Music for a Sunday Afternoon: Fall Edition

Chamber music at Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre

2024-11-03 15:00 2024-11-03 17:00 60 Canada/Eastern 🎟 NAC: Music for a Sunday Afternoon: Fall Edition

https://nac-cna.ca/en/event/36074

In-person event

Prepare to be amazed as the tuba steps into the spotlight! Curated by Chris Lee, NACO's Principal Tuba and a true virtuoso, this chamber concert showcases the instrument's expressive range like you've never heard it before. Experience an afternoon of rare and captivating music featuring the tuba, with works by jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, rising star Jessie Montgomery, the timeless Ralph Vaughan Williams, and more. This is a unique opportunity to hear the tuba's full...

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Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre,355 Cooper St,Ottawa
Sun, November 3, 2024
Sun, November 3, 2024
Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre 355 Cooper St Ottawa

≈ 1 hour and 30 minutes · With intermission

Last updated: October 31, 2024

A note from Chris Lee, Principal Tuba of the NAC Orchestra

Dear audience,

I’m excited to present this program of tuba chamber music, featuring Canadian premieres of works by Jesse Montgomery, Quinn Mason, and David Baker.

Our concert opens with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Romanza” from the first tuba concerto ever written, in 1954. Next, Gary Kulesha's trio (from 1981, revised in 2024) takes you on a virtuosic journey through a completely different musical language, ending abruptly after a whirlwind third movement. Jesse Montgomery's In Color (2014) is a set of five vignettes, two of which connect the “Lament” from Wynton Marsalis’s Tuba Concerto (2021) with Quinn Mason's optimistic piece, On Life (2018).

The second half of the program beautifully juxtaposes the three other movements from In Color and David Baker’s Sonata for Tuba and String Quartet (1971).

I hope you enjoy this program!

Program

Chris Lee, tuba
Emily Westell, violin
Jeffrey Dyrda, violin
Jethro Marks, viola
Leah Wyber, cello
Karen Donnelly, trumpet
Frédéric Lacroix, piano

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS “Romanza” (Mvt 2) from Tuba Concerto (4 minutes)

GARY KULESHA Passacaglia, Cadenzas, and Finale for trumpet, tuba, and piano (12 minutes)
I. Passacaglia
II. Cadenzas
III. Finale

The next four pieces are performed without pause.

JESSIE MONTGOMERY “Red” (Mvt 5) from In Color for tuba and string quartet (1 minute)

WYNTON MARSALIS (arr. Chris Lee) “Lament” (Mvt 3) from Tuba Concerto (5 minutes)

JESSIE MONTGOMERY “Aqua” (Mvt 1) from In Color (1 minute)

QUINN MASON On Life for tuba and string quartet (7 minutes)

INTERMISSION 

The second half of this program is performed without pause.

JESSIE MONTGOMERY “Purple” (Mvt 3) from In Color  (1 minute)

JESSIE MONTGOMERY “Makina” (Mvt 4) from In Color (1 minute)

DAVID BAKER Sonata for tuba and string quartet  (20 minutes)
I. Slow – Moderato
II. Easy swing “blues”
III. Very slow
IV. Fast

JESSIE MONTGOMERY “The Poet” (Mvt 2) from In Color (1 minute)

JESSIE MONTGOMERY “Red 2” from In Color (1 minute)

Repertoire

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

“Romanza” (Mvt 2) from Tuba Concerto

During his final creative period from 1951, English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) became interested in unusual timbres and instruments. Of the latter, he was drawn to those that weren’t typically featured in a solo role, like the harmonica, for which he composed a romance in 1952. Two years later, Vaughan Williams completed a concerto for tuba, the first in that genre for the instrument. He requested the premiere be given by tubist Philip Catelinet and the London Symphony Orchestra at one of the LSO’s Jubilee concerts. Catelinet, who was self-taught on the instrument and had played it while in the BBC Military Band then became principal tuba of the BBC Theatre Orchestra, was initially shocked by the prospect of being thrust into the spotlight. “As a musician, I really couldn’t appreciate the idea of the tuba being the centre attraction as soloist on a concerto at an orchestral concert,” he recalled of the experience. “The tuba was too often connected by the public with what was humorous and ludicrous to be considered seriously a possibility on a concert platform.”

The Tuba Concerto was a success, not least because Vaughan Williams, as music historian Eric Saylor has noted in his recent biography of the composer, “treated the instrument seriously as a solo instrument, exploring sonorities and techniques that reveal its technical abilities and expressive depths.” The piece has since inspired composers to make their own contributions to the solo repertoire for the tuba.

Vaughan Williams described the music of this three-movement concerto as “fairly simple and obvious and can probably be listened to without much previous explanation.” The middle movement, “Romanza”, is the emotional heart of the work, set in the composer’s signature English pastoral style. Throughout, the tuba muses rhapsodically, demonstrating the instrument’s capabilities for song-like lyricism and fluid agility to poignant effect.

