Conservatory eNews October 2012
Faculty News

As a newly-named recipient of the Heinz Award, faculty member and composer Mason Bates has won both a remarkably prestigious prize and significant support for his work. The $250,000 prize goes to only one individual each year in each of five categories: arts and humanities; environment; human condition; public policy; and technology, the economy and employment. At 35, Bates is one of the youngest-ever recipients of a Heinz Award. His works recently have been performed by the San Francisco Symphony and at the Cabrillo Music Festival (see more under alumni news). Bates is currently composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He also holds down a night job as DJ Masonic, mixing up classical music and electronica at dance clubs with his Mercury Soul project.

 

Indefatigable Conservatory Chamber Choir Director Ragnar Bohlin has taken the helm of a new Renaissance vocal ensemble. His first concert with the Chalice Consort recently featured music from Hildegard von Bingen to Arvo P�rt. This month, Bohlin returns to his native Sweden to conduct the Swedish Radio Choir and Nordic Chamber Orchestra in music by P�rt, Whitacre and Sixten for broadcast on Swedish National Radio. Bohlin also serves as chorus director of the San Francisco Symphony.

 

Opera faculty member Milissa Carey recently directed a production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos, California. The cast featured Conservatory stage director and choreographer Michael Mohammed (M.M., voice, '00) as the "comfort counselor" and ex-con Mitch Mahoney.

 

September Sun, written by composition faculty David Conte in commemoration of 9/11, will be performed by the University of California-Berkeley Chorus and string orchestra in Hertz Hall on October 28. Conte also leads a day-long composition master class for Hidden Valley Music Seminars in Carmel on October 13.

 

Regards et jeux dans l'espace by composer and music theory faculty Jacques Desjardins was performed by Quebec's Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivi�res on September 29. The piece, named after the collection of poems by Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, was featured in a celebration of the poet's 100th birthday and was the highlight of the city's 2012 International Poetry Festival. Professor Desjardins won praise this summer for his re-orchestration of John Harbison's opera The Great Gatsby, performed as the closing event of the Aspen Music Festival.

 

The work of voice physiology faculty Dr. Krzysztof Izdebski is featured in an upcoming National Geographic documentary entitled The Mystery of the Human Voice. In the film, he explains how voice loss occurs, how it affects communication and emotions and how diagnosis and treatment can be improved. Izdebski is guest teaching a voice pathology course at San Jose State University this fall. He also recently conducted a first-of-its-kind seminar for California attorneys on how legal professionals can scientifically establish criteria for assessing individuals who suffer voice, speech and swallowing problems as a result of work-related injuries.

 

Piano Department Chair and String and Piano Chamber Music Co-Chair Mack McCray takes on Liszt's Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat Major later this month with the Bay Area's Master Sinfonia Chamber Orchestra. Performances are conducted by David Ramadanoff and take place October 27 and 28.

 

Bryan Nies, musical director of the Conservatory's Musical Theater Workshop, gave a televised lecture on vocal coaching styles in Walnut Creek last month for the Rossmoor Opera and Ballet Club with mezzo-soprano Nicole Jacques, voice student of Jane Randolph. This November, Nies conducts two performances of Die Fledermaus with Opera San Jose at the California Theater.

 

Collegiate and Preparatory Division faculty William Wellborn recently gave a lecture on Liszt and Wagner for the Wagner Society of Northern California. Wellborn coordinates the 2013 National American Liszt Society Festival, to be held at the Conservatory from May 30 to June 1.



Student News

Graduate student and pianist Carlin Ma won the third place prize in the inaugural MUSICCAS International Young Artist Competition. MUSICCAS, a Silicon Valley company founded by Preparatory Division faculty Jonathan Koh, uses cloud-based software to help musicians streamline the auditioning process. The competition drew more than 150 submissions from 18 different countries. Ma studies with Yoshi Nagai.

 

A current student, alumnus and faculty member make up a trio of Conservatory composers to be featured in a Hayes Valley choral concert later this month. "Music in Honor of the Blessed Sacrament," performed by the Schola Adventus at Church of the Advent under the direction of Paul M. Ellison, includes the world premiere of the motet "Ego sum panis" by Vasken Ohanian, a student of Elinor Armer. The program also includes a setting of "Ave Verum Corpus" written for the Schola in 2010 by Joel N. Morris (B.M., composition, '09) and two commissions by composition faculty David Conte, "O salutaris Hostia" and "Tantum ergo."

