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15 April 2008

Thomas Friedli - In Memoriam

Geneva, Switzerland

A tragic Mountain Climbing accident in Portugal has taken the life of one of Europe's great Clarinetists and Teachers, and active supporter to the professional development of Clarinetists, especially his role as President of the Clarinet Jury of the Geneva Clarinet Competition, just recently held in Geneva. Information about his renowned career is indicated below.

Thomas Friedli studied music in Berne, Lausanne and also in Paris. In 1972, he was awarded the First Prize for Clarinet and the Ernest Ansermet Prize at the Geneva International Music Competition. This success was followed by other prizes and distinctions.

From 1971 to 1986, Thomas Friedli played clarinet solo for the Berne Symphonic Orchestra. He then took up the same post for the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. Since 1978, he has taught a virtuosity class at the Geneva Conservatoire. He regularly gives master classes in Sion, Biella and also in several European countries.

His long tours have taken him across Japan and throughout South America, in particular Brazil. He has performed with great success at the Lucerne, Gstaad, Zurich, Echternach, Bratislava, Sao Paolo, Stresa, Meiringen and Ibiza music festivals.

His interests cover a wide range: from unknown works of the classical and romantic periods to contemporary music.

He has created a large number of concertante partitions of works by Swiss composers.

Thomas Friedli has recorded numerous discs for CLAVES. He received the Golden Disc Award for his recording of W.A. Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet.

7 February 2008



Vincent J. Abato - In Memoriam Melbourne, Florida USA
Vincent J. Abato, age 89, of Melbourne, FL and formerly of Malverne, NY. Proud US Navy Veteran. Vincent graduated from the Juilliard School of Music where he also taught for many years. He played the clarinet and saxophone and was an original member of the Glenn Miller Band. He also played in the Tommy Dorsey Band and at the Metropolitan Opera House for many years.

December 8, 2007 - In Memoriam

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Influential Composer and Avant-Garde Guru, Dies at 79

Kuerten, Germany

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Karlheinz Stockhausen, an original and influential German composer who began his career as an inventor of new musical systems and ended it making operas to express his spiritual vision of the cosmos, died on Wednesday at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg, Germany. He was 79.

His death was announced on Friday by the Stockhausen Foundation; no cause was disclosed.

Mr. Stockhausen had secured his place in music history by the time he was 30. He had taken a leading part in the development of electronic music, and his early instrumental compositions similarly struck out in new directions, in terms of their formal abstraction, rhythmic complexity and startling sound.

More recently, he made news for his public reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center. Not widely known outside the modern-music world in 2001, he became infamous for calling the attack “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” His comments drew widespread outrage, and he apologized, saying that his allegorical remarks had been misunderstood.

Mr. Stockhausen produced an astonishing succession of compositions in the 1950s and early ’60s: highly abstract works that were based on rigorous principles of ordering and combination but at the same time were vivid, bold and engaging.

In “Song of the Youths” (1956), he used a multichannel montage of electronic sound with a recorded singing voice to create an image of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego staying alive in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. In “Groups” (1957), he divided an orchestra into three ensembles that often played in different tempos and called to one another.

Such works answered the need felt in postwar Europe for reconstruction and logic, the logic to forestall any recurrence of war and genocide. They made Mr. Stockhausen a beacon to younger composers. Along with a few other musicians of his generation, notably Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, he had an enormous influence. Though performances of his works were never plentiful, his music was promoted by radio stations in Germany and abroad as well as by the record company Deutsche Grammophon, and he gave lectures all over the world.

By the 1960s his influence had reached rock musicians, and he was an international subject of acclaim and denigration.

The intellectual and physical excitement of his earlier music diminished in the later 1960s, when he devoted himself largely to performing semi-improvised music with a chosen group of performers. The tone of his lectures and essays also changed. Earlier he had based his thinking on psychoacoustics and the nature of musical time; now he presented himself as the receiver of messages about a spiritual drama being played out in the cosmos.

Between 1977 and 2002, he concentrated his creative efforts on “Light,” a cycle of seven operas intended to bring that cosmic drama to the human stage. The project was extravagantly egomaniacal. Mr. Stockhausen devised the music, the scenario and the words for his operas, and he made stipulations about sets, costumes and lighting. During the period of “Light” and after, Mr. Stockhausen was venerated within his own circle of performers and family members (often the same people) but largely ignored outside it. His home at Kuerten, which he designed, became the center of a publishing, recording and promoting enterprise removed from the wider world. Formerly a star, he had turned into a guru.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on Aug. 22, 1928, near Cologne, the first child of Simon Stockhausen, a schoolteacher, and his wife, Gertrud. His mother began suffering deep depressions when he was still a boy and was committed to a mental hospital, where, according to Mr. Stockhausen, she was “officially killed” in 1941. His father later volunteered for the army and was killed in Hungary.