Program note by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

Gary Kulesha

Passacaglia, Cadenzas, and Finale for trumpet, tuba, and piano

I. Passacaglia
II. Cadenzas
III. Finale

Recently appointed to the Order of Canada, Gary Kulesha (b. 1954) is one of our country’s most visible musicians. Although he is best known as a composer, he is extremely active as a conductor as well and has appeared extensively as a pianist. His career has been an astonishing mixture of activities, taking him from the classical music world through broadcasting and theatre, film, and opera.

Passacaglia, Cadenzas, and Finale was written in 1981 and revised and corrected in September of 2024,” according to Kulesha. “It followed my Sonata for Trumpet, Tuba, and Piano, and is one of many pieces I wrote that used the tuba in chamber music.” As he further describes:

The Passacaglia [a musical form that features variations on a theme in the bass line] is actually a re-imagining of the first movement of my first Chamber Concerto, which I wrote immediately before this work. But this version differs from the Chamber Concerto in many ways, and the 2024 revision pushes it even further from that version.

The main theme of the Passacaglia is stated immediately at the beginning, and the variations that follow grow increasingly rhythmically complex. The theme is never absent, although it is frequently very disguised. It passes through all the registers of the instruments while the movement builds intensity. After the climax, the music subsides and ends with a simple statement of the theme over a sustained tone.

The Cadenzas are in two sections, one for trumpet and tuba together, and one for solo piano. They are true cadenzas—very virtuosic, with a somewhat improvisatory quality.

The Finale is very fast and very exciting. The theme of the Passacaglia, which also appeared in the Cadenzas, is once again the source of the main material. The movement begins with very high energy, relaxes somewhat for a more lyrical middle section, and then re-ignites for a volatile rush to the conclusion.

Composer biography and program note compiled and edited by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

JESSIE MONTGOMERY

In Color for tuba and string quartet

(Movements listed in performance order)

V. Red
I. Aqua
III. Purple
IV. Makina
II. The Poet
V. Red 2

Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981), as stated in her bio, is Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year, and a “Grammy-winning, acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator whose music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience.” In 2014, tuba player Bob Stewart commissioned Montgomery to write a piece featuring his instrument with string quartet. As he explained in an interview for Jazz Speaks, “I didn’t really want a typical tuba solo piece like an étude or something, but a piece that explored the sound qualities of the instrument, using multiphonics [an extended technique in which several notes sound at once], using overtones from the extremes of the instrument—a lot of different things. The result was the piece In Color, which is in five movements. Each movement explores a different texture that the tuba can present.”

For Montgomery, In Color presented an interesting challenge…

…to find a blend between the unique timbre of the tuba and the strings, to find a place in the middle where these two opposing timbres could meet. When I thought about how the tuba and the quartet were going to get along, I thought immediately about colour, the place in between melody and rhythm where interesting things can happen. My goal was to find a composite sound colour that would be unique to this kind of ensemble.

Montgomery had several listening sessions with Stewart to determine the kind of harmonies that are naturally created by playing multiphonics on the tuba, then wrote for the strings around those. In December 2014, Stewart released the recording Connections – Mind the Gap, which includes In Color with its five movements reordered and with other works inserted in between, thus creating a precedent for how they are presented in this afternoon’s concert.

Like on Stewart’s recording, the rhapsodic fifth movement “Red” frames this program. “Aqua” suggests oceanic depths, the ebb and flow of waves, and running water. Following the atmospheric “Purple”, “Makina”, a play on the word “machine” in Spanish, says Montgomery, “broadens the spectrum…so that the concept of blend is displaced by a collective cacophony of effects. This section is a play on the metal body of the tuba and its mechanisms; in this movement both the tuba and the string quartet use extended techniques almost exclusively to depict the metal switches, pistons, and wheels of an imagined mega machine.” In the second movement “The Poet”, performed second last in this concert, Montgomery features the tuba as the solo part, to which the player brings their own improvisations.

Program note by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

WYNTON MARSALIS

“Lament” (Mvt 3) from Tuba Concerto

Wynton Marsalis (b. 1961) has distinguished himself as a composer of works that are inventive hybrids of Western art music and jazz traditions. Notably, he adapts and fuses art music’s forms and mediums (e.g., orchestra, string quartet) with jazz and its many styles, along with other Black music idioms including work songs and spirituals. In this vein, his Tuba Concerto expands the notion of virtuosity for the soloist—as not only about technical prowess, but also about playing expressively, as well as being able to deftly perform a diverse range of Black and Latin American musical styles.

Co-commissioned by several orchestras including the NAC Orchestra, Marsalis composed his Tuba Concerto in 2021. Originally written for Carol Jantsch, principal tuba of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the piece was premiered by Jantsch and the orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin on December 9, 2021. It has since been performed by several other tubists and orchestra, including the NAC Orchestra's Principal Tuba Chris Lee who gave the concerto’s Canadian premiere on June 16, 2022.

