SYLVAN WINDS PRESENT

WINDS & PIANO

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2008 at 8:00 PM

The Sylvan Winds

Svjetlana Kabalin, flute; Alexandra Knoll, oboe; Pavel Vinnitsky, clarinet;

Erik Höltje, bassoon; Zohar Schondorf, horn

With Claude Frank, piano

Will present a program of works for “Winds & Piano” at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, 154 West 57^th Street on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 8 PM.

Program

            Samuel Barber (1910-81)                       Summer Music, Op. 31

            W. A. Mozart (1756-91)                        Piano Quintet in Eb Major, K. 452

            Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)                Piano Quartet in G Minor, Op. 25 for wind quintet & piano (arr. by Samuel Baron)

Tickets $30 & 25 for adults / $15 for students & seniors.

The program will be followed by a post-concert fund-raising reception in the Jacobs Room, adjacent to Weill Recital Hall.   Tickets at $250, $125, $100 & $85 for seniors are available.

For reservations & program information, please call 212 / 222-3569

The Sylvan Winds are particularly pleased to welcome back the distinguished pianist Claude Frank who has collaborated with them on several previous occasions.  Born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1925, Mr. Frank abandoned Nazi Germany in 1937 and went to France, studying at the Paris Conservatory. Fleeing France before the advancing German armies in 1940, he went first to Spain, then Portugal, before settling in America, where he became a citizen in 1944. He studied piano--interrupted by a term of military service--with Artur Schnabel in New York City, had his recital debut at Town Hall in 1947, performed with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1948, and had his New York Philharmonic debut under Leonard Bernstein in 1959. He has appeared with the Boston, Chicago, National, and Buenos Aires Symphony Orchestras, the New York and Berlin Philharmonics, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Mr. Frank has participated in music festivals all over the world, including his enduring involvement with the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York. A Beethoven specialist, Mr. Frank has always been admired as a superb chamber musician, from his first performances with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in the 1960s, to his frequent appearances with the Juilliard and Guarneri Quartets. An influential teacher, he currently serves on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music and the Yale School of Music. His master classes are highly anticipated and sought-after events.

Samuel Barber, (1910–1981) Commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, Summer Music was premičred on March 20, 1956 by the first-desk players of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. A regular in the Sylvan Winds repertory since 1980, they have repeated it in '85, '93, '98 and twice in ’99: on their own series as well as at the Sylvia & Danny Kaye Playhouse of Hunter College as part of its Samuel Barber Festival.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, (1756-1791) Completed a day or two before the work's premičre, as was often the case with Mozart, on a 1784 April Fool's Day concert at the Court Theater in Vienna, he considered it his best work up to that point. The program itself was a mammoth affair: there were three symphonies, interspersed with a piano concerto, a set of piano improvisations, three arias - not by Mozart - and this quintet. Its composition was surrounded by three piano concertos, K 450, 451 and 453 (Nos. 15-17 of the total 27 in his piano-concerto canon), one of which was performed on the aforementioned program. This chronological proximity of their creation may account for the exquisite wind instrument writing in Mozart's later piano concertos.

            Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) His Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor op.25 was unabashedly innovative and long, lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour in performance. It is presented on this occasion with the original string trio transcribed for wind quintet by the distinguished flutist Samuel Baron (1925 - 97). As a founding member of the New York Woodwind Quintet he made many arrangements for the group, with particularly fine and idiomatic transcriptions of string quartets. In this particular work, he felt that the massive scale of the work not only invited but almost needed the richer sound of five winds instruments to match the sonority of the piano. The fiery rondo-finale ‘alla Zingarese’ constitutes the earliest appearance of the style hongrois (and one of the most successful) in Brahms's chamber music.

Programs subject to change.

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Hailed by the New York Times for “its venturesome programming and stylishness of performance,” the ensemble has performed throughout the tri-state area, and has toured both domestically and abroad. The Sylvan Winds has established a reputation as one of the city’s most versatile chamber music ensembles and has received many honors, including an invitation to perform at the New York Governor’s Arts Awards. Dedicated to exploring the entire body of literature for wind instruments, the ensemble has consistently earned audience and critical acclaim. Of its spring ‘99 concert at Weill Recital Hall, New York Times critic Paul Griffiths wrote, “the work was beautifully executed here, with due care for its rhythmic demands. Indeed, throughout the evening the musicians showed themselves able to think, breathe and enter as one.”