In this edition of the 92nd Street Y's Tell Me Why podcast, host Julian Fleisher talks with Deborah Grace Winer, the new series artistic director for the Y's long-running Lyrics & Lyricists concert series. Tune in for a great discussion on legends of the American songbook and why "words matter."

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Equally respected as a violinist, violist, conductor, pedagogue and chamber musician, Pinchas Zukerman is indeed a master of our time. We honor him today, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, for his musical genius and prodigious technique that have long been a marvel to critics and audiences worldwide. He has performed at the Y over 30 times, the first being in 1976. The Zukerman ChamberPlayers Series is an annual favorite and in the upcoming season, he adds a special recital with pianist Marc Neikrug in February. Hanna Arie-Gaifman, Director of the 92nd Street Y Tisch Center for the Arts, writes:

In your first contact with Pinchas Zukerman, you are reminded of the prickly pear cactus, which can be found all over the deserts of Israel. Its fruit is called the sabra, which is also the nickname for Israeli-born children. The sabra is prickly on the outside and a challenge to handle, but once you peel away the tough exterior, inside is a delicious, juicy fruit that has been one of my personal favorites all my life. Pinky is very much the same way. When you first meet him, he has a commanding presence and an intimidating, even prickly personality, just like the “sabra” that he is. But once he picks up his violin or viola and makes music, all that peels away, and he touches your soul. And as I have gotten to know him, he has become my favorite “sabra.”

Zukerman was recently featured in The Strad and KBYU-FM in Salt Lake City is doing a tribute to him all week. Below, listen to the Zukerman ChamberPlayers perform Mozart String Quintet in C, K.515, II. Menuetto: Allegretto from their 2006 release, Brahms, Mozart: String Quintets.

[Zukerman ChamberPlayers at the Y]

For two weeks this summer, Jazz in July at the 92nd Street Y will swing with the sounds of George Shearing, Billy Strayhorn, Leonard Bernstein and Brazilian jazz. You can witness the thrilling performances of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Dr. Billy Taylor, Kurt Elling, Freddy Cole, Fred Hersch and many others.

Meet drummer Kenny Washington and bassist Peter Washington, both members of the Bill Charlap Trio but no relation beyond New York City’s impressive “jazz family” of the best musicians in the world.

Kenny Washington was born in Brooklyn and attended the LaGuardia High School for Music & Art. He studied percussion with former Dizzy Gillespie drummer Rudy Collins, and in 1977, while still in his teens, he worked with Lee Konitz and his Nonet. Within the next few years Washington would perform and record with Betty Carter, Johnny Griffin, Kenny Burrell, Ron Carter and Frank Wess, and his freelance career would begin. He has now played with many other major artists, including Johnny Griffin, Milt Jackson, Tommy Flanagan, Jay McShann, the Mingus Dynasty, Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, Arturo Sandoval and Benny Goodman, and he is a member of the Bill Charlap Trio. Washington has a discography of over 100 titles, and he has an interest in jazz history, writing liner notes and helping to prepare re-releases by Art Blakey, Count Basie and others. Catch his Jazz in July performances at Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein (Jul 22) and The Shearing Sound: A Tribute to George Shearing (Jul 30).

Perhaps the most recorded bassist of his generation, Peter Washington has a discography of over 350 recordings, and it grows on a near-weekly basis. Born in Los Angeles, he majored in English Literature at Berkeley, and while in San Francisco, he was invited by Art Blakey to move to New York and join his Jazz Messengers. From there Washington became part of two of jazz’s most celebrated trios: the Tommy Flanagan Trio, and for the past ten years, the Bill Charlap Trio. Washington’s freelance work roster is a “Who’s Who” of jazz, including many Jazz in July artists. Among the instrumentalists are Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, David Sanchez, David Hazeltine, Regina Carter and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band. He has worked with vocalists like Chris Conner, Mark Murphy, Paula West, and Ernestine Anderson. Catch his Jazz in July performances at Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein (Jul 22), Piano Jam (Jul 23) and Lush Life: Billy Strayhorn (Jul 31).

[Jazz in July 2008]

Previously: David Remnick’s Essential Jazz

The following are Program Notes and Artist Bios for the Lyrics and Lyricists show Did the American Songbook Really End in 1965? at the 92nd Street Y on May 31 to June 2.

“Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel..."*

So goes the American popular song. Lyrics and melodies so perfectly intertwined that a fragment alone is enough to elicit a cascade of memories. From the very beginning our lives are scored. Ever since the advent of radio, we make stars out of singers, as words and music ride on an invisible breeze directly into our hearts. It’s not different for the baby-boomers and beyond. Songs still carry emotional resonance and thread their way into our history. Perhaps it’s singer/songwriters that you identify with, like Joni Mitchell or Carly Simon and their struggle to define a generation. Maybe it’s the “misty, water-colored memories” elicited by film and theatre lyricists like Stephen Sondheim which feel like an “Old Friend” to you or the reassuring refrain that things will be alright because, “You’ve Got a Friend.” If Hal David, Lennon & McCartney, Jerry Herman and Billy Joel helped you to capture what it means to fall in love, then the music of the past 40 years has been true to its roots, and the “standard” is safe and secure for generations to come.

“So hold this moment fast, and live and love as hard as you know how, and make this moment last, because the best of times is now!” **

—Lesley Alexander

* “The Windmills Of Your Mind” (Alan & Marilyn Bergman)
** “The Best of Times is Now” (Jerry Herman)

WNYC and Sara Fishko offer more choice performances from the stage of the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. In this episode, hear members of the Ensemble Wien-Berlin (pictured) in music by Dvorak, as well as selections by Poulenc and Debussy from members of the New York Philharmonic and the Nash Ensemble. Listen to the show.

The Nash Ensemble return to the Y for the 2008-09 concert season as part of the International Ensembles Series and members of the New York Philharmonic will perform in the Distinguished Artists in Recital Series.

Previously: Tokyo String Quartet on WNYC

The following are Program Notes for the Distinguished Artists in Recital with the mother-son duo of violinist Miriam Fried and pianist Jonathan Biss at the 92nd Street Y on May 14. Distinguished Artists in Recital series subscriptions for the 2008-09 season featuring Pinchas Zukerman, Marc Neikrug, Nikolaj Znaider, musicians from the New York Philharmonic, Saleem Abboud Ashkar, Heinz Hollinger and members of the Zehetmair Quartet are now on sale.

BRAHMS: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in A Major, Op. 100
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833 and died in Vienna in 1897. He wrote the Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in 1886.

Composed between 1879 and 1888, Brahms’ three sonatas for violin and piano are works of mature and unostentatious mastery. In contrast to the Violin Concerto of 1878, which sets the soloist’s warm-blooded virtuosity against the resplendent panoply of the orchestra, the sonatas are predominantly intimate and conversational in tone. The muscular lyricism that characterized much of Brahms’ earlier chamber music has receded into the background. In its place is a more restrained, but no less compelling, mixture of tenderness and strength.

Both the sonatas and the concerto reflect the influence of the great Hungarian violinist and composer Joseph Joachim. Brahms’ long-time ensemble partner and artistic collaborator, Joachim first heard Brahms play the piano on a recital with the violinist Eduard Reményi in 1853. “Never in the course of my artistic life,” he recalled, “have I been more completely overwhelmed with delighted surprise than when the rather shy-mannered, blond companion of my countryman played one of his sonata movements of quite undreamed-of originality and power, looking noble and inspired the while.” Even at that early date, Joachim was as impressed by Brahms’ tenderness and “idealism” as by his forceful artistic personality.

The first movement of the Sonata No. 2 in A Major—marked, rather unusually, Allegro amabile—exudes the relaxed give-and-take of a companionable dialogue. The pianist introduces a lilting four-bar melody, whereupon the violinist echoes the final phrase, as if to say, encouragingly, “Yes, go on.” After two or three more false starts, the violin picks up the theme and runs with it. From then on the two instruments pass the ball back and forth, now lightheartedly, now in earnest, always careful to avoid upstaging each other. The genial repartee continues in the Andante tranquillo, with slow and quick sections alternating in rondo-like ABABA form. The main theme of the concluding Allegretto grazioso, like that of the first movement, surges upward in rising arcs before returning to rest at its starting point.

The 92nd Street Y and WNYC have partnered to offer a guided exploration of the Y’s impressive music archives. Sara Fishko curates and hosts this 10-part series, Music from the 92nd Street Y, which features the greatest live performances from the stage of the Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. In the premiere episode on April 26, the Tokyo String Quartet performs music by Haydn, plus a rarely heard Septet by German composer Hans Eisler, drawn from his own music for a Charlie Chaplin film. Listen to the whole show here.

