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June 4, 2024

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Ars Nova presents new works in “Shared Visions” 

Composers set poems that were in turn inspired by visual artworks

By Peter Alexander June 4 at 11:20 a.m.

Boulder’s Ars Nova Singers will present “Shared Visions,” a unique concert bringing together works by Colorado visual artists, poets and composers, this coming weekend.

Violinist Alex Gonzalez

Performances will be Friday in Longmont, Saturday in Denver and Sunday in Boulder (June  7, 8 and 9; details below). They will be led by Tom Morgan, Ars Nova’s music director, and assistant conductor Elizabeth Swanson. Violinist Alex Gonzalez from the CU, Boulder music faculty will be the featured soloist, playing the violin solo in a choral version of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending and a solo part in one of the new pieces.

The new works to be presented this year are by composers Raul Dominguez, Leigha Amick, Paul Fowler, and Morgan.  In addition to those new works, Ars Nova will perform a set of choral works by composers ranging from Baroque-era master J.S. Bach to current CU Boulder composition faculty member Annika K. Socolofsky. 

Ars Nova has presented “Shared Visions” programs twice before, in 2016 and 2019. For each occasion, Ars Nova invited Colorado visual artists to offer works that are placed in an online gallery, which this year featured 24 visual artworks. Then, selected poets are invited to write new poems based on one or more of the visual artworks. The poems are then collected into an anthology, which this year contained 44 poems. 

In the final step, three invited composers and Morgan have the opportunity to select a poem from the anthology to set to music. Morgan always waits until the other composers have made their selections, so that he can make sure that the program has a variety of visual art works and poems.

Tom Morgan

Morgan said Ars Nova originally planned to present “Shared Visions” every three years, as they did in 2016 and 2019. However, COVID and the time required to put together the program—selecting artists and giving both the poets and the composers time to create new works—made that impractical. This time it was five years, and in future he plans to hold the event every four years.

He says the time and effort are definitely worthwhile. “The energy of getting the artists together is just really gratifying to see what happens,” he says. “Several of these people have gone on to work together in other ways.”

The composer Paul Fowler returns to the “Shared Visions” program. His “Yet Another Layer” was selected for the 2016 program, and will be repeated on Ars Nova’s general program this year. Leigha Amick may be familiar to Boulder audiences as well. A Boulder native and currently a graduate student at the Curtis Institute of Music, she won the 2022 “Resound Boulder” composition competition and her winning score, Gossamer Depths, was performed by the Boulder Philharmonic in 2023.

The 2024 “Shared Visions” performances will open with “The Rings of Your Heart” by Raul Dominguez. The text is “Holding Your Heart” by Rosemarry Wahtola Tromer, which opens with the lines “I want to trace the rings of your heart/the way I would trace tree rings—/not to count them/but to honor each season of you.” 

“Fractions” by Chris DeKnikker

The poem was inspired by perhaps the most unusual artwork selected this year, “Fractions” by woodworker Chris DeKnikker. Morgan saw his work at the Arvada Center and found it so striking that he thought it would be interesting to include for “Shared Visions.” “[DeKnikker’s] ecstatic,” he says. “As a woodworker, you never imagine that your work is going to end up being sung by 40 people! You don’t imagine the that chain of inspiration is going to happen, so he’s been very enthusiastic.”

Amick’s “Shattering Love” is based on a poem of the same name by nonbinary and transgender writer and activist Hayden Dansky. “I know nothing/more of love/than you,” they wrote. “I’ve felt its grip like you have.” The inspiration was “amethyst,” a colorful canvas by multimedia artist and performer Michiko Theurer, who is currently living and working in Boulder while completing a PhD in musicology at Stanford.

“amethyst” by Michiko Theurer

Morgan’s “Glimmer of Sun” includes a violin part for Gonzalez. “He’s a featured element in the piece that I wrote,” Morgan says. “That made it fun for me to write a violin part at that level.” The text by Erin Robertson is titled “Burning it Off” and describes the search for a glimmer of sun through a canopy of clouds, as depicted in Margaret Josey-Parker’s three-dimensional glazed clay piece “Riding It Out.”

