Mark Alburger, 2011: October 15

SAN FRANCISCO
COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Mark Alburger, Music Director

The Dark Serenade

8pm, Saturday, October 15, 2011, Old First Church, San Francisco, CA
8pm, Sunday, October 16, 2011, Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland, CA
Mark Alburger, John Kendall Bailey, and Martha Stoddard, conducting

Program

Phil Freihofner
Carmilla (J. Sheridan Le Fanu)
                    I. Dreams Laugh at Locksmiths
                    II. A Soot-Black Beast
                    III. If Your Dear Heart is Wounded

                    Lisa Scola Prosek, Soprano

Lisa Scola Prosek
The Goldfish Pond from Night at the Kremlin

                    John Duykers, Tenor

Davide Verotta Facing Chaos

Intermission

David Graves
Amaranthine Silence

Mark Alburger
Regime Change
                    I. Let's Find a Young Woman
                    II. You Know What to Do

                    Lisa Scola Prosek, Soprano
                    Olivia Flanigan, Contralto

Loren Jones
Graveyard

SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

Mark Alburger

Music Director and Conductor

Erling Wold
Associate Music Director

John Kendall Bailey
Associate Conductor

Martha Stoddard

Associate Conductor

Flute
Bruce Salvisberg
Harry Bernstein
Martha Stoddard

Oboe
Phil Freihofner

Clarinet
Michael Kimbell

Bassoon
Michael Garvey
Lori Garvey
Contrabassoon

Trumpet
Stephen Ruppenthal

Horn
Brian Holmes

Bouzouki
Loren Jones
Percussion

Harp
Anna Maria Mendieta

Piano
Allan Crossman
Lisa Scola Prosek
Davide Verotta
Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman
Eytan Schillinger-Hyman

Percussion
Victor Flaviano
Anne Szabla
Collin Boltz
Mark Alburger

Violin
Monika Gruber

Violin II
Christina Knudson

Viola
Ivo Bukolic

Cello
Ariella Hyman

Bass
John Beeman

MARK ALBURGER (b. April 2, 1957, Upper Darby, PA) studied with Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.), Tom Flaherty and Christopher Yavelow at Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley. He is Founder and Music Director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, Conductor of San Francisco Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions, and Instructor in Music Literature and Theory at Diablo Valley College. As Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Monthly Journal (21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com), Alburger has interviewed many composers, including Charles Amirkhanian, Earle Brown, George Crumb, Alan Hovhaness, Steve Mackey, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, and Steve Reich. He has recently updated and expanded the articles on John Adams and Philip Glass for Grove Online and The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition. Alburger has been the recipient of many honors, awards, and commissions -- including yearly ASCAP Standard Awards; grants from Meet the Composer, the American Composers Forum, MetLife, and Theatre Bay Area; funding from the Marra, Zellerbach, Hewlett, and Getty Foundations; and performances by ensembles and orchestras throughout the United States. Alburger's concert and dramatic compositions combine atonal, collage, neoclassic, pop, and postminimal sensibilities -- often in overall frameworks troped on pre-existent material. His complete works 197 opus numbers to date (including 16 concerti, 20 operas, nine symphonies, and the 12-hours-and-counting opera-oratorio The Bible) are being issued on recordings from New Music. 500+ videos of his music may be found on the DrMarkAlburger YouTube channel, as well as on many other websites. Not Shy and Retiring: Mark Alburger's 55th and Friends will be held at San Francisco Community Music Center, 8pm, Saturday, April 14, 2012.

REGIME CHANGE, Op. 196, is excerpted from the opera-oratorio Solomon, Op. 70, detailing the reign transition from David to his son in Ancient Israel. The work references G.F. Handel's like-named oratorio, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica (David's inability to keep warm late in life without the comfort of a young warm body in his bed), polytonality, and George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children (and his allusions to Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde).

JOHN KENDALL BAILEY is Music Director, Principal Conductor and Chorus Master of Trinity Lyric Opera, Music Director and Conductor of Voices of Musica Sacra, Associate Conductor of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, and Artistic Director of the San Francisco Song Festival. He has been a guest conductor with the Oakland East Bay Symphony, American Philharmonic-Sonoma County, Diablo Symphony Orchestra, Mesopotamia Symphony Orchestra, Oakland Ballet, Oakland Youth Orchestra, Gottschalk Music Center Orchestra, and has conducted productions for Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, West Bay Opera, North Bay Opera, Pocket Opera, Mission City Opera, the Crowden School, Dominican University, Thick Description, Goat Hall Productions, Opera Frontier, Solo Opera, Shoebox Opera, and Golden State Theater Productions. Mr. Bailey has taught conducting at the University of California at Davis and Notre Dame de Namur University. A specialist in the music of Bernard Herrmann, Mr. Bailey recently conducted his cantata Moby Dick and the suite from Vertigo.