View the series schedule and read more about the Tokyo String Quartet at the Y in the 2008-09 concert season.

Alan Alda unites his two passions, music and theater, in dramatic presentations of two colorful chamber works featuring dancer Colleen Dunn and actor Noah Wyle. The following are program notes for the performances on April 29 and April 30 at the 92nd Street Y.

SAINT-SAËNS: Carnival of the Animals
Camille Saint Saëns was born in Paris in 1835 and died in Algiers in 1921. He composed Carnival of the Animals in 1886.

Of Camille Saint Saëns, Berlioz once remarked, “He knows everything but lacks inexperience.” This bon mot is ideally suited to describe a man who, having composed his first piece at age three, was hailed for a time as a second Mozart; who played a piano recital in Paris at age ten and offered to play as an encore any Beethoven piano sonata that the audience might be pleased to request; who was hailed by Liszt as the greatest organist in the world; who eagerly pursued studies in archeology, astronomy and philosophy and wrote extensively in all three fields, as well as taking a vigorous part in musical polemics. And, of course, in his 86 years, he composed 13 operas, five symphonies (of which two remained unpublished after his death), orchestral tone poems, ten full-fledged concertos for piano, violin, or cello, and a large body of chamber music and other works. But he is best remembered for a private burlesque which he dashed off in a matter of days, an amusing jest called The Carnival of the Animals (this fact would have caused him deep chagrin). Unlike many other composers of the romantic era, Saint-Saëns was more classical in his orientation, preferring clarity and craftsmanship to inspiration and personal expression. Today, when so many adopt the expression of personal feelings as the height of significant statement, we rather lose track of composers like Saint-Saëns, who remind us of the opposite swing of the artistic pendulum.

Continue reading Program Notes and Artist Bios.

The following are program notes by artistic director and host Jeff Harnar for the Lyrics & Lyricists: The 1959 Broadway Songbook shows at the 92nd Street Y on May 3-5.

Look at the list of Broadway musicals running in 1959. Blink, and look at it again. Whether it’s to appreciate the role call of songwriters at work in that single calendar year, or the array of stars bringing that work to life, or the seemingly impossible list of wonderful shows - and not one of them a revival - one cannot help but be astonished. It’s a breathtaking barometer of the level of genius at work within a single season.

1959. The hula-hoop was new, the Barbie Doll was new and I was new. Having loved Broadway music for as long as I can remember, I became curious to see which musicals shared my birth year. When I discovered more than 20 musicals were playing in 1959, some new, some still running from previous seasons, my imagination took flight.

Together with Alex Rybeck and Sara Louise Lazarus, I set about creating a musical collage, one that might highlight the delicious diversity and colors of the collective Broadway songbooks of 1959. I also aspired to pay homage to the very structure of the classic 1950s Broadway musical, to map our musical trajectory around the traditional “boy meets girl” plot line, formatted with the hallmarks of the musical comedy “Overture,” “Intermission,” “Entr’acte” and “Curtain Call.”

Continue reading Program Notes and Artist Bios.

The following are Program Notes for the Masters of the Keyboard concert with Paul Lewis at the 92nd Street Y on May 10. Masters of the Keyboard series subscriptions for the 2008-09 season featuring Hélène Grimaud, Garrick Ohlsson, Peter Serkin and Shai Wosner are now on sale.

MOZART: Fantasia in C minor, K. 475
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and died in Vienna in 1791. He wrote the Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 in 1785.

During the few short years of his lifetime, Mozart witnessed the introduction and widespread acceptance of a radically new keyboard instrument, the piano. Although he kept, and used, his beloved clavichord to the end of his life, he composed for and performed on the new pianoforte, or clavier, or Piano forte, or fortepiano—it took awhile for the name of the instrument to stabilize—from his twenties onward.

Beginning around 1760, Mozart’s father, Leopold, eagerly paraded his Wunderkinder—Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl—before the public, demonstrating their superlative harpsichord and clavichord talents. (Wolfgang also performed on a tiny violin.) Into his adulthood, his father continued to advise Wolfgang about the efficacy of this or that clavichord or harpsichord.

