Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presents Kurt Rohde’s Concertino, a program Kurt Rohde, as well as Brahms’ Clarinet Trio and works by Martin Bresnick, Jacob Ter Veldhuis and Lou Harrison.
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble welcomes composer Kurt Rohde, its founding artistic director, who has returned to San Francisco after a year spent composing in Italy. As a recipient of the prestigious 2008 Rome Prize, Rohde held a residency at the American Academy in Rome where each year a select group of artists and scholars are invited to pursue their creative goals in an atmosphere of artistic innovation and progressive scholarship. Among the works Rohde wrote while abroad is a chamber concerto dedicated to the internationally acclaimed violinist Axel Strauss, who will perform as a guest soloist with LCCE
for the concert. The world premiere of Rohde’s concertino is presented with works by Brahms, Bresnick, Ter Veldhuis, and Harrison. Left Coast’s flutist Stacey Pelinka is featured in Jacob Ter Veldhuis’ Lipstick and in a concerto for flute and percussion by Lou Harrison. There are star turns for LCCE’s clarinetist Jerry Simas as well, in the Brahms Clarinet Trio and Martin Bresnick’s beautiful composition *** for clarinet, viola, and piano.
Program:
Martin Bresnick ***for clarinet, viola and piano
Johannes Brahms Clarinet Trio
Jacob ter Veldhuis Lipstick
Lou Harrison Ariadne
Kurt Rohde Concertino for Violin and Chamber Ensemble (Premiere)
About the featured artists
Kurt Rohde
Recipient of the 2008 Rome Prize, Kurt Rohde has also received the Charles Ives Fellowship and the Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and commission awards from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hanson Institute for American Music. Kurt Rohde was a recipient of the Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. He has served as composer in residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival, and as guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference.
Recent commissions include a new work for dance with choreographer Brenda Way and artist Frances McCormack; a new work for the Berlin based Scharoun Ensemble; a new double viola concerto for himself and violist Ellen Ruth Rose and the University of California at Davis Symphony Orchestra; a work for speaking pianist on texts of Paul Mann for Genevieve Lee; a piano concerto for Sara Laimon and the New York based ensemble Sequitur; and the new work for violinist Axel Strauss and The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Mr. Rohde is currently collaborating on a number of film projects with artist and filmmaker Shelley Jordon. He will be composer-in-residence with Southwest Chamber Music in the Spring 2010. As part of his work with Southwest Chamber Music, Mr. Rohde has composed a new work for large ensemble based on a poem by Paul Mann, entitled still distant, still here.
Mr. Rohde is a graduate of the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, the Curtis Institute of Music and SUNY Stony Brook. He studied composition with Donald Erb, Ned Rorem and Andrew Imbrie, and viola with Karen Tuttle, John Graham, and Caroline Levine. He has attended the Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and has participated as a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Wellesley Composer Conference. Kurt Rohde is the former Artistic Director of the San Francisco based Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. He plays viola in The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, as well as The New Century Chamber Orchestra. Kurt Rohde has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is Associate Professor of music composition and theory at the University of California, Davis, where he is co-director of the Empyrean Ensemble. Originally from New York, Kurt Rohde currently resides in San Francisco. He is an active violist, performing a wide variety of new music.
Alex Strauss
The first German artist to ever win the international Naumburg Violin Award in New York, Axel Strauss has been equally acclaimed for his virtuosity and his musical sensitivity. Mr. Strauss made his American debut at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and his New York debut at Alice Tully Hall in 1998. Since then he has given recitals in major North American cities, including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 2007 he was the violinist in the world premiere of "Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby" – written for him by Pulitzer Prize winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis.
Mr. Strauss has performed as soloist with orchestras in Budapest, Hamburg, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, Bucharest, San Francisco and Cincinnati, among others. He has collaborated with conductors such as Maxim Shostakovitch, Rico Saccani, Joseph Silverstein, and Alasdair Neale. His recordings include the Brahms violin concerto (BPOlive), Mendelssohn's Songs without Words (Naxos), the violin version of the Sonatas Opus 120 by Brahms (Organum) and the Duo for Violin and Cello by Kodaly (Oehms Classics).
Since his European debut in Hamburg in 1988, Axel Strauss has been heard on concert stages throughout Europe. He has given concerts in Moscow, Vilnius, Berlin, Bremen, Leipzig and Nuremberg. Concert tours have taken him to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Romania. He has also toured South America and performed in Japan with the Philharmonic Violins Berlin. Mr. Strauss frequently performs at various music festivals in the United States and abroad, including Germany, India, Korea and Japan. His chamber music partners include Menahem Pressler, Kim Kashkashian, Joel Krosnick, Robert Mann and Bernhard Greenhouse.
At the age of seventeen he won the silver medal at the Enescu Competition in Romania and has been recognized with many other awards, including top prizes in the Bach, Wieniawski and Kocian competitions. Mr. Strauss studied at the Music Academies of Lübeck and Rostock with Petru Munteanu. In 1996 he began working with the late Dorothy DeLay at The Juilliard School and became her teaching assistant in 1998. He has also worked with such artists as Itzhak Perlman, Felix Galimir, and Ruggiero Ricci, and at the Marlboro Music Festival with Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida and Andras Schiff. Mr. Strauss has been residing in the United States since 1996. He maintains a busy performance schedule and serves as Professor of Violin at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
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:
Martin Bresnick ***for clarinet, viola and piano
Johannes Brahms Clarinet Trio
Jacob ter Veldhuis Lipstick
Lou Harrison Ariadne
Kurt Rohde Concertino for Violin and Chamber Ensemble (Premiere)
