Program

Krumpholtz: Sonata in F major
Damase: Sonata number 1
Gaubert: Trois Aquarelles

Flutist Bärli Nugent has always cared most about deeply engaging with communities around her by seeing opportunities in unexpected places and sharing the incomparable power of music to affect people’s lives in meaningful ways. Her lengthy professional affiliations as founder of the Naumburg Award-winning and internationally-touring Aspen Wind Quintet, creator of the landmark Aspen Wind Quintet and Kids Project, principal flutist of Marin Alsop’s Concordia Orchestra and artist-faculty at the Aspen Music Festival and School, have culminated in her current position as Assistant Dean and faculty at The Juilliard School, where she continues to innovate from an office whose door is always open.

Ms. Nugent grew up in Wilton, and graduated from Juilliard with Bachelor and Master of Music degrees. Her twenty-year international performing career began as a founding member of the Aspen Wind Quintet, winners of the 1984 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. Performing over 1,000 concerts in venues as diverse as St. Petersburg’s regal Philharmonic Hall, Amsterdam’s legendary Concertgebouw, the Frank Lloyd Wright house near Chicago, a hall filled with soccer-crazed young men in the Algerian village of Tizi Ouzou, a drafty Montana high school gym in a driving snowstorm, and a Finnish candle-lit logging cabin near the Arctic Circle, her passion for this work was to introduce audiences barely familiar with the quintet’s instruments to the joy and beauty of woodwind chamber music. And her love of teaching led to the creation of the Aspen Wind Quintet and Kids Project, in which hundreds of young people across the United States were given the opportunity to shine in their hometowns by performing with the Quintet as soloists. This hands-on community engagement later became the model for the Aspen Music Festival’s Outreach program. The Quintet’s commissions also reflected her vision of unusual engagement, including composers as diverse as Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Ward, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Frank Zappa and seven-year-old Juilliard Pre-College composition student Taktin Oei. And in her hometown of New York City, she was asked to create a chamber music program for InterSchool Orchestras of New York, serving hundreds of school children from around the New York Metropolitan area.

She has served as juror for international competitions including the London International String Quartet Competition, Concert Artists Guild, the Coleman and Fischoff Chamber Music Competitions, and was cited in a recent issue of Chamber Music magazine by members of the distinguished Jasper String Quartet for giving them a key piece of advice that altered their growth as a quartet. She has also written several articles for that magazine, including one detailing her experiences coaching string quartets and building a chamber music program in China.

Hailed by the New York Times as “a major artist” following her New York recital debut in 1975, Nancy Allen joined the New York Philharmonic in June of 1999 as Principal Harpist. She maintains a busy international concert schedule as well as heading the harp departments of The Juilliard School, Yale School of Music, and the Aspen Music Festival and School and teaching at Stony Brook University. In addition, Ms. Allen appears regularly with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. In May 2000, Ms. Allen was featured in the Philharmonic’s United States premiere of Siegfried Matthus’s Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra, with Music Director Kurt Masur and Principal Flute Robert Langevin.

Ms. Allen’s busy performing schedule includes solo appearances at major international festivals, and has featured collaborations with soprano Kathleen Battle, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, guitarist Manuel Barrueco, and flutist Carol Wincenc. She has appeared on PBS’s “Live From Lincoln Center” with The Chamber Music Society, as well as with Ms. Battle, and has performed as a recitalist for “Music at the Supreme Court” in Washington, D.C. Ms. Allen’s recording of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro with the Tokyo Quartet, flutist Ransom Wilson, and clarinetist David Shifrin received a Grammy Award nomination; she can also be heard on Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammophon, and CRI.

Program

Beethoven: Seven variations on Bei Mannern, Welche Liebe Fuhlen from Mozart’s Magic Flute
Fauré: Piano quartet No. 2, Op. 45, in g minor
Sierra: Angel de la Fuego

The members of Opus One – Ida Kavafian, violin, Steven Tenebom, viola, Peter Wiley, cello, and Anne Marie McDermott, piano — are veterans as well as present members of the world’s most prestigious chamber groups, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Beaux Arts Trio, and the Orion and Guarneri String Quartets. As soloists as well as chamber musicians, they are familiar figures in concert halls throughout the world and have joined together to form one of the most exciting groups performing anywhere. Their dedication to the works of contemporary American composers is reflected in their programming, and the sheer, obvious joy they have in performing together communicates directly to their audiences.