In a video conversation with Jantsch, Marsalis described the tuba as “such a singing instrument.” For “Lament”, he wanted to write a part that “started introspectively…the kind of thing we equate with Bill Evans and Wayne Shorter.” From introspection, the movement shifts to 19th-century Romantic lyricism, with the tuba playing a “kind of an opera recitative” to which the orchestra responds. After another introspective moment, a march appears; based on a repeated bass line and featuring tambourines, Marsalis explained that it’s a reference to the minstrel show: “I wanted the tuba to deal with the whole pathos that comes with this type of parody…the bittersweet quality of having to make a parody of yourself.” The middle section has “burlesques” with “extreme dissonances…and when you sing your part, you slowly realize that no matter what you do…you’re a comic-tragic character. A sad clown.” To drive this point home, Marsalis instructs the tuba at the movement’s climax to “shout as if wailing wasn’t enough.”

Program note by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

QUINN MASON

On Life for tuba and string quartet

Quinn Mason (b. 1996) is a composer and conductor based in Dallas, Texas. His music has been performed and commissioned by numerous renowned orchestras, including the San Francisco, Dallas, National, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Detroit symphony orchestras, Minnesota Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, and many more nationally and internationally, as well as acclaimed concert bands and chamber ensembles around the world. He has received numerous awards from several organizations, including the American Composers Forum and ASCAP Voices of Change, and has guest-conducted many orchestras throughout the United States.

On Life for tuba and string quartet from 2018 was commissioned by American tubist Evan Zegiel, who wanted a new work from Mason based on a theme for a concert in early March 2019 entitled “Young at Heart”. The piece unfolds in three parts, with two fast outer sections that seem to evoke the verve and bustle of life, framing a more reflective, somewhat dreamy central episode. Throughout, Mason, who said he wanted to represent the lighter, more humorous side of life in this composition, employs to full advantage the unique soundscape of a tuba with string quartet, setting their distinctive timbres off with a variety of contrasting textures and sonorities.

The lively first section opens with the strings engaging in playful shifts of musical meter and off-beat accents, the tuba soon joining in. In the ensuing slower section, the tuba plays lyrical phrases against a backdrop of fluctuating sounds ranging from shimmering tremolos to undulating figures. An expressive viola solo leading to a freely tumbling line is then emulated by the tuba, after which the two instruments sing briefly in counterpoint over the rest of the strings. Following a meditative cello solo, the tuba leads us back to the opening energy. The ensemble then briskly makes its way through various twists and turns, reaching the end with spirited good cheer.

Program note by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

DAVID BAKER

Sonata for tuba and string quartet

I. Slow – Moderato
II. Easy swing “blues”
III. Very slow
IV. Fast

Indianapolis-born David Baker (1931–2016) was a world-renowned composer, conductor, and musician (he chiefly played trombone and cello). A distinguished professor of jazz studies at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music from 1966 to 2016, he was also conductor and musical and artistic director for the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra from 1991 to 2012. As a composer, he was prolific, having written over 2,000 works ranging from jazz to classical music to film scores, commissioned by over 500 individuals and ensembles.

Baker composed his Sonata for tuba and string quartet in 1971, for his friend and Indiana University colleague Harvey Phillips (1929–2010), a celebrated tuba player known for his advocacy of the instrument. While the combination of tuba and string quartet might seem peculiar, the choice, said Baker in his description of the piece, was “very deliberate, and calculated to place the tuba in surroundings unlike those in which it usually finds itself.” Notably, the string quartet is “the companion (not accompanying) group” to the tuba. As Baker further explains, “Because of Harvey’s great artistry and sensitivity as well as the vast tonal combinatorial possibilities inherent in this unusual alliance, the string quartet provided the perfect foil.”

Each of the Sonata’s four movements, notes Baker, is “designed to explore a different aspect of the quartet/tuba combination. All four movements make extensive use of ostinato [a repeated musical figure or rhythm], virtuosic writing for tuba and strings, and intense rhythmic activity and drama.”

The first movement is characterized by a “multi-layered rhythmic scheme, extensive use of imitation, multiple stopping, and fragmentation.” Fragmentation of musical materials between the instruments is also the principal technique of the second movement, which draws extensively in terms of “mood, harmony, and note choice on the ‘blues’”, says Baker, with solo tuba introducing a “21st-century” blues at the start. 

The slow and lyrical third movement features the use of stretto (overlapping statements of a theme), as well as “slides, slurs, and sudden changes in volume, mood, and rhythms.” A “virtuosic string passage in stretto”, played “on the bridge” of the instruments, opens the finale, over which tuba soars with the first theme. A rhythmic ostinato in the strings combines with the tuba line for the second theme. Later, there’s a short cello and tuba duet, “in which both instruments engage in double stops—for brass instruments, this very difficult and modern technique is called multiphonics,” Baker clarifies. Following an enigmatic episode, the virtuosic string opening returns, with tuba on the first theme, and leads into “a strongly rhythmic coda” culminating in an ascending tuba line, then ends on a sustained low C.

Program note by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

Artists

  • Curator/Tuba Chris Lee
  • cattroll-684-x2
    Violin Emily Westell
  • Violin Jeffrey Dyrda
  • Viola Jethro Marks
  • Cello Leah Wyber
  • Trumpet Karen Donnelly
  • fred-lacroix-photo-william-meekins-2-e1612898539101
    Piano Frédéric Lacroix
  • Featuring Musicians from the NAC Orchestra