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Refractions/Reflections on Schumann and Brahms By ANDRÉ EMELIANOFF
There are many ways to present a recital of standard repertoire. Aside from simply playing the music, one can give the audience a historical or anecdotal context through program notes or a pre-concert lecture. Other creative ways of drawing in the audience include using projections, lighting, and other multimedia devices. My idea, in collaboration with composers Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum and Martin Bresnick, was to use Schumann's Five Pieces in Folk Style and Brahms's Sonata in F Major as the inspiration for two new works. The composers would take some essential qualities or fragments from the older works and create something that is forward-thinking (by use of video and sound installations), yet a clear homage to these two Romantic masters. The results will be heard on June 1 at 8 p.m. in a concert that I will be playing in nearby Merkin Concert Hall (on 67th Street), with pianist Thomas Hoppe. (Music by Janacek and Kurtag will also share the program.)
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Music by Schumann and Brahms serves as inspiration for two contemporary composers, who create forward-thinking multimedia works that pay homage to these two
Romantic masters.
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Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum is a recent Juilliard graduate in composition and now directs the Juilliard Composer's Forum. She is also co-director of Vision Into Art, a group created to fuse musical and visual realizations. Nora is writing Vis-a-vis for live and prerecorded cello. The piece uses fragments of the Schumann Five Pieces, a work that I find strikingly autobiographical. There are water images—sometimes agitated, sometimes calm—suggesting the Rhine, the Lorelei (represented by high harmonics), and the drive, suspension, and abruptness of a suicidal leap.Nora writes, "I was thrilled when André Emelianoff approached me about writing a piece for him in homage to Robert Schumann. There was no question in my mind that Schumann's eccentricity coupled with Emelianoff's creative vitality could create a wonderful dialogue between composer and performer out of which I could build a piece. Beyond my love of Schumann's music, I have always been fascinated by the extent to which Schumann thrived on the characters he created in his mind and on paper. As a composer working in interdisciplinary art, it struck me that I might have the opportunity to write and stage a piece that interprets this multi-faceted mind not only through sounds, but also through a literal visual component that displayed these different characters."According to Nora, Vis-a-vis treats Schumann, his music, and the performer "as a condensed love affair of multiple personalities, wherein distinctive representations of both Robert and André play off of each other, creating the counterpoint that drives the music." The piece combines my live performance with a three-channel video/sound installation; the projected images and I create a multimedia cello quartet. "The audience," explains Nora, "is asked to step into the character-trait differences that these four mirrors expose."Nora also appropriates fragments from the opening melodic material of the Schumann. While she could have lined them up perfectly, thus revealing Schumann's theme, she chose instead to mask the melody—"disclosing small attributes but never the full line in order to truly allow the conversation of perspective, illusion, hallucination, and duplication to unravel," as she explains.Martin Bresnick, who is a professor of composition at Yale and the recipient of the first Charles Ives Award in 2000, is someone I know well from musical collaborations with my group Da Capo Chamber Players and his wife, pianist Lisa Moore. Our after-concert libations to Brahms have at last borne musical fruit. Martin writes in his dedication, "Ballade is an homage to Brahms. It suggests the dark colors, compact rhetoric, intricate counterpoint and formal rigor characteristic of that great master. Composing Ballade has been a stringent but rewarding challenge; it has taken some hard labor, but it has been a labor of love."The F-Major Sonata, Op. 99, of Brahms is one of the towering achievements of the chamber music literature, with its daring harmonic relationships, visceral and demanding virtuosity, and fiercely joyful, mysterious, and raging immersion in nature. All of these qualities are transformed into the tragedies and triumphs in the human realm. Cellist André Emelianoff teaches in both the College and Pre-College Divisions, and has been on the faculty since 1990.
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