On the first faculty concert of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, cellist extraordinaire Natasha Farny will premiere my new work for singing cellist “Uno”. The concert will be at the Guerry Recital Hall on June 15th 8PM at the University of the South in Sewanee.

About Natasha:

American cellist Natasha Farny performs as a soloist and chamber musician. Highlights for 2019 include the release of her debut CD of French music for cello and piano with Jitka Fowler Frankova available soon on the Centaur label, and the emergence of her new chamber group, the Ekstasis Duo with pianist Eliran Avni. She made her concerto debut at age 17 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and Yale College during her undergraduate years. After completing her master’s and doctoral degrees at the Eastman School of Music and at the Juilliard School, she received a fellowship for study in Leipzig, Germany. While studying at Juilliard, Ms. Farny won two concerto competitions, performing Dutilleux’s Tout un Monde Lointain with Robert Spano and Olav Anton Thommessen’s world premiere, Through Reflection with Joel Sachs. More recent performances have included concertos with the Buffalo Philharmonic, Abilene Philharmonic, and the Greeley Symphony Orchestra, as well as with the Longwood (Boston) Symphony, Orchard Park  (NY) Symphony, National Music Festival Orchestra, Pennsylvania Sinfonia, Erie Chamber Orchestra, and the Western New York Chamber Orchestra.

Abroad, Ms. Farny performed at the International Dvorak Society American Spring Festival in the Czech Republic with Jitka Frankova in 2011. In 2013, she made a tour of Brazil, giving concerts in four capital cities, and returned in August 2016 as a clinician and performer. She performed on the Theremin cello for a project of the complete works of Edgard Varèse, alongside the Asko/Schoenberg Ensemble, the London Sinfonietta, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Her performances with these groups of Varèse’s rarely heard Ecuatorial were held at the Holland Festival (Amsterdam), Festival d’Automne (Paris), the Southbank Centre (London), and at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City. Nationally, she has played for audiences in New York City at the Bargemusic “Here and Now” series, at Chicago public radio “Live from WFMT”, Rochester, NY public radio “Live from Hochstein”, and at numerous recital series across the nation. Ms. Farny is also active as a new music performer and has been recognized with an “Encore Grant” in 2012 from the American Composers Forum. Ms. Farny’s two recent residencies at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute resulted in performances with her new music duo, Amistella, and her French cello music CD project. In addition to her work with the Ekstasis Duo, other chamber music projects include her string faculty jazz quartet called FredFour and her trio, ANA. In residence at Fredonia, the soprano-cello-piano collaboration champions the works of living composers. Both groups have performed in Erie, Buffalo, Rochester, New York City, and Boston.

Ms. Farny is the cello professor at the School of Music at the State University of New York in Fredonia. She oversees the Fredonia cello choir and coordinates the string chamber music program. She has been honored there with several awards, including grants from the Faculty Student Association and the United University Professions, as well as the Hagan Young Scholar Artist Award for outstanding artistic performance. In the summer, she teaches at the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, the Brancaleoni International Music Festival, and the Fredonia String Camp and has been appointed to festivals in  Chestertown, MD, Boulder, CO, Anchorage, AK, and Sweden, ME.

About the piece:

“Uno” intertwines a collection of ones. The interplay of the voice and the cello suggests a search of oneself, a moment for reflection. Sparse, for moments frantic, the cello character goes from gritty to idyllic, always exploring.
Throughout an introspective journey the piece takes the listener through momentos tangueros based on Mariano Mores’ tango Uno, to strokes of Brahms first Symphony. All tinted with the palette of my own self.

Concert of new music this Tuesday 1-22 8 PM UT Powell Recital Hall. Here the program that will feature guest violist Hillary Herndon.

Epidermis (2017) marimba, bass clarinet and electronics by Dan Van Hassel

            Abby Fisher – marimba

            Jorge Variego – bass clarinet

Inner blues (2014) solo vibraphone by Jorge Variego

            Abby Fisher – vibraphone

De Kooning Movements (2001) marimba and clarinet by Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez

            Abby Fisher – marimba, Jorge Variego – clarinet

Thread and Frey (2006) viola, marimba and bass clarinet by Sarah Kirkland Snider

            Abby Fisher – marimba, Hillary Herndon – viola, Jorge Variego – bass clarinet

Program Notes:

Epidermis

In Epidermis the bass clarinet and marimba merge into a single machine-like entity playing funky rhythmic patterns made up of percussive sounds with electronics forming a noisy protective layer around the players. At the beginning of the piece the acoustic and electronic sounds are closely aligned, but as the piece progresses they begin to move apart. Repeating melodic patterns begin to appear in the bass clarinet and marimba, while the electronics become noisier and more abrasive. This piece was commissioned by Transient Canvas and premiered in November 2017 with funding provided by the Johnstone Fund for New Music. – Dan Van Hassel

Inner blues

Inner blues is a jazz ballad in sulfuric acid. – Jorge Variego

De Kooning Movements

Lately, I have been looking at the work of an immigrant artist, Willem De Kooning, who came to the United States from his native Holland and later became one of America’s most representative 20^th-century artists. I have always been impressed by the brutality, the energy, dynamic forms, and the synthetic power of de Kooning’s work, and have now composed a piece that, through its exploration of the dramatic power of rhythm and bold instrumental gestures, seems to conjure that experience of flipping through the pages of a printed catalog of de Kooning’s paintings. A journey that allows me to savor with each stop a graphic, perfectly assimilated and electric concoction of Matisse, Picasso, German expressionism, Abstract Expresionism and total abstraction. – Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez

Thread and Fray

Thread and Fray, commissioned by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble of the Aspen Music Festival, weaves a single, middle-register melody through an increasingly fragmented musical landscape. – Sarah Kirkland Snider