Pianist Kimi Kawashima is well known to NOVA Chamber Music Series audiences as a frequent guest artist and now she has taken on a larger role, as the series’ new artistic director. She succeeds the members of the Fry Street Quartet, who will continue curating the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) Gallery Series as artist partners and quartet-in-residence. Kawashima is keeping NOVA’s programming brand which astutely juxtaposes music from the old and new eras with surprising insights about artistic connections between them. Her husband, pianist Jason Hardink, fortified the programming brand during his tenure at NOVA.
Kawashima has opened a new and exciting chapter for the series, which is approaching its 50th anniversary in a couple of seasons. Both openers for this season’s Libby Gardner Hall subscription series and the UMFA Gallery Series drew great audience response, in ticket sales and at the performances. At the UMFA G.W. Anderson Family Great Hall concert on Sept. 15, the husband-and-wife duo of violinists Alex and Aubrey Woods delivered a blockbuster of a season opener that would have been the envy of programmers in any major classical music organization. It was a well-chosen and ingeniously instructive selection of music for this concert. The first half was dedicated to trio sonatas by the Big Three of the Baroque Era — Bach, Vivaldi and Handel— performed on period instruments and including the basso continuo of harpsichord and cello. The second half was equally gratifying, with a resplendent reading of Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne (drawn from the composer’s score for Pulcinella) and the Utah premiere of Kenji Bunch’s Apocryphal Dances, scored for string quartet.
With one of the largest audiences in recent memory, the Libby Gardner Series opened on Oct. 13 with music featuring three Polish composers: Chopin; Grażyna Bacewicz Biernacka, a 20th century composer and violinist who died in 1959, and Marta Ptaszynska, a widely acclaimed contemporary composer who is also a virtuoso percussionist. Flanking two pieces by Chopin, not composed for solo piano, were two chamber ensemble works by these women composers, one of them still active in the current century. And, it was noteworthy that Kawashima performed piano on both contemporary pieces, while her husband, pianist Jason Hardink, a former NOVA artistic director, accompanied the pair of Chopin pieces.
That first concert was an excellent indicator of what the remainder of the season will bring. Besides a couple of world premieres and a nice bounty of Utah premieres, the season lineup speaks sincerely to NOVA’s commitment to representation matters in the arts, especially in the number of works by Asian-American composers. In tandem, Kawashima has scored one of the season’s most anticipated offerings with a concert highlighting works by Jessie Montgomery, who won the Grammy for best contemporary classical composition this year. Montgomery, who is also a violinist, will perform.
It has been just three decades since Asian composers — including Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Chinary Ung, Bright Sheng, Zhou Long and Bun-Ching Lam, among others — have emerged. However, this season’s NOVA slate will give audiences a deeper look into the latest generation of composers who have brought new voices to the international music community in portfolios and honors that are as extensive as what many Asian and Asian-American musicians have achieved. Continuing a programming strategy that has kept NOVA at the top of the chamber music world in Utah, Kawashima is setting up fresh conversations by tying familiar composers of the classical tradition to their contemporary counterparts so audiences can appreciate and comprehend the weight of history occurring in recent music developments. In every instance, the contemporary works featured this season offer ingenious takes on inspirational themes, motifs, forms and harmonic structures that respond in parallel to their older counterparts. Put simply, audiences will experience new ways of appreciating how East meets West, in the canon of contemporary music.
The remainder of the season will feature the following:
The subject of musical marriages falls naturally into Kawashima’s bailiwick, with the Nov. 10 concert featuring four works by two couples: Clara and Robert Schumann and Wang Lu and Anthony Cheung. Cheung and Wang, who are on the music faculty at Brown University, have in their respective careers garnered many honors and high-profile attention for their compositions. Featured will be the Utah premieres of Cheung’s Flyway Detour (2006), scored for violin, cello and piano, and Wang’s Like Clockwork (2020), scored for violin, viola, cello, percussion and piano (which will feature Kawashima at the keyboard).
Wang Lu describes her music as reflecting “a very natural identification with influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music and freely improvised practices, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.” Along with an extensive portfolio of international performances of her music, Wang has received the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond award from American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020), the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (Spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Barlow Foundation, New Music USA and the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University.
Cheung’s international reputation is equally extensive. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles Ives Fellowship and Scholarship) and ASCAP, and first prize in the Sixth International Dutilleux Competition (2008), as well as a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2012). He has also received commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm foundations. For the introduction to the composer’s Roundabouts portrait disc, music critic summarized Cheung’s musical language: “This is a composer who is interested in how a compact idea, a spin of a few notes, will open up harmonic directions going slantwise to any norm. The idea may involve pitches from inside the cracks in the piano keyboard – blue notes and those of many other colours – or regular tones in irregular formations. Music is then made by letting the idea range – a principle that may be drawn as much from a jazz improvisation as from an intricately worked composition by any of the late twentieth-century masters… Cheung’s is music of spectacular sound – of brilliantly imagined solos and gatherings – but it is also music of spectacular time. Harmony being for this composer a condition of movement, we feel ourselves to be travelling through time’s spaces: its zooms and its lulls, its turns and its stallings. The trip is never ordinary.”
Cheung’s music has been programmed at international festivals such as Ultraschall (Berlin), Cresc. Biennale (Frankfurt), Présences (Paris), impuls (Graz), Wittener Tage, Ojai, TIME:SPANS (NYC), Wien Modern, Tanglewood, Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Transit (Leuven), Heidelberger Frühling, Helsinki Festival and Musica Nova Helsinki, Centre Acanthes, Musica (Strasbourg), and Nuova Consonanza (Rome).
