Although music has often been described as a universal language, the way that it has been created, performed, and appreciated throughout history has been largely determined by geography, ethnicity, and social status. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, owing to large-scale immigration, the dissemination of sound recordings, and, most recently, the internet, the boundaries between music made by different people in the world have become extremely porous. 

Vivian Fung’s personal identity is as deeply layered as her music. Though her parents are Chinese, her central Canadian upbringing offered her scant contact with others who shared her ethnicity. The cultural milieu in which she immersed herself and excelled was Western classical music; her training culminated in a doctorate in composition from one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories, The Juilliard School. While her initial paucity of exposure to Chinese heritage was something she came to think of as a deficit, rediscovering Chinese traditional music inspired her Pizzicato (2001), recorded by the Ying Quartet, as well as her 2010-11 vocal composition Yunnan Folk Songs, given its première by Chicago’s Fulcrum Point New Music Project. It also led her to explore other Asian music, in particular music from Vietnam and the Indonesian islands Java and Bali. She has performed with Javanese and Balinese gamelan groups based in New York City and has also made several trips to Indonesia to study this music first hand. These experiences have left an indelible imprint on many of her compositions.

The Violin Concerto’s  genesis dates back to the première of her 2009 Piano Concerto, the first of her compositions to be commissioned and given its première by Metropolis Ensemble. For that performance, violinist Kristin Lee served as the concertmaster and at the time expressed interest in having Fung compose a concerto for her. In 2010, Lee accompanied Fung on a trip to Bali to gain a deeper understanding of the music that was so central to Fung’s compositional vocabulary. The intensely lyrical concerto that Fung ultimately composed for Lee shortly after their return directly resulted from that shared experience. The Violin Concerto is presented in one continuous movement with clearly audible boundaries between its various sections. The concerto begins serenely, the violin soloist hovering rhapsodically over bird-like sonorities in the strings. The next section is fast and propulsive, with the soloist still in the foreground, its initial rhythmic restlessness eventually settling into a thirteen-beat groove. This is soon followed by a less rhythmically driven passage dominated by ghost-like harmonics. This leads into another fast section filled with virtuoso violin pyrotechnics that eventually burst into a fiery, unaccompanied cadenza. Before the return of the orchestra, the violin soars to an extraordinary high note to which Fung affixes the instruction, “Play like a rock star.” What then ensues is perhaps the most harmonically dense passage of the entire composition; various tonalities collide as they vie for the listener’s attention. Amidst this polytonality, the violin soloist quotes a very famous Javanese folk-song that often opens gamelan performances, Puspawarna (Javanese for “kinds of flowers”), interrupted by various sections in the orchestra that reinvent this folk-song in very un-Javanese ways. Ultimately, however, the concerto returns to its initial tranquility, ending in much the same way as it began.

Credit – Frank J. Oteri

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Heather Schmidt’s unique dual talents as a pianist and composer have garnered praise from the press, describing her as “a brilliant virtuoso pianist”, “poised and utterly musical”, “a great artist”, and “as much a pianist in the professional sense as she is a composer”.

Her acclaim in both her native country of Canada and on the international musical scene comes from her many successes as a virtuoso soloist and composer including performances, broadcasts, commissions and awards in Canada, the United States, Russia, Finland, Iceland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, England, Cyprus, Mexico, Brazil, and the British West Indies.

Heather began studies in piano and composition at the age of 4, and composition at the age of 5. She pursued double majors in piano performance and composition throughout her musical education. She studied at Juilliard in New York City and at Indiana University, where, at age 21, she became the youngest student to receive a Doctor of Music degree.

Since these formative years she has received numerous accolades, including a nomination for the prestigious “Juno” award, the Canadian equivalent of the “Grammy”, in the category of “Best Classical Composition.” As a virtuoso soloist, she received First Place in the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, and First Place, the Audience Choice Award, and the Maestro’s Choice Millennium Foundation Award at the Canadian Concerto Competition. Composition awards include three consecutive Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) Awards, SOCAN Composer Awards, the Zwilich Prize in the International League of Women Composers Competition, the Juilliard Composers Competition, and the Dean’s Composition Prize at Indiana University.

