PRISM Saxophone Quartet George Emmanuel Lazaridis - Princeton ...

Princeton University Department of Music and Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

CONCERT

PRISM Saxophone Quartet and

George Emmanuel Lazaridis Performing works by

GIORGOS KOUMENDAKIS STEVEN MACKEY MODEST PETROVICH MUSORGSKY

Monday, October 14, 2013 7:30 p.m. McAlpin Rehearsal Hall

Woolworth Music Center This concert is organized in collaboration with the Onassis Cultural Center (New York)

Program

The Music

STEVEN MACKEY Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

STEVEN MACKEY: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

(performed in its original version for saxophone quartet)

(commissioned by PRISM in 2004)

GIORGOS KOUMENDAKIS Typewriter Tune for saxophone quartet

Jackass

The PRISM Saxophone Quartet Matt Levy, tenor saxophone Timothy McAllister, soprano saxophone Zachary Shemon, alto saxophone Taimur Sullivan, baritone saxophone

Intermission

GIORGOS KOUMENDAKIS Mediterranean Desert (excerpts) for solo piano (US premiere) MODEST PETROVICH MUSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition for solo piano

Bagpipe Machine

A

t the heart of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is the plunging gesture from high to low that opens the piece. “Jackass” is relentlessly insistent on this gesture, but in everchanging harmonic terrain and myriad versions of the landing. One of the appealing quirks of the saxophone is how its sound changes from thin, pinched, and oxygenstarved in the very high register to robust, thick, and reedy in the low register. This plunging gesture performed by saxophones reminded me of a bellowing hee-haw. All of the movements take a different angle on this gesture, morphing it from jackass to bagpipe and machine. The plunging gesture, as a refrain in an ornamented melody with drones, suggests a giant set of bagpipes, and, when rough and relentless, it becomes a growling machine. Steven Mackey

George Emmanuel Lazaridis, piano

This concert is made possible with the generous support of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA) 1

2

GIORGOS KOUMENDAKIS:

GIORGOS KOUMENDAKIS:

Typewriter Tune for Saxophone Quartet (2006)

Mediterranean Desert (2002)

M

“

D

uring the last few years, Greek traditional music has been the moving force behind my compositions. I re-invent, re-structure and re-compose traditional music themes to preserve their energy and subtlety, the authenticity of their primordial model, their vibration and soul. I follow the paths of the “anonymous” folk composers, “anonymous” composers of every kind and without borders, far from any national selfadmiration. As this material swirls in my hands, it inevitably gains something from my personality (the dose being determined by the material itself as well as by the innumerable “hearings” of my music, as the sound is shaped step by step on paper). These degrees of personal expression leave no room for returning to familiar ground. The Typewriter Tune for Saxophone Quartet belongs to the cycle of works under the general title Typewriter Tune, which attempts to decipher musical letters sent to various recipients. Each work offers the next one something from its own world, and thus a succession is created with a beginning lost in time, a present that is not static, and an ever-evolving future. Typewriter Tune for Saxophone Quartet is a letter addressed to the film Faces (1968), directed by the Greek-American John Cassavetes. During the whole piece, the music elaboration of Konyali—a folk dance from the city of Konya in the region of Cappadocia, performed extrovertly and proudly—predominates; it is always varied in the same way that Cassavetes’s Faces enduringly shifts between emotions. Just as four human characters come to terms with their weaknesses after a series of intense confrontations, so too does this quartet; although the thematic material is initially “in symphony” with its traditional nucleus, it is then interrupted, deconstructed, and scattered through the use of different musical idioms, resulting in a lengthy yet fully “transubstantiated” coda. Giorgos Koumendakis