The following are bios for Dick & Derek’s Piano Party, a Jazz Piano at the Y concert on April 12, 2008. Now is also the time to get your subscriptions for the Y’s annual Jazz in July series which includes tributes to Leonard Bernstein, George Shearing, Billy Strayhorn and 42 Years of Swing.

Dick Hyman is a pianist, organist, arranger, conductor and composer. As a busy studio musician, he has won seven “Most Valuable Player” awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, having recorded more than 100 albums under his own name and even more in support of other artists. Hyman has performed solo, with orchestras, with his own quintet, with cornetist Ruby Braff and in duo piano performances with George Shearing, Derek Smith, Roger Kellaway, Ralph Sutton and Dick Wellstood. In 1975, Dick Hyman was asked to conduct the New York Jazz Repertory Company on a State Department-sponsored tour of the former Soviet Union. Hyman has acted as music director for radio and television, including the 1989-90 In Performance at the White House. He has written numerous scores for television dramas and documentaries for which he has received Emmy Awards for both composing and musical direction. He has also orchestrated Broadway musicals and composed scores for films, including many for writer-director Woody Allen. He composed and performed the score for the Cleveland Ballet’s Piano Man and for Twyla Tharp’s The Bum’s Rush with the American Ballet Theatre. His concert compositions include his Piano Concerto, Ragtime Fantasy, and Sonata for Violin and Piano. Other projects include an interactive CD-Rom, A Century of Jazz Piano, and with John Sheridan, Forgotten Dreams...Archives of Novelty Piano. Hyman created and served for 20 years as artistic director for the 92nd Street Y’s Jazz in July series and was selected by his successor for its 2006 “Jazz Legend” tribute. He has been artistic director for Jazz Piano at the Y since its inception in the ‘70s. His Web site is www.dickhyman.com.

Derek Smith began his career in his native England at the age of 14. He joined John Dankworth’s band when Cleo Laine was the female vocalist and also performed and recorded for the BBC. Smith moved to the United States, and only a couple of weeks after his arrival in New York, he recorded with the Modern Jazz Quartet. One of his first New York engagements was with his own trio opposite Mel Tormé and Ella Fitzgerald at Basin Street East. He joined Benny Goodman’s band in 1961 and was pianist on Benny Goodman—The Swing Era, released by Time/Life Records. Doc Severinsen hired Smith as pianist for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he played with the band for seven years while continuing to record daily in New York studios and work with Benny Goodman. After leaving The Tonight Show when it moved to California, he led his own band on NBC’s Musical Chairs game show. Smith has numerous albums as leader to his credit in the U.S. and Japan; his trio album, Love for Sale, was nominated for a Grammy in 1989. Probably the world’s most recorded commercial/jazz pianist, Smith may be heard on recordings ranging from pop albums with Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick and Steve Lawrence/Eydie Gorme to jazz albums with Dizzy Gillespie, Louie Bellson and Clark Terry, to those with Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. He can also be heard on movie soundtracks, among them Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence.

The following are Program Notes and Artist Bios for the International Ensembles concert featuring Juliane Banse, soprano / Rossetti String Quartet / Brian Zeger, piano at the 92nd Street Y on April 10. This is the only New York appearance for the Rossetti String Quartet and Juliane Banse who will give the first New York performance of Bach’s Alles mit Gott, a work discovered in 2005.

BACH: Selections from Schemellis Musikalisches Gesang-Buch, BWV 439-507
“Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen”
“Nicht so traurig, nicht so sehr”
“Was bist du doch, o Seele”
“Komm, süsser Tod”
“Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag”
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685 and died in Leipzig in 1750. Georg Christian Schemelli’s Musikalisches Gesang-Buch was published in Leipzig in 1736.

In 1737, Johann Adolph Scheibe published one of the most infamous put-downs in musical history, dismissing J.S. Bach’s music as “bombastic,” overwrought, and lacking in naturalness. Although Scheibe later ate his words, Bach’s reputation as a fusty academic lingered for decades after his death. Scheibe’s criticism seems particularly ill advised in light of the simple and affecting hymns in Georg Christian Schemelli’s Musikalisches Gesang-Buch of 1736, to which Bach contributed the continuo accompaniments and at least three of the hymn tunes.

