Grahamstown music lovers are in for a treat this week with two concerts and the chance to win TWO FREE TICKETS.
On Tuesday 26 August Adam Campbell on alto saxophone and Mareli Stolp on piano played a varied programme in a free concert on the Rhodes campus.
Grahamstown music lovers are in for a treat this week with two concerts and the chance to win TWO FREE TICKETS.
On Tuesday 26 August Adam Campbell on alto saxophone and Mareli Stolp on piano played a varied programme in a free concert on the Rhodes campus.
Campbell learned saxophone while a pupil at Kingswood College with French saxophonist Paul Richard. He is currently continuing his saxophone studies in France, at the Besançon Music Conservatoire.
Tuesday's recital in the Beethoven Room at the Department of Music and Musicology included works by David Salleras, Paule Marice, Bach and Bozza.
Watch the video here
On Thursday, 28 August, at 7.30pm in the St Andrew's College Drill Hall, the Grahamstown Music Society presents Caleb Vaughn-Jones, cello, and Joanna Wicherek, piano, in a recital that includes works by Chopin, Brahms, Mazowiecki, and contemporary American composer Geoff Knorr.
Two free tickets are available for Grocott's Mail readers.
For the chance to win a ticket email the answer to the following question to sarah@grocotts.co.za: What is the last of Frederic Chopin's works to be published in his lifetime?
Caleb Vaughn-Jones
Caleb Vaughn-Jones is a dynamic young musician who is always willing to learn so that he take his craft to new heights. His performances have included everything from Bach to Miles Davis to premiers of works by composers of his generation.
The Baltimore Sun said that “[He] demonstrated again his exploratory grasp of the cello with an anything-but-classical approach to the classical repertoire.” Past performances have included concerti of Tchaikovsky, Elgar, and Schumann and recital works of Barber, Beethoven, and Chopin.
In addition to traditional concert music, Caleb Vaughn-Jones has collaborated with actors; on stage and in film. In 2008, he made his first stage appearance in Sarah Ruhl’s “Melancholy Play”, where he portrayed the cellist Julian. Later, the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC featured him in the American premier of Euripides’ “Ion” with the music score written for him by Los Angeles-based composer Michael Roth.
Caleb also appeared in the 2006 feature film “Step Up”. Caleb Vaughn-Jones recorded as soloist with the Prague FILMharmonic in a recording for the video game Civilization V, which released in September 2010. The composers for the game are Geoff Knorr and Michael Curran. In 2013, he produced the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Choir for the sound track for Civilization V: Brave New World.
Caleb Vaughn-Jones is a former member of the Young Eight, which toured throughout the United States and was ensemble-in-residence at Seattle University. Since January 2010, he has performed as a guest with the Ritz Chamber Players, a chamber ensemble of preeminent musicians and composers of colour. In the summer of 2010, Caleb Vaughn-Jones served as the Assistant Artistic Director of the Juilliard International Jazz Camp and the TAP Camp of the Boys and Girls Club, which included performances at the Kennedy Center.
In February 2011, he moved to South Africa to work with the Eastern Cape Philharmonic’s Music Investment Project where he also served as principal cellist. In 2013, he founded the company Regulus Sound Productions that is focused on giving the best musicians in South Africa recording opportunities for multimedia companies around the world. Caleb Vaughn-Jones was born in Charleston, South Carolina and holds degrees from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and Lynn University’s Conservatory of Music.
He also finds time to write advice for young musicians in his blog at calebvaughnjones.com/Blog/.
Joanna Wicherek
Joanna Wicherek is an accomplished classical pianist. Her extensive repertoire has an emphasis on contemporary music. She also has a profound understanding of Historically Informed Performance and specialist knowledge of historical keyboard instruments.
Wicherek is a Young Artist of a prestigious Accademia Villa Bossi in Italy. Wicherek professionally collaborates with Poland’s two most important composers Paweł Mykietyn and Paweł Szymański. She performed Szymański’s music on the soundtrack to the filmViolated Letters (2010). In 2003 Wicherek recorded a CD with the early music ensemble Proavitus, contributing harpsichord and singing parts.
Wicherek has been awarded prizes at the Competition of the 20th and 21st Centuries for Young Performers, Warsaw and the International Competition of Contemporary Chamber Music, Krakow. She has performed internationally with many renowned artists. Sonata in G Minor for Piano and Cello, Opus 65 Frédéric Chopin Born February 22, 1810, Zelazowa Wola, Poland Died October 17, 1849, Paris Program notes by Eric Bromberger Chopin’s Cello Sonata (1845-46) dates from the troubled final years of his life; it was in fact his last published work.
