The San Juan Daily Star
March 6-8, 2015
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The San Juan Daily Star
March 6-8, 2015
Puerto Rico Needs a Miracle This Weekend
Christian Performers Give Free Event for Peace
By PEGGY ANN BLISS
[email protected]
T
hey say there has been nothing like it on the island
since evangelist Billy Graham gathered a large audience in Hiram Bithorn Stadium 20 years ago, but just
as certainly organizers believe the time is right for a “prayin” for Puerto Rico.
preachers, church
This is the consensus of several preachers
groups, singing groups and others who would ask for “A
Miracle for Puerto Rico.”
Faith is, according to the saying, “the last thing to go,”
says Puerto Rican evangelist Joseph Vargas.
Begging for a miracle and a renewal of faith are the
economic crisis, rampant crime, unemployment and other
negative currents.
That’s why Vargas will lead the Milagro Fest uniting
historical, Pentecostal and autonomous churches to create a
multitude to call for “A Miracle for Puerto Rico.”
The free event beginning at 6 p.m. in Hiram Bithorn
will oﬀer participation by recognized Christian singers
Samuel Hernández, Daniel Calveti, René González, Melvin
Ayala and Nimsy López, among others.
“The bad news indicates that our island is ready for
an encounter with God,” said Vargas. “It will be an event
to pray united to our Lord Jesus Christ for our land, to be
complemented by the musical praise of the show.”
show
They will pray for a reduction in domestic violence,
murders and unemployment, and a return of smiles, the
development of exports and more business to strengthen
the labor force, Vargas said.
“When there seems no other way out, it is time to
join in prayer, give ourselves to God and ask sincerely for a
miracle for Puerto Rico,” he said.
Vargas and his wife created the Milagro Fest in 2009.
The event promises an unforgettable experience of adora-
tion that will allow attendees to return home full of peace
and love. The event has been held in Africa and India,
where 40,000 and 27,000 attended, respectively.
In 1995, a similar event was held in the same venue
when Graham visited the island with his crusade to encounter God. Graham, now 96, has suﬀered from Parkinson’s Disease since 1992, has kept a relatively low profile,
and made one or two “last” appearances in 2005 and 2006.
Alea 21 Gives Family Concert at Conservatory
Ensemble in Residence Presents Avant-Garde Repertoire
By The STAR Staﬀ
A
lea 21, this year’s Ensemble
in Residence at the Conservatory of Music, is oﬀering another concert – this one free – of its
avant-garde music.
The group of students and professors, directed by Manuel Ceide,
will present a Family Concert at 4 p.m.
Sunday entitled “Ya nadie se desnuda
bajo la lluvia” (Nobody Takes Their
Clothes Oﬀ in the Rain Anymore).
Most of their repertoire is written by the members themselves as
well as by other Puerto Rican, Latin
American and international composers.
The concert will be in the Bertita
and Guillermo Martínez Theater. The
Conservatory is located at 951 Ponce de
León Ave., at the corner of Hoare Street.
Parking is oﬀ the
marginal road, entering through Hoare
Street. For more information, call (787)
751-0160, Exts. 274,
260 and 286 or visit
cmpr.edu.
The San Juan Daily Star
March 6-8, 2015
Shanghai Quartet Offers 3 Jewels
Fifth Casals Concert Tonight Is Intimate
By PEGGY ANN BLISS
[email protected]
T
he acclaimed Shanghai Quartet, in the fifth concert
of the Casals Festival tonight, will perform three
quartets: one whose initial rejection later consecrated its composer, another a major contemporary quartet,
and yet another a dazzling pioneering eﬀort by a giant
Romantic force: Maurice Ravel’s “Quartet in F Major for
Strings,” Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Third String Quartet”
and Ludwig von Beethoven’s “String Quartet, Opus 59.
No. 2.”
The concert will be held tonight at 8 in the Pablo
Casals Symphony Hall at the Luis A. Ferré Performing
Arts Center in Santurce.
