NCMF Twenty-Five Years - The Pitch
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David YangI asked Michael if he knew someone local I could talk to about starting my one in town. That’s how I wound up on the phone with Jane.
This is going to be a terrific concert.
Pianist Evren Ozel isn’t good, he’s extraordinary, and he is coming to St. Paul’s on Saturday, March 7th for a concert packed with wondrous and romantic music. You’ve got masterpieces by Debussy, Schumann, William Grant Still, and György Kurtág (ok, the last one isn’t exactly romantic). It’s a concert of big pieces each made up of miniatures – a kind of musical tapas, if you will. Each piece is stuffed to the brim with tiny movements (twelve for the Debussy, twenty-one for the Schumann!), which transport the listener to a different emotion landscape. Listening to this program is to be an intrepid explorer of feelings in music.
Let’s start our journey: first stop, Harlem, New York, 1935. All aboard!
The concert begins with William Grant Still’s classic “Summerland.” Still was a pioneering composer associated with the Harlem Renaissance and the first American to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera (with a libretto begun by Langston Hughes). “Summerland” feels to me like sitting in the grass overlooking a hill on a long, lazy summer day.
Following this, we hop over to France and Debussy’s Preludes (Book One). There are twelve preludes and they are as varied as a selection of their titles would suggest: “The Wind in the Plain,” “Footsteps in the Snow,” “The Engulfed Cathedral,” and most famous of all: “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” You’ll recognize many of these without realizing where they came from.
After intermission, we head east to Hungary and Kurtág’s gnomic utterances with titles such as “The Voice in the Distance” and “Play with Infinity.” Ninety-nine years old and still going strong, Kurtág includes a tender homage to his wife Marta, who died in 2019. They met in conservatory and were married for seventy-three years.
The concert ends with Schumann’s magnificent “Carnaval” consisting of twenty-one little gems. Here, Schumann paints a musical portrait of himself and a group of friends donning masks and heading out for a wild night on the town during Carneval (what they call “Mardi Gras” in New Orleans). Real friends he invites along include Chopin and his wife, Clara. Others include what I would call “aspirational” friends, such as Paganini, or outright fictional friends he wished he could ask along such as the clown “Pierrot” or the comedic servant “Harlequin” from Italian Commedia dell’Arte.
He even invites his alter egos “Eusebius” (Schumann’s melancholic and introverted side) and “Florestan” (his passionate and extroverted side) as separate guests. Like a musical Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, each character gets their own musical portrait resulting in a joyful investigation into the panoply of human personality.
I hope you can join me on this journey in March.
David Yang, Artistic Director
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David YangI asked Michael if he knew someone local I could talk to about starting my one in town. That’s how I wound up on the phone with Jane.
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David YangThe winter holidays – Christmas decorations, holiday parties, takeout Chinese food, and a baroque world premiere in Newburyport.
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David YangThe best ones are from oil country Pennsylvania where they still fry them in beef tallow.
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