Voice Of The City Ensemble presents the music of Eric Shimelonis starring F. Murray Abraham in the premiere of Elusive Things: A Song Cycle After Poems by Ilene Starger with Voice Of The City Ensemble Christian Hebel, violin Matthew Lehmann, violin Philip Payton, viola Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf, cello Andy Einhorn, piano Tonight's Program Elegy for Victor piano solo Hejira Variations (three movements) violin and piano Suspended Animation string quartet Dux et Comes string quartet For Elliott Carter string quartet Quintet after Igor piano quintet (brief intermission) Elusive Things: A Song Cycle baritone and piano quintet 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Dream Village The Weight of Water Absence Lullaby For Medea, Waking Equilibrium Aubade Program Notes from the Composer Elegy for Victor is dedicated to my grandfather, who died recently. This piece laments his absence from this recital, celebrates his life, and attempts to communicate the passion for classical music that he has helped to instill in me. It quotes many of his favorite compositions: works that we discussed at length; and it is built on many biographical and numerical symbolisms. For instance, the composition is 93 measures long: one for each of his years. Hejira Variations is derived from a guitar piece by Andrew York, and the Joni Mitchell song with the same name. There are three short movements that blend folk, renaissance, and modern voices. Hejira means “journey” in Arabic. Suspended Animation is a short romantic piece built mainly of suspensions: moments of discord that turn into harmony, made by prolonging a note of one chord into another. Dux et Comes is constructed entirely of canonic materials: notes and phrases that repeat at different time intervals and inversions to create varying counterpoint. The title is Latin for “leader and companion.” For Elliott Carter is dedicated to the 101 year old composer, who is still very much alive, and still composing at his home in Greenwich Village. This piece is based on one of Mr. Carter's all-note all-interval chords: a chord that contains all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, and includes all of the possible note intervals. Quintet After Igor uses two chord structures used by Igor Stravinsky and other composers of the Russian tradition. It starts with octatonic scales, moves on to whole tone scales, and ends blending the two together. Elusive Things was composed especially for F. Murray Abraham. Work started 18 months ago, and the last piece was completed in December. It is a cycle comprised of eight songs: each one inspired by and incorporating the lyrics from a poem by Ilene Starger, all eight of which are included in these pages. F. Murray Abraham has narrated and performed with the New York Philharmonic, as well as with the symphony orchestras of Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and Indianapolis. He has worked with Michael Tilson Thomas, James Levine and Jordi Savall, among others. He continues to study music, and receives vocal instruction from Janet Aycock. In theatre, he has acted in ancient and modern classics by Shakespeare, Molière, Giraudoux, Pirandello, Beckett, Pinter, Miller, Mamet, Kushner, and Coen. He has authored a book on A Midsummer Night's Dream, published by Faber and Faber, and is the voice of the PBS Nature series. He has appeared in many films including The Ritz, Scarface, Finding Forrester, and Amadeus, for which he received the LA Film Critics' Award, the Golden Globe, and the Academy Award. About the Artists Eric Shimelonis grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in a family of music lovers. Primarily self-taught, he learned a number of instruments as a child and began composing in his teens. He moved to New York City in 1998 where he has built a career in theatre and film, and where he has continued to compose and to further his studies in music. His classical compositions have been performed at the Juilliard School and in the Rattlestick New Music Series, where he was a resident composer. He served as assistant director for Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat with the Philadelphia and Boston Symphony Orchestras, and he has several conducting engagements this coming year. He has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers, and he was nominated for a 2007 Lucille Lortel Award for his work in theatre. Ilene Starger is presently compiling a full-length collection of poems. Her work has been published in Bayou, Oyez Review, Georgetown Review, Tributaries, Folio, Oberon, Paper Street, Second Wind, Tar Wolf Review, Erato, Grasslimb, Manzanita, Poesia, Ibbetson Street, Iodine, Phoenix, The New Renaissance, The Same and online in the Tupelo Press Poetry Project. She received honorable mentions in the 2004 Ann Stanford Prize sponsored by the Southern California Anthology (she was a finalist in 2005), in the 2005 NMW competition, in the 2006 Oliver Browning competition sponsored by Poesia/Indian Bay Press, and in the 2007 Writecorner Press competition. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Lethe, Postponed in September 2008. Christian Hebel (violin) has been a recitalist and guest soloist throughout North America, Europe and the West Indies, and is currently the Concertmaster for Wicked on Broadway. He has performed as Concertmaster with The New York Pops and serves in this capacity for concerts and recordings in New York City and Los Angeles. Mr. Hebel is violinist for Bernadette Peters and has performed with Tony Bennett, Beyonce, Billy Joel, James Taylor, and Diana Ross. In addition, he had the privilege of touring with Barbara Streisand throughout America, Canada and Europe in 2006 and 2007. He has performed on many film soundtracks including Public Enemies, Superman Returns, Walk Hard, Body of Lies, The Wolfman, and Alice in Wonderland. In addition, he is featured in Sex and the City II to be released summer 2010. His Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include Wicked, The Light in the Piazza, The Last Five Years, The Farnsworth Invention, and Next to Normal. Christian is the director of Voice Of The City Ensemble. Matthew Lehmann (violin) obtained a Masters Degree from the Mannes College of Music and a post-graduate degree at the Manhattan School of Music where he studied with Glenn Dicterow. He has given concerts with many of New York’s prestigious ensembles, such as the American Symphony and the New York City Opera. Matthew has also performed locally in numerous Broadway musicals, and is currently the concertmaster of A Little Night Music at the Walter Kerr. Mr. Lehmann is in his fourth year as a member of the Hofstra University String Quartet and is an Adjunct Professor of Violin at that institution. As an orchestral musician, Matthew Lehmann began his career as Assistant Principal Second of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra in 2000. He is currently a member of the Grant Park Symphony in Chicago, as well as the Assistant Concertmaster of the Harrisburg Symphony. In addition, Mr. Lehmann has performed concerts with the Rochester Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, and the New York Philharmonic. Philip Payton (viola) enjoys an actively diverse career around the county and abroad. He was a member of the New World Symphony where he was a concertmaster and principal violin under several prominent conductors including Michael Tilson Thomas, Marin Alsop and others. He participated in the Pacific Music Festival in Japan and the National Jeugd Orkest in the Netherlands where he was a concertmaster. Currently he performs regularly with the Sarasota Orchestra, Harrisburg Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Gotham Chamber Opera and several others. He is intimately involved in the inaugural seasons of the Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival performing on both violin and viola and plays with Chamber Dance Project, Argento Chamber Ensemble and has performed recitals in St. Croix, Maine, Michigan and elsewhere. An active Broadway musician, he has played on Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, Spring Awakening (on violin, viola and electric guitar) and is currently performing in West Side Story. He has performed with a number of major performing artists including Smokey Robinson, Luciano Pavarotti, Quincy Jones, Jose Carreras, Savion Glover, LeAnn Rimes, Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel and several others. Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf (cello) was born in Scotland, and studied cello at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester and at the Guildhall School of Music in London. She holds MMs and DMA degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and has served on the faculty of Denver’s Arapaho College and as faculty and guest artist at the Ameropa International Chamber Music Festival in Prague. She has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe, the US and Taiwan, including performances of the cello concerti of SaintSaëns, Elgar and Dvorak. Since moving to New York City in 2002 she has chosen to focus her career primarily on the music of Broadway, collaborating regularly with premier composers, singers and arrangers, and is currently playing in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music at the Walter Kerr Theater. Andy Einhorn (piano) grew up in Houston, Texas where he graduated with honors from Rice University. He assisted composer Adam Guettel on the Tony Award winning The Light in the Piazza and subsequently played the piano on the national tour. Andy served as the resident music director for the tour of Sweeney Todd (LA Drama Critics Circle Nomination, Best Music Direction with David Loud), and has also played on the tours of South Pacific, The Lion King and Mamma Mia! He coached Audra McDonald for her operatic debut at Houston Grand Opera. He has performed in concert as music director for Aaron Lazar, Kelli O’Hara, Ana Gasteyer, and Michael Cerveris. Most recently, he orchestrated and music directed Ordinary Days for the Adirondack Theatre Festival, conducted Ordinary Days at the Roundabout Theatre, and made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut with Audra McDonald. This spring Andy will be the conductor for James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Sondheim on Sondheim at Studio 54. DREAM There was a carpeting of lawn, plush and green; there was a canopy of moon; a panoply of stars, elusive things. The dream went on. We were half-asleep, conspiring with the night, whose silent whisper spoke of