University Symphony Orchestra to perform at Carnegie Hall
Betsy Goolian
The University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra (USO) will step onto the stage of Carnegie Hall, one of the world’s most celebrated concert halls, on February 28, 2008. En route to New York, the USO will tour, with stops at Cornell University and Oberlin College.
Carnegie Hall, famed for its warm but lively acoustics, has witnessed landmark moments in music history, with debuts by such legendary figures as Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, and Marian Anderson, and world premieres of such illustrious works as Gershwin’s Concerto in F, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, to name but a few.
On the program on February 28 will be Mahler’s tumultuous and powerful 5th Symphony and a new work, The Old Burying Ground, by School of Music, Theatre & Dance composition faculty member Evan Chambers.
“I wanted to select works that would show the depth and breadth of the extraordinary faculty and student musicians at the School,” said Kenneth Kiesler, Conductor and Director of University Orchestras.
The University Symphony Orchestra has earned a reputation as one of the leading student orchestras in the country. Recordings by the USO include four CDs of excerpts from operas sponsored by the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music; Bolcom Bassett Daugherty, a CD showcasing three of the School’s most prolific and celebrated composition faculty; and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, an epic work by faculty composer William Bolcom, performed and recorded at Hill Auditorium in April 2004; that recording went on to earn four Grammy Awards.
The USO performs eight concert programs each year, presenting a wide range of major orchestral works, repertoire for chorus and orchestra, opera, and new works, often by composers on the faculty at the School.
In fact, at 6:30 p.m., before the USO takes the stage at Carnegie Hall at 8:00 p.m., composers Evan Chambers, Michael Daugherty, Erik Santos, and Bright Sheng will present a pre-concert forum, Composing Michigan: Legacy and Leadership in New Music. The forum, which is free and open to the public, will be moderated by the School’s Dean, Christopher Kendall.
The newest work on the program, Evan Chambers’ The Old Burying Ground, will have its world premiere in Ann Arbor in December and its East Coast premiere at Carnegie Hall in February.
The Old Burying Ground, two song cycles for soprano, tenor, folksinger, and orchestra, will feature original poetry recited between songs. The original inspiration for the work came to Chambers on a stroll through a New Hampshire graveyard some ten years ago. “When I visited the cemetery for the first time, I was floored by the power of the epitaphs,” Chambers says. The work that arose from that seminal moment is a hauntingly compelling musical portrait of the imagined voices of residents who inhabited rural New Hampshire two hundred years ago
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“When I thought about the voices of these 19th century rural inhabitants, it was hard for me to hear them breaking out into song in the voice of an Italian bel canto tenor; I needed to find a style of singing that would create a feeling of naturalness.”
One perfect fit for the sound Chambers was looking for came through the voice of folksinger Tim Eriksen, best known for his work on the soundtrack for the Civil War movie Cold Mountain. Thomas Lynch, resident poet-undertaker of Milford, MI, is one of five poets writing original works for the composition. Along with poetry by Lynch, additional works are being written by Keith Taylor, Jane Hirshfield, Richard Tillinghast, and Paula Meehan.
“I consider it a privilege and a responsibility to work on a premiere,” says conductor Kiesler, “to be one of the first to see the score, to hear directly from the composer what the intention is—that’s really exciting to me.”
The Old Burying Ground will be performed on December 10, 2007, the Mahler 5 on Tuesday, February 5, in Ann Arbor at Hill Auditorium, both at 8:00 p.m.
Tickets for the Carnegie performance go on sale December 28 at the Carnegie Hall ticket office.
Ann Arbor premiere of The Old Burying Ground
The complete orchestral version premiere of Evan Chambers’ The Old Burying Ground
Brad Waters
This winter the University of Michigan will celebrate a new major work by UM professor/composer Evan Chambers titled The Old Burying Ground. The world premiere, a commercial recording of the piece, and a tour of the work to Carnegie Hall are planned for the 2007/2008 season. The work is a 45-minute song-cycle that fuses folk and classical music together in a setting of emotionally-charged texts of tombstones from an historic New Hampshire cemetery. The events will be both musical and literary, as five internationally recognized poets have contributed new poems commissioned specifically for the project.