The final new piece will be “Freedom Night” by Paul Fowler, based on a poem by Jennifer Gurney and a photograph by Raj Manickam, all with the same title. Inspired by Manickam’s dark and mysterious photo, Gurney wrote, “I am yearning/To be filled to the brim with/Effortless contentment.”

Both Gurney’s poem and Fowler’s score reflect Manickam’s aim to take more than snapshots. “I capture everything from sudden moments to everyday occurrences and translate them into fine yet relatable art,” he has written. “I strive to shine a light on the reality of the human experience through composition and honest storytelling.”

The original art works and the full text of the poems they inspired an be seen on Ars Nova’s Web page.

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“FRUITION: Shared Visions”
Ars Nova Singers, Tom Morgan and Elizabeth Swanson, conductors
With Alex Gonzales, violin

  • Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending, arr. Paul Drayton
  • Paul Fowler “Yet Another Layer” (from Shared Visions 2016)
  • Eriks Esenvalds: “Trees” 
  • Annika K. Socolofsky: “Like a diamond”
  • Harry Dixon Loes: “This little light of mine,” arr. Moses Hogan,
  • Knut Nystedt: “Immortal Bach” (based on music by J.S. Bach)
  • J.S. Bach: Allemande from Partita No. 2 for solo violin
  • Hugo Alfven: “Aftonen” (Ensemble Singers)
  • Paul Mealor: “Upon a Bank” (Ensemble Singers)

SHARED VISIONS 2024:

  • Raul Dominguez: “The Rings of Your Heart”
    Visual Artist: Chris DeKnikker, “Fractions”
    Poet: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Holding Your Heart”
  • Leigha Amick: “Shattering Love”
    Visual Artist: Michiko Theurer, “amethyst”
    Poet: Hayden Dansky, “Shattering Love”
  • Tom Morgan: “A Glimmer of Sun” (with violin)
    Visual Artist: Margaret Josey-Parker, “Riding It Out”
    Poet: Erin Robertson, “Burning It Off”
  • Paul Fowler: “Freedom Night”
    Visual Artist: Raj Manickam, “Freedom Night”
    Poet: Jennifer Gurney, “Freedom Night

7:30 p.m. Friday, June 7, Longmont Museum, Longmont
7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 8, Central Presbyterian Church, 1600 Sherman St., Denver
7 p.m. Sunday, June 9, Dairy Arts Center, Boulder

TICKETS

CORRECTIONS: Typo corrected June 4. Corrected June 6: the name of Chris DeKnikker’s wood sculpture is “Fractions”; the original story incorrectly stated that the title was “The Rings of Your Heart.” And EDEN-Colorado students will not be participating in the performances listed here.

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April 20, 2023

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Boulder Phil boldly goes to Orion Nebula for Saturday’s concert

Program centers on piano-and-orchestra works by Ravel, Rachmaninoff, with pianist Angela Cheng

By Peter Alexander April 20 at 5:10 p.m.

Conductor Michael Butterman, pianist Angela Cheng and the Boulder Philharmonic will visit France and Russia for their concert Saturday (7 p.m. April 22 in Macky Auditorium; details below).

Image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the sharpest view ever taken of the Orion Nebula, including more than 3,000 stars of various sizes. Image from 2006.

Those are the native countries of composers Ravel and Rachmaninoff, whose works are featured. But if you add in the subjects of the other programmed works by Tchaikovsky and Boulder native Leigha Amick, the itinerary expands to Shakespeare’s Verona and the Orion Nebula as seen by the Hubble telescope.

The concert will open with the world premiere of Amick’s Gossamer Depths, the 2022 winner of the “Resound Boulder” composition competition. Now a graduate student at the Curtis Institute, Amick grew up in Boulder, where she began her composition studies with CU faculty member Daniel Kellogg. One of her earlier pieces was played at a Boulder Phil Discovery Concert when she was still in high school.