Ravel wrote his quartet in 1903 when he was 28.
Dedicated to friend and teacher Gabriel Fauré, the work
was introduced in Paris on March 5, 1904. Ravel’s final
submission to the Prix de Rome and the Conservatoire de
Paris, the composition was rejected by both institutions.
The quartet received mixed reviews from the press and
academia. Even Fauré called it a failure. As a result of this
rejection, a frustrated Ravel left the Conservatoire.
Surprisingly, a sympathetic public rallied behind
him. In 1905, Claude Debussy wrote to Ravel: “Do not
touch a single note you have written in your Quartet.”
Today, it is one of the most widely performed chamber
music works in the classical repertoire, representing the
young Ravel’s rise from obscurity.
Beethoven’s Op. 59 quartets, known as the Razumovksy Quartets for the wealthy Russian ambassador
count who commissioned them, are more technically
challenging, dramatically and psychologically more
intense than the Viennese chamber music quartets by
Haydn, Mozart and earlier Beethoven. After his pioneering “Eroica Symphony,” the composer’s chamber music
emerges more intense and profound on a whole new level
of virtuosity.
Penderecki’s “String Quartet No. 3: Leaves from an
Unwritten Diary” was commissioned by the Shanghai
Quartet in 2008 and premiered at a 75th birthday concert
honoring the composer. The single-movement work consists of four short sections of contrasting tempos and character. Stylistically, the quartet is like most of his chamber
works since the 1990s, contrasting sharply with the first
two quartets from the avant-garde period.
Three Decades Together
The Shanghai Quartet, founded in the Shanghai
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Conservatory in 1983, has garnered ovations in Europe,
Asia and the Americas, from the International Peking
Festival to Carnegie Hall in New York and the Beethoven
Festival in Prague.
The quartet includes three Chinese musicians (two
brothers, one of whom changed instruments to keep the
group together, and a longtime friend of theirs) and one
Harlem-raised member.
In 1984, the quartet won second prize in the Portsmouth International Quartet Competition in England. For
the next three years, they studied at Northern Illinois University with the Vermeer Quartet, then made their New
York debut at Town Hall. In 1989, they became the quartet-in-residence at the University of Richmond, where
they were later named Distinguished Visiting Artists.
They are now artists in residence at Montclair State
University in New Jersey. All four are visiting professors
at the Shanghai Conservatory and Central Conservatory
of Music in China.
Four Equal Parts
The only American member of the Quartet is cellist
Nicholas Tzavaras, who grew up in Harlem. A student at
the New England Conservatory and the State University
of New York at Stony Brook, he developed a cello program
for the Opus 118 Music Center in East Harlem. Tzavaras
has toured with Madonna, has performed for President
Bill Clinton at the White House, and appeared with Meryl
Streep in the major motion picture “Music of the Heart”
as well as the Academy Award-nominated documentary
“Small Wonders.”
Weigang Li, the quartet’s first violinist since its
founding, began studying violin at 5 with his parents. He
began formal music education at the Shanghai Conservatory at 14, and participated in an exchange program with
the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He studied at
Northern Illinois University and Juilliard, where he was
teaching assistant to the Juilliard Quartet. He appears in
the film “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China” and
is on the faculty at Bard College Conservatory.
Honggang Li attended Beijing Conservatory and the
Shanghai Conservatory, where he became a faculty member. Later, in New York, he was a teaching assistant at
Juilliard. Honggang, the original second violinist for the
Quartet, learned to play the viola when the original violist left. It was easier to learn a new instrument and find a
second violinist, Yi-Wen Jiang. Li has been a soloist with
the Shanghai Philharmonic and the Shanghai Conservatory Orchestra.
