Due to a bad case of covid, our guest artist Amy Frost Baumgarten is unable to be with us for these concert.  She was supposed to travel from Washington D.C., but had to cancel her travel.  She has been replaced by Stephanie Flores on cello.

Because of the late notice of Amy's cancellation, and the difficulty of the Spheres of Influence sextet, we made the hard choice to change pieces.  Instead of Spheres of Influence, we will perform Mozart's beloved g minor viola quintet, K. 516.  We sincerely hope to be able to perform Ching-Chu Hu's wonderful sextet in the near future.  We have left Professor Hu's bio in the program, as he is a composer that we should all be more familiar with!

Born in Iowa City, Iowa, Ching-chu Hu (M.A., M.F.A. in composition, 1996) studied at Yale University, Freiburg Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany, The University of Iowa, and the University of Michigan, where he earned his Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition. His composition teachers included William Bolcom, William Albright, Michael Daugherty, Leslie Bassett, Bright Sheng, Evan Chambers, David Gompper and Richard Hervig. His conducting teachers included Alastair Neale, David Stern, and James Dixon. He also studied piano with Donald Currier, Stéphane Lemelin, and Logan Skelton and bass with Diana Gannett and Eldon Oberecht.

He is currently on the faculty at Denison University.

Honors include being named the Aaron Copland Fellow at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, composer-in-residence at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, guest composer at the American Music Week Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, and winner of various competitions, including the 2018 American Prize for Chamber Music, the 2nd Annual Secret Opera competition, Fifteen Minutes of Fame Competition, and inclusion on ERM Media’s “Masterworks of the New Era” CD series.

Ching-Chu Hu's magnificent string sextet Spheres of Influence was commissioned and premiered by the Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival in 2013.

Dr. Gwyneth Walker (b. 1947) is a graduate of Brown University and the Hartt School of Music. She holds B.A., M.M. and D.M.A. degrees in Music Composition. A former faculty member of the Oberlin College Conservatory, she resigned from academic employment in 1982 in order to pursue a career as a full-time composer. For nearly 30 years, she lived on a dairy farm in Braintree, Vermont before returning to live in her childhood hometown of New Canaan, Connecticut. A composer since age two, Gwyneth Walker has always placed great value on writing in a broad array of genres. More than 400 commissioned works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, chorus, and solo voice have been created—all arising from the impetus of performers and collaboration with musicians. Over the decades, she has traveled throughout North America to attend performances of her works and to meet her musician colleagues.

Gwyneth Walker is a proud resident of New England. She was the recipient of the 2000 “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Vermont Arts Council and the 2018 “Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award” from Choral Arts New England. In 2020, her alma mater, the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford, presented her with the Hartt Alumni Award.

Walker's world premiere cello duo Of Cliffs and Sacred Spaces, commissioned by Beth Vanderborgh and Amy Frost Baumgarten,  was inspired by the Vedauwoo Rock formations in Eastern Wyoming. Walker writes the following:

"Of Cliffs and Sacred Spaces is inspired by the Vedauwoo rock formations in Eastern Wyoming. These spectacular outcroppings are considered to be sacred places. The Arapaho Indians refer to this as the Land of the Earthborn Spirit. Native Americans have come here on their vision quests. The four movements of this cello duet reflect the various ways that visitors might experience Vedauwoo: from the base, one looks up in wonderment at the magnificent rocks adventurers; in teams of two, may climb the rock faces; prayer is always part of the sacred rocks and, at the height of the summit, one has reached a place beyond time and space. In the traditions of the Arapahoe native peoples, it is considered a sacred site: The Land of the Earthborn Spirit.”   Slides of photos of the Vedauwoo are available thanks to the American Heritage Foundation in Wyoming.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Mozart was just 31 years old in 1787 when he composed two of his greatest works of chamber music: the two viola quintets, K. 515 in C major and K. 516 in g minor. Mozart was a violist himself, as well as a pianist, and he loved the rich inner voices of the viola.  What better way to express his love of the viola, than to compose chamber music with two viola parts!  The g minor Quintet, written relatively late in Mozart’s life, displays some of Mozart’s finest work.  It was written just before Mozart completed his masterpiece opera “Don Giovanni” in 1787.
 
The K.516 g minor viola quintet is in four movements:
The first movement Allegro is full of sweeping lines and wonderfully complex counterpoint.
 
The second movement Minuetto has an unusual use of violent, dissonant chords, followed by a more pastoral Trio.  Both sections of the Minuetto use syncopation in an innovative way.
 
The third movement Adagio features the 1st violin and 1st viola in a tender aria over muted strings. It is a far more peaceful movement than the rest of the quintet.  The Adagio is reminiscent of some of Mozart’s most poignant opera arias from Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutti.
 
The fourth movement Adagio-Rondo Allegro begins with a tragic slow section, which evolves into a happy Rondo, filled with lilting lines and virtuosity.  The great g minor Quintet ends in G major, as if to dispel all the darkness implied in the first three movements.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Johannes Brahms' 2nd string sextet in G major, op. 36, was composed when the composer was 31 years old, in 1864.  Brahms had just extricated himself from a love affair with Agathe von Siebold, a singer in Gottingen.  Brahms was saying farewell to Agathe in the sextet, by embedding her first name in the music.  He described Agathe as his last love.  Brahms used A-G-A-B-E (in German, the B replaces the T) in the climax of the first movement, in bars 162-168, as a musical signature- and repeats the series of notes three times in a row.  

Again we see the influence that people around us have on us as people and as artists- Brahms wove his farewell to love into this sextet.  Brahms never married or had children, though maintained a close friendship with Clara Schumann until she died.

The G major sextet is in four movements. It is very lush and nostalgic, with wonderfully inventive writing for strings. It was the first piece of Brahms’ chamber music to be performed in the United States in 1866, in Boston. It is also arranged for string orchestra, but performed mostly as a sextet.