JOHN DUYKERS made his professional operatic debut with Seattle Opera in 1966. Since then he has appeared with many of the leading opera companies of the world including The Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Netherlands Opera, the Grand Theatre of Geneva, Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, Frankfurt Opera, Opera de Marseille, Canadian Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Los Angeles Opera, San Diego Opera and the Opera Company of Philadelphia. His repertoire currently encompasses both standard works as well as contemporary. He is particularly well known for his performances of contemporary music, having sung in 100 contemporary operas including 67 world premieres. Among these, in 1987 he created the role of Mao Tse Tung in John Adams's Nixon in China which was premiered with Houston Grand Opera and he has performed throughout the world. Nixon in China was telecast over PBS' Great Performances winning an Emmy and recorded for Nonesuch, winning a Grammy.

Contralto and Flutist OLIVIA FLANIGAN is a Senior at Tamalpais High School (Mill Valley), who has performed with The Marin Theatre Company and studies voice with Lisa Scola Prosek.

Oboist and Composer PHILIP FREIHOFNER has been a regularly performing member of SFCCO since 2004. He works Saturdays at Forrests Music in Berkeley, and has written and maintains medical software for the UCSF Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant department. Freihofner has published and sells chamber music arrangements and compositions. His suite for the silent horror film The Golem was released this year on CD by Crystal Records, and his electro-acoustic Three Ways to Cook a Fish was recorded this August by oboist Kristin Polk (not yet available). Other recent work includes a piano-three-hands arrangement of music inspired by the silent film comedy from Russia: The Girl with the Hat Box, progress on a commission for a new work for oboe and piano, and the publication of two minimalist works for piano solo: Prelude and Sandcastles.

From Dr. Hesselius' files comes the narrative account of Laura, a half-English, half-Austrian, young woman who lives with her retired father in a lonely "schloss" in Styria. Her mysterious friend, CARMILLA, turns out to be the vampire Countess Mircalla! Three of a projected seven songs are presented here, with text extracted from Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu's short story Carmilla, originally published in the 1860's, several decades before Bram Stoker's Dracula.

DAVID GRAVES has been composing for more than 30 years in a wide variety of genres for live performance, film, theater, and recording studio. He studied at the University of Nebraska and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and was a resident composer for the Berkeley Symphony for two seasons. This will be David's tenth performance with the SFCCO.

AMARANTHINE SILENCE is a novel piece that uses electronics derived from field recordings of presumed silence (a garden, an empty restaurant, a parking garage, and so on). Between intense orchestral gestures, these apparent silences will cause the audience to focus on what is rarely given attention: the "silence" between the notes.

LOREN JONES, a native of San Francisco, began composing as a child. He studied with Tom Constantine and Alexis Alrich, and is currently with David Conte at the SF Conservatory of Music. His work has been performed by his own chamber group, by the SFCCO, and by students and teachers from around the Bay Area. He has produced many recordings, worked in radio and film, including creating a sound track for an animated short which won a special Academy Award. He was the recipient of a 2007 Meet the Composer Grant. Selections from Dancing on the Brink of the World, for chamber orchestra and period instruments, based on the history of San Francisco, has been an ongoing part of the repertoire of the past three seasons of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra concerts.

GRAVEYARD is a celebration of Halloween, an homage to the great Universal monster movies of the 1930's and 1940’s and a spiritual celebration of death and it's mystical aspects, with lighting effects, black light, fog and a surprise ending. it was written by an unseen hand, holding a feather pen, floating by a lone candle in the middle of the night, scribbling away by itself. The wok is dedicated to Edward Valentine.