Opus One is deeply committed to chamber music education. One of the innovative projects they have developed is workshops with amateurs as well as students. Concepts to help break down barriers include special concerts in which the members of Opus One collaborate with young musicians.

1998-99 marked the inaugural season of Opus One. The group made its debut on October 23, 1998, at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Subsequent seasons have included debuts in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, San Diego, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon. Their orchestral debut was with the Chattanooga Symphony, performing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and a work written by Douglas Lowry especially for the group to perform with orchestra. Along with the Pittsburgh and Cleveland Chamber Music Societies, Opus One commissioned the composer Stephen Hartke to write a new quartet, “Beyond Words,” an emotional tribute to the victims of 9/11. The piece was premiered in December, 2001.

Program

Debussy: Clair de Lune (Suite Bergamasque)
Debussy: Images Book II
Schumann: Fantasie op. 17
Debussy: La terrasse des audiences au clair de lune (Préludes Book II)
Debussy: Images Book I
Beethoven: Sonata in f minor op. 57 ‘Appassionata’

Named by The Economist as one of 20 Living Polymaths, British pianist Stephen Hough is a rare renaissance man of our time. Over the course of a long and distinguished career as one of the world’s leading concert pianists, he has also excelled as a writer and composer. Mr. Hough combines an exceptional facility and tonal palette with a uniquely inquisitive musical personality, and his musical achievements have resulted in many awards and accolades for his concerts and a discography of more than fifty recordings.

In 2001 Mr. Hough became the first classical performing artist to win a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He was awarded the 2008 Northwestern University’s Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano and went on to win the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in 2010. He has appeared with almost all of the major European and American orchestras and plays recitals regularly in halls and concert series around the world. His recent engagements include recitals in Berlin, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Sydney; performances with the Czech, London, Los Angeles, and New York Philharmonics, the Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Toronto symphonies, the Cleveland, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Budapest Festival and Russian National Orchestras; and a performance televised worldwide with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle. He is also a regular guest at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Aspen, Blossom, Edinburgh, Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Salzburg, Tanglewood, and the BBC Proms, where he has made over 20 appearances and performed the complete Tchaikovsky concertos over four programs, a series he later performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall.

Mr. Hough’s 15/16 season began with an extensive tour to Asia, which included complete Beethoven cycles in Australia and Singapore, followed by recitals in Beijing, Taipei and Tokyo. That season continued with return appearances with the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the San Francisco, Montreal, Houston, Vancouver and New Jersey symphonies among others in North America as well as re-engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Europe; and recitals at New York’s 92nd Street Y, London’s Barbican Centre, and in Quebec, Kansas City and at Dartmouth and Northwestern University.

Many of Mr. Hough’s catalogue of over 50 albums have garnered international prizes including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Diapason d’Or, Monde de la Musique, several Grammy nominations, eight Gramophone Magazine Awards including ‘Record of the Year’ in 1996 and 2003, and the Gramophone ‘Gold Disc’ Award in 2008, which named his complete Saint-Saens Piano Concertos as the best recording of the past 30 years. His 2012 recording of the complete Chopin Waltzes received the Diapason d’Or de l’Annee, France’s most prestigious recording award. His 2005 live recording of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos was the fastest selling recording in Hyperion’s history, while his 1987 recording of the Hummel concertos remains Chandos’ best-selling disc to date. His most recent releases, all for Hyperion, include Grieg Lyric Pieces; a recording of his mass, “Missa Mirabilis,” with the Colorado Symphony and Andrew Litton; a recital disc with Steven Isserlis including Mr. Hough’s Sonata for cello and piano (Les Adieux); a solo recital of Scriabin and Janacek; and the Dvorak and Schumann concertos with the CBSO and Andris Nelsons.

Mr. Hough is also the featured artist in an iPad app about the Liszt Piano Sonata, which includes a fully-filmed performance and was released by the cutting-edge, award-winning company Touch Press.

