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![Sunday, Feb. 2, 2003 Sioux City Journal Vol. 139 No. 150 • Sioux City, Iowa • METRO EDITION Beethoven performed in seemless fashion during symphony concert By Bruce R. Miller Journal staff writer [REVIEW] At Saturday's Sioux City Symphony concert, pianist Ursula Oppens did what so many guest artists don't. She listened. Throughout Beethoven's Piano Concerto in E-Flat Major, Opus 73, Oppens complemented what the resident musicians did; she didn't just expect them to keep up with her. The result was a seamless performance that must have been as exciting for the orchestra as it was for the audience. Ironically, the piece was one Beethoven wrote after he had lost his hearing. Filled with rapid runs, it could have been a "look at me" turn for the two-time Grammy winner. Instead, Oppens played as if she had been a member of the orchestra for years. Slipping into the stormy duel between the cellos and the violins, she gave the work the understated surprise it needed. In the second movement, she created the piano equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a fluid aria that got Oppens to embrace the piano and dig into the music's very definite structure. She even nodded her head in ways that suggested the fire of the work's creator. Because the orchestra and the guest artist were so well matched, heat seemed to rise from the stage. In truth, the building's thermostat was set a bit high. But the musicians could have melted ice with their performance. Unfortunately, the first ("Overture to Fidelio") and last (Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Opus 92) offerings didn't have as much heat as the centerpiece. The timpanist was challenged on both, but overwhelmed in the former, impressed in the latter. The oboes got a chance to solo in the symphony as well. But this was really a night for strings. In all three selections, the pace was intense. The workout was a good one. While the overture wasn't as memorable as it could have been, it made the concerto all the more special. The symphony, as a result, was a bit of a let-down, even though it asked more of its players and reeked of the familiar. There were sections that have been lifted for film scores, movements that have served as inspiration for others (including Schubert). The play "Amadeus" made much of Mozart's excess ("too many notes, the royal said). But Beethoven insisted every one he put on paper was important. When the symphony was performed in 1813, Mozart's old nemesis Antonio Salieri led the percussion section. It's easy to see the necessity of every melody, counter-melody and beat. The stuff works because it's so intricate. One look at conductor Stephen Rogers Radcliffe revealed as much. He got the best exercise of all. And he enjoyed the perks of a guest performer who wasn't around for the glory. She was there for the workout, too.](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/2003/02/2003_02_02_Sioux_City_Journal_Feb_2_2003-scaled.jpg)
![Gramophone September 2001 Brahms • Franck [N] Brahms Serenade in D, Op 11 (nonet version, reconstr Boustead) Franck Pièces brèves (arr Büsser) The New York Chamber Ensemble / Stephen Rodgers Radcliffe Roméo Records 7209 (55 minutes: DDD) A fresh, lyrical account of Brahms’s Serenade in its near-to-original chamber version Brahms’s Serenade No 1 in D major, Op 11, is known largely in the orchestral guise the composer devised in 1859. But he conceived the piece first as a chamber work for flute, two clarinets, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and bass. The original 1858 version, in a reconstruction by Alan Boustead, is the chief fascination on this disc from the New York Chamber Ensemble under Stephen Rodgers Radcliffe. As Clara Schumann suggested to Brahms, the score claimed a symphonic character that seemed to cry out for more instruments. Even so, the chamber version places the music in intimate relief, pointing out the long-breathed lyricism and lilting personality of the pastoral material. Brahms even provided a hint in the orchestral version that he was fond of the smaller incarnation: the Menuetto I and II in the former are scored for flute, two clarinets, bassoon, first violins, violas and cellos. Boustead’s reconstruction may be speculative, but it honours Brahms’s sound world even as it embraces the music’s charm, poetry and moments when the sun slips behind the clouds. The disc’s other novelties are three of Franck’s Pièces brèves, organ miniatures from the last year of the composer’s life orchestrated by Henri Büsser. They are delightful trifles beautifully cast for winds, brasses, strings and percussion. The New York Chamber Ensemble, which made this recording in November 1992, brings ample polish and expressive depth to both scores. The Brahms, from a studio performance, is rendered fresh as motivated by Radcliffe’s judicious tempos and attention to detail and his players’ vibrant interweaving of lines. Donald Rosenberg](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/2001/09/Grammophone_Sept_2001-scaled.jpg)
