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Alterity Chamber Orchestra returns for their fifth anniversary concert! Led by internationally renowned conductor and composer Juan Trigos, Alterity presents a program of contemporary works of great beauty and dazzling virtuosity. Featuring the world premiere of the Double Concerto for flute and guitar by composer Alberto Rodríguez Ortiz (Puerto Rico) with soloists Eladio Scharrón (guitar) and Carrie Wiesinger (flute).
Program:
Dance Mobile / Augusta Read Thomas
Suite for ensemble / Juan Trigos *
Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum / Harrison Birtwistle
Double Concerto for flute and guitar / Alberto Rodríguez Ortiz **
* US Premiere
** World Premiere
Juan Trigos, conductor
Juan Trigos as a conductor has premiered, promoted, and recorded an extensive catalogue of new works with numerous choirs and orchestras around the world. Currently he is Principal Conductor and Music Director of The Last Hundred Ensemble and Sinfonietta MIQ. As the Music Director and Principal Conductor of the orchestra Sinfónica de Oaxaca (Mexico), among other successful projects, during the 2016 Trigos recorded, for the Spanish label iTinerant, four monographic compact discs with works by the Mexican composers Carlos Jiménez Mabarak, to celebrate his 100th year of birth, Víctor Rasgado, Jesús Villaseñor and his own. The same label recently published also his monographic CD “Trigos” including his Clarinet Concerto, Concerto for Four Guitars and Orchestra and Danza Concertante for piccolo and orchestra.
Carrie Wiesinger, flute soloist
Carrie Wiesinger, flutist, is an international performing and recording artist. Originally from Michigan, she received her undergraduate degree from Eastern Michigan University where she was a two-time concerto winner and winner of the MTNA Woodwind Competition. During her undergraduate studies, Ms. Wiesinger was principal flute with the Detroit Symphony Civic Orchestra.
Ms. Wiesinger received her MM from the Manhattan School of Music in New York City where she studied with Linda Chesis. Upon returning to Michigan she won Second Flute with the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra, a job she continues to hold while residing in Winter Park, Florida.
Ms. Wiesinger is one half of the Scharron-Wiesinger Duo, a flute and guitar duo who recorded their first album in Budapest, Hungary in 2015. The duo performs around the United States and Puerto Rico, most recently for Chamber Music at the Scarab Club in Detroit, Michigan.
Ms. Wiesinger plays principal flute with the Hollywood Concert Orchestra, a touring orchestra that has traveled extensively throughout China and Japan. She also performs with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, Orlando Symphony Orchestra, Florida Lakes Symphony and the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra.
Eladio Scharrón, guitar soloist
Eladio Scharrón was born in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico into a family of guitarists well known in the island. He is a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico where he studied with guitarist-composer Ernesto Cordero. After obtaining the B.A. in music, he went to Paris to continue graduate studies in guitar under the direction of the renowned master Alberto Ponce. In 1981 he obtained the prestigious Diplôme de Concertiste at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. Dr. Scharrón has won numerous awards and competitions, among them, the Concurso de Guitarra de la Casa the España in Puerto Rico, the International Guitar Competition of Sable Sur Sarthe in France, and the Reynolds Musical Award.
About the composers
The music of Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964 in New York) is nuanced, majestic, elegant, capricious, lyrical, and colorful — "it is boldly considered music that celebrates the sound of the instruments and reaffirms the vitality of orchestral music" (Philadelphia Inquirer).
A composer featured on a Grammy winning CD by Chanticleer and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Thomas’ impressive body of works “embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). The New Yorker magazine called her "a true virtuoso composer." Championed by such luminaries as Barenboim, Rostropovich, Boulez, Eschenbach, Salonen, Maazel, Ozawa, and Knussen, she rose early to the top of her profession. The American Academy of Arts and Letters described Thomas as “one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American Music."
Juan Trigos is the Creator of the concept Abstract Folklore. Among his most significant compositions include six Operas, five Symphonies, three Cantatas, Concertos for several instruments, diverse chamber music and for solo instruments. His music has been performed in many cities and countries of Europe, America (continent) and Japan. As a highly distinguished composer, he has been invited by the Eastman School of Music as the Howard Hanson Visiting Professor 2017. He is member of Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (Mexico). Recently has been awarded with the 2020 From Commission (Harvard University). As a conductor he has specialized in XX Century and Contemporary music. He has commissioned, premiered, promoted, and recorded an extensive catalogue of works with numerous choirs and orchestras around the world. His last two monographic Cds released by iTinerant include three of his Concertos (clarinet, four guitars and piccolo), Symphony n. 4 Nezahualcoyotl Icuicahan and the Ballet Sansón (suite).
Sir Harrison Birtwistle was born in Accrington in the north of England in 1934 and studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music. In 1965 he sold his clarinets to devote all his efforts to composition, and travelled to Princeton as a Harkness Fellow where he completed the opera Punch and Judy. This work, together with Verses for Ensembles and The Triumph of Time, firmly established Birtwistle as a leading voice in British music.
The music of Birtwistle has attracted international conductors including Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim, Elgar Howarth, Christoph von Dohnányi, Oliver Knussen, Sir Simon Rattle, Peter Eötvös, Franz Welser-Möst and Sir Antonio Pappano. He has received commissions from leading performing organisations and his music has been featured in major festivals and concert series including the BBC Proms, Salzburg Festival, Glyndebourne, Holland Festival, Lucerne Festival, Stockholm New Music, Wien Modern, Wittener Tage, the South Bank Centre in London, the Konzerthaus in Vienna and Settembre Musica in Turin and Milan.
Harrison Birtistle passed at his home in Mere, Wiltshire, on 18 April 2022, aged 87.
