Download “Global conversations we need to have”: Renowned NH music

“Global conversations we need to have”:
Renowned NH music/peace program comes to the Hop in November;
Premieres reflect on the Syrian Uprising
Photos, from top: Sally Pinkas; Apple Hill String Quartet; Kinan Azmeh
HANOVER, NH—Like Vedran Smailović, the cellist whose music rang out during the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo,
acclaimed clarinetist Kinan Azmeh and Emmy-nominated composer Kareem Roustom use music to speak to
the suffering of their homeland, Syria.
The two join Hop pianist-in-residence Sally Pinkas and the world renowned Apple Hill String Quartet (Elise
Kuder and Colleen Jennings, violins, Michael Kelley, viola, and Rupert Thompson, violoncello) for a concert
that includes the world premiere of two works by Roustom that speak to the beauty of Syrian culture and the
catastrophe of the country’s current civil war. Initiated by Pinkas as part of Playing for Peace, an
internationally known 25-year-old program of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in Nelson, NH, the
concert takes place Wednesday, November 13, at 7 pm in Spaulding Auditorium of the Hopkins Center.
(Azmeh last performed at the Hop in February 2013 as part of the ensemble New Sounds from the Arab Lands;
Pinkas performs two Hop concerts each season, solo and with other musicians.)
The concert is just one part of a busy three-day Dartmouth residency by the composer, musicians and Apple
Hill Director Leonard Matczynski that connects them to Dartmouth students and the wider community. Other
events include a public discussion on Tuesday, November 12, noon-1 pm, at Dartmouth’s Tucker Foundation,
titled “What Matters to Me and Why”; a private master class with young musicians from the Upper Valley
Music Center; visits to Dartmouth music and Arabic language classes; and informal gatherings and miniperformances on the campus.
In the concert, the two works by Roustom are Traces, for clarinet, piano
and string quartet, and A Muffled Scream. Co-commissioned by by the
Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, The Hopkins Center at Dartmouth
College and the Gammage Auditorium Series at Arizona State University
Public Events, Traces “is a meditation on loss: both the loss of people and
infrastructure as well the loss of a sense of place and connection that one
has with a place,” Roustom writes in program notes about the piece.
Since the start of the Syrian uprising, he said, all of his concert works
have reflected on the situation in his homeland. Traces takes its title and
inspiration from a genre of pre-Islamic poetry that often begins with the
poet and his companions returning to a desert campsite where his
beloved lives, only to find that the camp has been broken and all its
inhabitants have moved to another site that is unknown to the poet. All
that is left behind are al-atlaal or traces of the site’s former in habitants.
A Muffled Scream is a work for solo clarinet, played Azmeh (“intensely
soulful”—The New York Times; “spellbinding”—The New Yorker;
“incredibly rich sound”—Canadian Broadcasting Company), a friend and
previous collaborator of the Boston-based Roustom. Roustom writes that it was “composed after reading a
news article about the terrible state of Syrian refugees at the Zaatari camp in Jordan. A specific incident, two
children who died in the night because they did not have enough blankets, moved me to compose this work.”
The new works share the bill with the haunting Piano Quintet by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996), which he
wrote in 1944, five years after fleeing his native Poland for the Soviet Union (leaving his parents and sister,
who ultimately perished in the Holocaust). Like much of Weinberg’s music, it has a “programmatic,” or
storytelling, quality, with sections recalling the folk dances and Yiddish theater with which he was raised.
Living the rest of his life under Soviet rule (including a brief imprisonment in 1948 for “Jewish bourgeois
nationalism”), he left behind a considerable amount of music that has been re-discovered in recent years. In
addition, the Apple Hill String Quartet will play Haydn’s String Quartet in G minor, Op. 74, No. 3 “The Rider,”
which moves from its minor key to peaceful and joyful G-major conclusion.
This collaborative project is close to the heart of its
initiator, the Israel-born and -raised Pinkas, who came to
know Azmeh and the Apple Hill musicians through three
successive summers on the faculty at the Nelson center.
