Chamber Music by Local Composers to be Premiered at Simon's Rock
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GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — A program of chamber music for clarinet, strings, and piano will feature first performances by two Berkshire County composers on Sunday, March 31, at 3:00 p.m. in Kellogg Music Center on the campus of Bard College at Simon's Rock as part of the South Berkshire Concert Series.
Admission to the concert is free of charge.
"To a Child Dancing in the Wind" by Alice Spatz is inspired by the poem of the same title by William Butler Yeats, whose lines are read at the start of each movement. "Klezmer-ish" by Larry Wallach offers personal impressions of this folk-and-jazz form of Jewish music, and features a virtuosic role for the clarinet. Two classics of earlier 20th century music round out the program: a playful "Suite" for clarinet, violin, and piano by Darius Milhaud, and the "Fourth Violin Sonata" of Charles Ives, subtitled "Children's Day at the Camp Meeting," which incorporates nineteenth-century Sunday-school hymns. The performers include clarinetist Sangwon Lee, violinist Ronald Gorevic, violist James Berlin, cellist Anne Legêne, and pianist Larry Wallach.
Sangwon Lee
Clarinetist Sangwon Lee joined the Hartford Symphony as Principal Clarinet in 2023. He has performed with orchestras all over New England, which include the Boston Philharmonic, Berkshire Opera Festival, Vermont Symphony, Dartmouth Symphony, New Bedford Symphony, Symphony New Hampshire, etc. As a chamber musician, Sangwon has shared the stage with the late Peter Serkin - performing the Beethoven and the Mozart Quintets for Piano with Winds in multiple performances in 2018. He holds a BM in Clarinet Performance and a BA in Economics from the University of Michigan, an MM in Critical, Curatorial, and Performance Studies from Bard College, and a Graduate Diploma from the New England Conservatory. His teachers include Daniel Gilbert and Thomas Martin. As a member of the New Fromm Players, he participated in last summer's Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood.
Ronald Gorevic
Ronald Gorevic has had a long and distinguished career as both a teacher and performer, on both the violin and viola. He is principal violist of the Springfield Symphony and on the faculties of University of Massachusetts and Smith College. As a violist, he has been a member of several well-known string quartets, spanning over twenty years, and covering most of the quartet repertoire. He has performed the Beethoven cycle twice, and has toured throughout the U.S. Germany, Japan, Korea and Australia. He has been heard on radio stations across the U.S., and has also been broadcast on S. German and S. W. German radio, and on the Australian Broadcast network. With pianist Larry Wallach, he has performed complete sonata cycles of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.
James Bergin
James Bergin is a composer, conductor, violist and teacher. His compositions include microtonal and tonal works for chamber ensemble, solo instruments, voice, chorus, piano, and organ. He has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. From 2006 until its closing in 2018, he was the executive director of the Boston Microtonal Society. He co-founded its chamber ensemble NotaRiotous, dedicated to the performance of microtonal music on traditional instruments, which he conducted from 2006-2017. In 2013 he founded CIAO! (Community Intergenerational Action Orchestra), based in Williamstown, MA. and is an Artist/Teacher at Berkshire Children & Families/Kids4Harmony, an El Sistema-inspired intensive youth music program. Since 2016 he has been the music teacher at Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter School in Adams, MA.
Anne Legêne
Anne Legêne performs chamber music regularly on cello and viola da gamba with her husband, pianist and harpsichordist Larry Wallach, with harpsichordist Mariken Palmboom, and with her sister, recorder virtuosa Eva Legêne. Anne has played with numerous ensembles and
soloists in the Northeast. She teaches cello and conducts the chamber orchestra and the Collegium at Bard College at Simon's Rock, and teaches cello and viola da gamba at her home studio in Great Barrington, MA. Anne studied cello with Jean Decroos, principal cellist of the Concertgebouw orchestra, at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands. She earned a Graduate Performance Diploma in Early Music from the Longy School in Cambridge, MA, where she studied viola da gamba with Jane Hershey and baroque cello with Phoebe Carrai.
Larry Wallach
Larry Wallach holds the Livingston Hall Chair in Music at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where he taught for five decades. He is a composer, performer, musicologist, and educator whose interests span the history of Western music up to the present day, with particular focus on baroque and modern repertories. He has published articles about Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms, and as pianist, has performed all the Ives violin sonatas. He was a founding board member of the Berkshire Bach Society. Dr. Wallach's compositions, primarily of chamber music, have been performed across the United States. He has been awarded two "Meet the Composer" grants, and his 1986 composition, "Echoes from Barham Down," won the composition award from the New School of Music in Cambridge MA. He has created works for the Atlantic Sinfonietta, the Da Capo Players, the Housatonic River Festival, the Prometheus Piano Quartet, the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, and the Claflin Hill Symphony. In 2020, his orchestral composition, "Species of Motion," was recorded and released by the Janacek Philharmonic in the Czech Republic for Navona Records, and can be heard on Spotify. It was given its first live performance by The Orchestra Now on March 3 of this year.
