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N C O L L E G E O F F I N E A R T S

Fred Fox School of Music

Elena Miraztchiyska, pianoLauren Rustad Roth, violin

Timothy Kantor, violinHugo Vera, tenor

Sarah Kortemeier, reader

Tuesday, February 6, 2018Holsclaw Hall, 7:00 p.m.

A Faculty Artist Series Recital

In collaboration with the UA Poetry Center

Poetic Sara Frakeroboe & English horn

keeps an active private voice studio in New York City. He is also general artistic director and founder of Lawrence Opera Theatre (LOT) a summer music performing company. Mr. Vera holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in voice/opera and choral conducting from the University of Kansas, a Master of Music degree in opera from the University of Kansas, and a Bachelor of Music degree in voice from the University of Utah. Further education includes the University of Michigan, and various summer vocal institutes. Mr. Vera enjoyed the privilege of training with several noteworthy young artist programs including the Brevard Music Center, the Tanglewood Music Festival, Aspen Music Center, Chautauqua Opera, The Lyric Opera of Kansas City, The Minnesota Opera, and Glimmerglass Opera.

SARAH KORTEMEIER is the instruction and outreach librarian at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. A working poet, subject specialist in contemporary poetry, and teaching librarian, she holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in library and information science, both from the University of Arizona. She teaches in the Poetry Center’s Classes and Workshops program, coordinates the Poetry Center’s educational outreach for university audiences, and has served as a judge, emcee, trainer, and featured guest performer for the annual Poetry Out Loud competition for high school students. Sarah’s creative work investigates questions of travel, feminism, and fertility, among other themes, primarily through the lenses of autobiography and fairy tale. You can find work from her most recent project, an experimental reworking of text from the stories of the Brothers Grimm, online at The Feminist Wire, Under a Warm Green Linden, and Slush Pile Magazine. Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fairy Tale Review, Folio, Pilgrimage, and Sentence, among others, and she has been a finalist in the annual Gulf Coast and Tennessee Williams Festival poetry contests. Sarah’s research interests include critical librarianship and critical library pedagogy, feminist classification theory, and the intersections between arts education and information literacy instruction. Her scholarly writing has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies from McFarland and the Association of College & Research Libraries. As a student in the Library and Information Science program at UA, she won the Miriam Braverman Memorial Prize from the Progressive Librarians Guild of the American Library Association for her work on visibility, gender, and classification in the Poetry Center Library.

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P R O G R A M

“When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats

Pilgrim Soul .............................................................Augusta Read Thomas (b.1964)

“The Wild Iris” by Louise Glück

Aubade for the Continuity of Life ................................... William Bolcom (b.1938)

“My voice is weak, but not my will” by Anna Akhmatova

Poem for Oboe and Piano ...................................... Marina Dranishnikova (1929-1994)

I N T E R M I S S I O N

“To Blake” by Sarah Kortemeier

Selections from Ten Blake Songs ...................... Ralph Vaughan Williams Infant Joy (1872-1958) A poison tree The Lamb Ah! Sun-flower Cruelty has a human heart Eternity

FA C U LT Y A RT I S T S E R I E S R E C I TA L

PoeticSara Fraker, oboe & English horn

Elena Miraztchiyska, pianoLauren Rustad Roth, violin

Timothy Kantor, violinHugo Vera, tenor

Sarah Kortemeier, reader

Tuesday, February 6, 2018Holsclaw Hall

7:00 p.m.

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TIMOTHY KANTOR is assistant professor of violin at the Fred Fox School of Music at the University of Arizona. A member of the Afiara Quartet, Mr. Kantor is also the former concertmaster of the Evansville (Indiana) Philharmonic. He was a founding member of the Larchmere String Quartet and the Eykamp String Quartet in residence at the University of Evansville. He has performed as a member of the Kuttner String Quartet in residence at Indiana University, the chamber music and Quartet in the Community residencies at the Banff Centre, the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar and the St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar. He has also performed with many of today’s leading musicians, including Joshua Bell, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Atar Arad, Alexander Kerr and the Pacifica Quartet. In 2013 Mr. Kantor was featured as the young artist in residence for American Public Media’s “Performance Today.” Mr. Kantor is devoted to the performance of new music and has participated as soloist, concertmaster and chamber musician with the new music ensembles at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Indiana University. Mr. Kantor graduated with honors from Bowdoin College and earned a Master of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music. His former teachers include Jaime Laredo, Paul Kantor, Stephen Kecskemethy, Andrew Jennings, and at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music he studied with Mark Kaplan. A dedicated teacher and coach, Mr. Kantor is also assistant professor of violin at the Fundación por la Música in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