The five sacred solo songs heard this evening are a fair sampling of the contents of Schemelli’s anthology. As with the other 64 hymns in the Gesang-Buch, the texts are drawn from the extensive repertory of 17th- and 18th-century religious poetry. The musical settings range from the restrained, meditative style of “Komm, süsser Tod,” in plaintive D minor, to the bright major key affirmation of “Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen.” (The latter is the only one of the five melodies that scholars have firmly ascribed to Bach.) Likewise, the unadorned declamatory style of “Nicht so traurig, nicht so sehr” and “Was bist du doch, o Seele” contrasts with the showier, more soloistic vocal line of “Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag.”

Schemelli was court cantor at Zeitz, a few miles south of Bach’s home in Leipzig. His hymnal appeared at Eastertide in 1736, around the time the revised version of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion had its first performance in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche. No doubt the oratorio’s great double choruses struck some members of the congregation as excessively contrapuntal—or, as Scheibe put it, “artificial.” For them, the artless pieties of Schemelli’s Gesang-Buch must have been balm to the ears.

The following are Program Notes for the Chamber Music at the Y concerts with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, Leila Josefowicz (violin) and Michael Tree (viola) at the 92nd Street Y on March 18 and 19. Artist bios are available here.

STRAVINSKY: Duo concertante for Violin and Piano
Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, in 1882 and died in New York in 1971. He wrote the Duo concertante for Violin and Piano in 1931-32.

Stravinsky composed his Violin Concerto in 1931 for the young Samuel Dushkin. Although Stravinsky (as conductor) and Dushkin (as soloist) received invitations to play the concerto all over Europe, the composer realized that their performances were limited to cities with a capable orchestra. It occurred to him that concerts might be more easily arranged if he wrote something for piano and violin, so that he and Dushkin could perform it almost anywhere. The result was the Duo concertante, composed between December 1931 and mid-July 1932.

It was atypical of Stravinsky at this time to admit to so practical a reason for the composition as needing the piece for his concert tours. But he found an aesthetic justification for writing a work for piano and violin, a medium he claimed (in his autobiography) to dislike.

Continue reading Program Notes...

Danny Sanderson performs at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday, March 22 for this season’s last concert of the Israeli Voices series. Subscriptions for the 2008-09 series featuring Chava Alberstein, Yoni Rechter and David Broza are now on sale.

Sanderson was born in Kfar Blum in Israel, grew up in Haifa and Savion, and at the age of 10 moved with his family to the U.S., where he lived until he was 18. Sanderson was drawn to music early in life, and played in several rock bands, influenced mainly by mid-60s American pop and rock. At the age of 18 he was conscripted to the Israeli Defense Forces and played guitar with the Nachal military singing band. Sanderson was mainly noted at the time as a phenomenal guitar player, but soon also gained a reputation as a composer and arranger.

In 1972, along with friends Alon Oleartchik, Efraim Shamir, Gidi Gov, Meir Feningstein and later Yoni Rechter and Yitzchak Klepter, Sanderson founded a band called Kaveret (“Beehive”). The original idea for the band, formulated by Oleartchik and Sanderson, was to create a poprock operatic show, centered on the fictional figure “Poogy”, which Feningstein and Sanderson created. The operatic show failed to catch on, but when separated into individual songs the band became an instant hit in Israel, catapulting Kaveret into the position of the most successful pop-rock band in Israel then and since. Sanderson was the dominant force in Kaveret, writing the music and lyrics, filled with humor, to most of the songs, making him the leading songwriter of his generation. In 1976, after three albums and a short tour of the U.S., many of the band members were eager to embark on their own individual careers so Kaveret disbanded. However, it has had several reunion tours, resulting in two more albums.

Sanderson took a break from music to write a nonsense book (Nekhira Pumbit, “A Public Snore”), and then created two more bands that also demonstrated his wit: Gazoz (a type of aerated drink), which released two albums; and Doda (“Aunt”), which had several hits. He then embarked on a successful solo recording career, resulting in 11 albums, most recently Congo Blue, a more somber album recorded in response to the death of his wife. He has produced several albums for other Israeli performers and has succeeded in other media, writing two more books and appearing on Israeli television as musician, comedian and host. Sanderson’s prolific and successful career has won him a prominent place in Israel’s cultural history.

[Israeli Voices: Danny Sanderson: 3/22/08]