Guitarist and composer Alberto Rodríguez Ortiz is characterized by successfully bringing new aesthetic trends to the most demanding public, demonstrating that music is still an art in constant transformation and development. This combination of technique, musicality and stage presence has led him to participate in important concert series and festivals in the Caribbean, North America, Central America and Europe. In 1997 was composer in residence for Rome Festival (Rome, Italy).
His compositions have been performed in major international halls such as: Weill Recital Hall in Nueva York; La Salle Cortot and Casa France-Ameriques in París, the Endler Hall in Cape Town, South-Africa and the Pablo Casals Hall, San Juan, PR. He has received commissions from the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, Carvajal Foundation, Camerata Caribe, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, Ana G. Méndez University, Inter-American Arts Festival of Puerto Rico, Orchestra and Choir of the School of Political Sciences in Paris, Carrie Wiesinger, Eladio Scharrón, John Rivera Pico and from the Fourte Guitar Quartet.
Program Notes
Dance Mobile
Augusta Reed Thomas
Music for me is an embrace of the world – a way to open myself up to being alive in the world in my body, in my sounds, and in my mind. I care deeply about musicality, imagination, craft, clarity, dimensionality, an elegant balance between material and form, and empathy with the performing musicians.
My works always spark and catch fire from spontaneous improvisations. It is music always in the act of becoming. I have a vivid sense that the process of the creative journey (rather than a predictable fixed point of arrival) is the essence. Poetry can give language to the ineffable. Music is, in an analogous way, akin to an infinite alphabet. Sounds can become like butterflies, hummingbirds, lights, rocks, trees, webs, gardens, and landscapes.
Three virtuosic dances, each lasting circa 4 minutes and 30 seconds, are, as if hanging on an Alexander Calder-like mobile, suspended so as to turn freely in the air; lively, sprightly, spry, energetic, vigorous; animated, traveling, flexible, versatile, changing, fluid, and on the move.
Organic and, at every level, concerned with transformations and connections, the carefully sculpted and fashioned musical materials of Dance Mobile are agile and spirited, and their flexibility allows pathways to braid harmonic, rhythmic, and contrapuntal elements that are constantly transformed — at times whimsical and light, at times jazzy, at times almost Stravinsky-ballet-like, at times layered and reverberating with resonance, pirouettes, fulcrum points, and effervescence.
Across Dance Mobile’s duration, there unfolds a labyrinth of musical interrelationships and connections that showcase the musicians of Alterity.co in a virtuosic display of rhythmic agility, counterpoint, skill, energy, dynamic and articulative range, precision, and teamwork.
Music’s eternal quality is its capacity for change, transformation, and renewal. No one composer, musical style, school of thought, technical practice, or historical period can claim a monopoly on music’s truths. I believe music feeds our souls. Unbreakable is the power of art to build community. Humanity has and will always work together to further music’s flexible, diverse capacity and innate power.
Suite for ensemble
(or chamber orchestra)
Juan Trigos
The Suite for ensemble consists of a set of six pieces of character and contrasting constitution. The titles allude to various images, ideas and musical homages, which are treated in an abstract way and give rise to the independent structure of each movement. These autonomous identity traits, along with the coherence of musical discourse and the peculiar orchestration, give meaning and unity to the form.
The score highlights the use of different performance techniques and atypical instrumental combinations, achieved by the incessant exchange of the woodwinds (piccolo, contralto flute, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, etc.) and percussion.
References to Spanish and Italian music and in particular the tribute paid by Trigos in the last piece of the cycle to his teacher and friend, the great Italian composer Franco Donatoni, are a clear example of the concept of abstraction proposed by the author. The work was commissioned by Cantus Ensemble and is dedicated to them.
Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum
Harrison Birtwistle composed this piece for the London Sinfonietta; he also conducted its first performance. It has become a standard work in the ensemble repertoire everywhere in the decades since then – and no wonder; it is highly appealing, playful and diversified instrumental theatre music (similar to Secret Theatre), in which “mechanisms,” i.e. groups behaving like mechanical devices, declare hostilities against one another in various rhythmic patterns and registers.
At age 33, Birtwistle had already found his own musical language, which he used to relate Carmen Arcadiae;its multitude of characteristic traits would come to mark his subsequent compositions.
Double Concerto for flute, guitar, and chamber ensemble
Alberto Rodríguez Ortiz
The Double Concerto for flute, guitar and chamber ensemble is a commission by Dr. Eladio Scharrón and Carrie Wiesinger. It was completed by 2020. Its premiere was programmed near the completion of the work, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it got postponed until now.
It is a two movement piece. The first one, Andante misterioso, is in a sonata form. The exposition has two themes. The first one is presented by the guitar and the flute at the very beginning of the piece. It is a very simple tune that ramifies into passages of more complexity on the oboe and clarinet, leading into the interventions of the soloists. The second theme is preceded by a fanfare on the brass instruments. It is of a more lively type, taking the flute and guitar to passages filled with virtuosity.
The development has a third theme, very deep and introspective, that is flanked by the two main cadenzas of the concerto, first on the guitar and second in the flute. This leads to a very energetic recapitulation.
The second movement, Con spirito, it’s a very rhythmical rondó with a rhapsodic edge that includes some of the themes of the first movement, specially the third theme, before deep and introspective, now presented in a majestic manner.
The Double Concerto is dedicated to the Scharrón/Wiesinger Duo.
Meet the Orchestra
![Rehearsals have been going swell. We hope to see you all tonight for our double Reed feature program, "Dark Wood". The concert is so bas-SOON! [Sorry, not sorry]
Thursday, May 23rd at the Timucua White House. Doors at 7 p.m., music at 7:30](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c2d99df7e0ab73ba6d084b/1663251657640-K36ACTJX8ZYGDVYCNN6D/image-asset.jpeg)
