Home for the Holidays
December 2006
“I consider this the best holiday CD project I have ever been involved in,” says Jeff Tyzik (BM ’73, MM ’77), who leads the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in its latest CD, A Holiday Celebration. As the RPO’s Principal Pops Conductor and the veteran of two other holiday-music CDs, Tyzik ought to know! For this collection of holiday favorites, he has invited several other Eastman alumni along for the sleigh ride, including tenor Tonio Di Paolo (BM ’74) and the RPO principal horn (and Eastman professor of horn) W. Peter Kurau (BM ’74), who is featured on the CD.
This recording was made possible by a landmark agreement in August 2006 between American symphony, opera, and ballet orchestras, and the American Federation of Musicians, allowing for the creation and sale of audio recordings of live performances. Ownership and copyright are retained by the orchestra institutions, and orchestra musicians share in revenue from CD sales. The Rochester Philharmonic is only the second orchestra to release a recording under this agreement.
For more information on A Holiday Celebration, including ordering information, go to www.rpo.org.
Dr. Walker’s Weekend
November 2006
Eastman Weekend 2006 (October 20-22, 2006) was the School’s first attempt at hosting an event for everyone in its vast interconnected community, combining Alumni Weekend, Family Weekend, and Eastman Community Music School Open House.
It was a great opportunity to meet old and new Eastman friends, but there were musical highlights as well. Chief among them was the Philharmonia’s October 21 premiere of Foils for Orchestra: Hommage à St. George, by Pulitzer Prize winner George Walker (PhD ’56). Neil Varon led the performance, acknowledging Walker at the end. This was the second Walker piece premiered by the Philharmonia, which performed and recorded his Eastman Overture in 1983. (Another ESM alum contributed to this concert, as it ended with Debussy’s La Mer in an edition by Professor of Theory Marie Rolf [PhD ’77].)
The energetic Dr. Walker was much in evidence throughout this first Eastman Weekend: attending a rehearsal of his piece on Friday afternoon with great pleasure, being photographed in the Eastman Theatre on Saturday while hearing his music, and being one of the honored guests at a Medallion Ceremony for 50-year alumni. In this new Eastman tradition, Interim Dean Jamal Rossi and University of Rochester President Joel Seligman presented specially designed medals to alumni from the Classes of 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956. Most of them proudly wore their medals all weekend!
Brass Revival
October 2006
Founded as a feature attraction at the 1962 Eastman Summer Brass Institute, the Eastman Brass Quintet was an acclaimed concert attraction by the mid-1970s, thanks to its legendary personnel: trumpeters Daniel Patrylak (BM ’54, MM ’60) and Allen Vizzutti (BM ’74, MM ’76), hornist Verne Reynolds, now Professor Emeritus of Horn; trombonist Don Knaub (BM ’51, MM ’61), and tuba player Cherry Beauregard (MM ’63, DMA ’70). The five members performed throughout the world, won rave reviews, and expanded the brass quintet repertoire with new works and arrangements.
Some of the quintet’s golden moments from 1975 are captured on Eastman Brass: 1975 Archive, a recently released Summit Records CD (#449). The CD is also a tribute to Verne Reynolds, as it consists entirely of his music: Concertares 1 and 4, Suite for Brass Quintet, and three examples of Centones — Reynolds’ arrangements for brass of vocal and dance music by Renaissance and Baroque composers such as Dufay and Fux.
For listening samples from 1975 Archive, and information about ordering, visit www.summitrecords.com.
Guitar Heros
September 2006
Two Eastman-trained guitarists, who both studied with Professor Nicholas Goluses, have just released CDs of interesting guitar music. Eladio Scharrón (DMA ’97), who teaches at the University of Central Florida, is working his way through the complete guitar music of the noted early 20th-century Mexican composer Manuel Ponce, who wrote many pieces for Andres Segovia; the second volume of Eladio’s survey is on the Centaur label (2701). A Minnesota Public Radio reviewer praised Eladio’s “warm, inviting tone” and the CD’s “vast palette of moods.” For his recent Centaur CD (2731), Peter Fletcher (MM ’95) explores the quirky music of Erik Satie, arranging these famous piano pieces for guitar. Besides his recordings, which also include a 2002 disc of music by Federico Mompou, Peter concertizes widely throughout the United States; this month he’ll perform in New York, Connecticut, Ohio, and Indiana.
Eastman sadly noted the sudden death last month of guitarist Aaron Brock (DMA ’03). The talented Canadian musician, only 31 years old, was considered one of the best classical guitarists and guitar teachers of his generation by his teacher Nicholas Goluses, and increasingly by the musical world in general. “He was a deeply sensitive artist, with a really refined touch on the instrument,” Goluses told the Toronto Star for Aaron’s obituary. “When someone is that good a guitarist and has that kind of humanity, they tend to be great teachers.”