As a virtuoso pianist, Heather excels in both traditional and contemporary repertoire, offering audiences her unique perspective on the standard repertoire of the past, her own works, and the works of other living composers. In addition to her solo recitals, she regularly performs as a guest soloist with orchestras, including exciting performances of her own six piano concertos. She is also a sensitive and much in demand chamber musician, especially well known for her long-time collaboration with Canadian cellist Shauna Rolston.

Heather’s performances and performances of her compositions have not been restricted to concert halls, and also include numerous television and recordings appearances. The first televised performance occurred when she was only 8 years of age. More recently, she appeared on the BRAVO Classical Now Series. Her most recent recordings include: Nebula, a CD of her piano performances of her own solo piano compositions on CMC Centrediscs; a CD of solo piano works by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel for the NAXOS label; “Shimmer”, a solo piano CD of works by various composers from Baroque through contemporary eras; and “Icicles of Fire”, a CD of works she composed and performs with cellist Shauna Rolston.

Heather’s extensive catalogue of concert music compositions includes works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestras as well as for vocal/choral genres. She has received commissions from prestigious sources such as the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation, WDR (Westdeutsches Rundfunk in Germany), the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the Harvard Musical Association.

At age 19, she was asked to write the required competition work for the 1995 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Since then this work that has been performed throughout North America and Europe. Ms. Schmidt has also composed imposed test pieces for other major competitions, including the CBC Young Performer’s Competition (Chaconne, 1999), the Ester Honens International Piano Competition (Nebula, 2006), and the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Piano Competition (Night Rainbow, 2007). She has held numerous composer residencies, including a long-term residency with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra.

As a composer of film, television and video games, Heather’s recent projects include Empire of the Sharks for SyFy channel, Jurassic School for Netflix, Break-Up Nightmare for Lifetime TV, Elvis Lives for AXS TV, the independent comedy feature How to Get Rid of a Body and Still Be Friends, and the video game Homesick.

In addition to being the composer, Heather also wrote and directed two short films – Midnight Violin, for BRAVO TV in Canada funded by BravoFACT, and The Uninvited Ghost. Heather is also the creator and co-executive producer of Animal Planet’s 2016 TV series Life at Vet U.

Heather’s creative interests have recently expanded to writing. In August 2018, she signed with literary manager Jeff Portnoy of Bellevue Productions as a screenwriter for film and TV. She also has aspirations as a writer of picture books and Young Adult novels.

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Heather holds dual Canadian and American citizenship. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and her pets.

A huge animal lover, she has many rescues — three dogs, three cats, a pigeon and a horse (plus a few fish!). In 2016, she launched a nonprofit 501c3 dog rescue called Hollywood Huskies, which in its first two years has rescued over 120 dogs. In January 2018, she opened a sister not-for-profit husky rescue in her hometown of Calgary called Halo Husky Haven.

We’re thrilled to feature Heather’s Lunar Reflections as part of our October 19th concert.

Of all the great music composed in England during the past hundred years, few works have been either so popular or as enduring as Gustav Holst’s The Planets, yet with the exception of an important composition for strings, the St. Paul’s Suite, Holst’s music has vanished from the orchestral repertoire. How could this be? A composer with so much imagination and technical mastery must have written more than one major orchestral work, surely?

Well, yes and no. A great talent and a great spirit, Gustav Holst worked appallingly hard for all of his adolescence and the first twenty years of his adult life in the effort to make ends meet while he learnt how to compose as he wished. The scion of a family of professional musicians whose vocation went back for generations, Holst intended to be a concert pianist as his father had been before him, but severe nerve damage from a combination of practicing too much and semi-starvation left him permanently disabled. In 1893 Holst was accepted as a student at the Royal College of Music and nearly starved until he won an open scholarship in composition in 1895. Over the next few years Holst taught himself the trombone, in the rather naive hope that he could earn a living — to his delight, he did, becoming a trombonist in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and in the Scottish Orchestra. In 1903 Holst was offered a teaching position in the James Allen Girls’ School and gave up the trombone; two years later he became the Music Director of St. Paul’s Girls’ School as well; in 1907 he became Music Director at Morley College, holding all three positions until 1920. He learnt to compose in his spare time, slowly gaining experience and technical skill. His music began to make an impression in the London concert-halls, though much of his work was for chorus and orchestra, which rather limited its likelihood of performance on a regular basis. At about this time Holst acquired a close friend in Ralph Vaughan Williams and a patron for special events in H. Balfour Gardiner.