editerranean Desert” is a piano work comprising 24 pieces inspired by the flora and fauna of the Mediterranean. All of us have felt the power of the Mediterranean landscape to some extent. It is a landscape daily disfigured by the improvident way its inhabitants treat it. The relationship modern man has with the natural environment— sometimes highly charged, at others out of kilter or non-existent—was the starting point for the composition of this work. The music sets aside tourist guidebooks to become a medium for meditation. It re-arranges the memories of summer and is transformed into a comforting guide for the winter. Every time we Greeks open our window, the Mediterranean is always there. Each of the 24 pieces is a musical commentary on the programmatic variety of the special—and above all physical— characteristics of fish, birds, animals, insects, and plants. The grouper, the larva and the moth, mint, thyme, sage, and the silkworm all gradually reveal their spiritual characteristics too. 1. Thyme 2. Mint 3. Sage 4. The Caterpillar and the Treble-Bar of L. van B. 5. Grouper 6. The Silk Road 7. Couple Giorgos Koumendakis

3

4

The Composers GIORGOS KOUMENDAKIS

MODEST PETROVICH MUSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition

M

usorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) in memory of a friend, the artist Victor Hartmann. The title refers to an actual showing of Hartmann’s drawings and paintings. The composer penned a series of short piano works that represent the images on their own terms while also capturing his own passage through the exhibition space. The musical vignettes are framed by the iconic and memorable “Promenade” theme, which represents the composer, a man of considerable bulk, ambling from one canvas to the next. The “Promenade” is heard intact at the beginning, then returns in intricate variation between movements titled “The Gnome,” “The Old Castle,” “Tuileries (Dispute between Children at Play),” “Cattle,” “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks,” “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle,” “The Market at Limoges,” “Catacombs,” “The Hut on Chickens’ Legs (Baba-Yaga),” and “The Great Gate of Kiev.” The overall design is symmetrical in terms of tonality (moving from E-flat minor to E-flat major) and subject matter. Scenes taken from Russian fairytales surround images from history and episodes in French and Polish life. Halfway through the cycle, the “Promenade” becomes part of the pictures themselves as the composer loses himself in the paintings, viewing them, as it were, from the inside rather than the outside. The concluding vignette, “The Great Gate of Kiev,” is cast in a rondo form, in which a given theme or section of music recurs after the presentation of contrasting materials. It relates to the rest of the cycle as a fractal—the design of a snowflake, or clouds, in which the smallest part reflects the pattern of the whole, self-same at any distance. Two melodies alternate before ceding to a quotation from Musorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov, which perhaps signals that the composer has returned to himself from his reverie. The “Promenade” concludes the work. Musorgsky did not orchestrate Pictures at an Exhibition. That task was undertaken in the 20th century by numerous musicians, famously by the French neoclassical composer Maurice Ravel, infamously by the British glam rock ensemble Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. The orchestrations are lavish, but the melodic and harmonic writing loses its rough edges. Much is lost in the translation of the undisciplined piano score into an orchestral favorite, including its unpleasant politics, which range from a dissolute harmonic depiction of Polish peasants (in “Cattle”) and an anti-Semitic melodic depiction of the “rich Jew” Samuel Goldenberg and “poor Jew” Schmuÿle as one and the same. Simon Morrison Professor of Music, Princeton University 5

