Chamber Music Palisades Pairs Contemporary Works April 13, 2010

CHAMBER MUSIC PALISADES PAIRS TWO CONTEMPORARY WORKS – INCLUDING WORLD PREMIERES OF SEXTET BY GERNOT WOLFGANG AND QUINTET BY LOCAL 17-YEAR-OLD COMPOSER – WITH VENERATED WOODWIND AND PIANO CLASSICS BY BACH, BEETHOVEN AND MOZART

Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 8:00 PM, at St. Matthew’s Parish in Pacific Palisades

Guest Artists Jonathan Davis, Oboe, Helen Goode, Clarinet, Judith Farmer, Bassoon, and Richard Todd, Horn, Perform in Season Closer with CMP Co-Founders/Co-Artistic Directors Susan Greenberg, Flute, and Delores Stevens, Piano

Chamber Music Palisades (CMP), concluding its 13th Season, contrasts two works from LA’s contemporary chamber music scene – the world premieres of Gernot Wolfgang’s Mr. Z, a sextet for piano and woodwinds, and 17-year-old Santa Monica-based Phillip Golub’s humorous Wood ‘n’ You – with venerated woodwind and piano classics ¬by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart on Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 8:00 PM, at St. Matthew’s Parish in Pacific Palisades.

The guest artists for the season’s finale, all of whom have previously appeared on the Chamber Music Palisades series, are Jonathan Davis, oboe, Helen Goode, clarinet, Judith Farmer, bassoon, and Richard Todd, horn. They join CMP Co-Founders/Co-Artistic Directors Delores Stevens, piano, and Susan Greenberg, flute.

A pair of classics opens the program – Bach’s Choral Preludes, Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God), arranged for woodwind quintet by Mordechai Rechtman, and a transcription for flute, clarinet and bassoon of Beethoven’s Variations on Mozart’s "La Ci Darem La Mano," WoW 28, the famous theme from his brilliant opera Don Giovanni.

The program continues with two world premieres. The first, Mr. Z, a sextet for woodwinds and piano honoring legendary jazz pianist Joe Zawinul, was a commission by Chamber Music Palisades (CMP) from noted Austrian-born composer Gernot Wolfgang, who currently resides in Los Angeles. It is his second commission from CMP. The first was Metamorphosis, written in 2001 for violin, viola, cello and piano. CMP has also programmed several of his other pieces over the years

Describing Mr. Z, a 15-minute piece, Wolfgang says, “Once I started writing it, I realized I wanted to honor pianist Joe Zawinul, co-founder of Weather Report, one of the most successful jazz groups in history. I took the spirit of Zawinul’s style and translated it into the chamber music idiom. It’s a colorful piece that’s definitely written for musicians with a classical background, but asks for them to groove like jazz players. Zawinul stacked sound by using synthesizers in different octaves, which I’ve emulated with the different octaves of the woodwind instruments. The piece also honors Weather Report’s other co-founder, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, whose musical style is reflected in the oboe solo, and its long-time bassist Jaco Pastorius, one of the most influential bassists in history, with the bassoon playing the bass line and the left hand of the piano doubling the bass line one octave lower. Mr. Z is also episodical, like Zawinul’s music, which started in one groove then would take off in completely different directions before going back to the original theme and main harmonic language.”

A graduate of the program Scoring for Motion Pictures and TV at USC Thornton, Wolfgang holds degrees from Berklee College of Music in Boston and the University of Music in Graz, Austria and has received numerous commissions. Wolfgang has also written original music for the animated Warner Brothers TV series Zorro and the feature films Ultimate Fight/The Process and Es war einmal. He was a member of composer Christopher Young's creative team for the scores to such motion pictures as Swordfish, The Glass House, Entrapment and Urban Legend. Wolfgang has also worked as an orchestrator for composers Joe Harnell and David Kitay and was a guitarist with the Austrian jazz ensemble The QuARTet, with whom he has recorded and toured extensively. He has received accolades from such organizations as BMI, Billboard Magazine, the American Composers Forum and the Austrian Ministry of Education and the Arts.

Wood ‘n’ You by Phillip Golub, 17, a junior at Crossroads School in Santa Monica who studies classical piano with Delores Stevens, will also be premiered. He says of the quintet for woodwinds, "the name catches the humor in the piece." The accomplished young jazz and classical pianist has already earned some prestigious awards, including, in 2008, as a ninth grader, the Los Angeles Music Center’s “Spotlight Award,” playing an original song in the jazz instrumental category. He also won the 2010 and 2009 ASCAP Young Jazz Composers Coker Scholarship Award and, last summer, was awarded a full scholarship to attend the highly competitive Summer Jazz Workshop at Berklee College of Music. Last fall, he began a two-year composition fellowship at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Young Composer’s Fellowship program, for which he wrote a short orchestra piece that was performed in a “Symphony for Schools Concert” by the LA Phil at Disney Hall. Additionally, as winner of the American Composers Forum/LA Composers Competition, he received a performance of his woodwind duo by Ensemble Green.

Concluding the concert and the season is Mozart’s famous Quintet for piano and winds, about which the composer wrote to his father, “I myself consider it to be the best work I have ever composed. How I wish you could have heard it.”

Chamber Music Palisades was founded in 1997 by Pacific Palisades residents Stevens and Greenberg. They draw guest artists from their vast pool of talented colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Opera, plus other leading instrumentalists from the U.S. and Europe. In addition to presenting established chamber works, to date Chamber Music Palisades has commissioned 11 compositions by such renowned composers as Paul Chihara, Jane Brockman, Henri Lazarof, Adrienne Albert, Maria Newman, Gernot Wolfgang and Joel McNeely.

Tickets are $25; students with ID are free. St. Matthew’s Parish is located at 1031 Bienveneda in Pacific Palisades, CA 90272. For tickets and information, please call 310-463-4388 or visit www.cmpalisades.org.

Official Website: http://www.cmpalisades.org