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First of Three albums in BCMS’s “Our Art in Our Time” series
Featuring premiere and reprise live concert recordings of BCMS commissions by Pierre Jalbert, David Rakowski, and Scott Wheeler
Founded by BCMS Artistic Director Marcus Thompson to “actively contribute to the creation of our art in our time,” the BCMS Commissioning Club sustains the historic practice through which the gift of great music is passed to future generations.
Since 2014, one new work has been featured on BCMS’s concert series each season. Many of them, written in response to previous masterpieces, have been heard on other chamber series, inspiring sequels and positive responses.
In honor of its 40th anniversary season in 2022-2023, BCMS committed to professionally capturing the premiere and reprise live concert recording of its commissions through 2025, further fulfilling its mission to make the chamber music artform more accessible to all. This first volume features Pierre Jalbert’s Street Antiphons for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano (2015), David Rakowski’s Entre Nous for Oboe and String Quartet (2016), and Scott Wheeler’s Sextet for Oboe, Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Double Bass and Piano (2022), all performed and recorded at NEC’s Jordan Hall during the 2022-23 season.
Pierre Jalbert: Street Antiphons for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano (2015)
1. Driving, cool, in a groove / 4’14”
2. Reverberant, sustained / 6’10”
3. Timeless, mysterious: Theme and variations / 8’59”
Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet; Alyssa Wang, violin; Raman Ramakrishnan, cello; Max Levinson, piano
David Rakowski: Entre Nous for Oboe and String Quartet (2016)
4. Quick and mercurial / 8’42”
5. Sostenuto, expressive / 10’06”
6. Scherzo. Fast and furious / 8’07”
Peggy Pearson, oboe; Alyssa Wang, violin; Jennifer Frautschi, violin; Marcus Thompson, viola; Raman Ramakrishnan, cello
Scott Wheeler: Sextet for Oboe, Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Double Bass and Piano (2022)
7. The Secret Journey / 4’39”
8. I speak to the birds / 2’33”
9. Urban Nocturne / 3’18”
10. A The Alchemist / 2’39”
11. Proverbs from Purgatory / 3’04”
Peggy Pearson, oboe; Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet; Jennifer Frautschi, violin; Marcus Thompson, viola; Thomas Van Dyck, double bass; Max Levinson, piano
Total Time: 62’36”
… [Jalbert’s Street Antiphons is] grounded in the tonal language and structures of the past, yet willing to extend them into a contemporary rhetoric.
The Boston Globe
Pierre Jalbert’s 2015 Street Antiphons filled the Hall with drive, mystery, reverence and invention. A BCMS (Commissioning Club) gem…it has enjoyed much praise since. Challenging contemporary work such as this expands our understanding, and in the combination of the inspired playing by de Guise-Langlois on both clarinet and bass-clarinet, joined here by superb pianist Max Levinson, and accomplished violinist Alyssa Wang and gifted cellist Ramakrishnan, enlarged our enjoyment as well.… Beckoned by the performers, the composer took to the stage amidst thunderous applause.”
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
[In Rakowski’s Entre Nous] Pearson’s dulcet tones helped serve as guide to the foreign textural landscape that the strings created, fully ascending art to transformation as a separate musical world briefly became conjured in Jordan Hall.
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
“[The Sextet’s] five short movements conveyed a wide range of tonal expression, sometimes with Coplandesque treble harmony, elsewhere with grumbling and gritty low-register bounces, and a fondness for abrupt, dangling cadences…. Wheeler answered the BCMS commission call with varied inspiration and genuine warmth and wit, creating a thoroughly likable addition to the chamber music repertoire.”
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
Wheeler’s style is at once familiar and daring. Like the composer’s operas and songs, his instrumental works reveal a jazz-tinged lyricism, often with a nod to the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde. Yet the Sextet…also incorporates a tasteful pastiche. The five movements, each possessing a poetic title, quotes liberally from Prokofiev’s 1924 Quintet as well as from Wheeler’s 2016 opera, Naga. A poem by Lloyd Schwartz serves as a basis for its final movement.
The work carries an emotional immediacy throughout its seventeen minutes…. The BCMS realized all of the work’s grace and levity, earning sustained applause for the composer and performers.
Boston Classical Review
Wheeler cites numerous origins for the piece, but creates a five-movement work entirely in his own language. Each movement sounded like a miniature fable. The lyrical second wouldn’t leave the brain for hours…. Wheeler’s sextet—oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, bass and piano—used every one of these players to great advantage. Unusual instrumentation? Sure, but we still want to hear it again.
Leonore Overture
Street Antiphons for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano (2015)
Pierre Jalbert (b. 1967)
Pierre Jalbert’s music reflects inspiration from a vast array of sources and has been performed worldwide by esteemed ensembles such as the Boston Symphony, the National Symphony, the Emerson String Quartet, the Borromeo String Quartet, and many more. His 2017 Violin Concerto was premiered by a consortium of three orchestras and soloists: Steven Copes with the Saint Paul Orchestra, Margaret Batjer with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Frank Almond with the Milwaukee Symphony. His many honors include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He studied composition and piano at Oberlin Conservatory, and earned a Ph.D. in Composition at the University of Pennsylvania, where his principal teacher was George Crumb. A co-founder of Musiqa, a Houston-based new music collective, Jalbert currently serves as Professor of Music at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
Street Antiphons was premiered by BCMS on April 19, 2015 at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, MA. Jalbert said the following about the work:
Street Antiphons attempts to present and contrast secular and sacred music. The “secular” music (music of the street) comes in the form of rhythmically driving sections, while the “sacred” music is often lyrical and suspended. The first movement is set up by each instrument entering and adding to a very syncopated groove (with many mixed meter changes). After a clarinet and violin canon-like duo over the rhythmic accompaniment of pizzicato cello and piano, the initial process reverses itself and the instruments exit one by one. The second movement really contains two movements in one—it begins as a lyrical and ethereal slow movement, with the use of many string harmonics, but gradually transitions into a rapid scherzo-like movement, with the use of the bass clarinet. The final movement is a set of variations—the theme is a Gregorian Chant entitled “O Antiphon”. The variations become more and more animated and after the final, extremely disjunct, variation, there is a reprise of music from the first movement, only to dissipate and once again recall the more “sacred” music from the piece.
