ZOFO Concert
House Concert at the home of Margot Golding, San Francisco. Music for piano four-hands, including a revival of Harold Shapero’s Sonata (1941), composed for Leonard Bernstein and Shapero to perform. Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, piano.
ZOFO
June 19, 2011, 3:00pm
PROGRAM
Joe Duddell (1977- )
Vaporize (2008)
Tomohiro Moriyama (1977- )
Let’s play a duet! (2006)
Allen Shawn (1948- )
Three Dance Portraits (1994)
Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)
Pastoral d’été (1920)
Harold Shapero (1920-2013)
Sonata for four hands (1941)
Joe Duddell studied composition with Steve Martland at the Royal Academy of Music. In 2000, he was signed to a publishing contract with Schott Music. Duddell was commissioned on several occasions to write for the BBC Proms. He has been composer-in-residence at the Lichfield and the Presteigne Festivals and was asked by the Manchester International Festival to orchestrate and conduct Elbow & The Hallé, which received unprecedented critical acclaim. An immediate commission followed for him to orchestrate songs for the BBC Philharmonic at The MEN Arena. Duddell released his first CD of chamber music in 2010. He currently holds the position of Reader In Music at the University of Salford.
Allen Shawn earned a B.A. from Harvard and an M.S. in music from Columbia University. He continued his studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. From 1972-85 he was an orchestra pit pianist on Broadway. In 1995 he received the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship for composers from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently teaching composition at Bennington College in Vermont, Shawn has written nine orchestral works, two operas with his brother, playwright Wallace Shawn, much incidental music for theater (including scores for the New York Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, and Lincoln Center Theater), the film score for My Dinner With André, and commissioned works for Atlanta Ballet, Lucinda Childs Ballet, Greenwich Symphony, Vermont Symphony, Sage City Symphony, Aspen Wind Quintet, clarinetist Benny Goodman, and many other organizations and ensembles. His music has been recorded on Northeastern Records, Bay Cities Records, Albany Records, and Opus One.
Born in France to Swiss parents, Arthur Honegger was a major 20th Century composer who rivaled Poulenc as the most successful member of Les Six. Stylistically, he absorbed certain features of neo-Classicism and took on a rugged yet expressive manner, always within a tonal context. Honegger enrolled at the Zürich Conservatory where he studied composition with Friedrich Hegar and violin with Willem de Boer. He left after two years for the more prestigious Paris Conservatory in 1911, where he studied composition with Charles-Marie Widor and André Gédalge. In the early 1920s Honegger shot to fame with his “dramatic psalm” Le roi David (“King David”), which is still in the choral repertoire. Between World War I and World War II, Honegger was very prolific. He composed the music for Abel Gance’s epic 1927 film, Napoléon, nine ballets and three vocal stage works, amongst others.
Born in Massachusetts, Harold Shapero was one of Tanglewood’s first students. In his teens, he studied with Nicolas Slonimsky and Ernst Krenek, and while at Harvard, he studied composition with Walter Piston and Paul Hindemith. After graduating, Shapero undertook further studies with Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky. Shapero won the Rome Prize in 1941 for the Nine-Minute Overture, which Shapero was unable to take because of the war. The 2nd Annual George Gershwin Memorial Concert held in 1946 at Carnegie Hall in New York City featured one movement of Shapero’s Serenade in D, which was part of a prize sponsored by B’nai B’rith Victory Lodge. In 1946 Shapero won the Joseph H. Bearns Prize for Symphony for String Orchestra. He has also received two Guggenheim Fellowships (in 1947 and in 1948), two Fulbright Fellowships (in 1948 and in 1960), and a Naumburg Fellowship.
Dynamic Swiss pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann has appeared as soloist in Europe and the United States, offering performances that are “breathtakingly intense” (Der Bund) and “passionate and deeply expressive,” (Berner Oberländer). Her engagements have included recitals as well as concerto performances with major symphonies, such as the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Winner of the prestigious Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship, Ms. Zimmermann has appeared at international festivals worldwide, including the “Festival Piano en Saintonge” France, the “Sommerfestspiele Murten” Switzerland, and San Francisco’s “Other Minds Festival of New Music.” A graduate with highest honors from the Conservatory of Geneva, Eva-Maria has studied with many distinguished musicians – Leon Fleisher, György Sebök, Leonard Hokanson, Tomasz Herbut, and Dominique Merlet, among others.
Keisuke Nakagoshi began his piano studies at the age of ten, arriving in the United States from Japan at the age of 18. Mr. Nakagoshi earned his Bachelors degree in Composition and Masters degree in Chamber Music from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Graduating as the recipient of multiple top awards, Keisuke was selected to represent the SFCM for the Kennedy Center’s Conservatory Project, a program featuring the most promising young musicians from major conservatories across the United States.
Mr. Nakagoshi has performed to acclaim on prestigious concert stages across the United States, including the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. He has received training from some of the most celebrated musicians of our time – Emanuel Ax, Gilbert Kalish, Menahem Pressler, Robert Mann, Paul Hersh, David Zinman – and enjoys collaborating with other accomplished musicians such as Lucy Shelton, Ian Swensen, Jodi Levitz, Robin Sutherland, Lev Polyakin, Axel Strauss, Mark Kosower, Gary Schocker and also conductors such as Alasdair Neale, George Daugherty, Nicole Paiement, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Herbert Blomstedt.