The young Mr. Stockhausen himself served as an orderly to a military hospital during the last year of World War II, after which he studied at the State Academy of Music in Cologne. He took composition lessons from Frank Martin, but his training was as a music teacher. He also played jazz in Cologne bars, directed an amateur operetta theater and, as he later remembered, “prayed a lot.”

His ambitions changed in July 1951, when he attended a summer music course at Darmstadt and heard a recording of Olivier Messiaen’s piano piece “Mode of Values and Intensities,” which he described as “incredible star music.” On his return to Cologne, he began studying the music of Messiaen, writing his own similarly conceived work, “Crossplay,” for piano, percussion and two wind instruments.

As “Crossplay” shows, he understood at once how Messiaen’s single notes could be organized by applying Schoenberg’s serial principle to every dimension of sound: pitch, duration, loudness and tone color. A few formal rules would be set up, and the notes would fall into patterns as of themselves. Here his admiration for Hermann Hesse joined with his intense Roman Catholic faith to give him confidence in a kind of music that would be new and pure, reflecting the unity of the divine creation.

He arrived in Paris in January 1952 and stayed 14 months, during which he wrote two big orchestral scores; “Counter-Points,” an exuberant ensemble piece with instrumental flourishes; and the first four of a continuing series of piano pieces. He also composed his first electronic piece. When he went back to Cologne, it was to assist in the foundation of an electronic music studio, as well as to marry his student sweetheart, Doris Andreae, with whom he had four children during the next decade: Christel, Suja, Markus and Majella.

Between 1953 and 1955, he wrote more piano pieces (influenced by a first meeting with John Cage and with Cage’s regular pianist, David Tudor) and two electronic studies. Then came works on a more public scale: “Song of the Youths” and “Groups.” He was attracted by the idea that pitch, timbre, rhythm and even musical form could all be understood as forms of vibration, and by the notion of an entire musical work as a kind of photographic blowup of a single sound or sequence of sounds.

The first performance of “Groups,” in 1958, confirmed his dominant position within the European avant-garde. But he kept moving on. His music became slower and more enveloping in the electronic “Contacts” (1960) and in “Moments” for solo soprano, choir, brass, percussion and electric organs (1964). At the same time, his Catholic piety began giving way to a broader spirituality that embraced Eastern thought. He also fell in love with the American visual artist Mary Bauermeister. He divorced his first wife to marry her in 1967; they had two children, Simon and Julike.

His first visit to Japan, in 1966, was crucial to his artistic development. He was impressed by traditional Japanese culture and gained an awareness of himself as an artist in a global context. In Tokyo he composed the electronic piece “Telemusic,” in which recordings of music from around the world are made to intermingle. On his return to Cologne, he produced “Anthems” (1967), an electronic composition based on national anthems. For a few years after that, much of his work was devised for his own live-electronic performing group.

Working with his chosen musicians, he simplified his notation, until, in “From the Seven Days” (May 1968), he was offering his players only a text on which to meditate in performance. He spoke not of improvisation but of “intuitive music,” the idea being that his words would guide the performers to a metaphysical connection with music beyond themselves.

With “Mantra” for two pianos and electronics (1970) he returned to precise notation and introduced a new style, in which entire compositions were to be elaborated from basic melodies. The method gave him the means to fill long stretches of time, and from then on his major works were of full-evening length. They included “Starsound” for several groups in a public park (1971) and“Inori” for orchestra (1974).

Once again, a turn in Mr. Stockhausen’s music coincided with a new page in his emotional life. In 1974 the American clarinetist Suzanne Stephens entered his entourage, and she remained his companion to the end, joined from the early 1980s by the Dutch flutist Kathinka Pasveer. These two, along with his son Markus, a trumpeter, and his son Simon, on saxophone and synthesizer, gave him a new ensemble.

They also became the central performers of “Light”: Markus, who shared his father’s striking good looks, as the hero Michael; Ms. Stephens or Ms. Pasveer as the lover-mother figure, Eva; and often a trombonist as Lucifer, the spirit of negation.

