2023 Honors Recital Tuesday, March 9, 2023

Commissioned by Tom Sherwood for the 2011 Modern Snare Drum Competition hosted by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Stop Speaking is a contemporary piece for solo snare drum and digital playback. Two CDs are inluded with the score: a practice disc with rehearsals divided and a performance CD of the entire work to play along with.

Written for snare drum and digital playback, the electronic voice heard is Vicki, from Apple’s Speech Preference Center. Akiho created the playback using a Microsoft Word Document read by Apple’s: Vicki. There is no meter in this piece, which calls on the performer to play many different tempi without having a notated tempo, making it difficult since many passages are the same, just at varying speeds. Another challenge of this piece is the lining up of Vicki’s voice to the snare drum while performing difficult techniques, such as thumb rolls, the use of varying sticks, and finger-playing, on the contrary, some parts require the performer to complement Vicki’s voice in an accompaniment fashion. This piece demands the player to use orchestral, rudimental, and drum set style playing.

- Trevor Landreth

Leonora wanted to flee the strict parental home with her lover, because her father did not want to approve of his daughter’s relationship with the Creole Alvaro. When her father surprises them during the escape, a shot is unintentionally fired from Alvaro’s pistol and unhappily kills the father. While fleeing, the two are separated and when Leonora mistakenly learns that Alvaro has fled to America, she enters a monastery as a hermit. After years she has not found peace there and wishes for her death.

Pace, pace is Leonora’s prayer, her plea for peace, which she will not achieve on earth and longs for her death (“Oh God, let me die”).

"'En Forêt by Eugene Bozza (1905-1991 is considered by many to be the most difficult piece ever written for the horn. Intended as a test composition for graduate horn students at the Paris Conservatory, it displays every problematic element of horn playing imaginable, including bounding intervals, rapid-fire lip trills, sonorous glissandos, and intricate hand-stopping techniques, all over four octaves from high C to pedal C.' (from John Cerminaro, on the liner notes of the 'blue CD', on the Crystal label).

"It is a great piece, one of our best works for horn and piano, and challenging to play but not to the extent that the program note writer gushes. I could easily find you much more difficult works. But it has been fun working again on those “bounding intervals, rapid-fire lip trills, sonorous glissandos, and intricate hand-stopping techniques” mentioned."

-- John Ericson

Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 3 in A minor, Op. 28 (1917) is a sonata composed for solo piano, using sketches dating from 1907. Prokofiev gave the première of this in St. Petersburg on 15 April 1918, during a week-long festival of his music sponsored by the Conservatory.

Among the many gifted composers and performers from the Czech lands who enriched the musical life of the mid-18th century was Johann Baptist Georg Neruda, born around 1711 in Rosice, Moravia, near Brno, about thirty miles north of the border with Austria. Neruda was from a musical family — his brother, Jan Chryzostomus, was a violinist and later choirmaster of Prague’s Strahov Monastery — and he was trained as a violinist and cellist in Prague, where he spent several years performing in theater orchestras before entering the service of Count Rutowski in Dresden in 1741 or 1742. He became concertmaster of the Dresden court orchestra in 1750 and remained in that post until his retirement in 1772; he died in Dresden four years later. Neruda composed nearly a hundred works, including an opera, church music, some three-dozen pieces in the gestating form of the symphony, numerous trio sonatas and fourteen concertos that were widely disseminated throughout northern Europe in both manuscripts and printed editions. Two of his sons became violinists in the Dresden court orchestra.

The Concerto in E-flat major, Neruda’s best-known work, was originally written for the valveless horn of the late 18th century (then known as corno di caccia — “hunting horn” — to denote its sylvan associations) but it is most commonly performed today on trumpet. It was written during the years of transition from the Baroque to the Classical era, and shows traits of both the old and new styles: its harmonic and melodic components are largely of the modern type, while certain formal characteristics and modes of expression look back to the models of preceding generations. Each of the Concerto’s three movements is rooted in the old ritornello form, in which an orchestral refrain returns (ritorno in Italian) to separate the soloist’s intervening episodes. There are three such formal alternations in both the opening Allegro and the closing Vivace, with the last solo episode in each culminating in a cadenza. The slow tempo of the central Largo allows for only two solo episodes, with the second rounded out by a cadenza.

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Alcina’s recitative and aria at the end of act 2 (“Ah! Ruggiero crudel” … “Ombre pallide”) exemplifies Handel’s musical palette. One of the most stunning and colorful musical scenes in the opera, Zamudio refers to it as “quite crazy in terms of the melody and harmony.” The recitative commences with sustained chords accompanying Alcina as she laments her loss of Ruggiero. As she attempts to cast a new spell on him, she finds that she is powerless, and her impotency is musically represented in the sparse texture; the harmony drops out and her vocal line is merely doubled in unison strings. As she ponders the loss of her powers in the following aria, her despondency is heard in the chains of dissonances in the orchestra and the long, winding, and often fragmented vocal lines. As the orchestra adopts a simpler tone, she briefly seems to accept her loss, and she breaks her wand in two. With this however, her rage overtakes her once again and the mournfulness and fury of the opening returns.

"'Fantasie' for solo clarinet is my first real piece for my own instrument, the clarinet. With its eccentric virtuosity and its cheerful, ironic fundamental character, it reflects the experience with Stravinsky's 3 Pieces for solo clarinet of 1919 and the tonal innovations which did not appear in music before Carl Maria von Weber's notation for the clarinet and takes them further in a new way. It is a little imaginary scene uniting the dialogues of different people in close proximity in the spirit of the commedia dell'arte."

- Jörg Widmann

Giuseppe Verdi produced many successful operas, including La Traviata and Falstaff. He became known for his skill in creating melody and his profound use of theatrical effect, and his music served the audience of the mass public rather than that of the musical elite. His most mature works, except for Falstaff, are serious and end tragically. These fast-paced works deal with emotional extremes and the music emphasizes the dramatic situation.

“Sul Fil d’un Soffio Etesio” is soprano, Nannetta’s, aria from Falstaff. Nannetta, disguised as the Fairy Queen, calls the fairies out of their hiding places and commands them to dance. It is in binary form (A, A1), which is perfect for the fairy song she sings, and it is simple and melodic. It is a very unique and beautiful moment as there are very illustrative musical tactics. There is a fairy call, and the clouds part to reveal the moon. It is very mysterious and dreamy, and the air is laden with excitement and anticipation.

Les Colloque des Deux Perruches is comprised of six movements of equally virtuosic writing for the flute and alto flute. This scoring effectively portrays two parrots conversing due to the range differences, the alto flute pitched a perfect fourth below middle C. The opening Allegrissimo of this duet provides great opportunity for the introduction of both instruments as different entities. Interweaving semiquaver motifs are cleverly written in the relevant range to each instrument. Sadness is prevalent in the first Larghetto movement of this conversation between two parrots, denoted by its minor key. Semiquaver motives dart in and out of a light 3/8 texture in the following Scherzando movement. The Scherzando section draws to a close with witty grace note staccato quaver gestures marked L istesso Tempo. The silences between the notes and the extended silence before the alto flute s final utterance of the phrase create this comedy by subverting the expectations of the listener. The following section, marked Poetico, ma sempre in tempo, consists of light pianissimo semiquavers shared between the voices to create a constant line. The final conversation between these two parrots is a rollicking Allegro with interweaving parts in a fast-march tempo. Again Francaix writes idiomatically for each instrument, the C flute written in the higher register, and the alto flute naturally a few octaves lower.

- Abby Bridgett Grace Fraser, 2011