 

   

Preparatory Student News

 

Cellist Clark Pang, student of Jonathan Koh, was honored with a Resolution from Supervisor Candace Andersen of the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors on September 25 for his national achievements in Latin and cello. Clark won the nation's top prize for Latin student scholars in competition against more than 1600 students at the National Junior Classical League Convention in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

 

Preparatory Division pianist Agata Sorotokin received first prize in the 2012 Ross McKee Piano Competition this past June. Sorotokin vied with five other finalists to win the honor at a concert given in the Conservatory's Recital Hall last June. She is a student of John McCarthy.

 

The roster of semi-finalists in the 2013 Mondavi Center Young Artists Competition includes no fewer than 11 Preparatory Division students. They are: Alexander Stroud, student of Scott Cmiel; Irene Jeong, Catherine Kim and Yuki Mizuno, all students of Jonathan Koh; Anyan Cheng and Catherine Xu, students of John McCarthy; Alex Goldberg, Mai Matsumoto and Sean Takada, all students of Bettina Mussumeli; Albert Yamamoto, student of Wei He; and Ila Shon, student of Amos Yang.  

 


Alumni News

Soprano Jessica Slatkoff Arteaga (M.M., voice, '05) sings Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni next month with Riverside Lyric Opera, where she is currently a Resident Artist. Also in November, but further afield, she performs a concert in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, with tenor Ricardo Tavio. Arteaga studied with Sylvia Anderson and Pamela Fry.

 

Trista Cunningham Bernstein (B.M., voice, '06) has taken on the leadership of Broadway By the Bay in Redwood City. She recently was named executive director after serving the company in that role on an interim basis.

 

Patricia Cheng (M.M., piano, '05) performs piano solos by Brahms and Chopin in a concert celebrating National Arts and Humanities Month at Palo Alto's Lucie Stern Community Center on October 14. She reprises those works, and throws in the Brahms Horn Trio and the Beethoven Sonata for Horn and Piano to boot, when performing as a member of the Classical Collective at Trinity Chamber Concerts in Berkeley on November 3.  

 

Composer Minna Choi (M.M., composition, '09) and her indie-classical Magik*Magik Orchestra helped record the soundtrack for the new sci-fi action film Looper, starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In addition to using Choi's orchestra, which features numerous Conservatory students and alumni, composer Nathan Johnson scored his evocative soundtrack for an industrial fan and several instruments he built himself. Choi is featured in a video preview posted on the website of Rolling Stone.

 

Conducting faculty and Oakland East Bay Symphony music director Michael Morgan recently showcased two pieces by composer Miguel del Aguila (B.M., piano, '82). Conga for Orchestra opened a concert in Oakland in May, and Morgan recently conducted the West Coast premiere of Caribe�a with the Sacramento Philharmonic. Two other works by del Aguila, Pacific Serenade, for clarinet and piano, and Seducci�n, for violin and piano, can be heard on newly-released recordings by the TransAtlantic Ensemble and Duo Deconet.

 

After premiering Bagatelles, a new work by faculty member Mason Bates, at the Cabrillo Contemporary Music Festival this summer, the Del Sol String Quartet is taking the piece on the road - to China - for this month's Chengdu Contemporary Music Festival. All of Del Sol's members have studied at the Conservatory: Kate Stenberg (B.M., violin, '84), Rick Shinozaki (Preparatory Division, violin, '86), Charlton Lee (M.M., viola, '93) and Kathryn Bates Williams (M.M., chamber music, '07). Returning stateside, Del Sol will launch its 20th anniversary celebration with a week of performances, workshops, and events from December 4 to 8 at Z Space in San Francisco.

 

Two compositions by Joshua Fishbein (M.M., composition, '09) will be performed next February at the Fifth International Festival of New Jewish Liturgical Music in Miami, Florida. Fishbein was a student of David Conte.

 

Emmanuel Franco (B.M., voice, '11) is off to Amsterdam this fall to attend the Dutch National Opera Academy. His assignment: several concerts at the Het Muziektheater and a full production next spring of Mozart's Le nozze de Figaro in which he sings Count Almaviva. In addition, the Mexican baritone was invited by the Netherlands Opera Studio to sing the role of Tarquinius in Britten's The Rape of Lucretia in December. Franco studied with C�sar Ulloa.