The first three “Light” operas were introduced by La Scala, the next two by the Leipzig Opera; the remaining two have not been staged. Mr. Stockhausen’s final project was “Sound,” a sequence of compositions for the 24 hours of the day.

Mr. Stockhausen is survived by his companions, his six children and several grandchildren.

Right from his early 20s he never doubted that he was a great composer, and this conviction guided all his actions. It made him authoritarian in his dealings with others, whether fellow musicians or administrators. It pulled him through the creative challenges he set for himself as a young man. But it left him an isolated figure at the end.

14 November 2007

In Memoriam - David Oppenheim, Clarinetist and Dean of N.Y.U. Arts

New York City USA

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: December 3, 2007

David Oppenheim, a clarinetist at Tanglewood and a producer of classical music records and television documentaries who became the main architect of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, died in New York on Nov. 14. He was 85 and lived in Manhattan.

Taking charge of what had been a collection of departments in offices and classrooms scattered throughout Lower Manhattan, Mr. Oppenheim transformed N.Y.U.’s arts programs into a major institution offering programs taught by professionals in photography, cinema, musical theater, dramatic acting and writing.

Mr. Oppenheim was dean of the N.Y.U. School of the Arts from 1969 to 1991, and in 1985 he secured a donation of $7.5 million from Laurence A. Tisch and his brother, Preston Robert Tisch, billionaire businessmen who were then members of the N.Y.U. board of trustees. With that donation, most of the school’s programs were centralized in a 12-story building at 721 Broadway as the Tisch School of the Arts.

Mary Schmidt Campbell, the current dean of the Tisch School, said last week that under Mr. Oppenheim the school’s enrollment increased to 3,000 from 600 and its budget to about $50 million from $2 million. But far more than growth mattered to Mr. Oppenheim, Ms. Campbell said.

“He made it clear that this was not going to be an academic school of the arts,” she said, “this was going to be a school where working professionals teach” — among them the director Martin Scorsese, the actress Olympia Dukakis and the noted Broadway lighting designer Jules Fisher. In the 1970s, in cooperation with Leonard Bernstein, Mr. Oppenheim started the school’s musical-theater writing program.

Mr. Oppenheim also created what the school calls its studio system. “When our undergraduates study acting, they do so at independent professional studios outside of N.Y.U.,” Ms. Campbell said, including the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute and the Stella Adler Acting Studio. The school’s alumni include Mr. Scorsese, Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. In 1970, New York State gave approval for the school’s film studies program to grant doctoral degrees, making it the first such program in the United States.

“The miracle to me is that the school was founded in 1965, and within five years it was on the map,” Ms. Campell said. “And David Oppenheim was the architect of that.”

It was music that first attracted Mr. Oppenheim. Born in Detroit on April 13, 1922, he was a son of Louis and Julia Nurko Oppenheim. His father owned a department store.

Mr. Oppenheim began playing clarinet as a young boy. When he was 13, the family moved to New York. For a year, he studied at Juilliard; he then transferred to the Eastman School of Music, from which he graduated in 1943. He served as an anti-tank gunner in Germany during World War II.

After the war, he received a scholarship to study at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. There, over several summers, he performed under famous conductors, including Toscanini, Stokowski, Stravinsky and Bernstein. In the late 1940s, he was first clarinetist for the New York Symphony Orchestra.

From 1950 to 1959, Mr. Oppenheim was director of the Masterworks division of Columbia Records, working with artists like Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Metropoulos, Bruno Walter and George Szell. With Bernstein at the piano, he recorded Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata. He then joined Robert Saudek Associates, a television production company, where he helped produce “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic” and the PBS documentary series “Omnibus.”

From 1962 to 1967, he worked at CBS as a writer, producer and director. Among the shows he produced were “Stravinsky” and “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution,” the latter an attempt by Bernstein to bridge the generation gap by explaining why he liked some pop music. In 1964, Mr. Oppenheim wrote, produced and directed “Casals at 88,” about the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, which received the Prix Italia.

Mr. Oppenheim married the actress Judy Holliday in 1948; they divorced in 1957. That year, he married Ellen Adler, the daughter of the famed acting teacher Stella Adler; they divorced in 1976. He married Ms. Jaffe in 1987.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Oppenheim is survived by his son from his first marriage, Jonathan, of Manhattan; two children from his second marriage, Sara Oppenheim of Manhattan, and Tom, of Brooklyn; a brother, Stanley, of Yorktown Heights, N.Y.; four grandchildren; and six step-grandchildren.

