by Daniel Hathaway
Musicians who are inclined to talk to the audience during concerts should take their lead from Timothy Weiss. On Saturday afternoon in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the director of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble gave cogent and dryly humorous introductions to music by Luke Bedford, Philip Cashian and Morton Feldman, and conducted a brief, impromptu interview with composer Sean Shepherd. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Looking fit and energized after his recent back problems, Franz Welser-Möst returned to Severance Hall on Thursday evening, April 18 to lead one of the most exciting and highly-polished Cleveland Orchestra concerts of the season. And one of the most varied: the first performance of Sean Shepherd’s Tuolumne shared the program with Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Frank Peter Zimmermann out in front, and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6. One might quarrel with the ordering of the pieces, but the elements that made up this weekend’s musical triptych were smart choices and the performances were winners.
In February, Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow Sean Shepherd completed his impressions of three Yosemite National Park scenes captured by American photographer Ansel Adams, the final commission of Shepherd’s two-year residency with the orchestra. The composer is quick to point out that the piece is not a musical representation of the Adams images but “a kind of response to that set of three black-and-white photographs… a meditation on and celebration of both the place and the images” — exactly what the French Impressionists had in mind a century ago. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“Tuolumne is really the piece of my life so far,” says Sean Shepherd, the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow of the Cleveland Orchestra. Beginning on Thursday, April 18 in Severance Hall, Franz Welser-Möst will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in the world premiere of Shepherd’s mammoth score. The concerts also include Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Frank Peter Zimmermann as soloist and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6.
Sean Shepherd is a fast-rising star in the field of contemporary concert music, Recent premieres include Blue Blazes, a Hechinger Commission from Christoph Eschenbach and the National Symphony Orchestra, Quartet for Oboe and Strings at the Santa Fe and La Jolla summer festivals in 2011, and a work for the Claremont Trio in celebration of the opening of Calderwood Hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. From 2010 to 2012 Shepherd served as the first-ever Composer-in-Residence of the Reno Philharmonic, his hometown, and in 2012 Susanna Mälkki, premiered Shepherd’s Ensemble Intercontemporain-commissioned Blur in Paris and Cologne.
In his program notes, Shepherd writes, “Tuolumne (‘two ALL um knee’ or, as some California locals say it, ‘two ALL ‘o me’), from the Native American language of Miwok, is a word of unclear meaning, but is often thought to describe the small group of indigenous people who lived in what is now known as Yosemite National Park. [Read more…]