Here and Now Winter Holiday Concerts with Celia Daggy, Scott Wheeler, and PianoFORTE ensemble

Here & Now Winter Holidays Concert

• Scott Wheeler Blue Ridge Suite *NY Premiere*
  1. Highway to Chesapeake Bay
  2. The Governor’s Mansion
  3. Shenandoah
  4. Fire on the Mountain

Celia Daggy, viola, and Scott Wheeler, piano

Blue Ridge Suite

Violist Celia Daggy and I collaborated at every stage of the development of my Blue Ridge Suite. The two of us discussed the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival and ways we might connect the four movements of the piece to this area of the country. “Highway to Chesapeake Bay” depicts both the city and the countryside. At Celia’s suggestion, it makes a brief reference to Benjamin Britten’s Sunday Morning sea interlude from Peter Grimes. “The Governor’s Mansion” combines a waltz and a gentle ragtime, using two spirituals to represent the workers who were all too often invisible but were responsible for maintaining the elegance of the mansion. “Shenandoah” combines the famous folk melody with a movement from a Bach cantata — a literal depiction of this festival. “Fire on the Mountain” is a traditional fiddle tune including a sort of folk dance, also quoting a slower fiddle tune Hector the Hero. A Beethoven string trio also makes a brief cameo appearance. Blue Ridge Suite as a whole is an exploration of the colors of the viola, with several passages that call on the composer/pianist’s long background in jazz. —Scott Wheeler

Scott Wheeler’s fall 2025 premieres were Insomnia Flowers with Boston Artists Ensemble and Equinox for two pianos with George Mason University. In January 2026 his Auslander Lieder will be premiered by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman. In April 2026 Scott will play piano with violinists Gil Shaham and Markus Placci in the premiere of his Borderlands in Bologna and Milan. scottwheeler.org

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• Matthew Guerrieri  Pop Songs (2023)    World Premiere
• Ethan Iverson Prelude and Fugue   World Premiere

Ethan Iverson, piano

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• Kathleen Supové, pianist
  Dead Beats I (2018) by Alvin Curran (US Premiere)
  Every Door (2025) by Douglas Cuomo  (World Premiere of piano version)
  DenshiRenji (2025) by Kathleen Supové  (World Premiere)

Dead Beats #1 (2018) by Alvin Curran

“The piano has always been at the core of Alvin Curran’s oeuvre. Granted, you’d expect

a statement like that from the liner notes to a collection of his piano pieces. In this case,

however, he’s said so himself, in a candid interview with sound artist Andrew Liles: “It’s

the focal point and kind of a totem for all my work in music.” Certainly, thanks in part to a

cycle like “Inner Cities”, which spans twenty years of his career, it has become a sort of

constant in a catalogue with very few constants, the perfect tool for a composer who

likes to think beyond tools. Still, the bond between Curran and the piano has always

been one of attraction and repulsion.” Note by Tobias Fischer. Dead Beats was written

for pianist Reinier van Houdt.

Every Door (2025) by Douglas J. Cuomo

Itaru Sasaki, is an old garden designer living in the village of Otsuchi, on the Western

coast of Japan. At the age of 72, in 2010 he lost his cousin to cancer. He responded by

building what he called a wind phone — a phone booth in his backyard, with a phone

that’s not connected to anything. He used it to communicate with his lost relative, to

help him deal with his grief. A year later, Japan was hit with the most powerful

earthquake ever recorded in that country, triggering a tsunami which caused a

meltdown in a nuclear plant. Almost 20,000 people lost their lives, including over 1,200

in Otsuchi (about 10 percent of the town’s population). In response Sasaki opened his

wind phone to others. Since then over 30,000 people have visited to connect with

those who have died. There is always a notebook placed by the phone, and in it many

visitors have left messages for their loved ones.

For a long time, the specific location of the wind phone was intentionally not revealed

— there were no guides or maps. The act of wandering, the uncertainty of where you

are, and of how and when you’ll arrive was a sort of meditation, opening the visitor to

the possibility that many things exist beyond the way we normally experience them.

Every Door is in two parts. The first is a wandering in sound, with the idea of settling

the mind of the performer and listener, leading them through their own internal

landscape. The second part is spoken, with text by Lavinia herself. Before beginning to

write the piece I asked her what she would say, what she would write in the notebook.

