Skrowaczewski Music For Winds

[Melissa Alvarado]

Thisspecial annual MIT event features performances by MIT Wind Ensemble chamber ensembles, the MIT Chamber Music Society, and also a short program of music by the award-winning MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble and MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble performing jazz standards and contemporary works.

Founded by Music Director Dr. Frederick Harris, Jr. in the fall of 1999, the MIT Wind Ensemble (MITWE) is one of the most innovative ensembles of its kind. Comprised primarily of outstanding MIT undergraduates and graduate students studying a wide range of disciplines within science, engineering, and the humanities. Repertoire includes outstanding traditional works and new music for full wind ensemble, chamber winds, brass ensemble, percussion ensemble, and woodwind ensembles. MITWE has commissioned 45 original works from many prominent composers. MIT Affiliated Artist, renowned composer, and tuba player of the Empire Brass, Kenneth Amis, is the Assistant Conductor of MITWE.

Throughout its 21-year history, MITWE has collaborated with elementary, middle and high school students throughout Massachusetts. In March of 2019, MITWE embarked on its first tour, spending a week in the Dominican Republic, presenting four concerts, many STEAM presentations for middle, high school and college students, and premiering the eco-music piece In Praise Of The Humpback.

Dr. Frederick Harris, Jr. is the Director of Wind and Jazz Ensembles at MIT, where he serves at Music Director of the MIT Wind Ensemble, MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, and oversees jazz chamber music programs including three combos, MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble, and the Emerson Jazz Scholars Program.

He and the MIT Wind Ensemble have been featured on PBS in the 2014 Emmy-winning documentary Awakening: Evoking the Arab Spring through Music, with music by Jamshied Sharifi. Harris and his students also are featured in the 2018 Emmy-winning documentary Imagination Off The Charts: Jacob Collier Comes to MIT.

He is a strong advocate for the creation and performance of new music, having commissioned and/or premiered 93 works for wind, jazz, and mixed ensembles, recently leading pieces by Jamshied Sharifi, Chick Corea, Don Byron, Jacob Collier, and Miguel Zenn. He has also been highly active with public school students and music educators throughout his career. Harris is the author of Conducting with Feeling and Seeking the Infinite: The Musical Life of Stanisław Skrowaczewski, and currently writing a biography of Herb Pomeroy. He has performed as a drummer with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, John Harbison, the Boston Pops, and Grammy-winning jazz saxophonist Joe Lovano.

As a tuba player, Mr. Amis has performed as a soloist with the English Chamber Orchestra and has been a member of the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra and the New World Symphony Orchestra. His performance skills are showcased on many commercial records distributed internationally. Mr. Amis is presently the tuba player of the Empire Brass and the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra, the assistant conductor for the MIT Wind Ensemble, a performing artist for Besson instruments, and on the faculties of Boston University, the Boston Conservatory of Music, Longy School of Music and the Conservatory at Lynn University.

An active composer, Amis has been commissioned over a dozen times and has written for many organizations including the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, the University of Scranton, the College Band Directors National Association, the Boston Classical Orchestra, and a consortium of twenty universities and music organizations. His music is published by Subito Corp., Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. and through his own company, Amis Musical Circle, which can be found at www.AmisMusicalCircle.com.

The FJE has a long history of performing original music by MIT students and composers from around the world. Since 2001, it has presented over 50 world premieres. Among others, Mark Harvey, Herb Pomeroy, Jamshied Sharifi, Ran Blake, John Harbison, Chick Corea, Joe Lovano, Gunther and George Schuller, Kenny Werner, Don Byron, Steve Turre, Magali Souriau, Guillermo Klein, Chris Cheek, Miguel Zenn, Dominique Eade, and Luciana Souza have collaborated with the MIT FJE. In January of 2019 the FJE participated in a highly successful cultural exchange, touring Puerto Rico with Miguel Zenn, presenting concerts in various venues and STEM workshops in middle and high schools.

The trio is a new grouping of musicians who are prolific performers on their own. Nakamatsu, a Music Series at Akin guest in the fall of 2014 with clarinetist Jon Manasse, saw his career take off after winning a gold medal at the 10th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1997, making him the first American to win the award since 1981. Critiqued as an alluring and elegant artist, he has appeared throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East. Nakamatsu has worked with conductors such as James Conlon, Marek Janowski and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. He remains active with chamber collaborations, orchestra performances, and solo recitals.

Frautschi has twice been nominated for Grammy awards and is artist-in-residence at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York. She is equally at home with classic or contemporary repertoires, and her recent seasons have featured performances and recordings of works ranging from Robert Schumann and Lili Boulanger to Barbara White and Arnold Schoenberg. She has also had the privilege of premiering several new works composed for her by prominent living composers. Frautschi has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Philharmonic, among many other concerto appearances.

Tsang also has been Grammy-nominated. He is the division head of strings at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at The University of Texas at Austin. He has appeared as a soloist with orchestras around the world. In chamber music, he has collaborated with many artists, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He was recipient of the Texas Exes Teaching Award after just his first

In his spare time, Bion helps his family run the Paul J. Tsang Foundation, a nonprofit organization named in honor of Bion's father and formed to help facilitate educational or career opportunities for promising students and professionals in the arts and sciences.

The next guests of the Music Series at Akin will be Curtis on Tour, a septet of winds and strings from the Curtis Institute of Music. The Curtis Institute offers merit-based full-tuition scholarships to musically gifted students. It will celebrate its 100-year anniversary next year. Curtis alumni have gone on to receive Pulitzer Prizes, Guggenheim Fellowships, and Avery Fisher Awards, and perform with symphonies and musical establishments around the world. Curtis on Tour is the Nina von Maltzahn Global Touring Initiative of the Curtis Institute of Music.

The concert is sponsored by the Perkins-Prothro Foundation and Mrs. Dale Prothro with the Lamar D. Fain College of Fine Arts at MSU. The series debuted in spring 2012 and since has since hosted many notable classical musicians.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Dmitri Shostakovich's music was and still remains his aesthetic ambiguity, the likes of which is almost impossible to find in modern music. The Fifth Symphony in particular is regarded as an excellent example of how, during Stalin's regime, Shostakovich outwardly remained true to the regulations concerning art while still managing not to forfeit his own artistic freedom and identity. Conceived in a classical vein, the work is filled with powerful motion and Russian song, even going almost as far as late-Romantic transfiguration. But this idyll is deceptive. Again and again the apparent harmony is disrupted by biting sarcasm: the spirited main theme of the first movement soon stiffens into a march-like farce, while in the untroubled second movement a shrill motif in the winds tears apart the cheerful mood. Skorwacziewski amalgamates the contrasting tender sweetness of the violins and the violence of the attacking wind instruments in his precise and sparing interpretation, which is free of sugary expression and forced dynamics.

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