Yi-Wen Jiang began studying violin at age 6 with his
father. He gave his concerto debut at the Central Opera
House in Beijing at 17. He won first prize at the First China
Youth Violin Competition and was accepted to the Central
Conservatory in Beijing. He studied at the St. Louis Conservatory and took master classes with Pinchas Zuckerman in Dallas. He also worked with Arnold Steinhardt of
the Guarneri Quartet at Rutgers. Jiang has been a soloist
with the Victoria Symphony and Montreal Symphony. He
has won several competitions and has collaborated with
Alexander Scheider, Jaime Laredo and Lynn Harrell.
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The San Juan Daily Star
March 6-8, 2015
Free Concert Honors Clarinetist with Casals Tribute
Virtuoso Mitchell Lurie Was Jones’ Prof
By PEGGY ANN BLISS
[email protected]
A
long postponed event in tribute to world
renowned clarinet virtuoso Mitchell Lurie will be held Sunday at 4 p.m. at the
University of Puerto Rico as part of the 59th
Casals Festival.
The free concert, “The Magic of Casals,”
will feature Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra
Principal Clarinetist Kathleen Jones, Principal
Cellist Luis Miguel Rojas and guest pianist
Alan Lurie, Mitchell’s son.
This is not the first time this season that
this unusual combination of instruments has
been heard; it was showcased Wednesday in
a free concert at the Conservatory of Music by
the MAD Chamber Trio from Spain.
Although there is very little literature for
the unusual combination of instruments, this
program is expected to be more contemporary
with little if any chance of overlap.
The concert opens with a Ludwig von
Beethoven trio, Op. 11. continuing with Felix
Mendelssohn’s “Song Without Words, Opus
62,” and followed by “Albumblatt” by Max
Reger. Also on the program are “Adagio Elegiaco” by Ernst Toch, “Piece in the Style of a
Habanera,” George Gershwin’s “Promenade”
(Walking the Dog), and Johannes Brahms’
“Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Cello, Op 114.”
Lurie, who died in 2008 at age 86, was
famed both for high-calibre performances of
classical music and as a solo player with Hollywood’s RKO studio orchestras. Lurie played
many times at the Casals festivals in Puerto
Rico and the great cellist dubbed him his “ideal clarinetist.” Composer Leonard Bernstein
called him “the premier clarinetist in motion
picture music, and indeed in the world.”
For Jones, who has often worked with
him, he was a special inspiration, and she had
been planning this concert for years. A few
years back, it had to be postponed due to circumstances beyond her control.
Famous solo artists with whom Lurie
performed included cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, violinist Jascha Heifetz and the singer
Lilli Kraus. He played the Mozart and Brahms
quintets with the following several string
quartets including the Budapest, Curtis and
Guarneri.
In 1967, at the Hollywood Bowl, Lurie
gave the west coast premiere of Aaron Copland’s “Clarinet Concerto” with the composer
conducting and, in 1970, the U.S. premiere of
Pierre Boulez’s “Domaines” under that composer’s baton.
Lurie was born in Brooklyn, to parents
from Ukraine. The family soon moved to Los
Angeles. At 10, he started to study clarinet
and, at 16, he was chosen to play the Mozart
concerto at a special children’s concert with the
Philharmonic conducted by Otto Klemperer.
Choral Groups, PRSO to Join for Bach ‘Passionʻ
Casals Festival Hosts Rilling for St. Matthew
By PEGGY ANN BLISS
[email protected]
O
ne of the highlights of the 59th Casals
Festival will ring to the rafters of the
University of Puerto Rico Theater on
Saturday night as the Puerto Rico Symphony
Orchestra returns with J.S. Bach’s monumental “Passion According to St. Matthew.”
The concert with a bevy of vocal talent
will be presented at 8 p.m. under the baton
of German guest conductor Helmuth Rilling,
a specialist in choral music, conducting the
combined voices of the San Juan Philharmonic
Chorale prepared by Carmen Acevedo Lucío,
the legendary 49-year-old San Juan Children’s
Choir directed by María G. Fernández and the
solo singers of the Tenet Ensemble.