After some contemplation she replied very simply: I would have opened every door for

you. Douglas J. Cuomo, March 12, 2025.

DenshiRenji (2025) by Kathleen Supové

My husband Randy has been studying Japanese these past few months. He often

utters sentences while walking around the apartment to practice. One day he uttered

“DenshiRenji”, and I quickly adopted it as my favorite Japanese word. I later found out it

means “microwave oven”. To a significant extent, the love of this title word formed the

basis of the piece’s concept and content. Kathleen Supové, December 5, 2025.

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• Andrew Rudin (Born in Newgulf, Texas on April 10, 1939 – )
• Piano Sonata (2013)   US Premiere
  1. Allegro satirico
  2. Andante melanconico
  3. Maestoso – Allegro furioso

Beth Levin, piano

American composer and educator Andrew Rudin has been an important and endlessly inventive voice in music since the middle 1960’s.  As a teacher, Rudin taught at the Juilliard School and The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, until 2001.  As a composer, he achieved early importance and fame with his electronic music composed on the newly invented Moog synthesizer, with his groundbreaking opera, Il Giuoco (1966), and his four-movement symphony, Tragoedia (1968).  Since then, he has written many dozens of works for acoustic instruments and in many genres – operas, ballets, concertos, chamber works.  One of his most recently celebrated compositions – and most fiendishly difficult to play – is his searing, intriguing, and very virtuosic Piano Sonata, written expressly for Beth Levin in 2013.

The first movement is abrasive and stormy, but wildly fun, as it swings through an expanse of emotions with a careless abandon.  Beginning with a splayed-apart tone cluster, smashed out in repetitive chords and at high volume, the Sonata opens with a dash of icy water.  While the meter changes in almost every measure, Rudin himself describes this movement as full of “extreme contrasts in dynamics, abrupt gestures, and pauses.”  These contrasts happen at a quick pace, and it’s soon clear that it’s all impetuosity and naughtiness, as the tempo marking Allegro satirico (fast and satirical) tells us.  The impulsiveness invokes smirks and chuckles, like the music of a wild child on the playground, yelling, distracted, sometimes daydreaming, having tantrums, and occasionally delighted.  At about four-and-a-half minutes, a dreamy, almost Debussy-esque chorale floats into the soundscape, but it, too, gets distracted with menace as the opening cluster chord returns and repeats 28 times, beginning quietly, then building with great volume and intensity.  After this explosion of sound, the movement ends with an amusing few measures that seem to absent-mindedly skip off the stage without any adieu.

The second movement, Andante melanconico (slowly with melancholy), is a wholly different sonic universe from the first, mostly quiet and ruminative throughout.  This is music of an inner sphere, melancholically beautiful in nature.  In his note, Rudin tells us that the music begins as an “accompaniment seeking a melody, which it eventually finds,” but as the measures slowly wander, it feels as though the melody itself is also searching – like a midnight walk with many sorrows on the mind, and nothing but silent stars to bear witness.  The movement slips quietly forward with splintered rhythms creating discomfiting uneasiness, until it reaches a kind of anti-climax at about four-and-a-half minutes.  Now all becomes crystalline and almost dead quiet in a series of octaves in the piano’s chillingly high registers, suspending thought and time.  The movement then ends, as Rudin says, with a “calm [and] rather frigid coda.”

The final movement, Maestoso (majestically) begins with a brief, upward rising set of declamatory octaves, followed by several brief and quietly furtive figures.  A Furioso (furiously paced) section follows which creates a sense of fear and urgency, and these two contrasting ideas will trade off several times through this finale – grand proclamations (maestoso) followed by rampaging madness (furioso).  Right before the final section, though, the music pauses for a beautifully ethereal reprieve, marked piacere (pleasantly), cantando e espressivo (singing and expressive), which echoes the dream-like chorale passage from the first movement.  The music then builds to a final furioso section, the lengthiest and most virtuosic, that overshadows all that came before.  The Sonata then ends with a mighty series of searingly clamorous chords, loud and “chiming.”

© Max Derrickson

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with Celia Daggy, Scott Wheeler, and PianoFORTE ensemble