Published by Josef Weinberger, Mr. Hough has composed works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble and solo piano. His “Mass of Innocence and Experience” and “Missa Mirabilis” were respectively commissioned by and performed at London’s Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral. In 2012, the Indianapolis Symphony commissioned and performed Mr. Hough’s own orchestration of “Missa Mirabilis,” which was subsequently performed by the BBC Symphony as part of Mr. Hough’s residency with the orchestra. Mr. Hough has also been commissioned by the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Gilmore Foundation, London’s National Gallery, Wigmore Hall, Le Musée de Louvre and Musica Viva Australia among others.

A noted writer, Mr. Hough regularly contributes articles for The Guardian, The Times, The Tablet, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine and wrote a blog for The Telegraph for seven years which became one of the most popular and influential forums for cultural discussion and for which he wrote over six hundred articles. His book, The Bible as Prayer, was published by Continuum and Paulist Press in 2007. Mr. Hough resides in London where he is a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music and holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester. He is also a member of the faculty at The Juilliard School. In 2016 he was named “International Artist of the Year” by Limelight Magazine.

Program

Haydn: String Quartet in D major, Op. 76, No. 5
Bartók: String Quartet No. 5, Sz. 102, BB 110
Dvořák: String Quartet No. 11 in C major, Op. 61

The Juilliard String Quartet, widely known as the quintessential American string quartet, welcomed its new cellist, Astrid Schween, and celebrated its 70th anniversary during the 2016/17 season with return engagements in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Detroit, Toronto, Louisville, Cleveland, Tucson, and New York’s Alice Tully Hall. The JSQ premiered Fragments, String Quartet No. 6 by renowned Argentine-American composer Mario Davidovsky, jointly commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and the Juilliard School. The Quartet toured Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Turkey, including appearances at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Musikverein in Vienna, and the Berlin Konzerthaus.

Devoted master teachers, the members of the Juilliard String Quartet offer classes and open rehearsals when on tour. At the Juilliard School, where they are the String Quartet in Residence, all are sought-after members of the string and chamber music faculty and annually, in May, they are hosts of the 5-day internationally recognized Juilliard String Quartet Seminar.

Joseph Lin was a founding member of the Formosa Quartet, winner of the 2006 London International String Quartet Competition. He was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts and has won numerous awards, including the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, the Pro Musicis International Award and First Prize at the inaugural Michael Hill World Violin Competition in New Zealand. Mr. Lin has appeared as a soloist with the New Japan Philharmonic, the Sapporo Symphony, the Taiwan National Symphony, the Auckland Philharmonia, the Ukraine National Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony.

Violinist Ronald Copes has toured extensively with Music from Marlboro ensembles, the Los Angeles and Dunsmuir Piano Quartets, and with the Juilliard String Quartet. Mr. Copes has recorded numerous solo and chamber music works for radio and television broadcast as well as for Sony Classical, Orion, CRI, Klavier, Bridge, New World Records, ECM and the Musical Heritage Society. He has worked closely with composers including Stephen Hartke and Donald Crockett, and has garnered prizes in the Artists’ Advisory Council International Competition, the Merriweather Post Competition and the Concours International d’Exécution Musicale in Geneva. He joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in 1997, where he serves as chair of the violin department.

Roger Tapping, viola, joined the Julliard Quartet and the Juilliard School viola faculty in 2013. He moved from London to the USA in 1995 to join the Takács Quartet. His decade with them included many Beethoven and Bartók cycles in major cities around the world. He has been on the viola faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he also directed the Chamber Music program. Mr. Tapping played and recorded with a number of London’s leading chamber ensembles, including Britain’s longest established quartet, the Allegri Quartet. He was a founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He has performed as a guest with many distinguished quartets from the U.S. and Europe, and he was a member of the Boston Chamber Music Society.

Cellist Astrid Schween is an internationally recognized soloist, chamber artist, and teacher. Her recent appearances have included performances with the Boston, Memphis, Detroit and Seattle Chamber Music societies, the Boston Trio and ongoing recital partnerships with celebrated pianists Randall Hodgkinson and Michael Gurt. As a longtime member of the Lark Quartet, Ms. Schween performed at major venues around the world and received many honors including the Naumburg Chamber Music Award. During her tenure, the quartet produced critically acclaimed recordings for the Arabesque, Decca/Argo, New World, CRI, and Point labels, and commissioned numerous works.

In September 2016, she succeeded Joel Krosnick as cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet and joined the Juilliard faculty.

Photo by Steve J Sherman from Colbert Artists Management.