In an interview, Mr. Oppenheim once called the arts a “secular religion.”

“The world is chaotic,” he said. “Art is an ordering of that chaos.”

5 October 2007

Julie Anne Vaverka - In Memoriam

(b. Sept 6, 1953, Enid, Oklahoma)

Manchester, New Hampshire USA

[Obituary by Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin and Andrew Wilson]

The one thing that colleagues and friends will remember most about Julie Vaverka is her voice, whether from the other end of the telephone line, or from the bell of her clarinet. Julie never had to fear that she would not be heard. She was a commanding presence, with a speaking voice that could reach across the prairie expanses of her native Oklahoma. One only had to hear the first words to know that Julie was on the telephone, often with the welcome news that she was offering orchestral employment to New England’s musicians. More importantly, however, was the voice of beauty, grace, and harmony that she summoned from her clarinet during the hundreds of classical concerts in which she performed throughout New England for more than thirty years.
That voice was stilled in a Manchester, NH hospital on October 5, 2007, after a long and valiant battle with metastatic breast cancer.

Raised on the family wheat farm in Marshall, Oklahoma, Ms. Vaverka took a different path from an early age. She started learning piano at the age of 5, and towards the end of elementary school, chose the clarinet. As a child, she often played duets with her trumpet-playing dad (and sometimes trios when brother Jesse joined in), learning traditional Czech polkas first-hand in the thriving ethnic community of Garfield and Kingfisher Counties. Her musicianship developed rapidly as her mom drove her to Enid each week to study with Dr. Max Tromblee, clarinet instructor of the Phillips University Music Department. She later enrolled at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy, determined to become a professional clarinetist. She then went to study with Steve Girko at Oklahoma University, at the Eastman School of Music under Stanley Hasty, and later with Boston Symphony principal clarinetist Harold Wright. At age 19 she became the youngest member of the Oklahoma City Symphony Orchestra.

After moving to the Boston area in the 70’s, she established herself as an indispensable, passionate free-lance artist and teacher. She soon became a member of the New Boston Wind Quintet, and in 1978, co-founded the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra cooperative. Julie was profoundly devoted to the orchestra as principal clarinet, soloist, and concert organizer until her death. She also performed regularly with the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, the Boston Ballet Orchestra, and the Springfield (MA) Symphony. She was a regular member of the Monadnock Festival Orchestra and the New Hampshire Symphony, serving simultaneously as clarinetist and personnel manager for both organizations. Springfield Symphony principal clarinetist Michael Sussman, her colleague of over 30 years, described her this way: “Julie certainly studied with great teachers – Wright, Hasty, Moyse - but when she first came to this area, she was already a really excellent player. Of course she grew musically over the years. But she was just a natural, great musician, and she loved her colleagues.”

One of her career highlights was playing by Mr. Wright’s side as interim second clarinet of the Boston Symphony for the two years prior to Mr. Wright’s death, and for the two years following. At the BSO she also performed with the BSO Chamber Players at Prelude Concerts at Symphony Hall, at the Tanglewood Music Festival, and as a founding member of the Boston Wind Octet with Harold Wright and now-retired BSO oboist Alfred Genovese. Genovese recalls, ““Julie was so darn good – a fantastic musician! She was plenty talented to be a regular member of the BSO, and when we played together, she was just one of us. She was also an amazing friend, and I loved her like a sister.”

Ms. Vaverka recorded for both the Boston Pops and the Boston Symphony Orchestra during her time with the orchestra. These recordings include Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa, Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole under Bernard Haitink, and the movie soundtrack for Schindler's List under John Williams, for which she performed as principal clarinetist.

During rehearsals Julie was famous for her infectious laugh and straight-from-the-hip manner. Her deep love of animals was ever-present at rehearsals in the form of a tiny, impeccably behaved dog lying on stage in a soft carrier next to her clarinet case. Well-concealed, conductors never seemed to even notice that a dog was there.

A devoted and beloved teacher, Ms. Vaverka served on the faculties of Phillips Exeter Academy, the Boston Conservatory of Music, University of Connecticut, Boston University, and Dartmouth College. She maintained lifelong connections with many of her students, who were deeply touched by the continued love she devoted to them long after their studies were completed. Rohan Smith, chairman of the music department at Exeter, where Julie taught for over 20 years, described her impact on the school: “The Academy simply came alive in Julie’s presence. Over the years, letters arrived from Exeter graduates who mentioned that she imparted not just incredible skills, but her love of music and life.”