Cementing the theme of musical marriages, the second half of the concert will feature works from the Schumanns: Three Romances for Violin and Piano by Clara and Liederkreis, op. 39, a set of 12 songs that Robert composed and reflect the bond he had with Clara.
The 2025 portion of the Libby Gardner Hall subscription series will open with Stops and Starts: Bach Cantatas and Organ Works on Jan. 12, which will delight NOVA audience members who have been waiting patiently for the hall’s organ to fill the space with its glorious sounds. Haruhito Miyagi, who is on The University of Utah music faculty and performed in the September opener of NOVA’s Gallery Series, will perform Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C major, BWV 545 , followed by a world premiere of his Transfigured Permutation for organ. He also will perform on the harpsichord for the two Bach cantatas in the concert: Ich habe genung, BWV 82 (I Have Enough) and the Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, BWV 202 (Wedding Cantata).
Kawashima also has selected an ideal contemporary companion piece to Bach’s Wedding Cantata: Commitment Bed (2015) by Viet Cuong, which will feature the Utah Symphony’s Fremont String Quartet. An internationally renowned composer, Cuong “enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. His notable works thus include concerti for tuba and dueling oboes, percussion quartets utilizing wine glasses and sandpaper, and pieces for double reed sextet, cello octet, and solo snare drum. This eclecticism extends to the variety of musical groups he writes for, and he has worked closely with ensembles ranging from middle school bands to Grammy-winning orchestras and chamber ensembles.” A member of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas music faculty, he is Pacific Symphony’s current composer-in-residence, following three years as California Symphony’s Young American composer-in-residence.
Kawashima strikes a major coup in securing Grammy-Award-winning composer Jessie Montgomery, not only for her music but also her performance as a violinist on the March 9 concert. She won the Grammy for best contemporary classical composition earlier this year, with Rounds, a 15-minute work for piano and strings, featuring pianist Awadagin Pratt. Rounds received its Utah premiere last December by the Utah Symphony.
Among the works on the concert will be Musings for two violins (2023), which the composer will perform with fellow violinist Laura Ha. The two violinists also will be featured in selections from Bartók’s 44 Violin Duos. Another Montgomery-Bartók pairing will feature her Rhapsody for solo viola (2021), which will be performed by violist JT Posadas, and Bartók’s Rhapsody for violin and piano.
The concert is packed with little gems. It will open with Montgomery’s D Major Jam (2021), a short work for student musicians which will feature the composer and musicians from Sistema Utah. Other Montgomery works include Duo for violin and cello (2015), featuring Ha on violin and Walter Haman on cello and Source Code (2020), with Fry Street Quartet performing its Utah premiere. As Montgomery explains in a note at her website, she begins with transcriptions “re-interpreting gestures, sentences, and musical syntax (the bare bones of rhythm and inflection) by choreographer Alvin Ailey, poets Langston Hughes and Rita Dove, and the great jazz songstress Ella Fitzgerald into musical sentences and tone paintings.” From there, Montgomery returned to the Black spiritual as the coalescing force. The spiritual is a significant part of the DNA of black folk music, and subsequently most (arguably all) American pop music forms that have developed to the present day,” she wrote. “This one-movement work is a kind of dirge, which centers on a melody based on syntax derived from black spirituals. The melody is continuous and cycles through like a gene strand with which all other textures play.”
A bonus on the March 9 concert will be the Utah premiere of Fractured Water (2019) by Shawn Okpebholo, scored for flute, cello and piano. A member of the Blacknificent 7, a composer’s collective that Montgomery created, Okpebholo should be a familiar name to recent NOVA concertgoers. In March, flutist Mercedes Smith gave a magnificent Utah premiere of his On a Poem by Miho Nonaka: Harvard Square.
Closing this season’s Libby Gardner Hall series on May 4 will be American Gamelan: Lou Harrison’s Violin Concerto with Percussion Orchestra. Harrison’s 1959 violin concerto will feature Madeline Adkins, Utah Symphony’s concertmaster, and members of the Symphony’s percussion section. The effect of the gamelan ensemble is balanced against “the violin [which], stands out in high relief as intensely melodic—although it is often rhythmic and colouristic as well,” as Eric Salzman described in notes for a Hyperion Records release, “with the highly original sound of the double bass laid on its back with the strings hit on both sides of the bridge, creating fascinating ostinati especially in the first Allegro. ‘East meets West’ is very much the theme of this musical discourse.”
The rest of the concert will complement the Harrison ensemble textures and effects. A fan of works with prepared piano, Kawashima will perform Christopher Cerrone’s Don’t Look Down (2020), which will be accompanied by percussion quartet. Completing this imaginative slate will be two chamber music gems from the French canon: Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp and Fauré’s Sicilienne for Flute and Harp.
For the second Gallery Series concert this season at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Fry Street Quartet will feature the theme of The Great Fugue with Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op.20 No.4 and, of course, Beethoven’s Quartet in B-flat, Op.130. The ensemble also will premiere a short work by Hitomi Oba, who is on the faculty at University of California-Los Angeles directing several progressive and exploratory jazz ensembles, teaching jazz saxophone lessons, and developing and teaching multi-genre music theory curricula. A saxophonist, she has written for and performed in various jazz and classical new music settings, including commissions by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series and the Seattle Symphony’s chamber series, and as a member of Kenny Burrell’s Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited and the Jon Jangtet. In addition to leading her own ensembles, ranging from trios to big band, Oba is a co-founder of the new music collective, LA Signal Lab, premiering and recording stylistically diverse new music including a collaborative, multi-genre cantata.
For tickets and more information, see the NOVA Chamber Music Series website.