![Sioux City Journal April 12, 1998 Orchestra presents monumental symphony in ‘The Resurrection’ By Judi Hazlett Journal staff writer [Review] There may be bigger orchestras performing Mahler in bigger cities, but you’ll have to look long and hard to find any that will beat what happened right here in Sioux City Saturday night. It was a monumental musical event as the Sioux City Symphony Orchestra played a monumental symphony. Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, "The Resurrection," is a work of gigantic imagination and creativity in itself, but performing it takes on superhuman proportions. For the orchestra, its length and challenges loom large. Logistically, to get a huge orchestra on the stage at Eppley Auditorium, plus a huge chorus, two soloists and the conductor takes more than just a bit of doing. But the SCSO did it — with lots of style, class and panache, thanks to music director and conductor Stephen Rogers Radcliffe. He kept everything together in a performance that was sustained and deliberate, through the revealing slow and soft parts as well as the Mahler "tornadoes" that whirl everything up and around, then just as quickly suspend you in the storm’s peaceful center before whirling you around some more. Radcliffe never rushed it, but kept it unfolding and growing right into the magnificent finale of the fifth movement. That’s when the meaning of the word resurrection hits home. Out of Mahler’s beginning first movement — a funeral march — themes move through four more movements with moments depicting earthly bliss, turmoil, despair, mourning and the ever-present specter of death. Finally, Mahler realizes death can be transcendent, which, as Radcliffe pointed out, makes this symphony an appropriate one for the resurrection of Christ celebrated by Christians at Easter. The fourth movement introduces a solo voice but the fifth movement pulls out all the stops. It featured knockout performances by mezzo soprano Lucille Beer and soprano Sara Seglem as soloists. Their voices were added to the smooth, full vocalizations of the combined voices of the Siouxland Master Chorale, directed by Gregory Fuller; the Northwestern College Choir, directed by Kimberly Utke; the Wayne State College Choir, directed by David Lawrence; and the Siouxland Community Chorus, directed by Shirley Neugebauer-Luebke. As good as this all was, the evening really belonged to the orchestra, which underwent a resurrection of its own with Saturday’s performance. The musicians play almost every minute of the two and a half hour work, and work it is. Kudos to the brass and horns, which were brilliant, and the strings for providing the glue. Clearly there are the resources here for big works like this.](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1998/04/1998_04_12_Sioux_City_Journal_April_12_1998-scaled.jpg)
![The Philadelphia Inquirer Saturday, June 14, 1997 Review: Music Cape May Festival adds music to the Shore mix By Daniel Webster INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC Climate, culture, commerce: That was the formula laid out Thursday by New Jersey state arts council spokesman David Miller in his preface to the concert by the Cape May Festival Orchestra. Miller called the festival a model of what can happen when a resort community adds the arts to its traditional mix of sun and beachfront games. The concert, coming midway in a season that begins in late May and runs through June 29, brought around 250 vacationers into Cape May's Convention Hall to sit on folding chairs to hear music by Stravinsky, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Artistic director Stephen Rogers Radcliffe noted that the eight-year-old festival was designed as a boost to the "shoulder season," the early beach weeks before sun and water temperature guarantee full hotels. Radcliffe's musical forces are built around his New York Chamber Ensemble, which performs as an entity and whose players function as principals amid the young professionals who fill out the festival orchestra. In the course of the festival's history, a stage shell has been installed and some reflecting panels placed in the ceiling in an effort to focus the acoustics. More panels would help, but the hall was not designed as a musical setting, and Radcliffe sees adapting to the hall as one of the experiences helpful to his young players. His program balanced popular favorites — Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto — with Stravinsky's tangy Dances Concertantes. He guided the orchestra through Stravinsky's laconic metric scheme with admirable poise. The performance preserved the irony of this gloss on conventional ballet writing while solo players injected dots of sound and theatrical melodic fragments. The winds and brass have an advantage in this hall, but in Stravinsky, their prominence was