In 1997, Ms. Vaverka decided to relocate to NH, where she was teaching and playing more and more. Eva Gruesser, concertmaster of the NH Symphony, recalls that Julie “was the heart and soul of the New Hampshire Symphony, as well as the motor that kept it going." After a long search, she bought some land atop Mount Delight, where she could relish the pace of country life and yet manage frequent commutes to Boston. She had a home built to her designs and relished being surrounded by farmland again. Her yard soon grew into an organic Eden of horticultural wonders, from exotic, fragrant flowers to European heirloom tomatoes and Crandall currants, all lovingly tended until her final days.

Julie was also a talented cook and wine connoisseur. Her passion for the culinary arts nearly drove her to give up music as a career in order to pursue her equally compelling dream to become a professional chef. She enrolled at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and after completing her degree, realized she simply could not tolerate the large musical hole in her life. She returned to music, but shared her extraordinary culinary gifts with others at every possible turn. Whether sublimely turning a phrase of Schubert or delicately turning a Coq au vin, her life reflected an enormous heart and consummate artistry.

Plans for a celebration of her life will be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, 107 Brighton Avenue, Suite #1, Boston, MA 02134.

26 June, 2007

Thea King – In Memoriam

London, England

Last Updated: 1:59am BST 02/07/2007

Thea King, who died on Tuesday aged 81, was the doyenne of English clarinettists; a versatile and popular musician, her mellifluent tones were also well known to viewers of children's television in 1970, thanks to her accompaniment in the BBC's colour series of Andy Pandy.

Her playing produced a sound that was hard to resist, leaving a warm glow lingering for hours afterwards like the embers of a fire refusing to die away. Her enthusiasm bordered on the infectious, and her ability to encourage others was inspirational. Everywhere she played her technique was fluent and incisive, bringing a sparkle to the occasion while still delivering a solid performance rooted in the long-standing English clarinet tradition.

Thea King's recording of the Stanford and Finzi concertos on Hyperion launched that popular label. It was her love of cows - which feature on most of her album covers - that led to Ted Perry, Hyperion's founder, using works of art rather than pictures of the musical performers on the sleeves of his discs

Her later coupling of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and Quintet, on which she played the basset horn, went on to become the label's second best-selling release of all time, and her discography - both for Hyperion and elsewhere - was once described as being "as long as a basset clarinet".

Thea King was born at Hitchin, Hertfordshire, on Boxing Day 1925. Her father was Henry King, MBE, formerly manager of the family business, GW King Ltd, a paint and varnishing company based at Rossendale, Lancashire. Her mother, Dorothea, was musical and taught her daughter the piano as soon as she could read.

It was not until some years later, when she was in her final year at Bedford High School, that Thea was given a clarinet, so that she could participate in a new wind section in the school orchestra.

She later recalled: "The teacher who had been using it only had time to practise in the evenings, but it gave her indigestion." Within a few months of taking up the instrument Thea was playing for an approving Herbert Howells in a competition.

At the Royal College of Music, to which she won a scholarship during the latter years of the war, Thea King studied piano with Arthur Alexander - the clarinet was still her second instrument. "In those days it helped if you played two instruments, however poorly," she said.

In January 1953, five years after graduating, she married her clarinet teacher, Frederick "Jack" Thurston, a pupil of Charles Draper, and still regarded as one of the finest of all 20th-century clarinettists.

"He taught me that it was possible to play more beautifully and more convincingly than I had ever dreamed of and that it must take incredible courage and idealism," she once said.

It was a devastating blow for Thea Thurston when her husband died of lung cancer in December that year at the age of 52, only 11 months after their marriage.

26 June 2007

Dr. Michael Sullivan - in Memoriam
(1964-2007)

