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Pinnacle Vol. 3

Contemporary Chamber Works

Dušan Bavdek composer
Alla Elana Cohen composer
Richard E Brown composer
Andrew Schneider composer

Release Date: March 10, 2023
Catalog #: NV6508
Format: Digital
21st Century
Chamber
Clarinet
Piano
String Quartet

Navona Records presents PINNACLE VOL. 3, a collection of contemporary chamber works by composers Alla Elana Cohen, Andrew Schneider, Dušan Bavdek, and Richard E Brown that highlight the melodic, emotive, and dramatic styles offered by today’s chamber music. This diverse assortment of repertoire spans numerous influences and orchestrations, delivering a range of sounds from somber and moving to sprightly and energetic. Leveraging raw thematic material and colorful musical portraits, the composers and performers in this edition of PINNACLE keep the fire burning while bringing a fresh and unique tone to the series.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Capriccetto Dušan Bavdek Jakub Černohorský, violin; Tomáš Svozil, cello; Alexandr Starý, piano 3:12
02 String Quartet No. 1: I. Introduction Dušan Bavdek Benda Quartet | Jakub Černohorský, violin; Ondřej Pustějovský, violin; Petr Benda, viola; Tomáš Svozil, cello 4:00
03 String Quartet No. 1: II. Confrontations Dušan Bavdek Benda Quartet | Jakub Černohorský, violin; Ondřej Pustějovský, violin; Petr Benda, viola; Tomáš Svozil, cello 6:24
04 Watercolors of the Master Who is Accustomed to Paint Oils (Volume 1 Series 9): Movement I Alla Elana Cohen Karel Dohnal, clarinet; Martin Kasík, piano 1:07
05 Watercolors of the Master Who is Accustomed to Paint Oils (Volume 1 Series 9): Movement II Alla Elana Cohen Karel Dohnal, clarinet; Martin Kasík, piano 2:04
06 Watercolors of the Master Who is Accustomed to Paint Oils (Volume 1 Series 9): Movement III Alla Elana Cohen Karel Dohnal, clarinet; Martin Kasík, piano 0:40
07 Watercolors of the Master Who is Accustomed to Paint Oils (Volume 1 Series 9): Movement IV Alla Elana Cohen Karel Dohnal, clarinet; Martin Kasík, piano 1:34
08 Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano: I. Adagio - Allegro moderato Richard E Brown Juventas New Music Ensemble | Oliver Caplan, artistic director; Anne Howarth, horn; Ryan Shannon, violin; Julia Scott Carey, piano 5:44
09 Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano: II. Andante doloroso Richard E Brown Juventas New Music Ensemble | Oliver Caplan, artistic director; Anne Howarth, horn; Ryan Shannon, violin; Julia Scott Carey, piano 4:09
10 Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano: III. Allegro con spirito Richard E Brown Juventas New Music Ensemble | Oliver Caplan, artistic director; Anne Howarth, horn; Ryan Shannon, violin; Julia Scott Carey, piano 3:40
11 Les Exubérants, Op. 11 Andrew Schneider Karel Dohnal, clarinet; Jan Souček, oboe 4:34
12 Les Enchanteresses Dansantes, Op. 12 Andrew Schneider Dieter Flury, flute; Karel Dohnal, clarinet; Lukáš Polák, cello 5:39

Capriccetto, String Quartet No. 1
Recorded August 30-31, 2022 at Czech Radio Ostrava in Ostrava, Czech Republic
Producer Jan Košulič
Engineer Aleš Dvořák
Assistant Engineer Jan Balcar
Editing & Mixing Lucas Paquette

Watercolors of the Master Who is Accustomed to Paint Oils
Recorded July 8, 2022 at Czech TV Music Studio in Prague, Czech Republic
Producer Pavel Kunčar
Engineer Aleš Dvořák
Assistant Engineer Roman Sklenář
Production Manager Jean Noël Attard
Editing & Mixing Lucas Paquette

Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano
Recorded February 16, 2022 at Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport MA
Producer Brad Michel
Engineer Tom Stephenson
Editing & Mixing Lucas Paquette

Les Exubérants
Recorded May 2, 2022 at The Chapel at Korunni in Prague, Czech Republic
Producer Jan Košulič
Engineer Aleš Dvořák
Editing & Mixing Melanie Montgomery

Les Enchanteresses Dansantes
Recorded May 2, 2022 at The Chapel at Korunni in Prague, Czech Republic
Producer Jan Košulič
Engineer Aleš Dvořák
Editing & Mixing Lucas Paquette
Additional Editing Melanie Montgomery

Mastering Melanie Montgomery

Executive Producer Bob Lord

A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Danielle Sullivan

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Production Director Levi Brown
Audio Director Lucas Paquette
Production Assistant Martina Watzková

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming, Morgan Hauber
Publicity Patrick Niland, Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Alla Elana Cohen

Composer

Alla Elana Cohen is a distinguished composer, pianist, music theorist, and teacher who came to the United States in 1989 from Russia. Graduating from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory with the highest honors of distinction, Cohen lives in Boston and is a professor at Berklee College of Music.

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Richard E Brown

Richard E Brown

Composer

Richard E. Brown, a native of New York State and has been active as a composer-arranger and music educator for many years. His training includes M.M. and D.M. degrees in composition from Florida State University, as well as a B.A. in music education from Central College, which named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 1983. His principal composition studies were with Carlisle Floyd, John Boda, and Charles Carter. He is a member of ASCAP and is represented in the catalogs of several trade publishers, as well as his personal imprint Dacker Music.

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Dušan Bavdek

Composer

Dušan Bavdek (b. Slovenia, 1971) is a composer and professor of composition and music theory as well as a vice dean for international affairs at the University of Ljubljana Academy of Music. His compositional opus encompasses pieces for symphony orchestra, string orchestra, wind orchestra, opera, ensembles, chamber groups, and soloistic performance.

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Andrew Schneider

Composer, Pianist

A native of Houston, Andrew Schneider is a composer, pianist, and vocal coach whose virtuosic technique and daring interpretation has cemented his reputation among clients as a fearless musician. His extensive collaborative activity encompasses early music, standard operatic and art song repertoire, as well as contemporary music. Proficient for coaching purposes in French, German, Italian, and Latin, as well as adept with less frequently encountered languages, especially Slavic ones, Schneider enjoys using his considerable linguistic skill to help make challenging texts accessible to his clients. His wide ranging musical activities also include harpsichord and organ performance and conducting.

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Notes

Capriccetto was commissioned in 1997 by the famous Slovenian violinist and professor Tomaž Lorenz for his “Musical July on the Coast” master class and festival.

The occasional cheerful ex tempore piece was originally written for flute, cello, and piano. The flute can be, however, replaced by a violin and the cello by a bassoon. The first performance of Capriccetto was given by “Trio 3.” Later it was performed by the groups such as Trio di Parma, Trio Ars Musica, Pro Musica Nova, Trio Syringa, Smetana Trio, Rest Ensemble, and many others.

— Dr. Andre’ E. Godsey, Sr.

The piece was composed in 1996 for the Ljubljana String Quartet, which gave its first performance at the “Night of Slovenian Composers” concert in 1996.

After a short opening, the first movement shapes one single arch. In the middle of it, the culmination brings the counterpoint of the two main thematic materials — like the moon would find its reflection in a lake in the middle of the forest when reaching its highest point on its way over the horizon.

The second movement combines diverse, distinctly contrasting sound images, which are all based on the same tone material. The closing measures are reminiscent of the opening section and rounds off the entire form. The “golden ratio proportion” appears in the composition in various ways.