A native Texan, tenor HUGO VERA is described as possessing a “truly heroic voice” that is both “beautiful and brilliant.” Mr. Vera has performed 34 roles and 20 choral orchestral works with distinguished companies in the United States as part of his musical and artistic development of the full lyric tenor repertoire. In addition to the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Vera has sung with Spoleto USA, Piccolo Spoleto Kansas City Symphony, New York City Opera, Illinois Symphony and Chorus, Fort St. Symphony and Chorus, Opera Memphis, Center for Contemporary Opera, New Opera NYC, Aspen Music Festival, Brevard Music Center, Sarasota Opera, the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Glimmerglass Opera, Opera North, Aspen Opera Theatre, The Minnesota Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Nashville Opera, Shreveport Opera and Tanglewood Music Festival. As an active recitalist and clinician he has performed recitals as an artist in residence at Dartmouth College, University of Texas-Pan America, Westminster College, Presbyterian College, GLOW Lyric Theatre, Edinburg Consolidated School District, and Lawrence Arts Center. As an educator, he has served on the music faculties at New York University, the University of Kansas, and the Midwest Summer Music Institute. He taught various courses which included private voice, diction, and conducted the University of Kansas Men’s Glee Club, Oread Vocal Ensemble, and opera workshop. He

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Bulgarian pianist ELENA MIRAZTCHIYSKA completed her Master of Music degree at the Yale School of Music in 2010 as a student of Professor Claude Frank and Professor Boris Berman. Mrs. Miraztchiyska made her solo debut with the Bulgarian Chamber Orchestra in her home country at the age of 12 and since then she has performed as concerto soloist with the Varna Philharmonic, Sofia State, Arizona, and UNLV Symphony and Chamber Orchestras. She has appeared in solo and collaborative recitals in Bulgaria, Poland, Japan, and the United States. Elena is also a winner of numerous national and international competitions held in Bulgaria. In 2007, she was the grand prize winner of the MTNA National Young Artist Competition in Toronto, Canada and received a Steinway Model M grand piano. As a participant in numerous summer programs, she has worked with such artists as Emanuel Ax, Michel Beroff, Emanuel Krasovsky, Boris Bloch, Ursula Oppens, and Mykola Suk.

LAUREN RUSTAD ROTH is concertmaster of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and was named assistant professor of violin at the University of Arizona beginning in the 2013-2014 school year. Prior to these positions, she was concertmaster of the Canton Symphony. In May 2013, Ms. Roth earned a Master of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music as a student of William Preucil, and she was accepted into his prestigious Concertmaster Academy. She was a member of the Cleveland Pops Orchestra and a substitute with the Cleveland Orchestra. A native of Seattle, Ms. Roth received a Bachelor of Music degree in violin performance and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Italian studies from the University of Washington. She was a student of Professor Ron Patterson. During that time, she served as concertmaster of the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra, Thalia Symphony, Marrowstone Festival Orchestra, and the UW Symphony. Ms. Roth has appeared as soloist with Philharmonia Northwest, Thalia Symphony, Canton Symphony, Sierra Vista Symphony and the Tucson Symphony. In 2013 she attended the Tanglewood Music Center and received the Jules C. Reiner Violin Prize. An avid teacher and chamber musician, Ms. Roth was an adjunct faculty member at Holy Names Academy in Seattle and has served on the faculty of Icicle Creek Music Center and the International Lyric Academy in Italy. She enjoys spending summers in Prague, Czech Republic and Bellingham, Washington where she is a faculty member at the Prague Summer Nights Festival and the Marrowstone Music Festival respectively. In the upcoming season, Ms. Roth looks forward to solo engagements with the Tucson Symphony, Canton Symphony, and Southern Arizona Symphony. Outside of music, she enjoys sports, yoga and spending time with her nieces and nephews.

Four Songs on Words of Chinese Poetry .................................Pavel Haas (1899-1944) “I Heard the Cry of the Wild Geese” by Wei Jing-wu tr. S. Fraker

“In the Bamboo Grove” by Wang Wei

“Far Is My Home, O Moon” by Zhang Jiuling

“A Sleepless Night” by Han Yi

Texts will be available at the door after the performance.

Please join us for a reception in the Green Roomhosted by the Fred Fox School of Music

with the assistance of studentsfrom Dr. Fraker’s studio.