LISA SCOLA PROSEK was raised in Rome, Italy, and graduated from Princeton University, where she studied with Edward Cone and Milton Babbitt. Scola Prosek studied singing with Margherita Kalil of the Met, and in Italy she attended the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, and studied with composer Gaetano Giani-Luporini. To date, she has composed six operas, with librettos in Italian and English, and was recently commissioned by Thick House Theater for a new opera, Night at the Kremlin, a darkly comedic account of Churchill's all night drunken tête-à-tête with Stalin. John Duykers creates the role of Churchill, directed by Melissa Weaver, premiering at Thick House Theater in San Francisco for six performances in October 2012. In 2008 Scola Prosek premiered Trap Door, an opera commissioned by The Lab based on one soldier’s experience in Iraq, and inspired by Camus’ The Stranger. Belfagor, which premiered in 2007 at Thick House, the comic tale of self-destructive materialism by Machiavelli, was reviewed as “an impressive debut by … a gifted local composer” in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous commissions, grants and awards, including from the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, from the LEF Foundation, Meet The Composer, The Hewlett Foundation, the Zellerbach Foundation, and the American Composers Forum. lisascolaprosek.com

Emerging from his room in Villa #7, Churchill, in the opera NIGHT AT THE KREMLIN, is looking at THE GOLDFISH POND, when the spy assigned to his surveillance brings him a message: Stalin will meet him at midnight in the Kremlin. At first surprised by this odd schedule, he is distressed to wait all day for a meeting. Churchill then decides he would much rather watch the fish anyway, and spends a happy day in the Moscow garden.

MARTHA STODDARD earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Humboldt State University and her Master of Music degree from San Francisco State University, where she studied flute, conducting and composition. A recipient of the ASCAPlus Award in 2009 and 2010, her music has been performed for the San Francisco Chapter of the American Composer’s Forum, by Avenue Winds, ChamberMix and Carla Rees at the San Francisco Chamber Wind Festivals, and in London, UK by Carla Rees and Lisa Bost, by the San Francisco Choral Artists, San Francisco Composers’ Chamber Orchestra, schwungvoll!, the Oakland Civic Orchestra, the Community Women’s Orchestra, Womensing, on the New Directions Series of the Bakersfield Symphony, in the Trinity Chamber Concert Series and the New Music Forum Festival of Contemporary Music. Recent commissions include Outbursts, a piano trio for Sacramento-based Sierra Ensemble, a chamber work for the Harbor Bay String Quartet, the Orchestral Suite for the Young of All Ages for the Community Women’s Orchestra (Oakland), and a piano trio for ChamberMix. Stoddard is the Director of Instrumental Music at Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, a position she has held since 1991. She is also the Artistic Director of the Oakland Civic Orchestra, Associate Conductor of the San Francisco Composers’ Chamber Orchestra, and director of ChamberMix. She recently joined the faculty at the Crowden School as Program Coordinator for the John Adams Young Composers’ Program and has conducted premieres of several new chamber operas in San Francisco and Berkeley, including Mark Alburger's Job, Lisa Scola Prosek's Dieci Giorni, and John Bilotta’s Trifles. She is a featured performer on alto flute for John Bilotta’s Shadow Tree on Capstone Records, in John Thow’s Cantico, and as conductor on Janis Mercer’s Voices (Centaur Records CEN 295). ChamberMix is featured on Beauport Classical 2008, New Music for Concert.

DAVIDE VEROTTA was born in a boring Italian town close to Milano and moved to the very much more exciting San Francisco in his late twenties. He studied piano at the Milano Conservatory and piano and composition in California at the San Francisco Conservatory and State University (M.A.), and at the University of California at Davis (Ph.D.). He is an active solo and ensemble piano player, and he is actively involved in the new music composition scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recent works include chamber opera, string quartet, dance, wind quintet, piano and violin and piano solo. For more information please visit http://www.davideverotta.com

FACING CHAOS is an orchestral piece inspired by a passage from the tragedy Thyestes (62 C.E.) by Seneca the Younger: "Trembling are our hearts, lest all things fall shattered in fatal ruin and once more gods and men be overwhelmed by formless Chaos; lest the lands, the encircling sea, and the stars that wander in the spangled sky, nature blot out once more." Chaos: in the cosmogony of Hesiod and Democritus, the initial state of the universe, a dark void, a primordial condition where out of nothing tiny atoms are formed and churn incoherently until they collide together to form larger units, including the earth. The passage inspires Facing Chaos with a sort of existential malaise that, as probably was the case for Seneca, is generated by our discomfort with the apparent contradiction between the presence of us, our relationships, our civilization, earth, and the much larger overwhelming dimension of space and time that surrounds it. Structure is one way we face this discomfort, and a complex form characterizes the piece. In juxtaposition with rather aggressive rhythmic sections (inspired by Indian talas), the main motives of the piece take shape, metamorphosing all the way to the end of the piece. In addition, two highly recognizable slow sections (played in a low register by the bassoons) serve as stopping points: they represent question marks expressing our wonder in the face of the gigantic structure that sprouted from the original chaos to form the universe.

