Saidenberg Faculty Recital: Carol Wincenc

The programming for Monday evening's recital at Sharp Theater was among the most ambitious I've encountered for any performance this season.  It would take several paragraphs simply to list all the outstanding musicians who played with Carol Wincenc on the pieces she chose.

The program began with Hans Werner Henze's I Sentimenti di Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1982).  The Bach work on which the piece is based is a fantasy for keyboard and violin written in 1787.  Henze freely adapted Bach for a chamber ensemble that in this performance featured two string quartets, a bass, harp and flute.

The Henze was followed by a playful piece by Alfred Schnittke entitled Moz-Art a la Mozart (1990) for eight flutes and harp.  The work is actually one of four that Schnittke composed over a fourteen year period based an incomplete fragment, K416d/446, that Mozart composed in 1783 to accompany a pantomime, Masquerade at the Redoute, in which he acted and danced with friends and family during an intermission at Carnival.  The only parts which survive from the original work are the first violin part and a few sketches. From this Schnittke reassembled the components into a "polystylistic" work.  An amusing innovation was to have one performer after another leave the stage toward the end of the piece until finally only the piccolo player remained onstage at the conclusion.  This performance marked the work's U.S. premier.

The first half ended with Debussy's classic Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp (1916) performed by Ms. Wincenc, Cynthia Phelps and Nancy Allen.  Written in the midst of World War I, the piece was clearly intended to reassert the importance of French music against the incursions of German composers, most especially Wagner who years after his death still exerted tremendous influence on the development of European music.  The work's impressionist character makes reference to the French classical period and stands in strong contrast to the atonal new music then being promulgated in Germany.

After intermission came the world premiere of a work by composer Yuko Uebayashi for flute and string quartet entitled Misericordia (2013).  For me, this graceful work - an airy fantasy that conveyed the hint of a Japanese melody - was the highlight of the recital.  Its intent was described by Ms. Uebayashi as follows:

"My idea was to put the flute and four strings on a palette and mix them together to make many kinds of sound.  At times I could hear the sound of the flute in counterpoint with the strings coming to me just like a pale light.  I also had in mind to create the effect of the flute and the strings playing with and against one another, as though they were smiling at each other."

The recital concluded on a light note with Daniel Paget's One Hundred Roses, an arrangement of Neapolitan songs originally written "around the turn of the 20th century" for voice and piano and here transcribed for flute and chamber ensemble.