Entre Nous: Quintet for Oboe and Strings (2016)
David Rakowski (b. 1958)
David Rakowski’s music has been noted for its originality, its explosive high energy, its visceral surface, its unusual and quirky turns, its meticulous attention to detail, and its unfaltering sense of form and proportion. He is Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University where he has taught since 1995. His music has garnered much acclaim, and he has received many prestigious awards including the Rome Prize, the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center, the Barlow Prize, two Fromm Foundation commissions, two Koussevitzky Foundation commissions, a Guggenheim fellowship, and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, for his Persistent Memory and Ten of a Kind (Symphony No. 2). His set of 100 high-energy piano études have enjoyed regular performances worldwide, and he has held multiple residencies in Italy, France, as well as at Indiana University, Ithaca College, University of Utah, the Red Note Music Festival, and many others. Rakowski was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016.
Entre Nous was premiered by BCMS on April 7, 2017 at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, MA. Rakowski said the following about the work:
Entre Nous is cast in a traditional three-movement structure, fast-slow-fast. The first movement begins pizzicato, which speeds up and develops into an antsy fast music where the instruments trade licks like they’re passing around a hot potato. It comes to a suddenly loud close. The second movement is a slow movement designed to highlight oboist Peggy Pearson’s marvelous playing; in it the oboe gets long lines against slow harmony, and, in the middle section, running notes in the strings. The finale is a devilish scherzo that develops entirely out of an opening tutti.
Sextet for Oboe, Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Bass, and Piano (2022)
Scott Wheeler (b. 1952)
Scott Wheeler co-founded and directed Boston’s Dinosaur Annex. He has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, Washington National Opera, the Guggenheim, and Whitesnake Projects. His music has been performed by luminaries such as soprano Renee Fleming, violinist Gil Shaham, and conductor Kent Nagano. Lewis Spratlan, Virgil Thomson and Arthur Berger were among his composition teachers, along with additional studies at Tanglewood under Olivier Messiaen and at Dartington with Peter Maxwell Davies. Currently he serves as Senior Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Emerson College. While his catalogue boasts several large-scale operas, ballets, orchestral and choral works, as well as works for film and theater, his chamber works have been commissioned by National Sawdust Festival, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Shalin Liu, Fenwick Smith, Sharan Leventhal, and many others. Wheeler received the Stoeger Prize for excellence in chamber music from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and served in 2019 as Composer in Residence for the Chamber Music Conference of the East.
The Sextet was premiered by BCMS on October 2, 2023 at Jordan Hall, Boston, MA. Wheeler said the following about the work:
My Sextet began with my fascination for the 1924 Quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and contrabass by Serge Prokofiev. Originally written for a Paris ballet called Trapèze by choreographer Boris Georgevich Romanov, Prokofiev’s Quintet is a gem combining aspects of Russian folk music and French modernism. I thought if I added piano to this combination I could create an unusual set of musical colors that would be both entertaining and substantial, suitable for this fortieth anniversary season of the Boston Chamber Music Society.
The first movement of my sextet, “The Secret Journey,” includes a couple brief quotes from the Prokofiev quintet, along with echoes of a mysterious march from my opera Naga. The second movement is a scherzo, drawing on my setting of the poem “Readings” by Kathryn Levy. “I speak to the birds” is the first line of her wonderful poem. “Urban Nocturne” features the clarinet, pizzicato bass and piano. “The Alchemist” derives its title from a work I am currently developing with Doug Fitch and Stephen Greco, exploring aspects of the alchemist Paracelsus. This movement serves as an intermezzo, with solos for the contrabass and oboe. The title “Proverbs from Purgatory” is from the poet Lloyd Schwartz, using the basic structure of the music I wrote for my setting of Lloyd’s strange and delightful poem. Like the poem, this finale could be considered a dark comedy.
We wish to express special gratitude to the sponsors of this recording project. Without each of these patrons the project would not be possible.
Constantine Alexander and Linda Reinfeld • Jeffrey S. Berman and Jan Walker • Anselm C. Blumer and Dorothy C. Buck • Pamela and Lee Bromberg • Cynthia A. Clark and Willard McGraw • Marjorie B. and Martin Cohn • David Friend and Margaret Shepherd • John and Ellen Harris • Tom and Kate Kush • Marc Maxwell • Donald and Marilyn Malpass • The estate of Dr. Irene A. Nichols • The Theodore and Jane Norman Fund for Faculty Research and Creative Projects of Brandeis University • Bill and Kathleen Rousseau • Steven and Susan Sewall • Ellen and Jay Sklar
Recorded on October 2, 2022 (Wheeler), January 15 (Jalbert) and February 26, 2023 (Rakowski) at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Producer: Marcus Thompson
Recording engineer: Antonio Oliart Ros
Score reader and assistant editor: Heather Braun
Design and production manager: Wen Huang
Project assistant: Melany Piech
