Classical music lovers are anticipating the new season of ‘A Musical Feast’, considered a contemporary classical series of musical performances, hosted within the Tower Auditorium of the Burchfield Penny Art Center, located on Elmwood Avenue, on the Buffalo State Campus.
When asked about the upcoming series, general manager Irene Haupt responded, “When I go into a great bookstore (i.e. Rust Belt) and get lost in all the magic of all those great different books filled with fantastic ideas, I would like our ‘A Musical Feast’ series to be like that. A Journey of music, words, images and movement. Time stands still and you are JUST immersed in the moment. The fall concert of A Musical Feast features words, music, movement, and images that blend to lead the audience on a journey through time. The concert features poetic texts, film, and performance.”
The season opening program will be a multi-media event, very much in the now hallowed tradition of performances by the Creative Associates at the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo, back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, under the artistic leadership of Lukas Foss.
The series kicks of on Friday, October 20 at 8pm with a multi-media event is comprised of the following:
Ann Colley, a recently retired Distinguished Teaching professor of English at Buffalo State College debuts her multi-media work, A Cantata for Coleridge, based on her recent research on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s descriptions of landscape. Colley says “As a young man, this eminent early nineteenth-century British writer took rough, difficult walks, sometimes traveling more than thirty miles a day. Oppressed by personal problems as well as his addiction to opium, Coleridge found sustenance in the topography of rivers, meadows, mountains, and the skies. Often, he also hurriedly sketched line drawings to capture the contours of the landscape. My Cantata for Coleridge celebrates Coleridge’s beautiful way with words as well as his sensitivity to the nuances of light and movement in the natural world. Using passages from Coleridge’s notebooks, the piece combines a narrator (Anthony Chase), an actor musician/actor Paul Todaro and a singer (Tiffany DuMouchelle) who will voice passages from the notebooks. Images of Coleridge’s line drawings will be projected on a screen behind the performers”.
Tiffany will also sing Edgar Varese’s early work, Un grand sommeil noir, with a text by Paul Verlaine, accompanied by Ann Kissel, piano. She will also offer her interpretation of Zahra Partovi’s translation of the poem Seek Water, by the 13th century mystic Rumi. Zahra Partovi also collaborated with Chris Villars to produce the short but very rare film Feldman Sings, featuring the only known example of the composer Morton Feldman, who was perhaps in some ways the touchstone of the Creative Associates, caught in the act of singing fragments from the score of his opera Neither, to illustrate points he was making.
Violinist Hannah Hurwitz will offer selections from the long-running, episodic composition Signs, Games and Messages, by the leading contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág. Varying widely in character, many of these miniatures have been inspired by, or dedicated to an individual, and they are often in turn thoughtful or joyful, melancholic or sad, but never outstaying their welcome.
The more traditional part of the program will feature Natasha Farny, the internationally touring virtuoso cellist who is an Associate Professor of Cello performance at the Fredonia School of Music, in transcriptions, arranged by her, of selections both from Schumann’s radiant song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, op. 42, and of Schubert’s lied ‘Hark, hark the Lark’ from Ständchen D 889, accompanied by her Fredonia colleague, pianist Anne Kissel.
Tickets: General: $20; Burchfield Penny members: $10; students: $5. Call: 878-6011, or visit: www.burchfieldpenney.org
To learn more about “A Musical Feast” on Facebook, click here.
Also visit “A Musical Feast” at this website, for more info.