The Musical Entrepreneur
August 2006
Michael Drapkin (BM ’79) graduated from Eastman with a degree in clarinet performance, and still identifies himself first and foremost as a performing musician. But as founder and director of the Foundation for Entrepreneurialism in the Arts (FEA), Michael is also devoted to training young musicians in the realities of the modern musical world, so that they won’t just get jobs, but that they will help to create the jobs they want. Michael himself is an excellent example of this: after playing in the Honolulu Symphony, he became a serial entrepreneur in software development, launching 30 different startup companies before deciding to help his fellow musicians find new avenues for employment and founding the FEA.
As part of this vision, he launched the first Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship at the Brevard Music Center last month. The conference was a great success, selling out and drawing musicians, entrepreneurs, and educators from across the country.
“Call it what you want – entrepreneurship, leadership, management, vision, but every great revolution starts with one person who has an idea and figures out a way to make it stick,” said Drapkin, in his opening speech at the conference. “We want you to leave here inspired. To become a visionary. To dream about what might be, and to acquire the know-how to make it happen. An army of visionaries fanning out across American making things work. Finding a way to make things happen and clawing and scratching until some brick in that immovable wall comes loose, and you slip through.”
A Voice of Grace
July 2006
Soprano Pamela Coburn (MA ’77) graces the cover of the June 2006 issue of Classical Singer; inside the magazine is “Grace Refined,” an interview with Ms. Coburn by Melissa Ramb, detailing the singer’s extremely successful career, including many American and European operatic performances (under such conductors as Sir Colin Davis, Sir Georg Solti, and Riccardo Muti) and numerous recordings.
An Ohio native, Pamela attended DePauw University, where she wavered between playing on the tennis team and performing in operas, before deciding on graduate study at Eastman, where she eventually sang leading roles in Die Fledermaus, Capriccio, La Bohème, and Mozart’s Figaro, Così fan tutte, and The Magic Flute. She also studied with one of the great 20th-century singers, Jan DeGaetani — and passes on her teaching in her own private voice studio in Florida. In the Classical Singer article, Pamela shared happy memories of Eastman: “The environment was so nurturing, artistically stimulating, and safe,” she says, “It was very difficult for me to consider leaving.”
Three Decades of Praise
June 2006
In April, the University of Rochester’s Gospel Choir celebrated its 30th birthday. It has spent those three decades under the direction of the same man: Eastman Alumnus Rev. Alvin Parris III (BM ’73).
The Choir has a lot to celebrate. The UR Gospel Choir began with 8 students under Parris’s direction, but its average membership is now 35-40 students. Besides its many performances at the River Campus and at Rochester colleges and churches, the Gospel Choir has also performed with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and traveled to Cornell University, SUNY Binghamton, and Buffalo State College. It has also given two theatrical productions: Langston Hughes’ Tambourines to Glory, and the Broadway musical Purlie.
Parris, who graduated from Eastman with a degree in music education, is a widely performed composer and arranger, and a worldwide authority on gospel music. His Gospel Project, in collaboration with conductor Isaiah Jackson, has performed with many US orchestras, and also in Brisbane and Liverpool. He also collaborates frequently with another Eastman alumnus: his wife Debra Parris (BM ’76), a violinist and pianist.
A Big Win!
May 2006
Eastman produced five big prizewinners at last month’s Music Teachers National Association national competition in Austin, Texas.
The MTNA Collegiate Chamber Music Performance winners were the members of Eastman’s ViM Saxophone Quartet: Kristin Rarick, Michael Matlock, Dimitrios Kostaras, and Richard Miserendino, all juniors and students of Assistant Professor of Saxophone Chien-Kwan Lin. The Quartet was awarded a $3,000 cash prize.
The group, which has been working together for almost three years, regularly rehearses five days a week. For the last stage of the competition, they performed their entire program from memory.
Additionally, pianist Joseph Liccardo, a senior in the studio of Piano Department Co-Chair Douglas Humpherys, won the top prize in the Collegiate Artists Performance category performing works of Schubert, Chopin, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff. His prize was a Steinway M Piano, which has a retail value of $47,000. He will soon be visiting the Steinway factory in Queens to choose the specific piano that suits him best.
In the spring of 2002 – during his senior year in high school – Joe was the top winner in the high school division of MTNA’s Artists Performance category.
Learning About Lenny
April 2006
Musicology PhD student Ayden Adler (MM ’97 and DMA ’99 in horn performance) is currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, completing her dissertation about the Boston Pops Orchestra. She is also researching another Boston icon: the eminent composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1918, graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1935, and from Harvard in 1939. The university is offering a seminar this year on the early life of one of its most famous alumni, and the resulting research — by Ayden, along with numerous professors and students – will be shared at a conference on Bernstein’s life and career to be held in October.
Despite his celebrity, Bernstein’s early years have been studied very little. Students in the Bernstein seminar are interviewing his surviving grammar-school classmates, examining his high-school geometry notes, and exploring his childhood neighborhood for clues to his musical and intellectual development. The work may sound mundane, but as Ayden pointed out in a recent Boston Globe article about the seminar, “It’s important, if you can see the sources firsthand, to do so. When you’re writing later, you never know. Something that seemed unimportant at the time will turn into a gem of knowledge you will need for your work.” Spoken like a true musicologist!