A standing-room-only press preview at Kerrytown Concert House on September 17th marked the beginning of a series of events celebrating the premiere. “‘The Old Burying Ground’ made magic… The songs were by turns tender, rousing and stern… The melding of sung and spoken word was elegant and affecting” wrote Susan Isaacs Nisbett of The Ann Arbor News.
To give voice to the words of those long-dead and the ones who mourned them, Chambers has assembled unusual forces, including the Grammy-award winning University Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Kiesler, tenor and soprano soloists, and the noted folk/punk singer Tim Eriksen (recently heard on the soundtrack to the film Cold Mountain). Renowned poets Keith Taylor, Jane Hirshfield, Paula Meehan, Richard Tillinghast, and Thomas Lynch, who was recently featured in a PBS Frontline documentary, will read new poems commissioned for the event. The premiere will be paired with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
“The performers’ initial entrance – from the back, down the aisle like a mourners’ procession with fiddle and tinkling bells and ringing chimes – temporarily melted the house’s walls to reveal an 18th century churchyard. And it wasn’t long into the songs, and the poems interspersed among them, before the house began to seem a simple New England church, with the performers the preachers, and the audience the flock.”
-The Ann Arbor News, 9/18/07
Composer's song cycle headed to Carnegie Hall
Frank Provenzano, News Services
The haunting melodies in Evan Chambers' evocative song cycle come from a deep, resonant place — a sacred ground that holds memories of those buried 6 feet deep. Now, Chambers' unique phrasings inspired by implied stories etched in epitaphs will travel from country cemetery to one of the world's most famous stages.
An old cemetery inspired Evan Chambers to write a piece of music that will be performed at Carnegie Hall.
The work, The Old Burying Ground, inspired by Chambers' visits to a centuries-old cemetery in Jaffrey, N.H., is heading to Carnegie Hall in New York. The University Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Kenneth Kiesler will perform the piece on Feb. 28. (More information on the trip to Carneige Hall)
However, before the New York trip, The Old Burying Ground will premiere Dec. 10 at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor.
The 45-minute piece is comprised of two sets of songs based on Chambers' interpretation of tombstone epitaphs. Many of the songs are gentle and peaceful, imparting otherworldly wistful melodies. Several of the pieces resound with a distinctive avant-garde twist; large metal tubs and trashcans wrapped in chains provide the percussion.
Chambers is chair of composition at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. He also is associate director of Electronic Music Studios at the school, and an acclaimed Irish traditional fiddler.
A soprano, tenor and folksinger perform the songs in The Old Burying Ground, while several poets read their works during the interludes. Contributing poets include Thomas Lynch, Keith Taylor, Jane Hirshfield, Paul Meehan and Richard Tillinghast.
In his work, Chambers bridges the traditional with the contemporary, looks at history through the lens of the compassionate present, and composes a folksy tonal range that rises to the operatic.
"I needed to find a style of singing that would create a feeling of naturalness," says Chambers, who noted it was hardly plausible for the residents of early 19th-century New Hampshire to croon in the voice of an Italian bel canto. "I had this aim to create a work that sounded as if the voices were rising from the ground."
Since his collegiate days at Bowling Green University, Chambers has found walking through cemeteries to be serene and powerfully inspiring.
It is not unusual for him to lie on the ground near a tombstone and rub his fingers into the fading letters etched into granite as he tries to figure out a word or phrase. From there, he's likely to weave a probable narrative of the lives of families that lie in the eternal ground.
"While cemeteries are places of great peace, they also carry remnants of profound human suffering," Chambers says. "For me, they provide an ideal place for a meditation upon how lives appear and disappear in this world."
Click here to watch Evan Chambers discuss his inspirations for The Old Burying Ground. (video)