both welcome and vital. Violinist Corey Cerovsek was soloist in Mendelssohn's concerto. Steering clear of the staginess that has become a kind of norm with this piece, Cerovsek put his considerable virtuosity to musical ends. He shaded phrases, touched lightly some of the sweeps — like those opening the final movement — and found delicacy in writing that often sounds like shouting. The inner colors in his playing of the middle movement drew similar playing from the orchestra in this fresh reading. Audience response led Cerovsek to play a Kreisler nugget in which virtuosity again was bent to the task of mining the musical depth of the piece. After all that, the Beethoven symphony, played by an ensemble similar in size to those of Beethoven's time, sounded young, alert and a little brash. [Photo Caption] Stephen Rogers Radcliffe is the festival's artistic director. [Boxed Text] Cape May Music Festival Stephen Rogers Radcliffe conducts various programs in the festival, at Convention Hall, Cape May, through June 29. Information: 609-884-5404.](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1997/06/1997_06_15_Philadelphia_Inquirer_June_14_1997-scaled.jpg)
![Fanfare The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors March/April 1996 • Volume 19, Number 4 MOORE: Gallantry—A Soap Opera¹. HINDEMITH: Hin und Zurück². MENOTTI: The Telephone³. Stephen Rogers Radcliffe conducting; Jeanne Ommerlé, soprano (Helene²; Lucy³); Margaret Bishop, soprano (Lola¹); Julia Parks, mezzo-soprano (Announcer¹); Carl Halvorson, tenor (Donald¹; Robert²); Robert Osborne, tenor (Orderly²); Richard Holmes, baritone (Dr. Gregg¹; A Doctor²; Ben³); Austin Wright Moore, bass (A Sage³); The New York Chamber Ensemble. ALBANY TROY 173 [DDD]; 60:49. Produced by Dan Kincaid. (Distributed by Albany Music.) This group, with some of the same singers, performed these three comic one-acts at a luncheon concert in New York City’s Bryant Park a few summers back. I thought the trio most amusing, and, checking my watch, thought, "What a neat CD they would make!" Wishes do come true, sometimes. Douglas Moore’s 1957 Gallantry is a loving spoof of television soap operas, complete with commercial interruptions. In the commercials, a slinky lady announcer advertises soap and wax; in the drama itself a surgeon is trying to seduce his nurse-anesthetist, but she loves another, who turns out to be the patient on the operating table. . . . Moore wrote charming music for this blend of farce and sentiment, with a variety of arias and duets. To turn the finale into a quartet, the surgeon joins the announcer in endorsing the products while a love duet is still going on. My favorite exchange goes: > Donald (casually): How is Mrs. Gregg, Doctor? > Lola (stunned): Mrs. Gregg? > Donald: Yes! how is your wife, Doctor? > Dr. Gregg (disdainfully): Put the patient to sleep, Miss Markham. > Hindemith’s 1927 "sketch with music" centers on the cinematic trick of reversing the action: husband suspects wife of infidelity; they argue, and the truth comes out; he shoots her; doctor arrives and takes her away; husband leaps out window. A sage appears and decides to turn it all around. Husband leaps back in; wife is carried back in; bullet returns to gun; argument goes backward to a happy ending. This performance is in an English translation (the performance on a Candide LP is sung in German). Accompaniment is by two pianos and six woodwinds; it all takes but eleven minutes. The music is lively fun, and this performance makes the most of it. Menotti’s 1946 The Telephone has been a continuing success for half a century; its wit and elegance are typical of his early operas. The plot situation and the spirit of the piece are exactly the opposite of that other telephone opera, Poulenc’s La Voix humaine. Ben is trying to propose to Lucy, but her telephone keeps interrupting; he leaves and phones in his proposal, which she accepts. I’ve never heard The Telephone done better than on this disc: Jeanne Ommerlé is a breezy delight as the scatterbrained heroine, and she sings the high-lying near-monolog with silken ease. The instrumentalists are all first-rate, with especially lovely oboe playing by Marcia Butler. The recordings are bright and clear; full texts are included. An ugly cartoon cover becomes quite funny once you know Moore’s piece. I can’t imagine any listener not being amused and charmed by this disc. James H. North](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1996/03/Fanfare_Magazine_March_1996-scaled.jpg)
