Norwegian virtuoso Truls Mork and the Minnesota Orchestra with Eiji Oue. Several of his important works recorded on Argo have been re-released by Phoenix, including his Second Symphony, “Musica Celestis” for String Orchestra, “Invisible Moasic III, and "Symphony in Waves," with Gerard Schwarz and the New York Chamber Symphony. Recent critically acclaimed recordings include a disc of his song cycles by soprano Susan Narucki on Koch, and the release of orchestral works by the Grant Park Festival Orchestra on Cedille Records.

Aaron Jay Kernis was born in Philadelphia on January 15, 1960. He began his musical studies on the violin; at age 12 he began teaching himself piano and, the following year, composition. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Manhattan and Yale Schools of Music, working with composers as diverse as John Adams, Charles Wuorinen and Jacob Druckman. Kernis first came to national attention in 1982 with the acclaimed premiere of his first orchestral work, "dream of the morning sky," by the New York Philharmonic at its Horizons Festival. Mr. Kernis's music is published by AJK Music, administered by Associated Music Publishers.

Program Notes
By Aaron Jay Kernis

Trio in Red
Sometimes while I’m in the process of preparing to compose - taking walks, actively thinking about what I’m about to begin – I see colors. At times the colors are associated with my perception of harmony and the feelings and sensations that specific chords evoke, at other times it’s the qualities of sound I imagine – from the “colors” of instruments, separately or in combination, to the personal qualities that musicians I’m writing for bring to their performances. In this case I was always conscious of writing for these instruments and these three great musicians who playing I know relatively well.

But writing this piece I saw various shades of red; in fact, the original title of the work was Seeing Red. This not only refers to the color but also to the colloquial expression that refers to being in a state of controlled rage (before it becomes uncontrollable).
The moods of the first movement, Orange Circle, Yellow Line, tend to reflect the more modest shades and moods that the combination of those two colors create. It is a mostly lyrical slow movement with occasional bursts of turbulence, but for the most part it is about a long musical and structural line. Red Whirl is a dance movement of unrelenting motion, a danse macabre, or dance of death influenced by the whirling of fast klezmer music.

The work was composed between July 2000 and March 2001.

Trio in Red was generously commissioned by the Wharton Center for the Performing Arts at Michigan State University for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, David Shifrin, Music Director.

Still Movement with Hymn
From 1990 to 1995 I composed a series of works which are personal responses to the brutality and unending loss of war. Some works from this period are my Second Symphony, Colored Field, Lament and Prayer and Still Movement with Hymn. During this time I read extensively about the conflict in Bosnia and this led me on to explore my Jewish heritage and relationship to the Holocaust.

Still Movement with Hymn is both a Kaddish and a Requiem for the dead, and the influence of Hebraic music and Christian plainchant plays an important role in it. The work opens with bell sounds which are used in many ways and transformed throughout the work. Still Movement is approximately 30 minutes and is in three large contrasting sections with an extended hymn-like closing section.

It was commissioned by Minnesota Public Radio for Pamela Frank, Paul Neubauer, Carter Brey and Christopher O’Riley and completed in 1993. This evening’s version with clarinet in the place of viola was created recently. Still Movement with Hymn is dedicated to the memory of composer Stephen Albert.

Two Movements with Bells
Two Movements (with Bells) is a memory piece in honor of my father, Frank Kernis, who passed away in 2004. His favorite music was jazz and American popular song of the 40's and 50's, and although when I took up music I gravitated to classical and new classical music, as I was growing up there was a lot of music based in the blues and jazz playing around the house. After distancing myself from it for a number of years, since my father's death I've been surprised to see those musics seeping back into my work I'm becoming more aware of how jazz has implicitly marked my emotional and physical experience of music and what elements in my work can unexpectedly arise from improvisation, the soaring and emotional melodies of mid-20th-century ballad singers, and even the rawness of the blues.

I can also draw a direct line to this most recent of my works, Two Movements (with Bells), all the way back to my New Era Dance from 1992. While New Era Dance is rambunctious and colored by the urban Manhattan cityscape (and influenced strongly by Latin salsa, the "cool" jazz of the '50s and even rap music), Two Movements (with Bells) is essentially introspective and personal in character. Notwithstanding all the virtuosic and rhythmic music in this new work, it varies a great deal in mood, from exuberance, intense lyricism, desolation, emotional distance to melancholy and mournfulness. Much more chromatic than much of my lyrical music, the two movements share a tendency toward frequent expressive shifts, contrasts in mood and speeds and an improvisatory impetuousness. This comes in part out of free jazz and an expressionistic take on the common variation form of standard-based jazz. Certainly there are other influences from classical and 20th-century music at the heart of this work, but I've been aware of their formative role in my compositional voice for longer.

While the first movement is marked "Presto," it is filled with restless, often uneasy lines and silences, which often break into wild figurations and speeds. It is more fast than slow, while the second movement, "A Song for my Father," is the opposite — mostly lyrical and song-like with outbursts of activity and intensity.

Bell sounds are not used so explicitly, but I was hearing them in my head during the entire time that I was writing the work, and their presence (especially in the piano part) should color how the performers approach its sound world. Are they funeral bells, bells of distant memory, bells made of dense clusters of overtones which fracture and fragment from the intensity of their physical attack?

Two Movements (with Bells) was commissioned expressly for James Ehnes — whose exceptional musicality and virtuosity has inspired this effort — and his fine duo partner Eduard Laurel — by the BBC Proms. It was written in the late spring and early summer of 2007.