G

iorgos Koumendakis, born in Rethymno, Crete, in 1959, is a recognized Greek composer of the new generation, whose writing is characterized by a variety of musical idioms and a constant search for new directions. In 1985 György Ligeti chose him from among other European composers and commissioned the work Symmolpa 5, which was performed by the European Community Youth Orchestra, conducted by James Judd, in Asolo, Bolzano, and Luxembourg. Also in 1985, he participated in the Biennale di Venezia with the work Symmolpa 4, performed by the Divertimento Ensemble and Sandro Gorli. In 1987 Koumendakis collaborated with the Ensemble InterContemporain and Arturo Tamayo in Frankfurt for his work Symmolpa 3. In the same year, Mathias Bamert and the ECYO presented Symmolpa 3 at the Frankfurt Feste. In 1988 Symmolpa 4 was performed by Ingo Metzmacher and the Hong Kong Ensemble at the World Music Days Festival in Hong Kong. In 1990 his opera There Will Be a Day was presented in Oslo by the Oslo Sinfonietta and Christian Eggen, and the Xenakis Ensemble with Diego Masson performed the Concertino for Piano at the Nieuwe Muziek Middelburg Festival in Holland. In 1992 Koumendakis was awarded the Prix de Rome and spent the following year as composer in residence at the French Academy of Rome where his work Eros-Daemon was performed by the countertenor Aris Christofellis. That year, pianist Jay Gottlieb played Symmolpa 1 at the Présences ‘92 festival in Paris, at Tage für Neue Musik in Zürich, and at the Lecce Festival. In 1992 he collaborated with D. Papaioannou and the Edafos Dance Theatre Company (Moons-Sappho). In 1998 his work Journey into the Night was presented by the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Mediterranée and Henri Gallois at the Aix en Provence Festival. From 1998 to 2000, Koumendakis worked as composer in residence for Clio Gould and the BT Scottish Ensemble in London, sponsored by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust. In 2004 Koumendakis was musical director, composer, and music concept creator of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. Also that year, Hae-Sun Kang played Typewriter Tune for Violin at the Présences festival in Paris. In 6

STEVEN MACKEY 2005 the Athens Festival dedicated two concerts to Koumendakis at the Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus with the Camerata, the Accentus/Axe 21 Chamber Choir, and soprano Elena Kelessidi, directed by D. Papaioannou. In 2007 his work Amor Fati was performed at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall by the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Myron Michailidis, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis. In 2007–2008, Koumendakis participated in the Cultural Year of Greece in China, with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra and Tan Lihua. In 2008 he composed Point of No Return, a work commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. At the 2009 Milano Incontra La Grecia festival, the work Five More Steps until You Fall Asleep was performed by the Dissonart Ensemble and the Sentieri Selvaggi Ensemble. In 2010 his composition The Pedal Tone for a Child was presented by Myron Michailidis and the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra and the Athens State Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Alkis Baltas played Amor Fati at the Athens Concert Hall. In the same year, his Unknown Dialects was presented at the Athens Festival by the Dissonart Ensemble while the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble played Typewriter Tune for Amplified Chamber Ensemble in Amsterdam. Giorgos Koumendakis was the first guest of the “Carte blanche” series at the Athens Concert Hall in 2011, where the Piano Concerto No. 4–The Pedal Tone for a MiddleAged Man was performed by George-Emmanuel Lazaridis and the Camerata, conducted by George Koundouris. In the same year, the Prism Quartet presented Typewriter Tune for Sax Quartet in New York. In 2012 the Onassis Cultural Centre dedicated the “Composer’s Portrait” concert cycle to Koumendakis with a series of performances and concerts. He has also composed music for four Greek tragedies performed at the Epidaurus Festival (1981, 1984, 1989, and 1996) by the National Theatre, the Art Theatre and the Notos Theatre. As guest composer for 2012–14, he was commissioned by the Greek National Opera to compose The Murderess, an opera based on the novel by Alexandros Papadiamantis, and also a contemporary opera for children and adults entitled Omiros-Orimos, flying carpet-Odyssey, to be produced by the network opus21musikplus and scheduled to premiere in October 2013 at Munich Gastein.

7

S

teven Mackey, born in 1956 to American parents stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, is regarded as one of the leading composers of his generation and has composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He blazed a trail in the 1980s and ‘90s by including the electric guitar and vernacular music influence in his concert music. He regularly performs his own work and is also active as an improvising musician with his band Big Farm. Mackey’s orchestral music has been presented by major orchestras around the world, from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco and Chicago Symphonies, the BBC Philharmonic, Concertgebouw orchestra, and the Austrian Radio Symphony to the Sydney Symphony and the Tokyo Philharmonic. As a guitarist, Mackey has performed his chamber music with the Kronos Quartet, Arditti Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Nexttime Ensemble (Parma), Psappha (Manchester), and Joey Baron. Two of his works—Stumble to Grace, a piano concerto for Orli Shaham, cocommissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis and New Jersey Symphonies, and TONIC, an orchestral work for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia—have recently premiered. He is currently working on a piece for the Brentano String Quartet, jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Nasher Museum in Dallas to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, as well as a commission from the Aquarium of the Pacific to celebrate the “Urban Ocean.” Upcoming projects include a large multi-movement symphonic work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a trumpet concerto for virtuoso Hakan Hardenberger commissioned by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. Mackey has been honored with numerous awards, including a Grammy, several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center