Chopin wrote little music for instruments other than piano, but he appears to have had a special fondness for the cello, for he wrote three different works for cello and piano. Composing the Cello Sonata was particularly difficult for a composer unaccustomed to writing for anything but piano. In a letter to his sister, Chopin said: “I write a little and cross out a lot. Sometimes I am pleased with it, sometimes not. I throw it into a corner and pick it up again.”
The Cello Sonata has not won a wide following, and one of Chopin’s biographers had gone so far as to describe it as nothing but “immense wildernesses, with only here and there a small flower.” Yet this interesting and rewarding music shows a little-known side of Chopin. The sonata is remarkable for the concentration of its material: much of the music of the first movement grows out of the cello’s opening statement, and certain theme-shapes appear in all its movements. Some believe that the Cello Sonata suggests the course Chopin’s music might have taken, had he not died at age 39 of tuberculosis.
The sonata is in four movements. The Allegro moderato opens with a brief introduction by the piano, and when the cello enters it borrows some of the melodic shape of the introduction for its main theme. The mood of this music is mercurial: it is by turns agitated, noble, dramatic, and gentle. The structure here is unusual as well, for Chopin shortens the recapitulation and drives the movement to the two sharp concluding chords.
The Scherzo, much lighter in texture, is derived from material in the first movement. It rushes ahead on short phrases that contrast with the long lines of the wonderful trio section: here Chopin’s soaring melody rocks along gracefully before the movement concludes with a brief reprise of the scherzo. The Largo is relatively short (only 27 measures long), but this gorgeous music is the expressive center of the sonata. The cello’s wistful main idea, marked cantabile and dolce, sings gracefully above the piano’s steady accompaniment, grows to a climax, and falls away to the quiet close.
The vigorous Finale derives much of its energy from Chopin’s contrast of triplet and dotted rhythms. A solemn march-like passage provides a measure of contrast before this extended movement comes to its close on a più mossocoda.
Sonata No.1 in E Minor for Cello and Piano, Opus 38 Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria Program notes by Lawrence Budmen Brahms wrote over 100 chamber music scores but only two dozen survived his intense self criticism and his concern about composing in the shadow of Beethoven.
His "Cello Sonata No.1" was the first duo sonata that Brahms allowed to be published. This score pre-dates Brahms's monumental First Symphony. Three movements were written during a concert tour in 1862. (Brahms received considerable acclaim as a pianist.)
By the time the score was completed in 1865, Brahms had discarded an Adagio and added a new finale which pays tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) with its inventive fugal structure. Brahms composed this new movement around the same time he was writing his "German Requiem" – another score that owes much of its inspiration to the Baroque splendor of Bach's liturgical works.
There is a darkly somber cast to the opening Allegro ma non troppo. The unusually low range of the cello writings gives the entire movement a uniquely melancholy beauty. A more vigorous second subject only briefly imparts a more robust character to the music, after which brooding Romanticism returns in full sway.The intense atmosphere is embellished by the gravely halting piano chords at the movement's outset. (With its dark, rich coloration, this movement is quintessential Brahms.)
The second movement – Allegretto quasi Menuetto – is based on a classical dance form. This minuet, however, could never be mistaken for Haydn or Mozart. The wistful melody and surprising turns of phrase is pure Brahms. The vigorous fugal Allegro finale salutes Bach's "Art of the Fugue." (There are three thematic subjects – the first a variant of one of Bach's themes.) In this movement Brahms's mastery of contrapuntal writing comes to the fore. That Brahms managed to create such a masterful fugue within sonata form merely attests to his genius.
Brahms's first extant duo sonata is an extraordinary work! Aurora Geoff Knorr (1985-) Born June 13, 1985, Framingham, Maine, USA Geoff Knorr's music has been performed by large and small ensembles across the USA, including the Minnesota Orchestra, Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Peabody Symphony Orchestra, Wheaton College Symphony, and Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra, among others.
His music has received numerous awards, including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Macht Orchestral Composition Award, as well as honorable mentions in the National Association of Composers, USA and Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Competitions. He was selected as a participant in the 2009 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute.
Aurora can refer to "dawn," that early hour of the morning when daylight makes its first appearance. I rarely am awake early enough to capture the moment, but the times I have experienced it, it tends to be a quiet, peaceful, and unassuming time of day – a statement itself that the day has come and yet simultaneously that the day is still coming. Near the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, at the very beginning of Christ's ministry on earth, the author quotes a prophecy from the book of Isaiah as being fulfilled, "the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned."
Aurora, takes it's musical cues from this brief passage of Scripture. The anticipation, wonder, and hope of this light that has come, and yet simultaneously is still coming. Taniec Mazowiecki, Violin & Piano (Transcribed for cello) 1952 Three spirited central European dances, written with a wonderful feeling for the local folk style on the violin.
