Da Capo Chamber Players

1973

Chamber Music

Competition Winner

Allen Blustine, clarinet

Helen Harbison, cello

Joel Lester, violin

Patricia Spencer, flute

Joan Tower, piano

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The da capo chamber players were a winner of the 1973 Naumburg Chamber Music competition. Founded in 1970, the ensemble commissioned more than 100 works from composers including Joan Tower, John Harbison, Chinary Ung, George Perle, Shulamit Ran, Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, Martin Bresnick and David Lang among others.

The ensemble is a five-member "Pierrot" ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano). Da capo has been in residence at Bard College since 1982. They have released recordings on labels including New World, CRI, Innova and Bridge. NPR named the ensemble's recording, Chamber Music of Chinary Ung (Bridge Records) as one of the five Best Contemporary CDs of the Year (2010).

As part of their Naumburg prize, the da capo chamber players were awarded two commissions, Arie Da Capo by Milton Babbitt and Riding the Wind I by Harvey Sollberger, (a co-commission with the New York State Council on the Arts). Both works received their world premieres on da capo's Naumburg concert on April 25, 1974 in Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center.

Naumburg Concert, April 25, 1974, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

da capo chamber players, 1973 Chamber Music Award

Allen Blustine, clarinet; Helen Harbison, cello; Joel Lester, violin; Patricia Spencer, flute; Joan Tower, piano

Program

Mario Davidovsky: Chacona (1972)

Milton Babbitt: Arie Da Capo, World premiere, Naumburg commission

George Crumb: Eleven Echoes of Autumn (1965)

Harvey Sollberger: Riding the Wind I, World premiere, Naumburg commission

Arnold Schoenberg: Kammersymphonie, Op. 9 (1906)

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Program notes for Babbitt and Sollberger

Arie Da Capo was composed by Milton Babbitt in 1973. He wrote the work "as a grateful dedication to the Da Capo Chamber Players" and designed it to incorporate an "aria" for each of the five Da Capo instruments, each with its own transformations and reorientations - in Babbitt's vocabulary - according to its connections with the other four movements. The result is quintessential Babbitt. It is a dense and difficult work; it requires virtuosic musicians; it expects and exacts alert attentiveness from its audience. And then it offers lovely rewards; it is an entrance into a fully developed and complex world of musical relationships, each glimpsed and explored in small, demanding bursts.

Riding the Wind I was the outgrowth of a period of extensive research into the cataloguing and application of that whole new range of sound resources for the flute that came to be known as extended techniques. The work was composed for Da Capo Chamber Players - particularly for Patricia Spencer.

The title is derived from the writings of an ancient Chinese philosopher, Lieh Tzu, who in the end, ecstacy attained, cannot tell whether he is riding on the wind or the wind is riding on him. Thus, the work's opening, with its preponderance of extended techniques, strikes as kind of "music of nature" - what the ear lying at the foot of an abandoned pasture in Upstate New York in early autumn might hear; it's center - more the work of human artifice; and the conclusion, working back to extended techniques, finally comes to test on that most vulnerable of human sounds, that of breathing, of the sleeper trustingly at rest.

Early critical acclaim:

"The five members of the Da Capo group played each work with technical expertise and sympathetic immersion in the idiom. There is necessarily a very short performance tradition behind this music but these excellent musicians made it sound easy and natural." The New York Times

"The superb ensemble work and enthusiasm that this group of instrumentalists achieves make it a particularly effective proponent of contemporary music."

- Contemporary Music Newsletter

"The Da Capo Players played newer works with skill and apparent conviction, and tore into the Schoenberg with a winning rapport." - The New York Times

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