“The effect of this music is that rare thing in this day: music that is deeply engaged with the tradition, mining familiar forms and gestures, and yet somehow giving them integrity, authenticity, and personality. I never feel this is a rehash. Moravec strikes me as one who has found a way to look into the resources of the past without becoming reactionary. I continue to eagerly anticipate his future discoveries.”

Gil Rose: MORAVEC Northern Lights Electric… on BMOP
Classical Reviews – Composers & Works
Friday, 10 May 2013

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SYNOPSIS:
“Tempest Fantasy” by Paul Moravec …

MUSIC PLAYED ON TODAY’S PROGRAM:
Paul Moravec (b. 1957):
Tempest Fantasy
Trio Solisti
Arabesque Z-6791

To listen…

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CELEBRATING PAUL SACHER
Orchestra for the Next Century
Gary M. Schneider, conductor
Michi Wiancko, violin
Yael Manor, piano

April 30, 2013; Tuesday, 8:00PM
MERKIN CONCERT HALL, NYC

Program notes for MORPH (2005) – Paul Moravec

Morph is a musical fantasy on aspects of the Apollo & Daphne myth as related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shot by Cupid’s arrow, Apollo pursues the panicking Daphne through field and forest. At the very moment the god overtakes the nymph, she calls out to her father, the river-god Peneus, to transform her into a laurel tree. In his anguish Apollo proclaims, “Daphne, who cannot be my wife must be the seal,/The sign of all I own, immortal leaf/Twined in my hair as hers, and by this sign/My constant love, my honor shall be shown/…” And in response to Apollo’s devotion, “The laurel shook her branches and seemed to bow/A timid blessing on her lover’s pleasure.”

The title also refers to the nature of the music itself as motivic, harmonic, rhythmic, and phrase units continually metamorphose in the course of the work’s development. Finally, the title appropriately suggests the figure of Morpheus, god of dreams, in that an archetypal myth may be regarded as a civilization’s collective dream.

—- Paul Moravec

The program:

STRAVINSKY: Concerto in D for String Orchestra*
MARGARET BROUWER: Violin Concerto (NY Premiere)
Michi Wiancko, Violin Soloist
PAUL MORAVEC: Morph, for String Orchestra
MARTINŮ: Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano & Timpani*
Yael Manor, Piano Soloist

OFNC honors eminent Swiss conductor and musical philanthropist Paul Sacher (1906-1999), who through his commissioning of new works for his Basel Chamber Orchestra from many of the most important composers of the 20th century, is responsible for the existence of countless landmark musical compositions. Many of these works are universally considered to be priceless gems of the orchestral repertoire and are heard every year in concert halls around the world. OFNC will perform two Sacher commissioned works that are less often performed, but deserving of as much praise and recognition as the other works that we know so well.

Paired with these Sacher commissions from Stravinsky and Martinů, we present two recent works by distinguished American composers Margaret Brouwer and Paul Moravec that share a strong musical affinity with the earlier works, but realized through the craft, ears and sensibility of today.

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Students learn Paul Moravec’s instrumental song ‘Change at Jamaica’

Long Island students are learning an instrumental song composed by a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Paul Moravec, a professor at Adelphi University, wrote “Change at Jamaica,” a 10-minute instrumental about the Long Island Rail Road. He wrote it for eight different Nassau high schools, including Garden City High School.

Garden City students performed the piece Thursday at their spring concert.

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“In its eighty-ninth annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Fellowships to a diverse group of 175 scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.”

For more…

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It’s the mystery of creation and Casals on Now is the Time, Sunday, March 31st at 10 pm. Paul Moravec visited Montserrat, home of a monastery and of a statue of Pablo Casals. The great cellist had played there and was friends with the monks who attended to the Shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat. Casals is memorialized by that statue and now by Moravec’s cello concerto Montserrat, played sumptuously here by Matt Haimovitz.

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The Left Bank Quartet has distinguished itself by its programming of contemporary music, if not always by the overall quality of its playing. The group’s performance on Sunday afternoon, presented through the Steinway Series of free concerts in the auditorium of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, was a case in point. Two more-commonly heard quartets, by Leos Janacek and Antonin Dvorak, received professional but unremarkable renditions, while a relatively new work by American composer Paul Moravec stood out.

Actually, Moravec’s “Tempest Fantasy” is not exactly an unknown quantity, either. In the years since it won the composer a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, it has received a few performances in the area, proving itself a durable piece over multiple hearings. Guest pianist Audrey Andrist, building on her experience performing the work, anchored this performance with fleet fingerwork, while Paul Cigan stole the show with his grunting bass clarinet turn in the Caliban movement, a monster struggling its best to achieve elegance. Cellist Evelyn Elsing was perhaps too retiring in the role of Prospero in the second movement, too covered by the other instruments, and violinist David Salness had his best moments in the sweet, floating introduction to the fourth movement (“Sweet Airs”).

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On Tuesday evening the Oratorio Society of New York presented a…new work by Paul Moravec, The Blizzard Voices. Mr. Moravec’s oratorio uses texts by the former poet laureate Ted Kooser, based on testimonies from survivors of the sudden storm that brought blinding snowfall [to] the Great Plains on Jan. 12, 1888.

Mr. Moravec’s response is that of a painter. Scored for six soloists and a large chorus and orchestra, the oratorio becomes a vast canvas filled with vivid depictions of nature; chiaroscuro changes in lighting; and individual characters fixed with quick, confident brush strokes…

For the most part the music is tonal, and Mr. Moravec’s writing for the solo singers aims for an unaffected simplicity…The musical depiction of the outbreak of the storm was nothing short of terrifying. Yet in other parts the caressing strings and lilting vocal lines, the naïf settings of lullabies and children’s ditties that seemed intended to heighten the pathos, also acted as something of an analgesic.

— Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, New York Times

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The Moravec concerto dates from 2010 but arrived at Symphony in C on Friday in revised form, with authoritative soloist Maria Bachmann and a much clearer train of thought as it walks a delicate line between melodiousness and a subterranean thread that gives it long-term continuity. Imagine Delius minus the attention deficit disorder.

As in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, the soloist’s entrance is usually quiet, a stealthy start on a soft bed of orchestral tone clusters, setting the stage for music that feels tonal but has the more open-ended sense of direction associated with atonal music. Often, I wondered “Where are we? Where are we headed?” – and felt fine not knowing.

The second movement was shaded by modal Eastern influences, giving the music an attractive foreign accent, though one so integrated into the overall sound picture that I couldn’t spot the origin.

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Paul Moravec’s oratorio from 2008, set to a collection of poetry by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, is inspired by the deadly “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888. Its New York première was cancelled, however, due to another historic weather disaster—Hurricane Sandy, which effectively shut down Carnegie Hall for several days. Now it’s here, part of an Americana concert by Kent Tritle’s admired chorus that also offers music by Copland (selections from “Old American Songs” and “The Tender Land”) and Ives (including “The Circus Band”); the vocal soloists include the young Met star Susanna Phillips. (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800. March 5 at 8.) Read more:

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