Concert Programs

Dialogues and Contrasts

New River Ensemble dives into a rich ocean of North and South American folk music, and jazz and dance rhythms and finds a lively conversation among them. Debussy responds to American popular dances, folk tales and piano etudes and the New River Ensemble responds to Debussy with improvisation, jazz harmonies and adventurous time meters. A Cole Porter standard, "All of You" is turned inside out and becomes "None of Me. The gaucho rhythms and vast terrain of Ginestera's Argentina are set off by North American Native flute music and Appalachian flavored dances like the jig. The cello and alto saxophone have a jazz-inspired encounter facilitated by a Russian composer and the cello and clarinet ride the piano waves in one of the Bruch pieces and resolve an argument in the other.

Program:

Debussy The Children’s Corner, re-imagined by Cooney & Hyde (clarinet trio)

Ginastera Pampeana No. 2 (cello, piano)

Bruch Eight Pieces II. Allegro Con Moto (clarinet trio)

Cooney "None of Me" (clarinet trio)

- intermission -

Blyss "Blue Dawn” (flute and cello)

Kapustin “Duo” (tenor sax and cello)

Bruch Eight Pieces III. Andante Con Moto (clarinet trio)

Hyde Trio in American Dance: !!. Ballad, III. Jig (clarinet trio)

Listen/Watch

Beginning and End Times

In an era of ecological and political crisis, talk of “end times” abounds. At the same time, the end of one moment is always the beginning of another. New River Ensemble presents pieces all composed around the themes of “end times” or “beginnings”.  Israeli Composer Lior Navok writes about his sense of “leaking time” during the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War in Lebanon, while Messiaen, writing from a Nazi POW camp, writes that “The abyss is Time with its sadness.” The first and last movements of Milhaud’s “La Creation du monde” (arranged by Martha Hyde) tell the story of the beginning of time from the perspective of African folk mythology, while Hyde’s original piece “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” is a take on the Iroquois creation myth. Shostokovich’s Cello Sonata is a testament to artistic achievement within the backward-moving time of Stalinist counter-revolution. Cooney’s “Automation”, an ominous rendition of the folk-song “John Henry”, ponders the domination of machines over labor. In “Time Pieces”, Muczynski’s tells us that “everything exists in time: history, our lives and...in a special way…music"

Quartet for the End of Time  III. Abîme des oiseaux- Olivier Messiaen (clar solo)

“The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” Martha Hyde(Iroquois creation story)(clarinet trio)

“La Creátion du Monde” I.Overture (opening) VI. The Kiss (closing) (alto saxophone trio)-Milhaud

“Orbit” -Philip Glass (cello solo)”

“Automation” Brendan Cooney (clarinet trio) 

-Intermission-

Sonata in D minor Op. 40 for cello and piano I. Allegro -Dmitri Shostakovich (cello and piano)

“Time Pieces” Robert Muczynski 2 mvts (clarinet and piano)

“Whirling Sand Clock”  Lior Navok (clarinet trio)