Chamber Music Recital Features New Compositions by Chico’s Russell Burnham

Pianist Sylvia Beaudette and Bay-Area Mezzo Soprano Carrie Stevens. (photo Russell Burnham)

On Sunday, March 15 the concluding program in this year's Chamber Music Series will be presented at 3:00 pm in the Wismer Theatre. Three Twentieth Century works will form the program.

A cycle of nine songs by CSU, Chico clarinetist and composer Russell Burnham will be performed by faculty pianist Sylvie Beaudette and Bay Area mezzo-soprano Carrie Stevens. These songs are based on verse in which imagery of wind, rain, or snow figures prominently. Poems by local poets Sally McNall and George Keithley are used in the cycle. Other American poets whose work is included are William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The second work on the program will be George Crumb's Voice of the Whale. Crumb is a distinguished member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences whose intuitive and highly innovative works have come to be accepted as modern (or perhaps "post-modern") classics. This work is replete with musical and theatrical special effects meant to suggest the vast natural history of the Earth through the songs of whales. Flutist Jan Roberts and cellist Robin Bonnell will join Beaudette in this presentation.

Concluding the program will be music from Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, one of the works composed late in the second decade of the Twentieth Century that showed the way forward in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. This music was intended to accompany a tale in which the moral is "one must not seek to add to what he is what he once was." Often, the seminally neo-classic music of L'Histoire is performed on its own, as it will be in this recital. Joining Chico musicians David Colson (conductor), Richard Winslow (trumpeter), Dan Kinkle (percussion- ist), and Russ Burnham (clarinetist) in the performance will be professional Sacramento and San Francisco musicians Bill Barberini (violin), Alex Glickman (bass), and John Hollenbeck (trombone). In keeping with a growing reaction against Romanticism, this combo-like group of instruments was part of Stravinsky's initial efforts to do more with less.