At first glance, Sunday looks like a mini music festival. Let’s celebrate.
At 3 p.m., the Southwest Civic Winds will perform a gala concert in the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College before an appearance in Santa Fe at a national conference. Also, at 3 p.m., violinist Richard Silvers will present late-Romantic music in Roshong Recital Hall at FLC. Flutist Andreas Tischhauser will give a recital of 20th-century music at 7 p.m.in the UU Recital Series. Originally scheduled for April 22, the recital directly conflicted with the Fort Lewis College Extravaganza.
Someday, we’ll have a master calendar so that these mashups don’t happen. In the meantime, Sunday’s abundance of live performances gives music lovers hard choices.
“New Frontiers” is the official title of Sunday’s concert. It is also a send-off for our symphonic band, which will perform at the 2022 national convention of the Association of Concert Bands in Santa Fe, May 3 to 8.
“We will be the first of 11 bands to perform,” Rhonda Muckerman said. Artistic director of the Winds since 2020, Muckerman will conduct the program in the Santa Fe Hilton Ballroom. Our 46-member Durango-based ensemble will be followed by concert bands from Arizona, Denver, Albuquerque, Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Los Angeles.
Co-founded in 2012 by Ruth Katzin and Mark Walters, the ensemble has survived many changes, joining the national association is one.
“We’re the newest member,” Muckerman said. “We’ve not done this before, it’s a first for us.”
Sunday’s gala in the Community Concert Hall at FLC is more than a dress rehearsal, Muckerman said. The program offers everything from British band classics to a John Williams film score from “Far and Away,” to marches with unusual Middle Eastern overtones, a Khachaturian work that band member Karen Mesikapp discovered and prepared for the ensemble, and “Arabesque,” by Samuel Hazo.
If you go
WHAT: “New Frontiers,” a concert by Southwest Civic Winds, conducted by Rhonda Muckerman.
WHEN: 3 p.m. Sunday.
WHERE: Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College, 1000 Rim Drive.
TICKETS: $20. Available online at www.durangoconcerts.com.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit www.southwestcivicwinds.org.
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WHAT: Fort Lewis College Faculty Recital – violinist Richard Silvers.
WHERE: Roshong Recital Hall, FLC.
WHEN: 3 p.m. Sunday.
TICKETS: $15 at the door.
MORE INFORMATION: Email blaylock_sl@fortlewis.edu or call 247-7087.
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WHAT: UU Recital Series, flutist Andreas Tischhauser and pianist Marilyn Garst.
WHERE: Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango, 419 San Juan Drive.
WHEN: 7 p.m. Sunday.
TICKETS: $20 adults, $8 children and students at the door.
MORE INFORMATION: Email mmgarst1940@gmail.com or call 385-8668.
Jazz has been added, too. Assistant artistic director and well-known area jazz musician Jared Wright will solo in Allen Vizzutti’s “American Jazz Suite.”
“Jared brought this to us,” Muckerman said. “It’s yet another new frontier for the ensemble.”
Henner Mohr’s “Union of the Spirit,” will close the concert. “The song reflects the history and peoples of Durango,” Mohr says in the program notes. The work begins with a Native American song and then introduces a theme of the settlers. The two motifs are woven together, and the two merge “into an entirely new song that is even better than both of them apart.”
Violinist Richard Silvers will give the only Fort Lewis College Music Faculty recital this year at 3 p.m. Sunday. He will perform works by Chausson, Ysaye and Brahms.
“I’m not required to do this,” Silvers said. “But I love making music. The best way to celebrate the beauty of the past is to perform and communicate it to my students.”
Last fall, Silvers joined the FLC faculty. He teaches music history, theory, strings and chamber music. He has 10 students in his violin studio, and every Friday, Silvers spends time “with students in the Durango High School Chamber Orchestra.”
In 2021, he completed his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin – Madison concentrating on Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto, “a neglected gem of the early 20th century violin repertory.” In addition, he has a long performance record as a soloist, chamber and orchestra musician to which he’s added the FLC Faculty Trio and the San Juan Symphony.
Sunday’s recital focuses on tonal, late Romantic music, Silvers said.
“Chausson’s ‘Poème, Op. 25,’ is a 17-minute, very lyrical rhapsody. Ysaye’s Sonata No. 4 in E minor for solo violin was composed in 1922-24 and is dedicated to Fritz Kreisler, the most famous violinist in the 20th century. Elgar dedicated his concerto to Kreisler,” he said.
After intermission, Silvers and pianist Holly Quist will perform Brahms’ Sonata No. 3 in D minor for violin and piano.
“Brahms was a proponent of absolute music as opposed to Wagner’s programmatic music,” Silvers said. “This sonata is about 25 minutes long and is basically a piano concerto with violin accompaniment. It’s Brahms’ final sonata. It has four movements, not three as his earlier sonatas, and it’s filled with complicated cross rhythms, shifts and displacements. In order to understand Brahms, you have to be patient.”
Striding through the 14th season of unusual chamber music offerings, The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango presents another stellar program Sunday night. You won’t find a program like this anywhere else.
At 7 p.m., flutist Andreas Tischhauser and pianist Marilyn Garst will present four 20th-century works by composers from the former Soviet Union to the Czech Republic, France and America.
“It’s a program of virtuoso duos,” Garst said. “We’ll open with Bohuslav Martinŏ’s ‘First Sonata for Flute and Piano.’ He was a well-known Czech composer who was blacklisted by the Nazi Party. He fled to Paris in 1940, then escaped to the USA and taught at Princeton and Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music School. This work was composed in 1945.”
Otar Takakishvili’s “Sonata for Flute and Piano” exhibits a “rather simple harmonic language with folk influences,” Garst said. Born in 1924, the Soviet composer, established himself within the strict creative confines of the arts during the Soviet era. He won the Lenin Prize in 1982, Garst said, and like Shostakovich, with whom Takakishvili had a long-standing friendship, “he was subject to restraints.”
French music with Impressionist influences will offer a decided contrast, Garst said. Henri Dutilleux’s “Sonatine” was composed in 1943 and is part of a relatively small body of work.
“The ‘Sonatine’ is the most recorded of all his compositions,” Garst said.
To close the program, Tischhauser and Garst will perform Eldin Burton’s “Sonatina for Flute and Piano.” Adapted from a solo piano work, the flute revision was dedicated to Samuel Baron, a fellow Juilliard student, who premiered it in 1947.
And Tischhauser’s take on a program he and Garst have been rehearsing for months?
“This music is more challenging than any of my recitals, even my doctoral recital,” he said.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
