dancedramamusic

Conductor Jeffrey Milarsky Leads the Juilliard Orchestra in Annual Evening of World Premieres by Juilliard Student Composers on Friday, April 1 at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall

Free Program Features Four New Orchestral Works by Juilliard Composers Christopher Castro, Peng-Peng Gong, David Hertzberg, and Grigory Smirnov

Conductor Jeffrey Milarsky leads the Juilliard Orchestra in the School’s annual evening of world premieres by Juilliard student composers on Friday, April 1 at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall. The program features four new works for orchestra:  Christopher Castro’s Monolith (A Symphonic Sketch); Peng-Peng Gong’s Hourly Reminiscence with the composer at the piano; David Hertzberg’s Nympharum with soprano and Juilliard alumna Jennifer Zetlan; and Grigory Smirnov’s Romance for solo English Horn and orchestra with Juilliard English hornist Hassan Anderson.  Mr. Hertzberg, Mr. Castro, and Mr. Gong are all students of Samuel Adler; Mr. Smirnov studies with Christopher Rouse. 

Each year, two outside judges, who are respected professional composers and whose identity isn’t revealed to the students or faculty, select four winning works from the 10-15 scores they receive. The main restriction is that the piece must not have received a public performance prior to the date of the concert.  The winners have their works performed by the Juilliard Orchestra.

Christopher Castro’s Monolith (A Symphonic Sketch) was written between May and October 2010. The majority of the piece was written in an abandoned office building in Long Island where he worked as a fire guard. The work is a one movement work scored for large orchestra with the only percussion instrument being timpani. The work, he says “is built around three points of harmonic stasis, which I see as a large rock grounding the piece.”

Peng-Peng Gong’s Hourly Reminiscence is a single-movement concerto for piano and orchestra. Mr. Gong, who will perform the piano part, writes: “The work is a detailed response to Kate Chopin’s short story, The Story of an Hour, constructed through an expansive range of emotional extremes. The work took one month to complete and two weeks to revise and finalize. It provides a full and violent depiction of the psychological path of the fiction’s heroine, Mrs. Mallard.

A whirling journey from the death of her husband, her initial grief, her shifted realization of her freedom, and to her ironic death after she found out her husband was indeed alive. The work is contrapuntally complex and rich, rhythmically challenging and virtuosic for each player, and reveals a most luscious flow of late-romantic lyricism.”

For his piece, Nympharum, David Hertzberg was drawn to the early poems of Ezra Pound for “their potent, expressive imagery and their general economy of composition. Their bold, vivid contrasts and juxtapositions of sensory impressions seemed to have a temporally suspended, almost spatial quality to me, as if the poems themselves were already, before I tried to express them in music, an attempt at some kind of visual transcription. I wanted to take these evocative miniatures, and with music, draw them out and try to capture with yet another sensory palette their various expressive hues.” Soprano and Juilliard alumna Jennifer Zetlan will perform the work with the Juilliard Orchestra.

Grigory Smirnov finished his Romance for English horn and small orchestra in the winter of 2009-10 in New York City. He writes in his notes: “I have always been in love with the sound of the English horn, so I decided to compose a piece for the instrument. The fact that there is still not much music written for the English horn was especially inspiring to me…I wanted to try composing in a very simple, tonal and ‘romantic’ style. This distinguished my Romance from other pieces of mine, which are composed in a more complex language. I chose the title Romance because I thought it would best describe the nature of this music.”

Juilliard has presented past premieres at the annual spring concert by composers Mason Bates, Kenji Bunch, Jefferson Friedman, Nico Muhly, and Sean Shepherd. Juilliard continues to provide a strong education in composition, and bachelor, master and doctoral degree programs are offered in composition. The current members of Juilliard’s composition faculty are Samuel Adler, Robert Beaser, John Corigliano, and Christopher Rouse. Alumni of the program include: Bruce Adolphe, Mason Bates, Kenji Bunch, Sebastian Currier, Richard Danielpour, Norman Dello Joio, Philip Glass, Laura Karpman, Lowell Liebermann, Nico Muhly, Steve Reich, Richard Rodgers, Ned Rorem, Huang Ruo, Peter Schickele, Conrad Susa, and Ellen Zwilich.

FREE tickets will be available beginning March 18 at the Janet and Leonard Kramer Box Office located at Juilliard, 155 West 65th Street. Box Office hours are Monday through Friday from 11 AM – 6 PM. For further information, call the Juilliard Box Office at (212) 769-7406 or visit the Web site at www.juilliard.edu.