8

Modest Petrovich Musorgsky Friedheim Award, and many others. He has been the composer-in-residence at major music festivals, including Tanglewood, Aspen, and the Holland Festival. His monodrama, Ravenshead, for tenor/actor (Rinde Eckert) and electro-acoustic band/ensemble (the Paul Dresher Ensemble), has been performed nearly one hundred times and is available on a MINMAX CD. In a year-end review of cultural events, USA Today crowned the work the “Best New Opera of 1998.” Many CD’s feature works by Mackey. Dreamhouse (2010) and Lonely Motel: Music from Slide (2011) were each nominated for four Grammy awards, and Mackey won a Grammy for Best Small Ensemble Performance for Lonely Motel. Steven Mackey is currently Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at Princeton University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1985. Helping to shape the next generation of composers and musicians, he teaches composition, theory, twentieth-century music, improvisation, and a variety of special topics. He regularly coaches and conducts new work by student composers, as well as twentieth-century classics. He was the recipient of Princeton University’s first Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991. Mackey’s web site is www.stevenmackey.com. His music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their son, Jasper, and daughter, Dylan.

M

odest Musorgsky (1839-1881) had a piecemeal musical education and failed to finish most of his major works. He came from an aristocratic family, but was forced, when the family’s resources dwindled, to take a job in the Imperial Russian government, hand-copying state property deeds for a living. Musically, he was supported by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who helped fill in the gaps in his training and served, as points, as his spiritual mentor. Musorgsky was also influenced, indeed controlled, by the nationalist ideologue Vladimir Stasov, whose thoughts on what Russian music could and should sound like continue to influence our own. Musorgsky’s music tends to be described as disobedient, exotic, and primitive in terms of its harmonic and melodic rule-breaking. The labels are reductive, but such was how Musorgsky and the other 19th century Russian composers known as the Mighty Five (Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, and César Cui) marketed themselves to their audiences, both at home in Russia and abroad. Musorgsky’s association with Russian nationalist trends in composition is manifest in the subjects that he chose for his mature operas and his experimentation with speech-based declamation. He derived inspiration from folksong and folklore and experimented with scales of ancient Slavic pedigree. His bursts of creativity were tempered by drink and by the lashing he received from music critics in St. Petersburg, chiefly for his unconventional approach to operatic composition. Recognizing his genius, his colleagues rescued his mature scores from oblivion. His twice-composed opera Boris Godunov (1869/72) ranks among the greatest in the repertoire. The tale it tells is exceedingly dark, suggesting that the political conflicts of Russia’s past are doomed to be repeated in the future. The opera that succeeded it, Khovanshchina (1880), which is set in the time of Peter the Great, provides an even grimmer indictment of Russia. The frightful, blood-red portrait that was made of Musorgsky just before his death from alcoholism portrays him as a sacrificial victim both of his art and his nation. His letters and the reminiscences of those who knew him in St. Petersburg create the image of a musical prophet.

