The Center for New Music Ensemble
with guest pianist Anna Arazi
performs the music of
 

Guest composer and pianist Ketty Nez (Boston University)

 
Sunday, April 15, 2018 at 7:30 in the Concert Hall
 

View: Concert Photos

 Program

4 visions (2017)

Ketty NEZ (b. 1965)
windmills
canons
escape
dream at midnight
Courtney Miller, oboe
Ketty Nez and Anna Arazi, piano
Peter Naughton and Travis Newman, percussion
David Gompper, conductor

Intermission

Suite for Two Pianos and Percussion (2002)

with video projection

András HAMARY  (b. 1950)
Window on Infinity
Lattices
Perpetuum mobile
Song with Strophes
Ketty Nez and Anna Arazi, piano
Peter Naughton and Travis Newman, percussion
David Gompper, conductor

 

Performer

Israeli classical pianist Anna Arazi is an active performer, speaker and educator. Among her interests are 20th- and 21st-century piano music, research on Israeli composer and pianist Verdina Shlonsky, and promotion of ergonomically scaled piano keyboards. Anna performed numerous premiers by composers including Ketty Nez, Greg Brown, Talia Amar, Vera Ivanova and Adam Berndt. Her entrepreneurial and concert activities were praised in Musical Intelligencer and Symphony Magazine. Anna received her doctoral degree from Boston University in 2015, supported by the honorable Richmond scholarship, and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Jerusalem Academy of Music in Israel. Anna is a prize-winner of the Dallas International Piano Competition 2015 and American Protégé International Piano competition 2014, among others. She performed with the Sinfonietta Beer-Sheba and Boston University Symphony orchestras, and recently had her Carnegie Hall debut.

 

Program Notes

4 visions

Written in Denver during the summer of 2017, 4 visions is an exploration of mirroring, echoing, allusions, and the establishment and disintegration of rhythmic and melodic patterns. The four movements follow each other without interruption: windmills, canons, escape, and dream at midnight. Textures are derived from my opera Lina and the Wolf. The last movement began as one of the arias, a setting of Anna Akhmatova’s poem “In a Dream,” a line of which evokes a mood of otherness: "If only at midnight/you'd send me a greeting across the stars.” —Ketty Nez
Composer/pianist Ketty Nez joined the composition and theory department at the Boston University School of Music in 2005, after teaching for two years at the University of Iowa. At BU, she directed the Time's Arrow new music ensemble for four years. Listen to a Wonder Never Heard Before!, her portrait CD as composer/pianist, was released in 2010 by Albany Records. Her folk opera, The Fiddler and the Old Woman of Rumelia, was premiered in a staged version in May 2012, by the Juventas New Music Ensemble. Her piano concerto thresholds, performed by Ketty and the Boston University Wind Ensemble, was released in July 2013 by Ravello Records. Current projects include the CD release of four scenes for Juliet, commissioned by the BU Wind Ensemble, and Lina and the Wolf, an opera on the life of Lina Prokofiev (based on the book Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev, by Simon Morrison). 

Suite for Two Piano and Percussion

Commissioned by the Hungarian Radio, Suite for Two Piano and Percussion was premiered in a public concert in 2002 at the Budapest Hungarian Radio Studio, by the dedicatee Márta Gyulás and the composer. The first movement, Window on Infinity, is a “galactic” piece.  One sees traces of the movements of stars, coming closer and moving further away, and hears their collisions. The second movement, Lattices, is the most “Bartókian” of the Suite, and alludes to Bartók’s magnificent Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.  Strange resonances and echoes emanate from the interiors of the pianos, as if these instruments were cathedrals. The third movement, a true Perpetuum mobile, includes no interruptions or pauses. The performers play every attack, and the first pianist plays only white keys.  Starting pianissimo, the music incessantly grows in dynamic, ending it fortissississimo, at the same time spanning the entire keyboard range in slow ascent. In the fourth movement, Song with Strophes, a very simple short melody serves as the basis of variations, through means of canons and echoes.  The last variation alludes to the resonant timbre of the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer used in East European folk music. I added my film for a subsequent performance in Hamburg.—András Hamary
András Hamary (Budapest, 1950) studied at the Bartók Conservatory and the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, and as a concert pianist under Hans Leygraf at the Hanover University of Music. Since 1986 he has held a professorship in piano and chamber music at the University of Music in Würzburg. For eight years he also conducted that university's Ensemble for New Music.
    He was awarded the Composition Prize of the City of Stuttgart for Timor - Fragmente zur Angst (“Timor: Fragments about Fear”), five pieces for orchestra written while he was still studying composition under Milko Kelemen. Since the late 1970s, Hamary has written compositions in an extremely varied range of genres, including the opera Seid still (“Be Still”), which was commissioned by the Second Biennale in Munich; the performance piece Regenzeit (“Rainy Season”) in collaboration with the Frankfurt-based choreographer Christian Golusda on a commission from Germany's Südwestrundfunk (SWR); and the ballet Der Welt Lohn (“The World's Reward”) for vocal soloists, choir and orchestra, which was composed for the 200th anniversary of Würzburg's Mainfranken Theater.
    Hamary has also focused his attention as a conductor entirely on new music. In Stuttgart he founded “ensemble avance”, a group of young musicians dedicated to the interpretation of contemporary music. With them he has made numerous recordings for radio and premiered the works of celebrated composers. For his work conducting Adriana Hölszky's opera Bremer Freiheit (“Bremen Freedom”) at the First Munich Biennale he received the BMW Musical Theatre Award for the best musical direction.