love. The Poems There was a bed of sky; there was a raft of sea, bluish-green. We were children in the dark, conspiring with the night. We trusted in its vow to keep us from truth’s light as we clung to love, elusive thing... Poems © 2008 Ilene Starger. All rights reserved. VILLAGE THE WEIGHT OF WATER Just beyond the hill there are horses. They drink from a stream Virginia, stones in pockets, laughs with the river; bends halfway down to meet its dark, brazen splash. cooler than human imagining; they bend in the shadow of a steeple; The family china is lonely: no solace in spare rooms or morning’s untidy sound. Virginia, stones in pockets, laughs bow their heads in private prayer, color of evening. at her own daring; wades deeper, past the river’s door; gently extends her hand to meet its dark, brazen splash. Daylight, premature, will jostle quiet creatures into locomotion; Ghosts in water: her children; Leonard’s face, lined with traces of the writer’s wound. Virginia, stones in pockets, laughs carriages will overflow with passengers, unseeing. Their guardians - at her own selfishness. She has not kept pace with others. She craves river; will descend to meet its dark, brazen splash. horses, stoic, gleaming must guide them over unmarked roads. She might at last be light; might unlace her life, rich with river, deep and brown. Virginia, stones in pockets, laughs to meet its dark, brazen splash. All the rutted sorrows, left unspoken by those who ride here. ABSENCE LULLABY The year without you began: quaint ordinariness. One jam jar, sweet with daisies, graced our kitchen table; October’s colors clung to walls. Beyond a cool expanse of hallway, your bicycle stood patiently in wait for this amnesiac’s journey: swift denial of your smell, feel; slow and lethal grin, unerring in its aim. Today I hold you in my arms, awed by your timeless majesty. I’ll try to lead you from harm’s way; to lend you grace, humility. Exalted, you could have held still. What pure exhalation had I witnessed, finished breath falling from your body, or my own? We’ll share raspberries and Madras tea and reveries refracted off gilded lakes of summer; we’ll lose ourselves in Italy until sweet yearning rouses us from travels which seem so real in slumber. I won’t be there to bathe love’s wounds when each prince arrives, each dark-eyed suitor; I’ll merely hold you in my arms, tender, ageless one. You gaze at me serenely, as if I had the answers to questions poised for fragile flight, like silk-clad ballet dancers. FOR MEDEA, WAKING EQUILIBRIUM Sleep’s black respite; blue, the rising day: blurred fact of loss, fresh salt, in your eye, on your tongue. Flung from the marriage bed, unmoored, face newly ravaged by revenge; yet, in cauterizing rage, strange freedom, dimly lit. Bereft by your own hand, you will not bathe your sons again; never touch dear tendrils of jet hair, violet-streaked. Wince as you inhale desire’s candied scent: once, blended with Jason’s pungent seed, it bled you of youth. Wild orchids, white beneath chariot wheels; history’s archives and your heart brim with endings: burnished, endured. If men, coarse comrades in gray wars, wield swords which split fig-like flesh, and build cities upon golden greed, or bile, women too yield violent secrets: quiet steel in bodily secretions of water, fire, milk, birth; bitter paradox for those who feed on them most often. You, weary exile, forced to choose between lover’s blaze and mother’s benign kiss: recall, as you weep, supine on crimson sheets, how the down on your arm rose, sunlit fleece, with his stroke; harm not yet done. Children could be soothed; night’s blade, sheathed; grief’s stain, cleansed. If, inconsolable, we come weeping; if, unquiet, we ask for muted sun; if, spinning, we seek balance, do not deny these contradictions. In middle age, our perfect recall of childhood’s sting astonishes, and so we wait for doors, unyielding, to pry themselves open; for playground bullies to be kind; for mothers, fathers to carry our eager faces, already pressed and faded, forever in their wallets, plastic; peeling like the moon. AUBADE See, it’s all right: so much dark blue breaking and entering where it has no business being. Be grateful nonetheless. A cacophony of clocks, their poorly kept secrets: minutes conspire with eternity, but look, it’s all right. A symphony of stars, late for morning prayers. Just one prayer will do: ‘More love awaits, of that we are certain.’ One dark blue fragment, special delivery, wrestles with the nascent day; insists on gaining entry. Clocks, stars pay homage to what has gone; what continues. More love awaits. Of that, we are certain. Special Thanks All publicity photos © Lois Greenfield 2009 Very special thanks to Lois and her studio colleagues: Miwa Nishio, Yi-Chun Wu, Aaron Burns, Jack Deaso and Matthew Karas Janet Aycock Chad Smith, Allison Seidner, and Carol Pool 853 Studios, NYC Martin Pretorious Ted Sperling Tiffany Haas Leslie Zucker Ethan Coen, Neil Pepe, and the Atlantic Theatre Co. David Van Asselt and Rattlestick Theatre Jonathan Dawe and the Juilliard School American Composer's Forum Finishing Line Press Last, but certainly not least, the composer wishes to thank his parents, Ralph and Laura Shimelonis, for a lifetime of support and encouragement. None of this would have been possible without you!