Tag Archives: huntsville symphony orchestra

Same Airport, Different Music

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HSV-BUD-HSV
I can definitely say that by now I know every little corner of the Huntsville and of the Budapest airports. I have seen these cities from the sky from every possible angle during take off and landing. Every time I depart and arrive however I am carrying different scores in my bag. I’ve got different music for familiar airport lounges.
This time my carry on was heavy of scores by Verdi, Telemann, David Lang
http://davidlangmusic.com/music/child
Kornel Fekete Kovacs
http://feketekovacs.com
and others.

2015 starts off with an all trumpet concert on January 5, honoring the 70th Birthday of Gyorgy Geiger, former principal trumpet player of the Hungarian Radio Symphony.
See a CD here him and I recorded together quite a few years ago:
http://amazon.com

Hungarian trumpeters from all over the world are coming together to celebrate and all of them are playing something fun. I am looking forward to a delightful mix of Baroque and contemporary music and some good times with friends who are also great musicians.
http://tarkovigabor.com
http://gabor-in-concert.com
http://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de

On January 11 Ensemble UMZE and special guest, flute player extraordinaire Claire Chase
http://www.clairechase.net
from NYC will be performing under my direction, again at the beautiful Budapest Music Center. The contemporary musical pieces on the program are all about marriage, birth, children and childhood memories. I am looking forward to hear Claire and the musicians of UMZE performing the Hungarian Premiere of my composition ‘Conversation With Children’!
Read about the concert here:
http://bmc.hu

On January 12 I will be on my way back to Huntsville to conduct Verdi’s magnificent Requiem for the classical series of the Huntsville Symphony. Then back again to Budapest…, but I will write about that in my next posts.

Here are the first two months of the New Year for me in airport codes:
HSV-BUD-HSV-BUD-HSV-BUD-HSV
Delta Lounge, here I come!

Percussion, Piano, Clarinet, Food And Drinks

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This is going to be a long but fun weekend! HSO’s special guest for Classical 2 is the Amadinda Percussion Group.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org
This world famous ensemble has agreed to stop by on their way to the Percussive Arts Society Annual meeting in Indianapolis
http://www.pas.org/
and play a concert at the VBC. This is a one in a lifetime opportunity to hear the group that is now, after 30 years in the business, is part of music history. They play with amazing musicianship and their repertoire stretches from Haiti folk music through jazz to contemporary classical pieces. They are great entertainers and masters of their countless instruments. Huntsville Symphony and myself will be joining Amadinda for the second half of the program for J.S. Bach’s Concerto for two keyboards (played on 2 vibraphones and 2 marimbas) and for a piece written for four percussionists and orchestra. The latter composition is by Levente Gyongyosi
http://www.kontrapunktmusic.com/
Levente is pretty well known in choral circles in the US. His vocal pieces are popular all around the world. I am happy to be part of the US Premiere of this 35 minute long Sinfonia Concertante written just last year, hopefully contributing to the future success of the composition.
Since we do not have the full orchestra on stage for the beginning of the concert Zoltan Racz and I will be playing the National Anthem on the piano, four hands, for our usual opening sing along. I can’t remember when was the last time I played the piano in front of a life audience. Zoltan and I are practicing every day.

I will be spending my Saturday rehearsing for our first Casual Classics concert this season. It is time for Dinner DIvertimento again (we only have 5[!] tickets left). This year we are matching different courses with different pieces. On the program: Richard Strauss: Serenade op.7, Dvorak: Serenade for Winds in D-minor, Jean Francaix: Ten Character Pieces. I’ll be playing the clarinet for the first two numbers and will be conducting the third one.
Again; practice time for Gregory!
The musical dinner will be served on Sunday at the Early Works Museum.
For more information visit our website
http://www.hso.org/