![Fanfare The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors March/April 1996 • Volume 19, Number 4 AMERICAN PROFILES. Stephen Rogers Radcliffe conducting the New York Chamber Ensemble. ALBANY TROY 175 [DDD]; 64:26. PISTON: Divertimento. GRIFFES: Three Tone Pictures. ROREM: Eleven Studies for Eleven Players. COPLAND: Sextet. While each of these pieces has been recorded before—all but the Piston currently have at least one recording in the catalog—it was an excellent idea to bring all four together on a single disc. They work together extremely well because of their differences as much as because of what they have in common. Piston’s three-movement Divertimento is, like all of this composer’s music, a sturdily crafted work in which strong, memorable thematic material is supported by solid, occasionally dissonant counterpoint. The two lively, thoroughly neo-classical outer movements surround a central slow movement based on a wonderful, flowing oboe melody. The Griffes pieces, arranged by the composer from his original version for piano, are attractive little landscapes, featuring the composer’s special brand of impressionism. Rorem’s Studies are a series of miniatures, varying widely in mood as well as instrumentation, that show the composer’s fine sense of detail, wry sense of humor, and irrepressible melodic gift. The final work, Copland’s own arrangement of his Short Symphony, is a masterpiece of American neo-Classicism. Nervous, muscular, and economical, the brief three-movement work is one of Copland’s most rhythmically challenging pieces. The performances are very good. The bouncy vitality of the Copland and Piston works is particularly well captured by Radcliffe and his excellent musicians. The Rorem pieces are played with lots of detail and show off individual members of the ensemble to great advantage. My only reservations concern the Griffes pieces where the beat seems all too heavy and the instrumental blends a bit rough. In addition, the piano, although nicely played by David Korevaar, is overly prominent, suggesting more a concerto than a work for chamber orchestra. The recording is good, quite clean and natural, but a little bit close. These flaws aside, this is a most enjoyable disc that should find a welcome place in every collection of American music. Richard Burke](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1996/03/Fanfare_Magazine_April_1996-scaled.jpg)
![Fanfare The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors January/February 1995 • Volume 18, Number 3 ROCHBERG: Music for the Magic Theater. Octet; A Grand Fantasia. Stephen Rogers Radcliffe conducting the New York Chamber Ensemble. NEW WORLD 80462-2 [DDD]; 48:39. Produced by Daniel Kincaid. Our esteemed editor continues to send me discs of George Rochberg's music, even though I have expressed a general distaste for it. It makes sense that each of Fanfare's reviewers gets mostly music that he or she appreciates; we are more likely to be knowledgeable about the music and informed about competing recordings that way, but it also accounts for the so-often-favorable reviews which have bothered some of our correspondents. An occasional counterview may be bracing, and I welcome another chance to understand any composer. Rochberg, of course, has been many things at many times; his compositional life was long an evolving struggle to find his own style, at a time (ca. 1945–75) when style was strictly dictated by a few academics (if you don't write my way, you don't pass my course, so you won't get the degree, so you can't succeed in the academic world of music, so you give up composing as a career). Music for the Magic Theater (1965) found Rochberg at a turning point; he had previously followed the required atonal serialism, and had experimented with music of chance, only to find unexpected, depressing similarities between the two systems. Here Rochberg tries to merge music past with music present and future by using collage, which was not yet fashionable, although Ives's music was beginning to be known. Collage brings much variety to these twenty-seven minutes, but it also exemplifies the problem I have with Rochberg's music: it seems so internally disconnected, with one minute's Mozart likely to be followed by another's Mahler or Miles Davis. The three "Acts" of this magic theater go from confusion of past and present, to wallowing in the past, and finally trying and dissolving the present "into what?" This seems to me more like sophisticated navel-gazing than making music. The booklet points out that B. A. Zimmermann was exactly Rochberg's age, forcing me to ask why I accept the German composer's collages more than the American's. It is because Zimmermann does so much more with his inherited material; he works it over thoroughly, transforming it into something all his own. For the record, the fifteen instrumentalists here (yes, yes: Schoenberg and Berg) make many beautiful and intriguing sounds, and they are expertly recorded. Octet; A Grand Fantasia (1980) consists of twelve brief pieces scored for two to eight players (flute, clarinet, horn, violin, viola, cello, bass, and piano). References to the past are now more subtle, more a matter of style than of substance. The variety of tempos and moods (listing them all would take nearly as long as hearing them) is somehow more acceptable as a suite of short pieces than as chunks within larger movements. It also