The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presents Audible Visions, a program celebrating the connection between eye and ear, with works by Gabriel Fauré, Kaija Saariaho, and Barbara Kolb, and the North American premiere of Matthew Barnson’s String Quartet #2.
In Audible Visions, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble explores the musical connection between eye and ear. Barbara Kolb’s work for guitar and violin depicts an artist’s palette, complete with cerulean blue; Gabriel Faure was one of the so-called “impressionist composers” who preferred that a simplistic link not be made between his music and the art of his time; yet his colorful piano quartet blossoms in the context of other works that were literally motivated by color. The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho creates sonic images of seven aspects of butterflies, while Matthew Barnson, the winner of the 2009 Left Coast Composition Contest, exploits an unusual sound palette in his abstract work for string quartet.
About the Contemporary Composers
Barbara Kolb has been the recipient of many awards, including three Tanglewood Fellowships, four MacDowell Fellowships, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Kolb became the first woman to receive the American Prix de Rome (1969-71) in music composition. She was also awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for a year of study in Vienna. Many of her works have drawn upon ideas and images having their sources in literature or the visual arts. Umbrian Colors, for violin and guitar, premiered in 1986 and was performed by Pina Carmirelli and David Starobin (for whom it was composed) at the Marlboro Music Festival.
Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. Born in Helsinki in 1952, she studied at the Sibelius Academy there with the pioneering modernist Paavo Heininen and, with Magnus Lindberg and others, she founded the progressive ‘Ears Open’ group. She continued her studies in Freiburg with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, at the Darmstadt summer courses, and, from 1982, at the IRCAM research institute in Paris – the city which has been her home ever since. Throughout her career Saariaho has developed close and productive associations with a number of individual artists, including Peter Sellars, soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Emmanuel Ax.
Matthew Barnson, winner of the 2009 LCCE Composition Contest, is emerging as an exciting new voice in both the United States and Europe. He has studied with many notable teachers, including Kaija Saariaho. He is the youngest recipient of a Barlow Commission at the age of 22. Last year alone he received awards, prizes, and fellowships from the American Composers Forum, Yale University, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts, Clefworks, and the Brian M. Israel Prize; as well as a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Aaron Copland Prize.
About Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE)
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s mission is to present inspiring performances of chamber music, programming new music alongside familiar masterworks to demonstrate the connection between the great tradition of concert music and the music of our own time. By embracing both new and old chamber music, the Ensemble aims to enrich the audience's experience of both musics—to reawaken the feeling of immediacy of older compositions and to reveal the expressive intentions of new ones. The mix of programming makes the performance accessible, even for audience members with no experience of newer music. LCCE’s twelve musicians, many of whom have been playing together since the 1980s, perform in different combinations to present a wide range of chamber music.
Program
Barbara Kolb, Umbrian Colors
William Grant Still, Suite for violin and piano
Kaija Saariaho, Sept Papillons
Gabriel Faure, Piano Quartet in G minor
Matthew Barnson, String Quartet (Winner, Left Coast Composition Prize)
