WEDNESDAY NOON CONCERTS
Today we present BLACK CEDAR with Kris Palmer, flute; Steve Lin, guitarand Isaac Pastor-Chermak, cello
Program:
Sonata in G Major, K. 91 by Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757)
Grave
Allegro
Grave
Allegro
Drei Nachtstücke (1990) by Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (b. 1941)
Chimären des Zweifelns
Schwarze Zungen der Nacht
Ça va, monsieur Croche?
Flute Sonata in C Major, BWV 1033 by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Andante
Allegro
Adagio
Menuett
In Transit (2017) by Ursula Kwong-Brown (b. 1987)
Commissioned by Black Cedar
Romance Del Diablo by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)
La Danza Tarantella by Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)
Black Cedar’s accolades include multiple grants from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, plus an invite to the National Flute Association Convention. Their recently released debut album A Path Less Trod has earned critical praise, with Stephen Smoliar’s The Rehearsal Studio blog writing, "While the instrumentation is unconventional, it is surprisingly effective...Black Cedar is particularly effective for the rhetoric of intimacy they establish…an intimacy evident in the strategic command of understatement one encounters in the performances on this new album.” The trio’s commissions include Mark Fish’ The Devil Inside (2016), Miscellaneous Music (2015) by Bay Area composer Durwynne Hsieh and Of Emblems (2014) by San Francisco’s Garrett Shatzer. Since their inception in 2013, Black Cedar has performed almost 60 concerts throughout California, and they’ve appeared repeatedly on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco, KKUP 91.5 FM in San Jose, and KWMR 90.5 FM in Marin County. “Hats off to them!” writes the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “Black Cedar has done a wonderful job of making the case that chamber music can involve approaches to instrumentation not usually expected,” says the San Francisco Examiner.
Kris Palmer is a winner of the Carmel Chamber Music Society Competition, a second prize winner in the National Flute Association Young Artist Competition, and a Carnegie Hall Recital Debut winner with Artists International. She is a former member of the New Mexico Symphony, and she holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Rice University. The New York Concert Review calls her "clearly among the few current performers on any instrument to fully understand the nature of French Baroque music."
Steve Lin is a winner of both the Boston GuitarFest Competition and the East Carolina University Guitar Competition. A recording artist for VGo Recordings, Steve has released two albums, Eliot Fisk Series Vol. 1, and Imagen. Classical Guitar magazine calls Lin "a confident player with a powerful sound, quick hands, and a solid musical memory." Steve is the Professor of Guitar at San Jose State University.
Isaac Pastor-Chermak is Principal Cellist with Portland Opera and Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony, Associate Principal Cellist with Stockton Symphony, and a member of Monterey Symphony, Santa Cruz Symphony, and Santa Barbara Symphony. Winner of both the Lyon and Witzel Prizes at UC Berkeley and commissioner of nearly two dozen new cello chamber works, he is equally at home in early music with appearances at the Berkeley Early Music Festival, the American Bach Soloists, and the International Baroque Institute at Longy.
PROGRAM NOTES
Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti spent much of his career as a music instructor and court composer for the royal houses of Spain and Portugal. His music is clearly in the Baroque style that defines the first half of the eighteenth century, but his work also ends up influencing the development of the Classical style, and this stylistic transition can be heard in his later works. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti, he composed in a variety of musical forms, but his lasting legacy is an output of 555 keyboard sonatas. This G Major Sonata has been arranged for Black Cedar by their guitarist Steve Lin.
Drei Nachtstücke by Klaus Hinrich Stahmer is from an eight-movement work written over thirty years ago but rarely heard outside of Germany. The movements feature the seldom-heard bass flute, creating low tone color pairings with the cello to great effect. Stahmer was born in Szczecin, Poland in 1945 but soon fled west to Germany with his family upon the approach of the Soviet military during the post-World War II East-West divide.
Johann Sebastian Bach was not widely known throughout Europe during his lifetime. He considered himself to be a conscientious craftsman merely doing his job to the best of his ability towards the service of his superiors, for the enjoyment of his fellow man, and most importantly to Bach, to the glory of God. Yet, two hundred years after his death, his music holds the highest position in the canon of European art music, and his name is venerated more than that of any other composer. This C Major Flute Sonata comes from a set of six sonatas that Bach composed for the flute and a keyboard instrument, roughly between 1730 and 1740. This is another work adapted for Black Cedar by guitarist Steve Lin.
Ursula Kwong-Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in U.C. Berkeley’s music composition program, and Black Cedar has commissioned two works from her for this season: Sunrise for solo alto flute, and In Transit for the trio. In Transit was commissioned with support from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music and was inspired by the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit): both the sounds of the train itself and the journeys of the over 60,000 people who use it daily. The work begins with a harmonized and distorted recording of a train which fades away as the instruments enter.
Astor Piazzolla is best known for being the father and inventor of Tango Nuevo, a revolutionary new genre in which jazz rhythms and classical music were infused into tango. Tango Nuevo, at first, was strongly rejected in his home country Argentina, but eventually was appreciated and celebrated for the genius it was throughout the world. Steve Lin arranged Romance Del Diablo for Black Cedar.
Rossini’s La Danza Tarantella is a fine example of a patter song, which typically has a fast tempo and a rapid succession of rhythmic patterns with a single syllable or word on each note, creating a very fast moving text delivery for the singer to accomplish. La Danza comes from a collection of songs titled Les soirées musicales (1830–1835), and Bay Area composer Durwynne Hsieh arranged it for Black Cedar.
ABOUT WEDNESDAY NOON CONCERTS: The community is invited to our complimentary Wednesday Noon Concert series. As part of our ongoing mission to use the transformative power of the arts to inspire and enrich our community, we have opened our doors for the past two years, every Wednesday at Noon, and presented concerts performed by talented musicians that are free of charge to the public. These free noon performances offer listeners the opportunity to discover the beauty of music in an intimate accessible setting, while providing the community with cultural enrichment and exposure to talented performers.
Concerts are in a one-hour format and performances take place in the intimate Tivoli or Crescendo where both audience and musicians can sit in vibrant, close proximity. Musicians often stay after the performance to informally speak about the program and their upcoming concerts.
