Program
Sonata in G major (grave, allegro,
adagio, allegro molto), Giovanni Platti, transcribed by Eugene
Rosseau
Fantasia (anime, lent, tres anime),
Heitor Villa-Lobos
"Vocalise," Sergei Rachmaninoff, Opus
34, No. 14, transcribed by Larry Teal
Sonata (allegro, andantino cantabile,
allegro vivace), Lawson Lunde
"Introduction, Dance, and Furioso,"
Herbert Couf
"Sonatine," Claude Pascal (in memory of
Daniel Deffayet 1922-2002)
"Pulcinella," Eugene Bozza, Opus 53,
No. 1
"Danse Hongroise," Justin Ring and Fred
Hager, transcribed by Rudy Wiedoeft
Background
notes from Keith Zimmerman
Giovanni Platti
(ca.1690-1762) was a Venetian singer, violinist, oboist, teacher and
prolific composer. He was well-known as a chamber music player in
Bavaria when he died there. The Sonata in G major was originally for
flute, but in Platti's time it was common for any of several
instruments to play solo lines of a piece. This arrangement of the
sonata is by well-known saxophonist and teacher Eugene Rosseau, who
makes my classical alto and tenor saxophone mouthpieces.
Heitor Villa-Lobos
(1887-1959), a self-taught Brazilian composer, wrote his Fantasia
for soprano saxophone, three horns and string orchestra in 1948 in
Rio for the famous French saxophonist and teacher Marcel Mule.
Villa-Lobos had returned earlier from Paris, where he had lived
since 1923. Mule never performed the piece, due to a lack of
interest on the part of various conductors to whom he showed it.
Typical of the music of the composer's last period of activity, the
fantasia emphasizes technique. The first movement features strong
dancelike ideas before moving to an exotic and melancholy second
movement. The second movement flows directly into the third
movement, which uses some complex South American rhythms.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
(1873-1943), the famous Russian
composer and pianist, chose exile from his homeland after the
revolution of 1917 to live in America and Switzerland and derived
most of his income from concert performances in America and Europe.
Entering the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 9, he failed his
general subject exams and moved to Moscow to study with Zverev, a
strict disciplinarian, where he acquired his phenomenal piano
skills. When Rachmaninoff was a young man, a very poor performance
of his 1st Symphony and dismal reviews by critics resulted in an
extended period of depression. He credited his recovery and eventual
successful composing to a long period of daily hypnotic treatments
while still in Russia. Eventually becoming an American citizen, he
died in Beverly Hills, Calif. The opus number of his popular "Vocalise"
places it between the 3rd and 4th Piano Concertos.
Larry Teal,
flutist and saxophonist, was a world pioneer in the teaching and
playing of classical saxophone at the University of Michigan at a
time when very few colleges would allow a saxophonist to be a music
major. In his work he joined American Cecil Leeson, Frenchman Marcel
Mule and Danish-American Sigurd Rascher.
Lawson Lunde
(b. 1935) in a recent letter tells me that the Sonata for alto
saxophone and piano was a work in which the opening movement
preceded the composition of the remaining ones by some time. The
first movement was written for James Bestman, a Northwestern
University graduate student saxophonist of Cecil Leeson. Several
months later, while in the army, Lunde received a letter from
Leeson's favorite pupil, the late Brian Minor, requesting that Lunde
finish the work for a series of concerts Minor was planning. The
piece was in progress at the time, so Lunde finished it.