Flagstaff, Arizona USA

Dr. Michael Sullivan, Professor of Clarinet at the Northern Arizona University School of Music in Flagstaff, Arizona, passed away on June 26, 2007, due to complications from bone cancer. Michael was convalescing from tumor surgery with his family in Orlando, FL, when his condition accelerated beyond treatment. His strong and supportive family was with him at death. He also served as NAU's Coordinator for the Wind and Percusssion area, and in 2005, Michael was selected as Teacher of the Year for the NAU School of Music. He received his degrees from Florida State University (B.M.E., D.M.) and the University of Michigan (M.M.). Upon receiving a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service, he studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Munich, Germany, and as first prize winner of the Pro-Mozart Society of Atlanta Concerto Competition, he was awarded a grant to study at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (Mozarteum) in Salzburg, Austria where he earned certificates in clarinet and saxophone. Dr. Sullivan served on the faculties of the University of Michigan at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and Pittsburgh State University. He appeared as soloist with symphony orchestras throughout the United States and presented numerous recitals in the U.S. and Europe, most notably performing at the Salzburg Festival in 1993. Michael Sullivan served as principal clarinetist with the Ernest Bloch Music Festival in Newport, Oregon and the Flagstaff Symphony Summer Ensemble and served as principal clarinetist with the Phoenix Mainly Mozart Festival, the Flagstaff Festival of the Arts Orchestra and Arizona Opera's Wagner Festival Orchestra. He performed as guest artist with the Music Academy of the West, the U.S. Army Field Band, and the Sedona Chamber Music Festival. He frequently appeared as a recitalist, adjudicator, and clinician with universities and high schools across the country. His principal teachers included Frank Kowalsky, Fred Ormand, Gerd Starke, and Alois Brandhofer. Michael was also proficient on piano, flute, violin, and tin whistle, and performed on these instruments regularly with his folk music ensemble, the Frayed Knots, where he enjoyed maintaining his Irish heritage.

Denise A. Gainey, DMA
Associate Professor of Clarinet and Music Education
Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Music
The University of Alabama at Birmingham
(205) 975-0558
clarinet@uab.edu

"Practice and hope.....but never hope more than you practice."
Kalmen Opperman

19 June 2007

Efrain Guigui – Former Conductor of the Vermont Symphony and Clarinetist - In Memoriam

Burlington, Vermont USA

A former conductor of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra died Monday in Los Angeles from complications of cancer. Efrain Guigui was 81.

· Guigui led the VSO from 1974 to 1989, notably taking the orchestra on a tour of all of Vermont's 251 towns to celebrate the 50th anniversary. During his tenure, Guigui, a clarinetist, as awarded the Alice Ditson award from Columbia University, which is considered to be the conductors' equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. In 1989 the Vermont Council on the Arts presented him with the Gov.'s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

"Vermont gave him a lot," said Martin Guigui, his son. "Vermont gave him the opportunity to find his voice as a conductor. He loved the people, he loved the spirit for the arts in Vermont. He said that it was unequaled anywhere else he had worked: the support for the arts, the spirit of the people he got to work with, and the spirit of the audience."

Guigui was born in Panama and raised in Argentina. He moved to Middlebury in 1974 to lead the VSO. After leaving Vermont Guigui did guest conducting in South America and started a youth orchestra in Mexico, his son said.

He was invited to conduct in many places, including the Julliard School in New York.

5 May 2007

Alvin Batiste, 74; veteran jazz clarinetist

By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post
May 7, 2007

New Orleans, Louisiana USA

Alvin Batiste, a widely respected jazz clarinetist, composer and educator who played across the musical spectrum, from traditional to avant-garde styles, and was a prolific figure on the jazz festival circuit, died Sunday at his home in New Orleans after an apparent heart attack. He was 74.

He played Saturday at FestForAll, a celebration in Baton Rouge, La., and died hours before he was scheduled to perform with pianist and singer Harry Connick Jr. and saxophonist Branford Marsalis at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Batiste recorded sparingly but performed with saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Cannonball Adderley, considered modern jazz greats, as well as musicians as diverse as drummer Billy Cobham and pianist Dr. John. Never a household name but always admired among musicians, Batiste received broader recognition in the 1980s, touring and recording with Clarinet Summit, a quartet that included John Carter, David Murray and Jimmy Hamilton.

Batiste was born Nov. 7, 1932, in New Orleans, where his father, a railroad worker, played traditional jazz clarinet on the side. Outside home, Batiste grew immersed in the city's music offerings.

"I remember following a parade when I was 3 years old," he told a Baton Rouge reporter last year. "It was Easter Sunday. I had on a little white suit and, all over New Orleans, the people fed me. When I got home, after they expressed the happiness for me being there, then they almost killed me."

Batiste received extensive musical training through the school system and, as a college student, was a guest soloist with the New Orleans Philharmonic, playing a Mozart clarinet concerto.

He was a 1955 music education graduate of Southern University and later earned a master's degree in clarinet performance and composition at Louisiana State University.

Batiste was increasingly influenced by bebop jazz pioneers such as saxophonist Charlie Parker. In 1956, he helped start the American Jazz Quintet in New Orleans with drummer Ed Blackwell, pianist Ellis Marsalis, saxophonist Nat Perrilliat and bass player Chuck Badie.