“Even though I have lived in the US many years, I have
never forgotten my Israeli roots and have many family
members there. We are united in the thought that we
have to peacefully coexist with our neighbors. This is a
wonderful way to do it…The cherry on top is that Kinan
and Apple Hill are such wonderful musicians, so the music
is so gratifying.”
Established in 1988, Apple Hill’s Playing for Peace program
is based on the idea that the skills needed for successful
chamber music collaboration—listening, watching, adjusting and remaining flexible—are also essential for
building trust and establishing a dialogue among warring nations. Under Playing for Peace, the Apple Hill
String Quartet, along with the eloquent and inspiring Matczynski, travel throughout conflict areas (notably the
Middle East), playing and teaching in diverse communities, reaching out to youngsters and bringing them
together. Said producer and composer Quincy Jones, “Apple Hill gets musicians from countries in conflict
together to work things out through music. These are the global conversations we need to have.”
More about the Artists
Pianist-in-residence and Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, Pinkas
holds degrees from Indiana University and the New England
Conservatory, and a PhD in Composition from Brandeis University.
Described by Gramophone Magazine as “an artist who melds lucid
textures with subtle expressive detailing, minus hints of bombast or
mannerism,” she has recorded solo works by Schumann, Fauré, Debussy
and Christian Wolff on the MSR, Musica Omnia, Centaur, and Mode
labels. Chamber music releases include works by Gaubert and Martinu
(with flutist Fenwick Smith, Naxos) and Piano Quartets by Fauré (with the
Adaskin Trio, MSR).
A graduate of Damascus’ High Institute of Music, Azmeh in 1997 became
the first Arab to win top prize at the Nikolai Rubinstein International
Competition in Moscow and went on to earn a degree from New York’s Juilliard School. He has appeared
worldwide as a classical clarinetist as well as a new music improviser and jazz player. His compositions include
works for orchestra, chamber groups, and solo clarinet as well as film scores, dance soundtracks, and electroacoustic music. He has recorded five CDs of his own music, including several with his band Hewar, which is
Arabic for “dialogue.”
The resident quartet of the Nelson, NH, Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, the Apple Hill String Quartet has
earned accolades from around the world for its interpretive mastery of the traditional repertoire as well as its
special dedication to seldom heard masterworks and contemporary music. The group has performed concerts
extensively throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, especially as part of the Apple
Hill Center’s innovative Playing for Peace program. The group has conducted mini-residencies in embassies,
communities, schools and universities locally in the Monadnock region, nationally in the major U.S. cities, and
throughout the world.
As 21st-century musicians, the quartet is deeply committed to the commissioning of new works. Its recent
commission by composer and long-time “Apple Hiller” Daniel Sedgwick was premiered at Apple Hill in 2009
and performed to critical acclaim throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. Its project, “Around the
World with Playing for Peace", features the rich multicultural repertoire of works and compositions associated
with countries visited through the Playing for Peace program, as seen through the lens of the string quartet.
Featured composers have included Victor Ullman (String Quartet #3, written in the Theresienstadt
Concentration Camp), Turkish composer Ekrem Zeki Ün, Armenian composers Alan Hovhaness and A.
Zohrabian, Syrian composer Kareem Roustom, and American composers Roger Sessions, John Harbison, Tom
Oboe Lee, Larry Siegel, and Charles Ives.
Members of the ensemble also are dedicated teacher-performers at Apple Hill’s renowned Summer Chamber
Music Workshop, held each year on the 100-acre Apple Hill campus. Pinkas and Azmeh have also served on
the workshop faculty, which is where the idea for the Hop residency and concert was born.
Roustom has written music for film, television, the concert hall and album projects. Steeped in the musical
traditions of the Near East and trained in Western concert music and jazz, Roustom has collaborated with a
range of artists including the Kronos Quartet, Shakira, the Philadelphia Orchestra, klezmer legend Giora
Feidman and renowned early music group The Boston Camerata. His Emmy-nominated score to the PBS
documentary The Mosque in Morgantown combined elements of North Indian music, Arabic music, and West
Virginia Bluegrass music. Other film scores include Amreeka, (2009, Sundance and Cannes film festival award
winner); Budrus (2009); and May In The Summer (2013). Roustom received a 2010 fellowship to the
prestigious Sundance Film Composers Lab and is also the recipient of BMI’s Pete Carpenter Fellowship in film
and television music as well as a CAP Award from the American Music Center.
