


David Gompper, director
The Center for New Music Ensemble
Featuring guest cellist Timothy Gill, London
performing works by
Furrer, Gompper, Ustvolskaya, and Jarrell
Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 7:30p in the Concert Hall
Sonata for Solo Clarinet (1959)
Marcelle Germaine TAILLEFERRE
Cello Concerto (2019)
David GOMPPER
II. Lethe
Peter Naughton, percussion I
Matt Anderson, percussion II
Bethany Wheeler, harp
Karina Glasinovic, piano
Nicole Peter, celesta
Joshua Palazzolo, violin I
Nicole Allen, violin I
Lou Barker, violin I
Luciana Hontila, violin II
Yixue Zhang, violin II
Christine Rutledge, Donghee Han, viola
Sarah Hansen, violoncello
Will Yager, double bass
David Gompper, conductor
Intermission
Composition No. 1 "Dona Nobis Pacem"
Galina USTVOLSKAYA
Music for a While (1995)
Michael JARRELL
Kim Cassisa, clarinet
Tsz Kiu Kwok, saxophone
Irene Tang, horn
Bryan Powell, trumpet
Tom Kelley, trombone
Peter Naughton, percussion
Matt Anderson, percussion
Karina Glasinovic, piano
Luciana Hontila, violin I
Joshua Palazzolo, violin II
Donghee Han, viola
Sarah Hansen, violoncello
Will Yager, double bass
David Gompper, conductor
Timothy Gill, violoncello

Tim Gill began to play the cello at the age of eight, subsequently studying with Dimitry Markevitch in Paris, Christopher Bunting at Cambridge and David Strange at the Royal Academy. In 1989-90 Tim was resident artist at the Banff Centre, Canada, where, as a result of winning the Banff concerto competition, he was invited to play the Elgar concerto with the Calgary Philharmonic and later to tour Canada as a recitalist.
His Purcell Room debut in 1990 was met with critical acclaim and resulted in an invitation from the Park Lane Group to give the Priaulx Rainier recital the following year. Tim has since given recitals and played concertos throughout the UK, Europe and India. In 1995 he recorded Beethoven's complete works for cello and piano for Dutch radio with Marietta Petkova, and in 1996 he gave his Wigmore Hall debut and released two CDs on the Guild label with pianist Fali Pavri.
Tim is currently principal cellist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta. He is also much in demand as a soloist and chamber musician.
"Timothy Gill and Fali Pavri elicit a searing lyricism bringing tremendous sense of direction to the melodic invention which can so easily meander in lesser hands". Classic CD;
Tim Gill became principal cellist of the London Sinfonietta in June 2005.
Marcelle Germaine Tailleferre
Sonata for Solo Clarinet
Marcelle Germaine Tailleferre was the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six. She experiemented with serialism around the age of 65 and one of the compositions to be published from this phase, was the Sonata for Solo Clarinet.

Beat Furrer
Lotófagos
Die Lotosfresser [The lotus eaters] – lotófagos, for soprano and double bass in 2007, is about a state of amnesia, in allusion to Odysseus’s consorts who ate lotuses in order to forget. As José Angel Valente put it: “We were in a desert, surrounded by our own image which we no longer recognized. We had lost our memory ...”. The theme is the slipping into “another” state which can be described in many different ways – as strange, oblivion, desert, death.

David Gompper
Cello Concerto
Cello Concerto (2019) is made up of two movements: an energetic and relentless opening gambit, followed by a response that is spectral, reflective of a memory that is fractured and detached. Attempts to recall and reconnect are made, but only as if in a dream, dissociated from reality.

Gompper's compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Merkin Halls (New York), Wigmore Hall (London), Konzerthaus (Vienna) and the Bolshoi and Rachmaninoff Halls (Moscow Conservatory). For the Naxos label, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) recorded his Violin Concerto with Wolfgang David, and two new discs of works that include four concerti (Double, Clarinet, Cello and Double Bass), as well as three compositions for orchestra. Tonight’s Cello Concerto will be recorded by the RPO next month for his third all-Gompper disc on the Naxos label.
Galina Ustvolskaya
Composition No. 1 "Dona Nobis Pacem"
"Dona nobis pacem" is part of a triptych of works written between 1970 and 1975; the others are No. 2, Dies irae, and No. 3, Benedictus qui venit. All were composed for very unusual instrumentations: piccolo, tuba and piano; eight double-basses, piano and wooden box; four flutes, four bassoons, and piano. The functions for each instrument are extremely defined and limited. The piano plays little more than single notes and clusters in a mechanical, detached fashion, so much so that the quiet dyads that appear in the final section of Composition No. 1 provide a welcome relief from the obsessive and brutal repetition that comes before. We hear equally unaffected and jarring rhythmic figures in the piccolo and tuba, sometimes in dialogue with the piano, or otherwise opposing it or filling in its uncomfortable silences.
Finally, one should keep in mind that tonight's performance is an ideal setting for this music, in that Ustvolskaya preferred a sacred space for the performance of these pieces (in as much as this recital hall was once the sanctuary of St. Thomas More Catholic Church). As one who rejected technical analysis of her own work, she explained, "My works are not actually religious in a literal sense, but are filled with a religious spirit, and - as I see it - they are best heard in a church, without academic introductions and analyses. In the concert hall, that is, in a secular setting, they sound different."

Michael Jarrell
Music for a While
Music for a While is a direct reference to the air by Henry Purcell, taken from his incidental music to the play "Oedipus". I was originally concerned with creating an ephemeral atmosphere which should be the soul of the work, for I wanted to compose music of a single moment that would ceaselessly reinvent itself, music that would be permanently renewed yet have a constant regard to its roots. I had already begun writing the piece when I decided to add on a sort of prologue in which I would establish a direct link with Purcell's music, and for this I took the first four bars of the continuo of Purcell's air and transformed them. Gradually this fragment became the basis of Music for a while. This work was composed for the Klangforum ensemble, and it is dedicated to Klaus Huber on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