Batiste considered the American Jazz Quintet an experiment in a modern chamber-jazz sound, and it resulted in an early album, "In the Beginning."

Competent on piano and saxophone, Batiste was called on for his multi-instrumental skills while touring with rhythm-and-blues artists such as Ray Charles, Guitar Slim and Little Willie John.

He also was a studio musician for the AFO ("all for one") label in New Orleans and toured regionally with his band, the Jazztronauts. That group included many of his music students at Southern University, where he helped create the jazz studies program in the late 1960s.

As an educator, Batiste influenced several generations of performers, including Branford Marsalis (son of Ellis, brother of Wynton) and pianist Henry Butler. Though retired from Southern University, he continued to teach at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, a conservatory for young adults.

His first major-label release was 1993's "Late" for Columbia Records, which included several of his compositions and a trio led by pianist Kenny Barron. This year, Branford Marsalis produced "Marsalis Music Honors Alvin Batiste," which showcased Batiste's compositions.

Batiste is survived by his wife of 53 years, Edith Chatters Batiste of New Orleans and Baton Rouge; three children, Alvin Batiste Jr. of Plaquemine, La., Marcia Wilson and pianist Maynard Batiste, both of Baton Rouge; a sister; and 12 grandchildren.

27 April 2007

Russian cellist and Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich - In Memoriam 27 April 2007

Moscow, Russia

Musical legacy of cellist legend

Rostropovich celebrated his 80th birthday in March

The celebrated Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich has died at the age of 80.

James Jolly, editor-in-chief of Gramophone magazine, looks back at his musical legacy.
With the death of Mstislav Rostropovich, the musical world has lost not just one of its greatest interpreters but also one of the greatest muses of the 20th Century.

As a cellist, he was responsible for the creation of hundreds of new works, many from some of the greatest composers of the day.

Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, Lutoslawski and Penderecki all wrote concertos or concertante works for him, and hundreds of lesser composers were the beneficiaries of his boundless enthusiasm for new music.

'Unique human spirit'

Rostropovich was a real musical polymath. Not only was he a cellist without equal but he was also a fine conductor.

He was music director of Washington's National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) from 1977 to 1994 and he enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) - those two partnerships are well represented on disc.

Rostropovich had an unconventional conducting technique

He was also an accomplished pianist, often playing for his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.

But above all he was a consummate communicator in everything he did - his idiosyncratic English, his opening plea to anyone he met to 'Call me Slava', his passionate, tactile grasp of life all combined to make him a colossus and a unique human spirit.

Of all his musical friendships, it was that with the composer Dmitri Shostakovich that bore the most fruit.

Not only did Shostakovich write both of his cello concertos for Slava, but also the cello part of his setting of Alexander Blok poems.

Proms performance

Rostropovich also played as an orchestral cellist in the 1962 revival of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, renamed Katerina Ismailova.

He later recorded the work for EMI with Vishnevskaya in the title role.

As a cellist he had a large sound - a beautiful musical expression of his generous personality.

He often worked with legendary composer Dmitri Shostakovich

His recording of the Bach cello suites, made in 1995, is pure Rostropovich - heart-on-sleeve, buoyant, songful and above all, so clearly a genuine response to the composer's message.

It became a hugely successful release, selling about 250,000 copies to date.

Another non-Russian work with which he was closely associated was the Dvorak Cello Concerto, which he recorded many times.

His Deutsche Grammophon disc with Herbert von Karajan is probably the best-selling of his many versions, but by far the most charged is a live recording of a Proms performance given the day that Soviet tanks entered Prague on 21 August, 1968.

Nicholas Kenyon, the current director of the Proms, recalls hearing the concert on the radio and noted the protests within the Albert Hall.

Rostropovich was a mentor to violinist Maxim Vengerov

'But the irony was that Slava, as the most committed advocate of freedom, was on their side, playing a great Czech piece. At the end of the concerto, as an encore, he played a solo Bach Sarabande in tears and dedicated it, sotto voce, to the Czech people,' said Kenyon.

Rostropovich enjoyed musical partnerships with many of the world's greatest artists. He performed regularly with pianists like Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin and Martha Argerich.

Not only did Benjamin Britten write a number of works for Rostropovich - the cello symphony and cello suites among them - but they performed regularly as a piano and cello duo.