Juilliard Composers - Bios

Christopher Castro is a third year undergraduate in the bachelor of music program where he studies both composition with Samuel Adler and double bass with Albert Laszlo. He was awarded the Frank M. and Mildred N. Figueroa Scholarship, the Luis A. Ferre Scholarship, and the Irene Diamond Scholarship. He attended LaGuardia High School where he was awarded the Charles Fox Prize for Composition and was commissioned to write a piece for their Symphony Orchestra. The work, entitled Essay for Orchestra, had its premiere in 2008. His string quartet, Nothing, was performed by member of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in 2008. He has received the ASCAP Rudy Perez Songwriting Scholarship, the ASCAP Boosey & Hawkes Young Composer Award Honoring Aaron Copland, and the BMI Theodora Zavin Memorial Scholarship. He studied privately with James Bassi for a year before being accepted to Juilliard. Mr. Castro has been studying bass for over ten years and has studied with Homer Mensch, Judy Sugarman, Linda McKnight, in addition to Albert Laszlo. He has performed with the Juilliard Orchestra, the BUTI Young Artists Orchestra, the New York Opera Society, and Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra.

Peng-Peng Gong, a native of Nanjing, China, began studying piano at age five and was accepted to the Shanghai Music Conservatory Primary School at the age of nine, where he studied with pianist Jian-zhong Wang and Zhijue Chao. He won several major piano competitions in his native country and was accepted by Juilliard’s Pre-College Division. He currently is an undergraduate student in the bachelor of music program at Juilliard. His instructors are pianist Yoheved Kaplinsky, composer Samuel Adler, and conductor Adam Glaser. Mr. Gong was signed by Opus 3 Artists in 2007 and has participated in over a dozen concerto engagements in North America, South America, Europe and China. He appeared as a guest soloist at the American Symphony Orchestra League in Nashville with conductor Leonard Slatkin, with whom he strong friendship and mentor relationship, joining the Maestro again in the National Symphony’s Season Opening Gala, alongside Renée Fleming. He has received six ASCAP awards for his works since 2005. His music is published by Lauren Keiser Music Publishing and distributed by Hal Leonard.  

David Hertzberg is in the third year of the bachelor of music program at Juilliard where he is the recipient of the Richard Rodgers Scholarship. He studies composition with Samuel Adler and also is the recipient of Juilliard’s 2011 Arthur Friedman Prize in composition. He began his musical studies in composition, violin, cello and piano when he was eight years old at The Coburn School in Los Angeles. He continued his studies in composition privately at the USC Thornton School of Music. He moved to Boston when he was sixteen to study composition and piano at the New England Conservatory and the Walnut Hill School for the Arts. He has spent his most recent summers studying composition and conducting abroad at the Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik in Darmstadt, the Freie Universitat in Berlin, and at the European American Musical Alliance at La Schola Contorum in Paris, where he studied with Michel Merlet and was awarded the Florence Gould Foundation/Michael Iovenko Memorial Fellowship.

Grigory Smirnov is currently finishing the master of music program in composition at Juilliard, where he studies with Christopher Rouse. A native of Novosibirsk (Siberia, Russia), he studied composition with the distinguished Siberian composer Yuri Yukechev at the Novosibirsk State Conservatory (2000-2006) and piano at the Novosibirsk Music College (1996-2000). During his studies in Russia, he was a prize winner at the prestigious Prokofiev International Composition Competition and attended international master classes and workshops. Mr. Smirnov was just accepted to the Tanglewood Music Center Composition Fellowship Program for the summer.

About Conductor Jeffrey Milarsky

Jeffrey Milarsky is a leading conductor of contemporary music in New York City and now a member of Juilliard’s conducting department. He is the music director for AXIOM. Known for his innovative programming and wide-ranging repertoire from Bach to Xenakis, he has premiered and recorded works worldwide by contemporary composers, and led such accomplished groups as the American Composers Orchestra, MET Chamber Ensemble, the Milwaukee Symphony, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York New Music Ensemble, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Speculum Musicae, Cygnus Ensemble, Fromm Players at Harvard University, and the New York Philharmonic chamber music series. In the United States and abroad, Mr. Milarsky has premiered and recorded works by groundbreaking contemporary composers, including Charles Wuorinen, Fred Lerdahl, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Gerard Grisey, Jonathan Dawe, Tristan Murail, Ralph Shapey, Luigi Nono, Mario Davidovsky and Wolfgang Rihm. Mr. Milarsky made his debut at the New York City Opera during the 2008-2009 season.

# # #

FOR LISTINGS:

Friday, April 1, 8 PM, Alice Tully Hall

Juilliard Orchestra

Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor

New Works by Juilliard Student Composers

 

David Hertzberg – Nympharum (Jennifer Zetlan, soprano)

Christopher Castro – Monolith (A Symphonic Sketch)

Grigory Smirnov – Romance (Hassan Anderson, English horn)

Peng-Peng Gong – Hourly Reminiscence (Peng-Peng Gong, piano) 

FREE tickets will be available beginning March 18 at the Janet and Leonard Kramer Box Office located at Juilliard, 155 West 65th Street. Box Office hours are Monday through Friday from 11 AM – 6 PM. For further information, call the Juilliard Box Office at (212) 769-7406 or visit the Web site at www.juilliard.edu.

Printer Friendly