 

Joseph Gregorio (M.M., composition, '06) is the national winner of the 2012 POLYPHONOS competition held by the Seattle-based choir The Esoterics. As a result, he'll write an a cappella work for The Esoterics' 2013-14 season, adding it to a list of recent commissions from Bucknell University and Pennsylvania State University. Gregorio's community chamber choir Ensemble Companio, which he founded in 2011 and directs, bested seven other finalists to win the 2012 American Prize in choral performance on the strength of their debut concert recording. Gregorio is currently a D.M.A. candidate in composition at Temple University, where he is the recipient of a Presidential Fellowship. He was a student of David Conte.

 

Just a few months after graduating, Maya Kherani (M.M., voice, '12) is off on a wide-ranging exploration of the soprano repertoire. She sets out this fall, singing Mabel in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance with the San Francisco Opera "Opera a la Carte" program. Then it's an excursion into contemporary opera at "Friday Nights at the de Young"  with Ensemble Parall�le later this month and an appearance as Nuria in that company's production of Golijov's Ainadamar next February. In December, Kherani takes a baroque detour, debuting with faculty member Corey Jamason's San Francisco Bach Choir in a candlelight Christmas concert. Kherani continues to study with Pamela Fry.

 

Kudos to Christina Knudson (Professional Studies Diploma, violin, '11), who has won a position as section violin with the Stockton Symphony. Knudson studied with Bettina Mussumeli.

 

Stacey Lichter (M.M., voice, '09) a former graduate teaching assistant in the Conservatory Italian department, has been hired as an Italian instructor for the ABC Language School in San Francisco.

 

Pianist Eliane Lust ('76) adds some much-needed romance to Election Day with a noontime concert of American tangos by Stravinsky, Schimmel, Sahl, Pender, Rudhyar and Thomson, plus world premieres by Bay Area favorites Robert Elkjer and Ron McFarland composed especially for her. It's part of Noontime Concerts at San Francisco's Old St. Mary's Cathedral on November 6. No registration required.

 

Michael Mohammed (M.M., voice, '00) recently appeared as a singing nun among a cast of inmates, patients and misfits in the Thrillpeddlers' acclaimed production of Marat/Sade. Victoria Fraser (M.M., voice, '12) was also on stage playing strings and percussion. This fall, Mohammed performed with Samantha McCurry (M.M., voice, '11) and Paul Murray (Postgraduate Diploma, voice, '06) in the Handel Opera Project's production of Dido and Aeneas, part of a double bill with Acis & Galatea starring Jonathan Smucker (Postgraduate Diploma, voice, '04). This month he directs Loving Repeating, a musical based on the life and writings of Gertrude Stein, with the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco.

 

Jessica Ivry (M.M., cello, '97) and Preparatory Division faculty member Alisa Rose (M.M., chamber music, '07 ) are touring the Balkans this season with their ensemble, Real Vocal String Quartet. They are one of eleven groups chosen to perform as part of the American Music Abroad program, sponsored in part by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. They'll travel to Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Bosnia, Lithuania and Latvia, playing concerts and teaching string improvisation. Real Vocal String Quartet is a world-music collective combining strings and women's voices. This month, the group celebrates the release of its second CD, Four Little Sisters.

 

Soprano Hj�rdis Th�bault (M.M., voice, '96) opens the season this month at l'Op�ra-Th��tre d'Avignon, France, performing the role of La Messaggiera in Monteverdi's Orfeo.

 

Composer Frank Wallace (B.M., guitar, '74) recently finished a composition entitled More Gargoyles for the Mobius Trio, a guitar chamber ensemble founded by classmates Robert Nance, Mason Fish and Matthew Holmes-Linder, all of whom received M.M. degrees from the Conservatory in 2011. The piece was conceived and written while Wallace was touring medieval churches in northern Spain this summer. He also produced a CD of his own compositions for mandolin and guitar with the German ensemble Mare Duo.


 

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Conservatory eNews is an electronic newsletter published by the communications department of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in consultation with the Faculty Executive Committee. Conservatory eNews aims to keep students, faculty and staff aware of exciting news and events related to the Conservatory. We rely on your submissions! Please send current news by the 15th of each month to [email protected] for consideration for the following month's newsletter. Students may only submit news through their teacher. Submissions are subject to editing.

 

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