HOLSCLAW HALL IS PROUD TO FEATURE THE

Peter & Debbie Coogan Steinway

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About the Music

Augusta Read Thomas, acclaimed American composer, said of her piece Pilgrim Soul: “Although this music is highly notated, precise, carefully structured, thoughtfully proportioned, and so forth... I like my music to have the feeling that it is organically being self-propelled – on the spot. As if we listeners, the audience, are overhearing a captured improvisation. … I like my music to be played so that the ‘inner-life’ of the different rhythmic syntaxes is specific, with characterized phrasing of the many colors, characters, and harmonies, etc. – keeping it ultra alive – such that it always sounds spontaneous.” Commissioned in 2011, the piece was inspired by the poem “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats.

Marina Dranishnikova’s Poem for Oboe and Piano was published in Moscow in 1953. The work was unknown in the United States until 2002, when it was brought to light by oboist Marc Finc, who traveled to the St. Petersburg and Moscow Conservatory libraries to research 20th-century Russian oboe music. Dranishnikova was the daughter of a prominent conductor and studied piano with Nadezhda Golubovskaya at the Leningrad Conservatory, though little more is known of her biography. This piece is dedicated to Vladimir Kurlin, who was solo oboist of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, and with whom Dranishnikova reportedly had a tragic love affair. This evening, the piece is paired with a poem by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966).

Aubade for the Continuation of Life was composed by William Bolcom in response to his reading of The Fate of the Earth, a novel by Jonathan Schell depicting the cataclysmic fallout of nuclear war. A slow and persistent sarabande motif carries the piece ever forward. Aubade was premiered in 1982 by oboist Heinz Holliger and pianist Dennis Russell Davies. Here, the piece is brought into dialogue with “The Wild Iris,” a poem by celebrated American poet Louise Glück (b. 1943). A prominent American composer and pianist, Bolcom is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and National Medal of Arts. Coincidentally, one of his major works is a setting of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a massive three-hour piece for orchestra, solo voices, and choruses composed over a period of 25 years.

Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his Ten Blake Songs over the Christmas holiday of 1957-58, during what would be the last year of his life. Written for the documentary film The Vision of William Blake, this song cycle was dedicated to tenor Wilfred Brown and oboist Janet Craxton.

The Blake Songs are texturally austere, yet remarkable for their richness of melody and modal counterpoint. Sarah Kortemeier composed her poem “To Blake” for this performance.

Four Songs on Words of Chinese Poetry by Czech composer Pavel Haas was originally scored for bass voice and piano. This transcription for English horn is inspired by Haas’s 1939 Suite for Oboe and Piano, which was likely originally written for tenor and piano. Haas composed the Four Songs inside the Terezín concentration camp for vocalist Karel Berman, who premiered them with pianist Rafael Schächter in the camp in May, 1944. The song texts were chosen from a Czech volume of Tang Dynasty poetry translations. Listeners familiar with the Oboe Suite will recognize the ever-present 14th-century hymn and Czech anthem, Svaty Vacláve. Through his persistent use of the four-note chorale motif (Fb –Eb –Cb –Db , as at the beginning of the first song), Haas expresses stark longing for a distant home.

About the Artists

SARA FRAKER is assistant professor of oboe at the University of Arizona and in her thirteenth season as a member of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. She performs with the Grammy-nominated ensemble True Concord Voices & Orchestra and spends the summers as a faculty artist at the Bay View Music Festival in northern Michigan. She was awarded a 2017 Artist Research and Development Grant by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, in support of an interdisciplinary commissioning and recording project. Sara has performed in festivals at Tanglewood, Aspen, Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, Chautauqua, Spoleto Festival USA, and the prestigious Schleswig-Holstein Orchesterakademie in Germany. She recently performed the Mozart Oboe Concerto with the Sierra Vista Symphony. English horn solo performances with the TSO have included Sibelius Swan of Tuonela, Copland Quiet City, and Berlioz Damnation of Faust. Sara has presented recitals at five recent conferences of the International Double Reed Society, including Tokyo and New York City, and has given master classes at universities and performing arts schools across the United States and in Australia. She is the oboist of the Arizona Wind Quintet, faculty ensemble-in-residence at the University of Arizona. With collaborators Jerry Kirkbride and Rex Woods, she has recorded a disc entitled Idylls for Oboe, Clarinet and Piano, scheduled for a 2018 release on Summit Records. Raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Sara is a graduate of Swarthmore College (BA), New England Conservatory (MM) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (DMA).