DONATIONS:

Archangel
(Contributing $1000 +)
Mark Alburger
Alexis Alrich
Lisa Scola Prosek
Sue Rosen
Erling Wold

Angel
(Contributing $500-$999)
Adobe, inc
John Beeman
Michael & Lisa Cooke
Anne Dorman
David & Joyce Graves
Ken Howe
Anne Baldwin
Hanna Hymans-Ostroff
Anne Szalba
Davide Verotta

Benefactor
(Contributing $100-$499)
Christopher & Sue Bancroft Kenneth & Ruth Baumann
Susan M. Barnes
Marina Berlin & Anthony Parisi
Bruce & Betsy Carlson
Patrick & Linda Condry
Rachel Condry
Connie & George Cooke
Steven Cooke
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Martha Stoddard
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Donor
(Contributing $50-$99)
Paul & Barbara Boniker
Mark Easterday
Sabrina Huang
Donna & Joseph Lanam
Harriet March Page
Larry Ochs
CF Peters
Barbara & Mark Stefik
Roberta Robertson

Patron
(Contributing up to $49)
Susie Bailey
Schuyler Bailey
Harry Bernstein
Joanne Carey
Hannes & Linda Lamprecht
Elinor Lamson
Anthony Mobilia
Deborah Slater

To make a tax-deductible donation, please send a check made out to:

The Lab
2948 16th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Please include a note saying you want the money to go to the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.

Special thanks to Lick-Wilmerding High School, for providing rehearsal space.

Philip Freihofner - CARMILLA (J. Sheridan Le Fanu)

I. And Laugh at Locksmiths

The door is bolted. The candle, burning.
The door is bolted. Thus I might take my rest in peace.

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones. Their persons make their exits and entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

The door is bolted. The candle, burning.
Thus I might take my rest in peace.

II. I slept, yet was conscious

I slept, yet was conscious that I was dreaming.

I saw, or fancied I saw something moving, a soot-black animal, resembling a monstrous cat, four or five feet long, pacing to and fro like a beast in a cage.

I could not cry out.

It's pace grew faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker and at length so dark that I could only see its eyes.

It sprang lightly onto the bed and the eyes approached my face. Suddenly I felt a stinging pain, like two needles darting into my breast.

I awoke.

The room was lit by my bedside candle. At the foot of the bed stood a female figure in a loose dark dress. A block of stone could not be more still.

Then she was by the door.

Then she was gone.

III. Dearest, your little heart is wounded

Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours.

In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die--die, sweetly die--into mine.

I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love.

So, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.

Mark Alburger

REGIME CHANGE (after the Book of 1 Kings)

I. Let's Find a Young Woman

OFFICIAL (To DAVID):
Majesty, let's find a young woman to
Stay with you and take care of...
She will lie close to you and
Keep you warm and safe and...

ABISHAG (Ecstatic):
(Vocalise)

II. You Know What to Do

DAVID
(Dying): My time to die has come.
Be confident in all.
But there is something else.

You recall what Joab did to me.
How he killed my leaders of troops?
Abner, son of Ner, and Amasa?
You know what to do, you must not let him die old.
Also Shimei, one who cursed me bitterly.

SOLOMON
(Entranced): You recall what Joab did to me.
How he killed my leaders of troops?
Abner, son of Ner, and Amasa?
You know what to do, you must not let him die old.
Also Shimei, one who cursed me bitterly.

ABISHAG
(Lamenting): (Vocalise)

***

A fine concert, with many enthusiastic comments and attendees including Vicky, Lucas, and Mike.

Before this, the

sound

check.

After, swing by Revolution Cafe to take in Harriet and company doing the Goat Hall Productions / San Francisco Cabaret Opera Kurt Weill Project show,

heading homeward thereafter to a very late night of more musical endeavors (11, 6, 22 -- pages re pdf of Aerial Requiem and composition of Psalm 77 and The Cop and the Anthem).