Gossamer Depths was inspired by a photo taken from the Hubble Telescope. “I saw that and thought it needed to be depicted in an orchestra setting,” Amick says. Her music portrays different elements that can easily be seen in the photo: “The different (harmonic) layers of the piece represent the different layers of color within the photograph,” she says.

Boulder native and composer Leigha Amick

On top of those layers of chords that move independently of one another, Amick explains, “swirls of dust and space gasses are represented by 16th-note runs throughout the orchestra. And then there are stars on top of all this, and those are accented notes, mostly in winds, brass and percussion.”

Amick’s evocative score will be followed by two separate piano solo works with orchestra, played by Angela Cheng: first Ravel’s Concerto in G major before intermission, and then Rachmaninoff’s popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini opening the second half. Although both works were written around 1930, Ravel’s restrained, jazz-influenced concerto contrasts strongly with Rachmaninoff’s deeply romantic Rhapsody.

Angela Cheng

“They are such different kinds of music—different sonorities, different kinds of touch required of pianists,” Cheng says. “The one similarity is the orchestra is fully an equal partner. In the Ravel Concerto, the orchestra part is just as difficult for some of the wind instruments—it’s almost like concerto for orchestra and Piano. And the same thing with the Rachmaninoff, you really feel like the orchestra is a full partner.

“Of course the sound that needs to come out of the piano is completely different—the (Ravel Concerto) is much lighter, much more transparent. In the Rachmaninoff, the lushness, the richness of the sonorities in the writing and what is required of the pianist, is great in the piano.”

Beyond the differences in playing technique, Cheng struggles to find just the right metaphor to describe the two pieces. Clearly she loves both, each in its own way. “I don’t know very much about wine, but what I know, how whites can be a little bit lighter, maybe that’s Ravel? And a richer red for the Rachmaninoff.

“Or you could compare it to food, even Chinese cooking: Cantonese, where there’s a lot of steaming, lightness, fresh vegetables, would be the Ravel. Rachmaninoff has heavier sauces, maybe northern cooking where it’s richer. Something like that, but they’re both delicious.”

Michael Butterman. Photo by Jiah Kyun

The Rhapsody is a series of variations on a theme used by the violin virtuoso Paganini for his own set of challenging variations in his Caprice No. 24 for solo violin. A simple harmonic outline, it is so well suited for creating variations that dozens of composers have used the same framework for their own variations. 

The most familiar of Rachmaninoff’s variations is No. 18, in which the melodic outline is inverted—turned upside down—and turned into a dreamy, Romantic tune out of character with the dramatic nature of other parts of the score. “It seems to come from a completely different world than the rest,” Butterman says. “It’s marvelous!”

The combination and contrast of Ravel and Rachmaninoff was the starting point of the program, Butterman says. “Originally this was going to be a French and Russian thing,” he says. “I have always thought (there were) color similarities between French and Russian music.”

The concert will conclude with Tchaikovsky’s well known Romeo and Juliet: Fantasy-Overture, which Butterman describes as “an example of music that has made its way into the popular awareness of filmmakers and more. I find it a really effective piece that doesn’t attempt to trace the narrative arc, but gives you the emotional arc of the play, from tragedy, of course, to the overwhelming sense of being head over heels in love. You can go through this whole gamut of emotions in 20 minutes.

“It’s marvelous, and people will love it and I think it pairs well with the Rachmaninoff.”

The concert will be dedicated to the memory of violist Megan Edrington, a member of the Boulder Philharmonic who died March 16 at the age of 43.

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Boulder Philharmonic, Michael Butterman, conductor 
With Angela Cheng, piano

Concert dedicated in loving memory of Megan Edrington (1979–2023)

Leigha Amick: Gossamer Depths (World premiere; Resound Boulder Commission)
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G
Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet: Fantasy-Overture

7 p.m. Saturday, April 22
Macky Auditorium

TICKETS

CORRECTIONS: The original post was incorrectly dated April 22. April 22 is the date of the concert, not of the blog post. April 20 is the correct date.
The correct title of Leigha Amick’s piece is Gossamer Depths. And earlier version of this story misstated the title as Gossamer Depth.