By MARC GOLDBERG

New York Woodwind Quintet members (front row, left to right) Marc Goldberg, Carol Wincenc, and Stephen Taylor; (back row) William Purvis and Charles Neidich. (Photo by Christian Steiner)

It seems impossible in these days of renovation and reconstruction at Juilliard not to spend some time reflecting on transition, and as the New York Woodwind Quintet returns to the Daniel Saidenberg Recital Series with our upcoming concert on April 5, I find myself doing just that.

My own association with Juilliard began in 1976 as a student at the Pre-College Division before continuing on to the College Division, where I was a bassoon student of Harold Goltzer and a chamber music student of N.Y.W.Q. oboist Ronald Roseman. I remember details of our coaching sessions with great fondness, and the humanity and humor Ronnie brought to our music making. The excitement of those long-past concerts in Paul Hall and the Juilliard Theater is still with me, and Ronnie's influence on my own music making is still very powerful.

It was interesting to return to the same Juilliard Theater (now called the Peter Jay Sharp Theater) this past January, this time as part of the N.Y.W.Q., joining in the Faculty Woodwind Soirée. We invited guest artist Ayako Oshima Neidich to join us on bass clarinet for Janacek's Mladi, and were happy to invite a quintet from the N.Y.W.Q. Seminar—Lissie Okopny, flute; Anna Steltenpohl, oboe; Nicholas Gallas, clarinet; Robyn Jutras, bassoon; and Tianxia Wu, horn—to join us in a performance of Mendelssohn's Octet, in a transcription by flutist Samuel Baron, a founding member of the N.Y.W.Q. At once teacher and as ever a perpetual student, I felt lucky to be part of the continuous stream of musical life here at Juilliard, and had a great feeling about the spirited and intense collaborations.

In a post-concert e-mail exchange, clarinetist Nick Gallas summed it up when he said, "The best thing about getting to rehearse and perform with my own teacher and coaches was having the chance to experience them doing exactly what it is they are trying to teach us to do as their students. All of the work they have done in their own lives as artists up to this point went into their playing and rehearsing, and I can't imagine there being a better learning experience for someone like me who is just starting out, than to be exposed to and interact with them in their roles as the performers they have become. Having the opportunity to learn a highly prized piece in the string chamber-music repertoire was a privilege because so much of it went beyond what I had ever been required to do as a wind player and it gave me the chance to try to expand my own expressive, stylistic, and technical possibilities. And it was just so fun!"

Having myself experienced the New York Woodwind Quintet in so many ways—as student, guest artist, and now member—I'm pleased that there is evidently such continuity in the artistic identity of the ensemble, that the humor, artistry, and adventuresome, spirited music making that I think of as hallmarks of the quintet remain paramount.

Our program on April 5 includes the U.S. premiere of Evis Sammoutis's Metallaxis, a work Charlie Neidich brought back with him after serving as a juror at the Munich Competition. Metallaxis was commissioned by and written for the competition, and Charlie was very impressed with Sammoutis's work. Also on the program is Episodes and Refrains, a quintet by Fred Lerdahl that is part of an upcoming N.Y.W.Q. recording project for Bridge Records.

From Samuel Baron's extensive library of transcriptions, we've extracted three fugues from Sam's full transcription of Bach's monumental The Art of Fugue, arranged for woodwind quintet and string quartet. Another work that Sam touched provides the brilliant opening of the concert, Villa Lobos's Pièce en Forme de Choros, originally for wind quintet but with English horn rather than French horn. This work was one of several seminal works for winds from the 1920s, including the esteemed quintets of Nielsen, Hindemith, and Schoenberg, and the sextet of Janacek. When Villa Lobos was in New York in the early 1950s, Sam met with him and asked him to write a new quintet; sometime after the composer's return home to Brazil, he sent Sam a horn part for this earlier work.

New York Woodwind Quintet Paul Hall Thursday, April 5, 8 p.m. Free tickets available in the Juilliard Box Office beginning March 22. Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

We will close the program with Carl Nielsen's Woodwind Quintet. The original source of inspiration for Nielsen's Wind Quintet was a telephone call he made in 1921 to his friend, the pianist Christian Christiansen, while the latter was rehearsing Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante with four members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. When Christiansen answered the phone, the other musicians went on playing. Nielsen heard them and asked whether he could come over and listen. Struck by how Mozart emphasizes and plays with each instrument's characteristics, Nielsen decided to write a quintet for them. The work was not only for his friends, but also about them and their relationships with each other. It is a descriptive, warm, humorous, and wonderfully human work, and it's great fun to perform it with this group of friends, my colleagues of the N.Y.W.Q.

Marc Goldberg became the newest member of the New York Woodwind Quintet in 2005. He has also been a Pre-College faculty member since 1988.