enables me to pinpoint a preference for Rochberg in slow tempos to Rochberg at speed. I give him much credit for leading the assault on an intolerable musical establishment, but I still don't like Rochberg's own solutions much. I hope this review is useful to someone; if you disagree with each thought I have expressed, you better go out and buy this record. James H. North • • • It's easy to speak of a kinship of Rochberg to Ives. Ives was the first to play about with polystylistics, emulsions in the main of highbrow with low. In the listening, however, the Ives-Rochberg connection plays as tenuous. We make better use of space contemplating Rochberg's entirely self-conscious move in the early 60s from serial atonality to (what has been called by the less than enthralled) pastiche. This bouncing about from musical style to style is today much in vogue, thanks in large measure to several of George Rochberg's pivotal works. The more appropriate comparison is to Lucas Foss, a Rochberg contemporary whose esthetic flexibility measures as relatively opportunistic. His obvious qualities notwithstanding, is Rochberg's a baleful influence on impressionable minds? In an environment where Steve Martland is packaged—in semi-beefcake, heaven help us!—as a hot property, the question is silly. Rather, let us see an unusually good and honest composer having hung an existential right on the road to what seemed to him, if not to everyone, a dead end. With regard to the discomfort Rochberg's suspiciously entertaining alternatives inflict on those for whom Theodore Adorno wields papal authority (to name but one arbiter), I offer this useless opinion. Perhaps—just perhaps—it is Rochberg's nature to entertain, his sojourn in Second Vienna's long shadow an aspect of development toward what he has become—a fulfillment that has helped shape today's postmodern terrain, moreover. (Escapes from serialism's constraints have led in startlingly disparate directions: Stefan Wolpe's for one, Giacinto Scelsi's for another.) Schwann Opus show Rochberg's cassettes, mostly CRI, outnumbering CDs. It's gratifying to see a skimpy CDiscography graced by these well-played and -recorded additions. Mike Silverton](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1995/01/Fanfare_January_1995-scaled.jpg)
![ATHENS DAILY NEWS/ATHENS BANNER-HERALD, Sunday, October 23, 1994 – Page 15A By Ernie Torres Weekend News Editor George Rochberg Rochberg: "Music for the Magic Theater." New World Records. (48:41) ★★★★ The two chamber works on this New World recording by Stephen Rogers Radcliffe and the New York Chamber Ensemble offer an interesting look at George Rochberg's singular brand of modernism. It's not music for the unadventurous, but it's by no means inaccessible. Taking its name from the Magic Theater in "Steppenwolf," the Hermann Hesse novel, "Music for the Magic Theater" is a sound collage of sorts from 1965 in which Rochberg reexamines the music of the past and the present. Over the course of three "acts" there are musical quotations from Mozart's K. 287 Divertimento; Beethoven's Op. 130 String Quartet; Mahler's Ninth Symphony; Webern; Varese; Stockhausen; Miles Davis' "Stella by Starlight"; and Rochberg's own Second String Quartet. Act 1 juxtaposes Mozart with austere and dissonant modernism; Act 2 is mostly Mozart, Miles and melodic; Act 3 is a return to our century's tonal austerity, with a searching, ambiguous and quiet ending. "Music for the Magic Theater" is scored for a 15-piece chamber ensemble. Also on this disc is Rochberg's Octet: A Grand Fantasia from 1980, which is scored for flute, clarinet, horn, violin, viola, cello, bass and piano. Consisting of 12 short sections, the Octet gets off to a fast and gruff beginning but gives way to mostly slow and medium-slow tem- [text cuts off] [Photo Caption] ROCHBERG](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1994/10/Athens_Daily_News_Oct_1994-scaled.jpg)
![THE SENTINEL-LEDGER Ocean City, N.J. Week of 7-13 June 1994 Festival Orchestra goes pops By ED WISMER Sentinel-Ledger Critic OCEAN CITY — The second Cape May Music Festival event to be held on the Music Pier for 1994 took place June 4 and it was a real "Popper." The Cape May Festival Orchestra played a program of light classics and the best of Broadway. This does seem like carrying coals to Newcastle because of the similarity of programming by our own sensational Ocean City Pops, but good music is sempiternal and it's truly a case of the more, the merrier. It best represents another opportunity to spread culture in this area through cooperation by the Pashley Insurance Agency, The Sentinel-Ledger and the city of Ocean City. All concerned are to be commended for their support of the arts. The Festival Orchestra had the pleasure and privilege of playing in Ocean City's state of the art facility. Festival artistic director Stephen Rogers Radcliffe mounted the podium and started the proceedings off with a flourish. Pops orchestras