The Tenor Is Dead

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Starting rehearsals tomorrow for the season opening production of the Erkel Theater. This theater -named after the famous and pretty much the only Hungarian romantic opera composer, Ferenc Erkel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Erkel
– was built in the 1910s and just recently reopened after a quick refurbishing after being closed to the public for a couple of years. What is Erkel Theater? This venue was built to serve the “Volksoper” idea: opera and ballet for the masses for affordable prices. Although the idea of having this theater under separate management has come up multiple times in the past decades, since the 50s it has always been and now for sure remains under the management of the Hungarian State Opera. Just imagine City Opera under the management of the Metropolitan Opera with a different repertoire and cheap tickets. It is not such a far fetched idea any more now, is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erkel_Theatre
The Tenor, a comic opera by Ernst von Dohnanyi
http://www.zti.hu/mza-dohnanyi/
is the only musical theater piece I know to start with the death of the tenor. No, I mean it actually starts with the funeral of Tenor 1 of a barbershop quartet (or rather the German equivalent of this type of ensemble). The quartet now has only three singers and they are in trouble. They need to get ready for the annual singing contest. They are in dire need of a replacement singer and there is only one guy in town with a great tenor voice. He is called Schippel (funny names are all around in this opera) and he is the flutist of the local orchestra. The problem is, that Schippel is a poor fellow. He has no money, no manners. He is drinking a lot and has a potty mouth. This is of course totally fiction… Our actual singers all are well educated and well behaved. 🙂 In any case the initial conflict here is that the well off middle class members of the ensemble -just like the daughter and the wife of the bass singer- do not want to socialize with the flute player/tenor. He is wanted for his voice but is not welcome in their social circles. Since there is no opera without a love triangle soon another conflict arises. The Prince who has fallen off his horse nearby arrives to the house. He falls for Thekla, daughter of Mr. Hicketier (his name means “Hickupman”) and so does Schippel…, and so does Krey who sings Tenor 2 in the quartet. So this is actually a “ménage a quatre”. I think you get it now how much sitcom there is here.
I will post more about the story and the production.
Stay tuned!
Opening performance on September 14, 2014.

Just how much tenors are well and alive here is a snippet of information about my new composition, Georgia Bottoms, A Comic Opera of the Modern South. I managed to write not one, not two but three tenor roles.
Rev. Eugene Hendrix: Christopher Pfund
http://www.christopherpfund.com/
Dr. Ted Horn/ Officer Lester: Daniel Weeks
http://www.tenorweeks.com
Sheriff Bill: Ron Roberts
http://www.thesingerlink.com/profile/RonRoberts

Talking (again) about Georgia… Author of the book and fellow librettist
Mark Childress
http://www.crazyinalabama.com
and soprano extraordinaire Rebecca Nelsen
http://rebeccanelsen.eu
visited Huntsville, AL on August 9&10 and helped the Huntsville Symphony and myself to start the fundraising process. The events (two house parties) were a huge hit and a great start to secure funding for Georgia Bottoms, The Opera. There is now a button on the Huntsville Symphony website where you can directly contribute to help us with our goal. Mark Childress has set up a fun FaceBook page as well. If you LIKE the page you will get updated information about the production and more and more fun facts, videos and interesting details of the production as we approach the premiere.
http://www.hso.org
https://www.facebook.com/GeorgiaBottomsTheOpera
There is no contribution too little and every LIKE counts! Join us and stay tuned! Keep the tenors alive!

mysterious; cat-like

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The title of the post is from the score of Michael Torke’s Tahiti. This instruction can be found in the first clarinet part of the 7th movement. Needless to say that my cat-lover musicians immediately started loving the piece, not that it is any difficult to love it without the cat reference.
Here are the program notes for the piece from the composers website and a link to the site itself.

“Each of the movements reminisces a feeling of the individual islands that make up the Society Islands in the South Pacific, which we generally refer to as Tahiti.
A certain humidity, along with the lush landscape, water-life, white sand, and palm trees brings relief, a kind of peace to a hurried soul.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, sees it this way: “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
The movements grow from a melodic idea (rather than a rhythmic or harmonic idea, like much of my other music) and undergoes a development; the first and third movements have the most extended treatment.
A bias of orchestration is to limit the string writing to four parts, with a pair of woodwinds doubling the top part, much in the way Bach does in his Orchestral Suites.”

http://www.michaeltorke.com

The last sentence of the program notes above gave me the idea of the program for our third and final Casual Classics this season. I picked movements 1, 4, 6 and 7 from Torke’s composition and inserted them into Bach’s Orchestral Suite #1 in C. My goal with this year’s Casual Classics was to rediscover alternative concert formats and discover unusual concert venues around town. After a dinner-concert setting at the Early Works Museum and an acoustical action piece at the Depot Roundhouse (see earlier post “Pre-Super-bowl Brass Attack”) we are doing an “uninterrupted stream of music” at the Flying Monkey Theater at Lowe Mill.
http://www.lowemill.net

Billions of people now around the world listen to music on their iPods, smart phones, tablets and MP3 or MP4 devices. We all know the SHUFFLE button. Well, this concert is going to be exactly like when you push SHUFFLE and let your device stream you your favorite music. All right, I am cheating, since I did create a carefully thought out order for how the Bach and the Torke movements alternate… But still, I got the idea from my own iPod and also from search engines on net-radios where the “free-association” of human programmed algorithms provide endless entertainment.