New Haven, CT (January 24, 2014): The New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s (NHSO) 120th season continues with an exciting celebration! In honor of composer Augusta Read Thomas’s 50th birthday, Music Director William Boughton conducts Wind on the Water on Thursday, February 27 at 7:30pm at Woolsey Hall in New Haven.
The NHSO is giving Ms. Read Thomas a special birthday gift: the world premiere of her Saxophone Concerto performed by Frederick Hemke, famed teacher of international recording star David Sanborn. The concerto, which Ms. Thomas calls “Prisms of Light”, captures in sound distinct aspects of a ray of light and also incorporates the jazzy rhythms that fill the saxophone repertoire.
Joining the Symphony are an internationally acclaimed diva and a hometown choir. Soprano Tony Arnold is soloist for Absolute Ocean, a work for orchestra, harp, and soprano set to poems by E.E. Cummings. The Elm City Girls’ Choir performs Two E.E. Cummings Songs. The program is rounded out by Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose, inspired by a seventeenth-century collection of European fairy tales by Charles Perrault entitled Contes de ma mère l’oye (“Mother Goose Stories”). Each Augusta Read Thomas piece is being recorded for commercial release on Nimbus Records.
AUGUSTA READ THOMAS is the pre-eminent female composer of her generation. She is a University Professor at the University of Chicago and was the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997-2006. In 2007, her Astral Canticle was one of the two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. In May 2009, she was elected to membership by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center since 2000, serving as Chair of the Board from 2005-2008. Ms. Thomas is a passionate and devoted teacher, currently serving on the Dean’s Music Advisory Board at Northwestern University. She inaugurated the NHSO’s Young Composer Project and each of her students was admitted to a conservator or university composition program. Ms. Thomas recently had four major world premieres: Cello Concerto No. 3 (March 2013), Harvest Drum (December 2012), Resounding Earth (September 2012), and Earth Echoes (October 2012).
FREDERICK HEMKE began studies with Marcel Mule in September 1955 at the Paris Conservatoire National de Musique et de Declamation in Paris, France. He earned the Premier Prix in 1956, becoming the first ever American saxophonist to earn this distinction. Since 1962, Dr. Hemke has been Professor of Saxophone at the Northwestern University School of Music in Evanston, Illinois, where he currently serves as the Louis and Elsie Snydacker Eckstein Professor of Music and Associate Dean of the School of Music. He has also served as President of the North American Saxophone Alliance, from which he was awarded Honorary Life Membership. Dr. Hemke has performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Northwestern University Wind Ensemble, and the Kronos Quartet, among others. Augusta Read Thomas’s Saxophone Concerto was commissioned in his honor, but his students, several of whom are full time musicians in the New Haven region.
TONY ARNOLD has been hailed by the New York Times as “a bold, powerful interpreter”. She is recognized internationally as a leading proponent of new music in concert and recording, praised for her sparkling and insightful performances of the most daunting contemporary scores. Since becoming the first-prize laureate of the both the 2001 Gaudeamus International Competition (NL) and the 2001 Louise D. McMahon Competition (USA), Ms. Arnold has collaborated with the most cutting-edge composers and instrumentalists on the world stage, receiving consistent critical accolades for a voice of beauty and warmth, an uncanny technical facility, sterling musicianship, and her riveting stage presence. “Simply put, she is a rock-star in this genre” (Sequenza 21).
ELM CITY GIRLS’ CHOIR, founded in 1993, has received national recognition and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Walt Disney World. The Choir has performed with many outstanding choral groups, including The American Boychoir, CONCORA, New York Virtuoso Singers, and Yale Schola Cantorum, and with professional orchestras including the Boston Philharmonic, New Haven Symphony, and Moscow State Orchestra. Based in New Haven, ECGC has toured extensively throughout North America and Europe, and has appeared on national television performing with Diana Ross at the women’s finals match of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament. The Elm City Girls’ Choir is open by invitation to choristers who have sung in the United Girls’ Choir for at least one year.
Tickets for the performance at Woolsey Hall ($15-69) can be purchased at 203.865.0831 x10 or www.NewHavenSymphony.org. KidTix are free for children up to age 18 with a paying adult. Blue Star tickets are free for the families of active duty military.
Concert Sponsor: The Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Season Media Sponsor New Haven Register. Media Co-Sponsors New Haven Living, New Haven Magazine.
