Carnegie Hall Premieres series continues with Oct. 9 concert

Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR)

Another group of brilliant young musicians from The Academy will be in residence at Skidmore College Oct. 7-10, continuing the "Carnegie Hall Premieres" series established in 2007.

The Academy is a program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. The two-year fellowship program provides extensive performance opportunities and intensive music education training for young musicians, mostly post-master's level students. Musicians perform as Ensemble ACJW, the ensemble coming together in different sizes and configurations, depending on the particular music being played.

Once each academic semester a group of the musicians travels to Skidmore to present workshops and to perform in concert.

On Friday, Oct. 9, in Filene Recital Hall, Ensemble ACJW will give the upstate premiere of "Five Chairs and One Table," for woodwind quintet, a Carnegie Hall commission by Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR).

Also on the program will be Dvorák's Piano Quartet No. 2 in e-flat Major, Op. 87; and Saint-Saëns' popular "Carnival of the Animals."

The 8 p.m. concert will be preceded at 7 p.m. by a conversation with Ensemble musicians and Roumain, hosted by Skidmore Professor of Music Charles M. Joseph. Admission is free and open to the public.

The same musicians will repeat the program at 7:30 p.m.  Tuesday, Oct. 13, in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.

An innovative composer, performer, violinist and bandleader, Haitian-American artist Roumain melds his classical music roots with his own cultural references and imagination.

His works range from orchestral scores and chamber music pieces to music for film, theater, modern dance and electronica. One of his recent orchestral works was "Darwin's Meditation for the People of Lincoln," an evening-length work commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a setting of a pocket play by Daniel Beaty. Roumain studied music as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music, and completed his master's and doctorate degrees at the University of Michigan under Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom.

"Five Chairs and One Table" for woodwind quintet was written by Roumain at the suggestion of singer Jessye Norman for Carnegie Hall's  "Honor!" festival celebrating the African-American cultural legacy in March, and was performed by the Imani Winds.

The composer's notes say he wanted the work to be theatrical, in response to Norman's career, and that he also wanted to create brief musical portraits of the South African singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba, folk singer Odetta, and the daughters of Barack and Michelle Obama, Malia and Sasha.

"In all of this," wrote Roumain, "Five Chairs and One Table" hopes to speak to a brief history of African – and African-American – song and struggle. I wanted to nudge the boundaries of what a traditional woodwind quintet usually performs by using a combination of traditional, numerical, prose-based, and graphic notation."

Tags: charles joseph, the academy, daniel bernard roumain, ensemble acjw