Roustom’s concert works have been performed in Europe, the U.K., the Middle East and throughout the US. Of
his oratorio The Son of Man (text by Khalil Gibran), the Boston Globe wrote “The music… is pitched toward the
impassioned, adapting Arabic-derived scales into a rich, heavily perfumed chromaticism, affording both eerie
atmosphere and high-impact drama. Moment to moment, [Roustom’s] invention is prolific.”
Recent projects include a new work for triple string quartet, titled A Voice Exclaiming, for the Kronos Quartet
and Providence, RI based Community MusicWorks, premiering November 8. (premiere November 8th 2013).
This residency is generously supported by Dartmouth’s Music Department, The Leslie Center for the
Humanities, and by the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost as part of Dartmouth's Year of the
Arts initiative in collaboration with the Dean of the Faculty.
RELEVANT LINKS
Playing for Peace at the Hop https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/131113_sallypinkas
Sally Pinkas http://sallypinkas.org/
Apple Hill’s Playing for Peace program http://www.applehill.org/playforpeace/pp_description.htm
Apple Hill String Quartet http://www.applehill.org/aboutus/ab_stringquartet.htm
Kinan Azmeh http://www.kinanazmeh.com/
Kareem Roustom http://www.kr-music.com/
Upper Valley Music Center http://www.uvmusic.org/
Press materials and photos
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScont
ent::loadArticle::article_id=A14ACB33-679C-469F-9E075A08469894E7&sessionlanguage=&SessionSecurity::linkName=
CALENDAR LISTINGS:
Playing for Peace, a concert by Sally Pinkas, piano, Kinan Azmeh, clarinet, and the Apple Hill Quartet
For 25 years, through “Playing for Peace,” New Hampshire’s Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music has used
chamber music to promote cross-culture understanding in “hot spots” across the globe. At the Hop, Syrian
clarinetist Kinan Azmeh (who performed at the Hop last spring) joins the Hop’s Israeli-born pianist-inresidence Sally Pinkas and the Center’s world-class quartet. Along with the haunting 1944 Piano Quintet by
Polish-born Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Haydn’s “The Rider” String Quartet in G minor, they
premiere Emmy-nominated Syrian composer Kareem Roustom’s Traces and A Muffled Scream, which
reflect on the culture of Syria, past and present, and the losses suffered during the current civil war.
Wednesday, November 13, 7 pm
Spaulding Auditorium, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hanover NH
Tickets $21/23/27; Dartmouth students $10; 18 & under $17 & $19
Information: Hopkins Center Box Office, 603.646.2422 or hop.dartmouth.edu
Discussion: What Matters to Me and Why
Playing for Peace musicians share their stories and discuss how chamber music can serve as a model of
successful collaboration and communication in conflicting communities across the globe. Co-sponsored by the
Tucker Foundation.
Tuesday, November 12, 12 pm
Tucker Foundation, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH
Free
Information: [email protected] or 603.646.2010
* * *
Founded in 1962, the Hopkins Center for the Arts is a multi-disciplinary academic, visual and performing
arts center dedicated to uncovering insights, igniting passions, and nurturing talents to help Dartmouth and
the surrounding Upper Valley community engage imaginatively and contribute creatively to our world. Each
year the Hop presents more than 300 live events and films by visiting artists as well as Dartmouth students
and the Dartmouth community, and reaches more than 22,000 Upper Valley residents and students with
outreach and arts education programs. After a celebratory 50th-anniversary season in 2012-13, the Hop
enters its second half-century with renewed passion for mentoring young artists, supporting the
development of new work, and providing a laboratory for participation and experimentation in the arts.
CONTACT:
Rebecca Bailey, Publicity Coordinator/Writer
Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College
[email protected]
603.646.3991