My Watercolors of the Master Who is Accustomed to Paint Oils volume 1 series 9 is one of many pieces of mine under the same title, they were composed for different chamber ensembles. I like to unite my piece in big series under the same title, 12 series form a volume. These pieces usually consist of 3-4 short movements of different character, which at times would present what I would call “a bold stroke of a broad brush” of a composer who mostly writes large-scale pieces (not so much by duration, as by musical contents) amongst more transparent, lighter “watercolor” touch, thus is the origin of the title.

The 1st movement of Clarinet and Piano “Watercolors” is somber and mysteriously disconsolate, the 2nd — a lyrical dialogue between clarinet and piano, the 3rd — gently humorous, and the 4th — impassioned, mournful, and the most large-scale — by musical contents — movement in this cycle. Though all the movements by duration are very short, the whole composition (all 4 movements) lasts a bit more than 5 minutes.

— Alla Elana Cohen

Although my Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano is inspired by the great work for the same instrumentation by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), usually called simply the Horn Trio op. 40, it is definitely not otherwise modeled on it. Besides belonging to a different period of music and all the rhythmic, harmonic, and stylistic differences that come with that, this trio is overall on a much smaller scale, lasting roughly half the duration of the Brahms masterpiece and having three movements to the Brahms Trio’s 4. I drew much of the raw thematic material for this composition from my 18 New Etudes for the Advancing Horn Student (WaveFront Music LLC – 2021).

— Richard E Brown

Les Exubérants, Op. 11 (2017) boasts a title which I attribute to my love of Francois Couperin’s use of many such enigmatic yet maddeningly specific titles. It was originally written as an entry in the AWEA Duo’s composition contest that year. I like to think of this piece as depicting a fantastical yet quarrelsome couple (hence the capitalized title), who get into the weirdest and most eccentric arguments imaginable with all manner of tangents and rabbit holes.

Formally, the invention-like piece is in the arch form of ABCBA+Coda so prized by Bartók, in which the outer sections are reversed in some way from their analogue. Throughout, the difficulties of wind instruments’ intonation with each other are played with fully, when even playing in unison is a struggle: expect many explorations of the implications of having one party in this argument imitate the other. For instance, the sedate B sections are exact inversions of each other, being composed in strict 12-tone technique in a manner contrasting with the freely composed A sections; this has the effect of showing the instruments being more exposed the second time around as they grotesquely imitate the other player’s mannerisms in extreme, widely-spaced registers.

By the last section, our couple are compelled to agree on nothing other than their being hopelessly entangled in a “high-octane” manner (as they surrender to their suppressed predilections for the rhythmic complexities of jazz), but for the better, one hopes. And who gets the last word, pray tell? A universally applicable question which surely merits future musical insight…

This piece was originally scheduled to be premiered at the SCI Region VI Conference at Texas A&M-Commerce in April 2019, but was canceled due to family emergencies in the ensemble. It was then scheduled to be premiered by Texas New Music Ensemble at the Tarrant County Community College, Fort Worth, in March 2020, but as with most other things, this performance was canceled due to COVID-19. At the time of this note, it is anticipated that this piece will have a live premiere in Houston in March 2023.

— Andrew Schneider

Les enchanteresses dansantes, Op. 12 (2018) was written as an entry for the Rapido Competition Contest, under a prompt to compose a “suite of dances.” I was rather perplexed as to how I would compose a cohesive work in the form prescribed here, yet lasting no longer than the time limit of eight minutes. In the end, I opted to create a single long scène de ballet which goes in and out of different dance forms in a manner in which one might enter a different room of a house to find an entirely new color scheme or perspective. From a furtive opening which evokes a cubist “coven of woodland spirits,” whose silhouettes can be dimly perceived amidst lush foliage, the piece features an habanera, a samba, a vertiginous tango, and a waltz before an extended coda in the vivacious mold of the opening.

— Andrew Schneider

Videos

In-Studio Performance: Andrew Schneider – Les Enchanteresses Dansantes, Op. 12

In-Studio Performance: Andrew Schneider – Les Exubérants, Op. 11

An Inside Look: music from Andrew Schneider

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