The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in New Mexico to produce "Modern Masters: Canadian Composers" on August 8 in cooperation with the National Arts Centre of Canada
July 25, 2003 -
Santa Fe, NM -- An evening of works by Canada's most exciting contemporary composers kicks off the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival's "Modern Masters" series. Highlighted are four fascinating modern Canadian composers – Denys Bouliane, Gary Kulesha, Alexina Louie, and Chan Ka Nin – whose works will be performed on Friday, August 8 at 18:00 at St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe's Museum of Fine Arts. Three of these four composers (Bouliane, Kulesha and Louie) are winners of the $75,000 National Arts Centre Composer Awards under its New Music Plan announced in 2002. As such they are working closely with Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra and its Music Director Pinchas Zukerman over a four-year period, creating new works and working with the Orchestra on a number of educational activities including its Young Composers Programme.
"Modern Masters: Canadian Composers" is produced jointly by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and Canada's National Arts Centre. Every August the NAC Orchestra's Music Director Pinchas Zukerman performs and mentors at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in New Mexico of which his longtime friend and recital partner Marc Neikrug, a pianist and composer, is the Artistic Director.
A lecture by the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Arts Centre, Peter A. Herrndorf, will introduce the concert. The first recipient of the William Kilbourn Award for lifetime contribution to the arts in Toronto, Mr. Herrndorf's career includes outstanding contributions to journalism, broadcasting, education, and the arts in Canada. He has been an active leader in many community and industry activities in Canada, including as a member of the Board of Directors of the Pinchas Zukerman Musical Instruments Foundation for the National Arts Centre Orchestra. In June of 2000, the Canadian Conference of the Arts awarded Mr. Herrndorf the "Diplôme d'honneur" for his outstanding service to the arts in Canada.
Alexina Louie (b. 1949) owes much of her style and creative impetus to the fact that she is the daughter of second-generation Canadians of Chinese decent. Ms. Louie is renowned for such major compositional accomplishments as O Magnum Mysterium: In Memoriam Glenn Gould and the film score, written with her husband, Alex Pauk, Last Night.
The festival will perform Louie's Bringing The Tiger Down from the Mountain II (1991, 1996), which was commissioned by the Canadian Music Competitions in 1991. Reflecting Ms. Louie's lifelong interest in Eastern influences, this work for cello and piano will test both aspiring virtuosos and established artists alike.
Chan Ka Nin was born in 1949 in Hong Kong and moved with his family to Vancouver in 1965. Twice winner of the Juno Awards for Best Classical Composition, Cha Ka Nin has had his works performed by ensembles such as the Miró Quartet, the National Arts Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. His opera Iron Road recently won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Musical. He will be represented at the festival with Among Friends for Clarinet, Cello & Piano (1989), which, in the words of the composer, "reflects the highs and lows of any human relationship…. Friendship, like music, will last only through the test of time."
Not yet 50, Gary Kulesha (b. 1954) is one of Canada's leading musicians. Active as a composer, conductor, pianist, and teacher, Kulesha has been Composer-in-Residence with both the Canadian Opera Company and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, as well as having guest-conducted the Toronto Symphony, Winnipeg Symphony, and numerous others. His works have been performed in Canada, the United States and Europe. His Trio No. 2 in F minor for Violin, Cello & Piano (2000-01), which will be performed at the Festival, was originally commissioned by the Gryphon Trio, with the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
Denys Bouliane (b. 1955), a native of Grand-Mere, Québec, started out playing guitar in an amateur rock band, but after a short time took the artistic road less traveled: he engaged in studies in piano and violin, eventually receiving his Masters in composition in 1979. Mr. Bouliane studied with György Ligeti from 1980-85. He is the founder of Série B, a group dedicated to extending acoustic possibilities through new electronic instruments. He currently is the director of the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble. The festival will present Trois Petits simiodrames for Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello & Percussion (1990, rev. 1999). The piece filters selected jazz and dance idioms through Bouliane's sophisticated metrical and timbral treatments.
In addition to the Canadian composers, the Festival presents a number of outstanding Canadian artists. Performing this evening's concert: Amanda Forsyth, Principal Cello of the National Arts Centre Orchestra; violinist Jessica Linnebach, the 2000 recipient of the Sylva M. Gelber Music Foundation Award, and now a member of the NAC Orchestra; and Bryan Epperson, Principal Cellist of the Canadian Opera Company. Joining them are several superb local and national musicians: Jacquelyn Helin, L.P. How, Kirsten Johnson, Todd Levy, Steven Osgood and David Tolen.
Included in the general programming of the Festival are Canadian residents Pinchas Zukerman, celebrated violinist and Music Director of Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra; Donnie Deacon, Principal Second Violin of the National Arts Centre Orchestra; Jethro Marks, Associate Principal Viola of the National Arts Centre Orchestra; and Stewart Goodyear, an accomplished young pianist who recently made his London debut with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields orchestra, and Anton Kuerti, one of today's most recorded artists and Officer of the Order of Canada.
The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival is supported by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers' Tax; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Office of Cultural Affairs; the New Mexico Department of Tourism; and grants and gifts from the Brown Foundation, Inc., McCune Charitable Foundation, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, Chamber Music America, Cudd Foundation, Wells Fargo New Mexico and numerous New Mexico businesses and individual donors.
The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival presents five weeks of classical masterpieces, jazz and world music, performed by the world's best musicians, at two historic venues in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Festival's 31st season, July 20 – August 25, 2003, includes 43 concerts, presented at St. Francis Auditorium and the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Programming includes a celebration of Schubert; works by composers ranging from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to Britten, Lutoslawski, and Takemitsu; world premieres of works by Morton Subotnick and Charles Wuorinen; four jazz concerts; world music with Portuguese fado singer Mariza and First Nations trio Ulali. Artists include Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell, Yefim Bronfman, Garrick Ohlsson, Ralph Kirshbaum, and the Orion, Miró and Johannes string quartets. Community events include free youth concerts, master classes, and daily open rehearsals.
Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, PO Box 2227, Santa Fe, NM 87504. TEL: 505-983-2075; FAX: 505-986-0251; E-mail: info@sfcmf.org; website: http://www.sfcmf.org.