9

10

The Artists George Emmanuel Lazaridis

B

orn in Greece in 1978, George Emmanuel Lazaridis enjoys a flourishing international career that has taken him from the United States and Mexico to Europe, Russia, Egypt, and the Middle East. He started composing at the age of four and attracted public attention at the age of six, appearing on various television programs and a special 45-minute radio broadcast on the Greek National Radio. Mentored by Yonty Solomon at the Royal College of Music in London, Lazaridis has also worked with Alfred Brendel, Ruth Nye, Domna Evnouhidou, Paul Badura Skoda, Noretta Conci Leech, and Douglas Finch. Since the age of eleven he has received many prizes, honorary awards, and scholarships, and during the past twenty years he has performed in some of the most prestigious international venues, including Royal Albert Hall, Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw, St. Petersburg Philharmonia Hall, and the Palais des Beaux Arts. His appearances have received great critical acclaim from audiences and critics alike, who recognize him as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Lazaridis has performed with many leading orchestras, under the direction of Sir Neville Marriner, Ingo Metzmacher, Yuri Temirkanov, Yoel Levi, Theodor Guschlbauer, Michel Tabachnik, Maxim Shostakovich, Pascal Rofe, Nikolai Alexeev, William Boughton, Alexander Myrat, and others. He has collaborated with renowned ensembles and artists in chamber music performances and has also performed in many international festivals. Recent tours have included the Rising Stars concert series in Europe and New York, a tour with the Medici Quartet in Greece and the United Kingdom, and a concert tour with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Yuri Temirkanov.

Lazaridis will soon release two new albums: one at ECM with George Koumendakis’s piano concertos nos.3 and 4, both of which were composed especially for him, and the other at SOMM with major works by Franz Schubert. As a composer, he has received commissions from the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Europa Cantat International Festival, the Cultural Capital of Europe 1997, the Melina Merkouri Foundation, the New Arts Generation Festival in Birmingham, the Athens International Festival, and the Athens State Orchestra. Lazaridis has also been an active teacher, a successful artistic director, and the founder of new international cultural organizations, including ADAP in 2002, an international association of artists that gives worldwide performances for peace. In 2006 he cofounded the Music-Village International Festival in Mount Pelion, one of the few international music societies of its kind, and in January 2013, he co-founded the Kyklos Ensemble. He has given master classes on piano performance, body language, and the psychology of live interpretation at the Trinity College of Music, Birmingham City University, the Manhattan School of Music, the Megaron Halls, Kutztown University, and numerous conservatories in Greece and the United Kingdom. Recently he served as head of music programming at the Demetria International Festival and since September 2010, he has been artistic director of the Megaron, the Thessaloniki Concert Halls Organization.

His Liszt recordings were recently selected within the top fifty best releases of the decade by the international magazine Pianist, and his release of Schumann’s “Papillon” has been ranked among the five best historical performances, alongside such keyboard giants as Sviatoslav Richter and Claudio Arrau. His performances have been described as “special enough to be beyond comparison” (Adrian Jack of BBC Music Magazine) and of “such drama, power and concentration, that [they] hold their own even if you stop to consider celebrated recordings of Horowitz, Argerich, Brendel, and Zimmerman” (Bryce Morrison of Gramophone Magazine).

11

12

PRISM Quartet

I

ntriguing programs of great beauty and breadth have distinguished the PRISM Quartet as one of America’s foremost chamber ensembles. Two-time winners of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, PRISM has performed in Carnegie Hall in the Making Music Series, in Alice Tully Hall with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and throughout Latin America under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. PRISM has also been presented to critical acclaim as soloists with the Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra and conducted residencies at the nation’s leading conservatories, including the Curtis Institute of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory. Champions of new music, PRISM has commissioned more than 150 works, many by internationally celebrated composers, including Pulitzer Prize-winners William Bolcom, Jennifer Higdon, Zhou Long, and Bernard Rands; Guggenheim Fellows William Albright, Martin Bresnick, Chen Yi, Lee Hyla, and Steven Mackey; MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient Bright Sheng; and jazz masters Greg Osby and Tim Ries. In 1997, PRISM initiated its own concert series in Philadelphia and New York City, presenting the newest compositions created for their ensemble by composers from around the world. The series has featured an eclectic range of guest artists, including Ethel, the Talujon Percussion Quartet, Music From China, Miro Dance Theatre, Cantori New York, and top jazz artists, including guitarist Ben Monder, saxophonist Rick Margitza, and drummers Gerald Cleaver, Mark Ferber, and John Riley. PRISM has also joined forces with the New York Consort of Viols, Opera Colorado, and the Chilean rock band Inti-Illimani in touring engagements. PRISM’s discography is extensive, documenting more than sixty works commissioned by the Quartet on Albany, innova, Koch, Naxos, New Dynamic, and New Focus. PRISM may also be heard on the soundtrack of the film Two Plus One, by Emmy nominee Eugene Martin, scored by Quartet member Matthew Levy, and has been featured in the theme music to the weekly PBS news magazine “NOW.” Hailed as “a master of his instrument” (Audiophile Audition) known for “evocative and bravura playing” (The Classical Review), Timothy McAllister (soprano sax) serves as 13