Holst’s increasing powers as a composer were reflected in the progression of works that occupied every moment of his spare time from 1905 to the onset of the First World War. A Somerset Rhapsody of 1910 marked the beginning of his real maturity, followed by the first group of hymns from the Rig Veda, and Beni Mora in 1912 and the Cloud Messenger in 1913. The Planets (1914-1916) and the Hymn of Jesus (1920) represented Holst at the very peak of his career.

Sadly, after that peak, there was a sharp falling away. Holst, searching for a new economy in his writing, began to pare his work down; deleting all unnecessary notes, he found a new austerity in his art that exactly captured within its reticulations all that he wished to express. His new music was intellectually rigorous, icily aloof, brilliantly executed. For the next ten years Holst devoted himself to writing in this new style, though audiences actively disliked it. The last years of his life were marked by a return to his warmer earlier style, but ill health interrupted his plans. His works from 1920 on are only rarely played to the present day. They are simply too forbidding.

As a composer, Gustav Holst was both a dreamer and a pragmatist. The inspirations for his compositions were often intuitive, even peculiar at first glance, yet somehow he always managed to make them work. His idea for The Planets came from a casual curiosity about astrology which simply grew. In 1914 he wrote, “As a rule I only study things that suggest music to me, that’s why I worried at Sanskrit (for the ‘Rig Veda’ hymns). Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely.”

Holst completed the first movement, Mars, in the summer of 1914 (coincidental, yet appropriate), Venus and Jupiter in the autumn, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune during 1915, and Mercury in 1916, the orchestration following apace. Written for a huge orchestra (with chorus), The Planets is nonetheless a work of great subtlety and elegance, even in its most ferocious moments.  The work was first played at a private performance in September 1918 by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra as a special gift to the composer by Balfour Gardiner. The first public performance took place on February 27th, 1919, to the beginnings of great acclaim.

The seven movements really require little in the way of explanation. The first, Mars, the Bringer of War, opens with a real sense of menace and soon builds to a frenzy of martial ferocity. The second movement, Venus, the Bringer of Peace, commences in a mood of cool serenity, into which a human warmth begins to obtrude. Mercury, the Winged Messenger, is in the form of an especially fleet scherzo with a wonderfully evocative trio. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, is arguably the best known and the most popular of all of the Planets, from its rollicking opening to its Elgarian central section. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age, was Holst’s personal favourite among the seven movements — the combination of suffering and menace creating an unforgettable effect. Uranus, the Magician, occupies the same ground as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the first Nachtmusik from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. A brilliantly grotesque dance, wonderfully orchestrated, the movement ends with a sudden stillness which suggests the unwinking stillness of the night sky. The last movement, Neptune, the Mystic, though very quiet could well be the real core of the whole work. Uncanny, unforgettable, Neptune offers perhaps Holst’s personal glimpse into the infinite.

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Astor Piazzolla was fabulously talented, and that wealth of talent caused him some confusion as he tried to decide on a career path. Very early, he learned to play the bandoneón, the accordion-like instrument that uses buttons rather than a keyboard, and he became a virtuoso on it. He gave concerts, wrote film scores, and formed his own bands before a desire for wider expression drove him to the study of classical music. In 1954, he received a grant to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and it was that great teacher who advised him to follow his passion for the tango as the source for his own music.

Piazzolla returned to Argentina and gradually evolved his own style, one that combines the tango, jazz, and classical music. In his hands, the tango, which had deteriorated into a soft, popular form, was revitalized. Piazzolla transformed this folk dance into music capable of a variety of expression and sharply contrasted moods; his tangos are by turn fiery, melancholy, passionate, tense, violent, lyric, and always driven by an endless supply of rhythmic energy.

