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HITTING A HIGH NOTE

HITTING A
The Brooklyn Papers / Steven

On Sunday afternoon, Brooklyn Friends of
Chamber Music will present the world premiere of two works the
organization has commissioned from one of America’s rising young
composers, Pierre Jalbert.



Jalbert (pronounced JAL-burt), a professor of music at Rice University
in Houston, has composed two vocal works – "Icefield Sonnets"
and "Four Porter Songs" – that will have their world-premiere
performances during a typically wide-ranging Brooklyn Friends
of Chamber Music (BFCM) concert at Fort Greene’s Lafayette Avenue
Presbyterian Church.



The program, which will be conducted by Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra’s
maestro, Nicholas Armstrong, also includes a trio for clarinet,
violin and piano by Russian composer Aram Khatchaturian (best-known
for his ballet score "Spartacus," part of which was
featured in Stanley Kubrick’s film "2001: A Space Odyssey")
and a quartet by Romantic-era Viennese composer Walter Rabl for
the unusual combination of clarinet, violin, cello and piano.
The ensemble Antares will perform these works.



Jalbert’s "Icefield Sonnets" and "Four Porter
Songs" were each written for two vocalists, a soprano and
a baritone, and were commissioned by Fleck for specific singers,
Jalbert said during an exclusive phone interview with GO Brooklyn
from his home in Houston.



"Soprano Judith van Wanroij is a Dutch vocalist that Wanda
had heard a while back, whom she wanted to use for another BFCM
concert, and baritone Thomas Meglioranza is another singer Wanda
had heard and wanted to hear again," said the 37-year-old
composer. "Wanda wanted to bring them both together for
a duo recital, and she also wanted them to sing new works."




Fittingly, Jalbert’s two new song cycles are based on the poetry
of a pair of his contemporaries.



"The texts for ’Icefield Sonnets’ come from poems of Anthony
Hawley, who is an acquaintance of mine," Jalbert explains.
"The other cycle, ’Four Porter Songs,’ is based on poems
of Christina Porter, a Brooklyn Heights resident who was in her
early 20s when she tragically passed away last year. Wanda knows
the Porter family, so she wanted to commission this piece to
be played here first."



Jalbert’s musical palette extends back to his younger days playing
rock and jazz, and he’s also been heavily influenced by composers
as disparate as Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen
and George Crumb (who was Jalbert’s music professor while he
was an undergraduate at Oberlin).



Jalbert’s instrumentation for "Icefield Sonnets" is
also a nod to his talents as both pianist and percussionist.



"What I had to work with for the ’Sonnets’ is that, basically,
I knew I wanted to use piano and to have the percussion instruments
color the piano sound," said Jalbert. "I also wanted
other instruments to round out the ensemble. So the strings provide
one sort of timbre, the piano another and the percussion can
color all of it. I like that combination."



As for "Four Porter Songs," Jalbert decided that fewer
musical adornments would work best for the young poet’s texts.



"I wanted to keep the instrumentation simple and straightforward,
so it’s just the vocals and the piano," he explained.



Another musician who is regularly associated with BFCM is percussionist
Svet Stoyanov, so when Jalbert included percussion in "Icefield
Sonnets," "Wanda immediately thought of him,"
explained the composer.



Stoyanov also returns later in the same program to perform two
movements from Jalbert’s Marimba Sonata, which had its premiere
in 2001.



Jalbert explained the genesis of this unusual choice for a solo
instrumental sonata.



"Another percussionist based in New York City, Mikoto Nakura,
who commissions a lot of new music, asked me to write him a marimba
sonata," he says. "I’m a pianist and a percussionist
myself, and the marimba, although it is set up like a keyboard,
utilizes a different technique; it’s played with mallets and
it’s made of wood. I found it very enjoyable to write, although
it was very challenging. Marimba was an instrument that I knew,
and it has a great, unique sound."



Why is Stoyanov only playing two movements of Jalbert’s Marimba
Sonata?



"I decided that it would be too daunting to do the whole
sonata, and it would have made for a very long program,"
explained Jalbert.



Just two days after his world premieres in Fort Greene, Jalbert
will travel across the river to hear the first local performances
of his latest orchestral work at Carnegie Hall.



"The Houston Symphony will be playing my work, ’big sky,’
which they just world-premiered in Houston," he says. "The
inspiration for ’big sky’ was me thinking what the Houston Symphony
could bring up from the Southwest to the New York area. There’s
something about the sky down here, where it seems that the horizon
goes on forever.



"I grew up in Vermont, and it’s a very different kind of
landscape down here," said Jalbert with a laugh. "I’m
not trying to paint a portrait of any particular thing, but it’s
an attempt to translate a wide-open environment into sound through
very wide-open chords which are spread throughout the whole piece."



Between the attention his work will receive at Carnegie Hall
and the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music world premieres, Jalbert’s
journey away from Houston’s skies will definitely be one for
the composer to savor.



The Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music
present "Rhythm and Rhyme: Music of Pierre Jalbert to Poetry
of Anthony Hawley and Christina Porter" as well as works
by Khatchaturian and Rabl, on Jan. 22 at 3 pm at Lafayette Avenue
Presbyterian Church, 85 South Oxford St. at Lafayette Avenue
in Fort Greene. Tickets are $15, $5 for students. For more information,
visit www.brooklynfriendsofchambermusic.org
or call (718) 855-3053.