One of New York’s pre-eminent vocal
ensembles,TENET has won acclaim for its innovative programming, virtuosic singing and
command of repertoire that spans the Middle
Ages to the present with a focus on the Renaissance and Baroque repertoire. TENET features
distinguished soloists who shine in one-voiceto-a-part singing.
Soloists are Aaron Sheehan as the Evangelist, Mischa Bouvier as Jesus, Jolle Greenleaf, soprano, Virginia Warnken, alto, Jason McStoots, tenor, and Tyler Duncan, bass.
Rilling, the man to bring all these ensembles together, was born in 1933 in Stuttgart.
Acclaimed worldwide as a conductor, pedagogue and Bach scholar, he has been a champion
of well known and lesser known choral works
since, at age 21, he founded the internationally recognized Gächinger Kantorei choir. The
group, founded in 1954, joined forces with the
Bach Collegium Stuttgart as its regular orchestral partner 11 years later.
During the Bach anniversary year in
2000, he became the first person to record all
of Bach’s cantatas, a monumental task involving well over 1,000 pieces of music and spanning 172 CDs.
He studied organ, composition, and
choral conducting at the Stuttgart College of
Music, in Rome and at the Accademia Musi-
cale Chigiana in Siena.
In 1967, he studied with Leonard Bernstein in New York and in the same year was
appointed professor of choral conducting at
the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, a post which he held until 1985.
In 1969, he took over as conductor of the
Frankfurter Kantorei (Frankfurt Choir). Since
1965 he has conducted the Bach-Collegium
Stuttgart. He also co-founded and led the
Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart since
1981.
He is co-founder and (until 2013) artistic
director of the Oregon Bach Festival, which
has become one of America’s most prestigious
music festivals. In 2001, he created the Festival
Ensemble to be part of the Stuttgart European
Music Festival (“Musikfest Stuttgart”).
In 2011, Rilling was awarded the prestigious Herbert von Karajan Music prize in
Baden-Baden honoring him for his unique lifetime engagement with Bach.
Rilling’s recording of Krzyztof
Penderecki’s Credo, commissioned and per-
He won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his teacher began to impart the French style that characterized him. He was later to study at the Paris
Conservatoire, beginning the French influence
that characterized his performance style.
After being drafted and serving in the
U.S. Army air corps, he and a few music colleagues invested in a small Cessna monoplane,
enabling them to reach concert halls in far-oﬀ
places until triple heart bypass surgery put a
stop to it all.
He was principal clarinet in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, and then moved back
to Los Angeles to work for RKO. His playing
also was featured in soundtracks for Disney,
United Artists and Universal.
Lurie also designed and produced reeds,
ligatures and mouthpieces, which are sold
around the world. His final design was the
Tyro, a cheap clarinet for students, which was
released in 2006.
The free concert will be on a first-come,
first-serve basis in the Río Piedras campus theater.
formed by the Oregon Bach Festival, won the
2001 Grammy Award for best choral performance.
For his 75th birthday, his record label
Hänssler Classic released his entire Bach edition on iPod.
The Children’s Choir, which recently
brought home top honors from an international choral competition in Rimini, Italy, and
sang before the Pope, is considered one of the
best children’s choirs in the world.
The San Juan Children’s Choir was
founded in 1966 by Evy Lucío Córdova, and
is made up of talented children from the ages
of 6 to 18. The group sings in about seven languages regularly and travels frequently to represent the island or to compete internationally, and has performed in Russia, China, Italy
and other countries.
The San Juan Philharmonic Chorale
was established in 1986 by Carmen Acevedo
Lucío, for a PRSO performance of Händel’s
“Messiah” conducted by Margaret Hillis. Since then, the San Juan Philharmonic Chorale
has collaborated with world renowned conductors such as Krzysztof Penderecki, Rilling,
Gerard Schwarz, Lukas Foss, Julius Rudel and
others.
The presentation of Bach’s “Passion According to St. Matthew” will be at 8 p.m. Saturday at the UPR Theater in Río Piedras.