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires is an unusual collection of individual tangos that form a remarkable whole. Its title (in Spanish, Las cuatro estaciones porteñas) needs to be understood carefully: cuatro estaciones is clear enough; it evokes The Four Seasons of Vivaldi. But the meaning of porteña (or porteño) is more elusive: it means “port” area, and it specifically has come to refer to the port area of Buenos Aires, where the tango was born. By extension, porteñas has come to mean anyone or anything native to Buenos Aires. And so a general translation of the title might be The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.

Las cuatro estaciones porteñas consists of four tangos that Piazzolla originally wrote for the small ensemble he led in Buenos Aires: violin, piano, electric guitar, bass, and bandoneón. Each tango depicts a different season in Buenos Aires, and Piazzolla wrote them over a period of time. The first, Summer (in Spanish, Verano porteño), dates from 1964, and the others followed over the next few years: Autumn (Otoño porteño) in 1969, and Spring (Primavera porteña) and Winter (Invierno porteño) in 1970. Piazzolla sometimes performed them as a group, and The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires

— by turns slinky, seductive, powerful, and haunting —

has become immensely popular. This music has been arranged for a variety of instruments, and it has become particularly famous in an arrangement by Leonid Desyatnikov for solo violin and string orchestra.

In this version, it becomes a sort of twentieth century Argentinian counterpart to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and those two works are sometimes performed together — like we will doing! 

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The Four Seasons (Italian: “Le quattro stagioni”) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written in approximately 1720 and were published in 1725 (Amsterdam), together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The Contest Between Harmony and Invention”).

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi’s works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music — music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:

Spring (Concerto No. 1 in E Major)

               Allegro

Spring has arrived with joy

Welcomed by the birds with happy songs,

And the brooks, amidst gentle breezes, 

Murmur sweetly as they flow.

The sky is caped in black, and

Thunder and lightning herald a storm

When they fall silent, the birds

Take up again their delightful songs.

                Largo e pianissimo sempre

And in the pleasant, blossom-filled meadow,

To the gentle murmur of leaves and plants,

The goatherd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.

               Allegro

To the merry sounds of a rustic bagpipe,

Nymphs and shepherds dance in their beloved spot

When Spring appears in splendour.

Summer (Concerto No. 2 in G Minor)

               Allegro non molto

Under the merciless sun of the season

Languishes man and flock, the pine tree burns.

The cuckoo begins to sing and at once 

Join in the turtledove and the goldfinch.

A gentle breeze blows, but Boreas

Is roused to combat suddenly with his neighbour,

And the shepherd weeps because overhead 

Hangs the fearsome storm, and his destiny. 

               Adagio

His tired limbs are robbed of rest 

By his fear of the lightning and the frightful thunder

And by the flies and hornets in furious swarms.

               Presto

Alas, his fears come true: 

There is thunder and lightning in the heavens

And the hail cuts down the tall ears of grain.

Autumn (Concerto No. 3 in F Major)

               Allegro

The peasant celebrates with dancing and singing

The pleasure of the rich harvest,

And full of the liquor of Bacchus

They end their merrymaking with a sleep.

               Adagio molto

All are made to leave off dancing and singing

By the air which, now mild, gives pleasure

And by the season, which invites many

To find their pleasure in a sweet sleep.

               Allegro

The hunters set out at dawn, off to the hunt,

With horns and guns and dogs they venture out.

The beast flees and they are close on its trail.

Already terrified and wearied by the great noise

Of the guns and dogs, and wounded as well 

It tries feebly to escape, but is bested and dies.

Winter (Concerto No. 4 in F Minor)

              Allegro non molto

Frozen and shivering in the icy snow,

In the severe blasts of a terrible wind

To run stamping one’s feet each moment,

One’s teeth chattering through the cold.

               Largo

To spend quiet and happy times by the fire

While outside the rain soaks everyone.

               Allegro

To walk on the ice with tentative steps, 

Going carefully for fear of falling. 

To go in haste, slide, and fall down to the ground,

To go again on the ice and run,

In case the ice cracks and opens.

To hear leaving their iron-gated house Sirocco,

Boreas, and all the winds in battle—

This is winter, but it brings joy.

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Credit – Betsy Schwarm