Associate Professor of Saxophone and Co-Director of the Institute for New Music at the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music. Additionally, he spends his summers as distinguished artist faculty of the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan and regularly performs at the Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, each August. He has recently been featured with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Tokyo Wind Symphony, Dallas Wind Symphony, and United States Navy Band, among others. He holds degrees and honors from the University of Michigan, including the Doctor of Musical Arts and the Albert A. Stanley Medal. McAllister’s work can be heard on the Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos, OMM, Stradivarius, Centaur, AUR, Albany, New Dynamic, Equilibrium, New Focus, and innova record labels. First-prize winner in the inaugural U.S. International Saxophone Symposium and Competition, Zachary Shemon (alto sax) serves as Assistant Professor of Saxophone at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music. He performs regularly throughout the United States as a soloist and chamber musician, including concerto appearances with the Indiana University Philharmonic Orchestra, University of Michigan Symphony and Concert Bands, Plymouth MI Symphony, Ann Arbor Concert Band, and Firelands Symphony. He was a prizewinner in the 2005 and 2011 Fischoff International Chamber Music Competitions and is a founding member of the Arundo Donax Reed Quintet. He is pursuing a Doctor of Music degree from Indiana University, holds degrees from the University of Michigan (BM, BSE, MM) and Indiana University (Performer Diploma), and is a recent fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and at the Université Européenne de Saxophone in Gap, France. Shemon is also a Rico Performing Artist and endorses Rico Reserve Classic saxophone reeds. Matthew Levy (tenor sax) has been hailed by the Saxophone Journal as “a complete virtuoso of the tenor saxophone” and by the New York Times for his “energetic and enlivening” performances. A recipient of composition fellowships from the Independence Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and grants from the NEA and American Composers Forum, he has scored four motion pictures, including PBS’s Diary of a City Priest, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival. His music is highlighted on three PRISM recordings on Koch and innova. He has also recorded for 14

Deutsche Grammophon, Tzadik, and Grammavision; collaborated with a host of choreographers/dance companies, among them Peter Sparling and Scrap; and appeared as a guest artist with the Detroit Symphony, Dolce Suono, and counter) induction. He holds three degrees from the University of Michigan, where he was a recipient of the Lawrence Teal Award, and has served on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Redlands, and Toledo. He currently teaches saxophone at the University of Pennsylvania’s College House Program. From 2000 to 2011, he served as director of the Philadelphia Music Project at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Taimur Sullivan (baritone sax) enjoys a prolific career as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator. His performances have taken him from the stages of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to engagements in Russia and Germany and throughout Latin America. The New York Times praised him as “outstanding . . . his melodies phrased as if this were an old and cherished classic, his virtuosity supreme.” The Milwaukee JournalSentinel wrote that Taimur is “talented, fearless and sensitive . . . the sounds he made were fully and deliciously drawn.” He appears on more than twenty-five recordings for the New World, Mode, Albany, innova, Capstone, Mastersound, Bonk and Zuma labels, and he has most recently recorded James Aikman’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone with Russia’s St. Petersburg Symphony. In honor of his distinguished record of promoting and presenting new works for the saxophone, including more than 150 premieres, Meet The Composer named him one of eight “Soloist Champions” in the United States. Mr. Sullivan is the Artist/Professor of Saxophone at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

This program will be performed tomorrow evening at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Please turn off your cell phones and other electronic devices.