Eastman will be well represented at October’s Harvard conference on “Bernstein and His Many Worlds”; besides Ayden, participants will include Professor Ralph Locke and Elizabeth Wells (MA ’96, PhD ‘04), who will chair a session on Bernstein’s best-known work, West Side Story. Soprano Nicole Cabell (BM ’01), named Cardiff Singer of the World 2005, will be featured in the conference’s finale, a “Celebrating Bernstein” concert. Nicole, joined by Harvard students, will sing highlights from Bernstein’s theatre scores.
A Little Love Music
March 2006
The recent Disney/Touchstone picture Casanova, starring Heath Ledger as the 18th-century’s most legendary lover, has an important Eastman School connection. Enhancing the movie’s lavish Venetian settings was a soundtrack of excerpts from works by a panoply of Baroque composers: Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Albinoni, and many more. Pulling them all together was arranger and orchestrator Sonny Kompanek (MA ’73), whose long list of Hollywood credits also includes A Knight’s Tale, Gods and Monsters, Three Kings, and The Big Lebowski.
Sonny calls the project “one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had,” adding “This was a very ambitious endeavor on the part of a major film studio — to have a film score employ the best Baroque players in New York and L.A. … The players were used to playing traditional Baroque works in a concert situation, and are specialists in this music. For the film, they had to play with a click track and make many changes on the spot. I must say they rose to the occasion most admirably and met some very demanding changes with the greatest artistry I have ever seen in a recording environment.” Their combined artistry paid off: the Casanova CD was #1 on the Billboard Classical Chart throughout the month of February.
Those talented artists, by the way, included trumpeter John Thiessen (BM ’87), percussionist Joe Tompkins (BM ’92), organist Jon Werking (MM ’85), bassist Louise Koby (BM ’77), and violinist Judson Griffin (BM ’73) — not to mention Eastman professor Paul O’Dette as lute and mandolin soloist.
The Casanova soundtrack CD is available on Hollywood Records.
Amplifying the Avant-garde
March 2006
Graduate student Lauren Radnofsky has a fine reputation for her performing of contemporary music. The cellist added to it considerably on February 17, with a concert of music for amplified cello and electronics — not in a recital hall, but in the atrium outside The Bop Shop, a Rochester record store. “I thought her avant-garde sound would be a nice addition to our jazz series,” says Tom Kohn, the Bop Shop’s owner, who has a fine reputation of his own for supporting adventurous music and performers of all kinds. The Rochester press agreed. The Democrat & Chronicle previewed Lauren’s concert, which consisted of music by Kaija Saariaho, Michael Gordon, and Eastman assistant professor of conducting (and prolific composer) Brad Lubman. Lauren also played her own piece, Very Badly Performed — not a phrase which City Newspaper’s Frank De Blase would have used to describe her playing; he wrote in his review, “it was hard to take your eyes off Radnofsky’s intensity…her music conjured actual images with its bowed onomatopoeia.”
Drumming Up Excitement
February 2006
Current Eastman percussion student Colin Tribby recently completed his first season as a member of the North Carolina-based Open Dream Ensemble. The group creates original works combining dance, music, drama, and design, and does artist residencies throughout the North Carolina public school system. In July 2006, the Open Dream Ensemble will kick off its second season at the Illuminations Festival in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In addition, Colin’s piece Let Freedom Ring, a setting of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for speaker and drum ensemble, was performed for the second time at Eastman’s Martin Luther King Day (January 16, 2006) performance in Kilbourn Hall.
Recent alumnus Michael Kozakis (BM ’98) is also drumming up some excitement in a one-year position as a percussionist with the great Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Michael’s recent gigs include an adjunct position on the faculty of Carthage College (Kenosha, WI) and as percussionist in the Ars Viva! Symphony Orchestra of Skokie, IL — an orchestra whose core is made up of Chicago Symphony musicians.
The Song Continues
January 2006
The Marilyn Horne Foundation was launched in 1994 on the beloved singer’s 60th birthday, to “encourage young talent and nurture audiences for the art of the vocal recital.” Over the years, the Foundation has been very successful in this ambition — and Eastman students and alumni have contributed to its success, as a regular part of the Horne Foundation’s concerts and master classes.
For example, five Eastman alumni and current students are taking part in The Song Continues, to be presented by the Horne Foundation at Carnegie Hall from January 24-27, 2006. And so, by extension, is a beloved Eastman voice teacher: all five are current or former students of Professor of Voice John Maloy, an Eastman faculty member since 1966 and chair of the voice department from 1977-2002.
A January 25 master class with tenor Robert White will include current Maloy students Marc Webster, bass, and (as an alternate) tenor Jonathan Michie. Baritone Ian Greenlaw (BM ’95) takes part in an evening recital on January 25, and the festival’s concluding recital on January 27, “Americans in Paris,” will include soprano Nicole Cabell (BM ’01) — winner of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition in summer 2005 – and baritone Nathaniel Webster (BM ’97).
For more information on the Marilyn Horne Foundation, visit www.carnegiehall.org or www.marilynhornfdn.org.