History - Performers - Videos - Composition Contest
| Concert 5 - June 20, 2020, 3:00 p.m. | Program Notes Festival Booklet (pdf) |
| Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Peanuts Gallery - Lullaby for Linus & Snoopy, Snoopy Does the Samba Lament Perry Mears, piano Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (born April 30, 1939) is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s she had shifted to a post-modernist, neo-romantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich currently serves as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. |
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| Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Lament Perry Mears, piano |
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| Eric Whitacre: Goodnight, Moon Esther Gray Lemus, soprano Adam Bowles, piano Eric Edward Whitacre (1970) is an American composer, conductor, and speaker known for his choral, orchestral, and wind ensemble music. In March 2016, he was appointed as Los Angeles Master Chorale's first artist-in-residence at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. A trademark of Whitacre's pieces is the use of aleatoric and indeterminate sections, as well as unusual score instructions involving, in some cases, hand actions or props. “Over the past few years I must have read Goodnight Moon to my son a thousand times - maybe more. Somewhere around reading number 500, I began hearing little musical fragments as I read, and over time those fragments began to blossom into a simple, sweet lullaby."--Eric Whitaker. |
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| Casey Rule: Fantasia for Solo Violin Daniel Gilbert, violin Casey Rule is a programmer by day and a composer by night, working as a senior software development engineer for SpokenLayer, serving as the business and technical director of NoteNova Publishing, and writing music when he's not busy writing code. Daniel Gilbert has performed his Fantasia for Solo Violin on several Luna Nova concerts. |
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| Francis Poulenc: Mouvement Perpétuels John McMurtery, flute; Mark Volker, guitar I. Assez modéré II. Très modéré III. Alerte Mouvements perpétuels, FP 14a, is a short three-movement suite for solo piano by the French composer Francis Poulenc, premiered in Paris in December 1918, when Poulenc was aged 19 and a protégé of Erik Satie. The work is dedicated to the artist Valentine Hugo and was first performed by Poulenc's piano teacher, Ricardo Viñes. From January 1918 to January 1921 Poulenc was a conscript in the French army, but his duties allowed him time for composition. He wrote the pieces at the piano of the local elementary school at Saint-Martin-sur-le-Pré. The suite was an immediate success with public and performers, and it remains one of the composer's most popular works. |
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| Du Ciel: Dance of the Chronically Tardy (2017) Maeve Brophy, piano Everyone has experienced the dreaded moment when, after peacefully waking up from a good night’s sleep, you look at the clock only to realize you’re due at an appointment in ten minutes. Of course, on the way to said appointment, everything that could possibly go wrong, does. Dance of the Chronically Tardy is an ode to all who have suffered from mass amounts of procrastination, alarm clock failure, unforeseen traffic, or a badly-timed run-in with an old, chatty friend. Smatterings of whole-tone themes representative of a dream-like state are intertwined with hasty melodies in lydian mode. This, along with the recurring crashes of dissonant piano chords, recreate the all too familiar, frantic feeling of running far behind schedule. |
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| Leo Brouwer: Mitología de las Aguas No. 1 John McMurtery, flute; Mark Volker, guitar Mitología de las Aguas, or Mythology of the waters, is a composition for flute and guitar by the Cuban composer Leo Brouwer, written in 2009 Brouwer defines this work as his first sonata for flute and guitar, and especially dedicated the work to Albertz, who played the world premiere in the German city of Leipzig on September 4 of that year, in the Peterskirche, as part of the closing concert of the International Festival "Con Guitarra" under the cultural patronage of the German Section of UNESCO.Though Brouwer refuses to confine it to a mere description or imitation of nature, the music of this monumental "sonata" is a kind of musical cartography Latin America, with its most emblematic landscapes, characters and cultures. |
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Leila Adu: Colour Wheel 0:08 I. Headbanging(ly) |
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| Earnest Charles: When I Have Sung My Songs Sabrina Laney Warren, soprano Perry Mears, piano In 1934 Ernest Charles wrote both the words and music for When I have sung my songs. The piece became a huge success in concert hall and on radio broadcasts. It was performed by such famous singers as John Charles Thomas, Jussi Björling, Kirsten Flagstad. It has remained popular through the years. The words are powerful, the music is beautiful, and the sentiment is timeless. |