"Afterword...had a broadly nostalgic and elegiac feeling, and I admired his ability to marry pain and beauty in music."
The concert included the premiere of a new piano concerto by American composer Chris Rogerson and works by French composers Francis Poulenc and Ernest Chausson.
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The newest piece on the program was an arrangement of a 2014 trio for piano, violin, and cello. Chris Rogerson's 'A Fish Will Rise' takes its title from a sentence in the trout fishing classic, 'A River Runs Through It.' It’s essentially a stream of bright music interrupted by flashes of drama.
The chamber-music repertoire for flute and clarinet is so scant you had to take what you were given. Poulenc's late-period sonatas for flute and clarinet are unquestionably first-class. However, Shostakovich's Four Waltzes weren't really worth anybody's time, showing the composer being intentionally trivial without subversive subtext. Paul Schoenfield is always a welcome musical handful, with his Sonatina for Flute, Clarinet, and Piano presenting sort of a warp-speed panorama of American popular music and dance styles as though it's the most natural thing in the world. The big discovery was Chris Rogerson,
The program ended with the New York premiere of “Summer Night Music,” for piano quartet, by another accomplished young composer, Chris Rogerson.
In the inaugural concert of the 2014-15 Spokane Symphony season on Saturday at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, music director Eckart Preu wasted no time in demonstrating how he and the orchestra came to win a prestigious award for adventurous programming. Rather than choosing to open with a cheerful overture by Rossini, Preu offered a serious recent work, “Noble Pond,” a 2009 composition by the gifted American composer Chris Rogerson.
Lembit Beecher, David Biedenbender, Daniel J. Choi and Chris Rogerson will be the first artists showcased through the program. They were chosen from an international pool of 28 student and early career applicants.
Chris Rogerson’s 'Once' bared a naturally and colorfully eclectic voice. These, and three other works on the program, two commissioned by Dinosaur Annex, mostly received high gear performances.
Chris Rogerson's 'Once,' a suite for violin and piano, presented a rather old-fashioned sense of lyric melody and emotional contrast within a traditional sequence of slow-fast-slow-fast movements. Bergman and violinist Gabriela Diaz employed an expressive but light touch that made the melody soar and the chromatic harmonies bite.
So, it was with 'Fishing,' Chris Rogerson’s chamber setting of Joan Hutton Landis’s narrative poem performed by Orchestra 2001 at Swarthmore’s Lang Concert Hall.
The program’s second premiere, Chris Rogerson's 'Fishing,' sets a poem by Joan Hutton Landis that depicts a very different aspect of family life.
I think it's really neat you have this musical relationship with your Curtis colleague Chris Rogerson, and I wondered if you could tell me how that started and how you've worked together with this composer.
Through its invaluable First Music program, the New York Youth Symphony has commissioned works from more than 100 emerging composers since 1984. The orchestra’s concert on Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall brought the premiere of “That Blue Repair,” a kind of mini-concerto by Chris Rogerson.
And, at the ripe old age of 23, composer Chris Rogerson premiered his piece, 'Once,' inspired by Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir, The Long Goodbye.'
It also examined the future possibilities of a young composer, Chris Rogerson.
Of the three student works, Chris Rogerson's "Four Autumn Landscapes" (2007) was the most overtly beautiful, a musical postcard about seasonal change, from autumn to winter.
His performance Saturday was deeply satisfying. It was the culmination of a program that tended toward gravity, although there were moments of light. Opening the program was “A Prayer for Spring,” by the young Amherst composer Chris Rogerson, currently a student at the Curtis Institute. Bravo to him for creating a piece people could enjoy on first hearing. This five-minute piece charmed.