and programs are proliferating exponentially. Most of us think of Pops orchestras starting with that part-time fireman Arthur Fiedler up in Boston, but pops programing was quite popular at the turn of the 20th century and before. A Sousa program would have consisted of light classics, popular songs and show tunes (many of which Sousa wrote himself a la John Williams). We have heard Radcliffe's orchestra do some very ambitious work in the past and recall an occasion when a 19th century synthesizer was used to intensify the sound. Radcliffe is experimental and innovative in his approach and one can always expect some extra pyrotechnics. He did not disappoint us this time either. The program consisted of works inspired by folk music and dance that was multi-ethnic. Radcliffe led off with a Rossini Overture that was impressively played and followed it with Dvorak's Slavonic Dance Op. 46, No. 8 (one of the more lively numbers in this evocative suite). > Artistic Director Stephen Rogers Radcliffe is fun to watch > Radcliffe is fun to watch. His kinetic gyrations were most evident in the Dvorak but he only enlivens proceedings thusly when it is appropriate. The late Dmitri Mitroupolis was overly physical and often fell right off the podium. Radcliffe's feet enthusiastically left the floor at times but he was always in control. Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Greensleeves followed it, and along with Faure's Pavane Op. 50, brought a more solemn and sedate mood to the concert. The wind section was outstanding in these two pieces. An unfamiliar tarantelle by Camille Saint Saens proved to be a lively and lovely example of how versatile the French composer could be. The Bizet Suite from Carmen featured "just right" vigorous tempi and playing that was, at the same time, abandoned and precise. The brass players took full advantage of Bizet's proclivity for writing superbly for their instruments. The final portion of the program consisted of two genuine Broadway classics in the form of selections from Gershwin's folk opera Porgy and Bess and Bernstein's West Side Story highlights. Both came in the form of fresh sounding and unfamiliar arrangements that featured innovative instrumental scoring that gave them new life. These evinced a standing ovation which was rewarded with an encore of Flimsy Korsetoff's (pardon an old musician's pun) Flight of the Bumble Bee which hummed right along. It is a certainty that the audience felt that it had a grand night out, topped off with truly professional musicianship and the sponsors could openly glow with pride. The whole affair added new vistas of cultural excellence that upheld the tradition of fine entertainment values exemplified by both cities. [Sidebar Text] CAPE MAY — The fifth annual Cape May Music Festival began May 15 and continues through June 26, hosting what is described as some of the world's most accomplished soloists and chamber musicians in music from the Renaissance and Vivaldi to the jazz era. The Festival Orchestra is conducted by Stephen Rogers Radcliffe. The festival is sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts (884-5404), in association with the Cape May Institute.](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1994/06/1994_06_07_Sentinel_Ledger_June_7_1994-scaled.jpg)
![York Newsday: New York Newsday New York EDITION MONDAY, JUNE 4, 1990 • MANHATTAN • 25 CENTS MUSIC REVIEW History As Engaging Theater THE NEW YORK CHAMBER ENSEMBLE. Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, music director. Hindemith: "Hin und Zurück" ("There and Back"); Weill: Mahagonny Songspiel; Milhaud: "The Abduction of Europe"; Ernst Toch: "The Princess and the Pea." Starring: Katherine Johnson, Margaret Bishop, Mark Bleeke, Richard Holmes, Robert Osborne, Nancy Ortez, Michael Brown. Florence Gould Hall, Friday night. By Tim Page THE NEW YORK Chamber Ensemble's Friday night re-creation of a particularly important concert from the 1927 Baden-Baden Festival was not only good, vital history but an engaging evening of music theater as well. Some background information: In the summer of 1927, four young composers — Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Darius Milhaud and Ernst Toch — were invited to write short operas for performance in a small theater, with a limited number of soloists and a chamber ensemble instead of a full orchestra. On July 17 of that year, the four works received their world premiere performances at a festival of music in the German spa town of Baden-Baden; three of these were greeted enthusiastically, while the Weill work provoked wildly mixed reactions and even, if contemporary reports can be believed, some fisticuffs. Still, Weill's "Mahagonny Songspiel," to a text by Bertholt Brecht, was the only one of the four to enter the standard repertory and the central "Alabama Song" may be numbered among the composer's best-known creations. I have little patience for Brecht's shrill, debased representation