Thankfully, there are recordings of this inspiring partnership - not least of which are glorious accounts of cello sonatas by Debussy and Frank Bridge, works by Schubert and Schumann, as well as pieces by Britten himself.

Emotional charge

From a younger generation he championed the Korean cellist Han-Na Chang and is held to be one of violinist Maxim Vengerov's real musical mentors - they recorded works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Shchedrin and Beethoven.

He was as generous with his time and advice as he could be with a schedule that combined so many musical disciplines.

And like his friend Leonard Bernstein, Rostropovich was a musician who blossomed in front of an audience.

Some of his tempi could be broad but there was no denying the emotional charge that lay behind his interpretative decisions.

His somewhat unconventional technique as a conductor was never an impediment to his extraordinary ability to speak directly to every member of the audience.

And as a cellist: well, he was simply one of the greatest.

28 March 2007

Tony Scott, 85; Jazz Clarinetist Explored Eclectic Mix of Music

Rome, Italy

By Matt Schudel

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 1, 2007; Page C06

Tony Scott, 85, a jazz musician who helped expand the musical limits of the clarinet and who was an early proponent of what is now called world music, died March 28 at his home in Rome, where he had lived for more than 30 years. He had prostate cancer.

A musician of vast and eclectic range, Mr. Scott found fame in the 1940s as one of the first clarinetists to master the difficult new jazz idiom of bebop, with its tricky chords and acrobatic runs. He led his own groups as a clarinetist, played in the saxophone sections of bands led by Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey and Buddy Rich and also performed as a pianist. In the mid-1950s, when he was music director for singer Harry Belafonte, he wrote the arrangement for "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)," one of Belafonte's biggest hits.

Mr. Scott recorded with such renowned musicians and singers as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday, yet he spoke fondly of times when he'd walk down streets in Bulgaria or Indonesia, piping away on his clarinet. He spent several years in Asia and Africa in the 1950s and '60s and made albums reflecting his interest in the music of other cultures.

"I was searching for something new, emotionally and spiritually," he said in a 1966 interview. "The jazz world here had turned cold for me -- cool jazz, cool people. It was without passion. I found the warmth I sought in Japan."

He had an outgoing personality that made him popular with other musicians. He wrote songs for Holiday, with whom he recorded on clarinet and piano, and also composed music for short films featuring stripper Lili St. Cyr.

At his peak in the 1940s and '50s, Mr. Scott was considered the most advanced clarinetist of his generation, rivaled only by Buddy DeFranco. In 1953, critic Nat Hentoff wrote in Down Beat magazine: "No other modern clarinetist has the fire, the drive, and the beat Tony generates."

"Mr. Scott has stretched the jazz range of his instrument farther than any of his contemporaries," John S. Wilson wrote in the New York Times in 1958. "He is the most exciting jazz musician playing today."

Mr. Scott, whose given name was Anthony Joseph Sciacca, was born June 17, 1921, in Morristown, N.J., the son of Sicilian immigrants. He began playing a metal clarinet at age 12, formed his first band at 14, quickly mastered the piano and was playing in Harlem jazz sessions by the time he was 18.

He studied for three years at the Juilliard School, performing Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" on piano as his audition piece. He played in Army bands during World War II and spent nights in New York jazz clubs.

In 1943, he first heard saxophonist Charlie Parker, one of the progenitors of the new bebop style, and was determined to bring Parker's musical advances to the clarinet. They often performed together, and Mr. Scott would later call Parker the greatest man -- not just the greatest musician -- of the century.

At a concert in Yugoslavia in 1957, two years after Parker's death, Mr. Scott improvised "Blues for Charlie Parker," which became his best-known composition.

"It was a spur-of-the-moment thing," he said. "The audience gave me a five-minute standing ovation. Musically, it was the high point of my life."

In 1970, he settled in Rome and formed a five-year musical association with Romano Mussolini, an acclaimed jazz pianist who was the son of Italy's executed fascist leader. Mr. Scott experimented broadly with musical styles in the 1970s and '80s before returning to more traditional jazz late in his career.

"Without experimenters, jazz would die a lingering death," he said on his Web site. "I believe in being receptive to all music. . . . If you stop learning, you might as well throw your horn away."

Cultivating an air of eccentricity, he grew a chest-length white beard and sometimes took apart his clarinet onstage, pretending to use it as a telephone. Nonetheless, his playing remained strong, and he continued to perform into his 80s.

In addition to his performing career, Mr. Scott had a large collection of photographs of jazz musicians and made jazz-influenced paintings.