of humanity but the music in this half-hour is wonderful — lean, tuneful, citric and altogether original. No wonder it caused a fuss. Hindemith's "Hin and Zuruck" — "There and Back" — owes a clear debt to the cinema. It might be described as an operatic palindrome that reaches a certain point in its action and is then run backwards. A husband enters to wish his wife a happy birthday, finds an incriminating love note, shoots her, then jumps out a window. The sequence of events is then reversed: the husband falls back through the window, the wife is restored to life, they quarrel about the love note, he wishes her a happy birthday and departs. Hindemith's score mirrors this chain of events: It is vigorous, virtuosic, richly contrapuntal and — no slight intended — sounds just as good backwards as forwards. In general, the music of Darius Milhaud has not worn the years very well (the same may be said of the other composers in the aggregate of French composers known as "Les Six," but Milhaud, with the most inflated reputation, had the farthest to fall). He now is remembered almost exclusively for his little jazz-age masterpiece, "La Creation du Monde," but the sweet pocket opera (nine minutes) he wrote for Baden-Baden, "The Abduction of Europe," deserves an occasional performance. It is exquisitely made, often very funny (including a chorus of mooing cows), imbued throughout with a sort of pastoral elegance that leads to a vaporous and beautiful finale. Unfortunately, the final opera, Ernst Toch's "The Princess and the Pea," is trite throughout, a succession of melodic, harmonic and theatrical predictabilities. Doubly unfortunately, it was by far the longest opera on the program — some 45 minutes. Still, for the sake of history, it had to be included: The New York Chamber Ensemble gave it a lively reading, and Margaret Bishop made a delightfully pouty princess. Indeed, there was little to fault in the evening's performances. The ensemble playing was synchronous and energetic, and Stephen Rogers Radcliffe's leadership was never less than authoritative. The singers — Mark Bleeke, Richard Holmes, Michael Brown, Robert Osborne, Nancy Ortez and Katherine Johnson — were equally fine; I particularly admired the Lotte Lenya-like mix of sweet and sour that Johnson brought to the Weill work. / II [Caption under photo: Conductor Stephen Rogers Radcliffe]](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1990/06/Newsday_June_6_1990-scaled.jpg)
![New York Newsday Monday, April 9, 1990 Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, Conductor MUSIC REVIEW An Homage to a Teacher AMERICANS IN PARIS: STUDENTS OF NADIA BOULANGER. Music by Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, David Diamond, Ned Rorem. New York Chamber Ensemble (Chester String Quartet, Hexagon), Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, conductor. Friday night. Florence Gould Hall, Alliance Francaise, 55 E. 59 St., Manhattan. By Peter Goodman THE MARK OF the great teacher is her ability to help the pupil be himself, not merely an image of the mentor. Nadia Boulanger was that sort of teacher. Renowned in the American musical world as the French pedagogue around whom gathered generations of aspiring composers from Virgil Thomson to Philip Glass, it is clear that whatever she taught them, she did not force them into her own mold. On Friday night, the New York Chamber Ensemble, an ambitious young group that includes a string quartet, a wind ensemble and other musicians, presented an attractive program devoted to the work of four of Boulanger's students. It was an evening of prima facie evidence that whatever Nadia Boulanger did, she didn't distort the voices of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, David Diamond or Ned Rorem. Indeed, only Rorem, the youngest of the four composers, could be said to speak in French. The program opened with two works for clarinet, piano and string quartet: Copland's Sextet, a reworking of his "Short Symphony," and Harris' Concerto for Clarinet, Piano and Strings. Their only similarity was the instrumentation. Copland created the Sextet in 1937 after failing to gain performances of the "Short Symphony," completed in 1933. Although written in his artistic rather than populist style, the similarities between the composer's two voices are plain: harmonies of seconds and ninths, electric rhythms, lovely writing for clarinet, bursts of lyricism squeezed between dense blocks of sound. It's the work of a master, and the Chester String Quartet (part of the ensemble) played with an ease that belied all the difficulty musicians found with the work 45 years ago. Harris' concerto is immediately more lyrical and elegiac, with its slow, deep introduction on clarinet and piano, and its long, singing lines. If Copland was a tough city kid, Harris was a singer from the country. The concerto is full of richness, both harmonic and contrapuntal, and a sense of ease not found in Copland. Ultimately, the concerto is too relaxed and doesn't keep the listener involved. The second half included David Diamond's Concerto for Chamber Orchestra, written in 1940, and Ned Rorem's Eleven Studies for Eleven Players. The Diamond was the most awkward piece on the program, straightforward, with square rhythms and steady pulse and a sense of self-conscious seriousness that kept it from coming alive. Only during the two sprightly, dancing fugues did one hear what seemed to be the composer's natural voice. Rorem, of course, has never hidden his natural voice, witty, epigrammatic, cool and lyrical — French. In the Eleven Studies, various combinations of strings, winds, brass and percussion sing, dance, joke or whisper mysteriously, an exquisite platter of aural hors d'oeuvres. The performances were fine, crisp and lively, particularly the playing of trumpeter Stephen Burns, oboist Matthew Dine and pianist David Korevaar. Steven Rogers Radcliffe conducted. The concert, by the way, was part of a series in Florence Gould Hall, an excellent chamber two stories below ground level at the Alliance Francaise on East 59th Street. It's a hall that deserves more activity. / II [Caption under photo: Stephen Rogers Radcliffe conducted the works composed by Nadia Boulanger's students.]](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1990/04/1990_09_04_NY_Newsday_April_9_1990-scaled.jpg)
![The ADVOCATE SERVING THE COMMUNITY SINCE 1829 • STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT • TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 1990 Radcliffe leads young virtuosos By John S. Sweeney Music Critic What is happening to the musical training of today's young people? Truly astonishing things, the Rondo Chamber Orchestra demonstrated Sunday afternoon at the Norwalk Concert Hall. Four virtuosos, none over 15 years of age, conducted by Stephen Radcliffe, already a veteran at 29, made remarkable music together. Radcliffe, who already has made his mark as a youthful conductor to watch, is a native of Greenwich and received his early musical training in the Greenwich public schools. What impressed most on Sunday was not the technical skills of the players, although they were of the highest order, but the real understanding of the music they performed. One would not expect musicians so young to grasp the subtleties of Bach, Haydn or Mozart as fully as did these performers. The youthful artists all played a full-length concerto, thus giving them a complete performing experience and their audience the opportunity to become fully acquainted with their musicianship. A sterling performance of Bach's D minor Concerto for two violins by two pupils of Alfred Markov, founder of Rondo, opened the program. Both 15 years old, Leonard Primak was born in Kiev and Gregory Kalinovsky in Leningrad. Their schooling was of the most solid discipline, with intonation, bowing, and dynamics all first rate. Radcliffe focused his ensemble with knowing craft, conducting with an easy, flowing style that brought rhythmic vitality and dynamic balances into place. Things got even better with Taiwan-born Kenneth Kuo, also 15, in Haydn's C major cello concerto. Kuo played with admirable security, executing the treacherous passages in thumb position with excellent intonation and control of bowing with a focused, well-rounded tone. His understanding of the slow movement, his sense of phrasing, his splendid balance with the orchestra, and the elan of his finale, making no concessions to difficulties, all belied his youth. Radcliffe drew from his orchestra a refined and stylistically impeccable accompaniment. His discerning sense of balance allowed his soloist to play his virtuoso passages without forcing the tone, yet provided solid support when required. Janacek's early work for strings, "Idyll," made an excellent foil on an otherwise baroque and classical program. Radcliffe extracted three contrasting movements from the work, each with an individual Slavic charm. His conducting was simple, technically skillful and idiomatically expressive without any trace of exaggeration or distortion. Alisa Kaplan, an engaging and self-possessed 12-year-old, stole the show with her surprisingly mature performance of Mozart's A major Piano Concerto, K. 414. Struggling with a less-than-perfect Steinway grand, her technical skills were superior and her style absolutely correct. She played her cadenzas with a remarkable understanding of their improvisational nature. Her rhythm never faltered even when, here and there, no doubt because of the jitters, a memory lapse occured. The accompaniment by the orchestra was commendable in its grace and dynamic control. Radcliffe followed his soloist's stylistic intentions with perfect faithfulness. [Photo Caption: STEPHEN R. RADCLIFFE]](https://stephenrogersradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/1990/03/1990_03_20_Stamford_Advocate_March_20_1990-scaled.jpg)
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