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WYNER: The Mirror / Passover Offering / Tants un Maysele

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WYNER: The Mirror / Passover Offering / Tants un Maysele

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MUSIC OF YEHUDI WYNER YEHUDI WYNER (b. 1929) THE MIRROR � Suite from music for the play (1972-3) PASSOVER OFFERING (1959) TANTS UN MAYSELE (1981) Prominent...

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MUSIC OF YEHUDI WYNER

YEHUDI WYNER (b. 1929)

THE MIRROR� Suite from music for the play (1972-3)

PASSOVER OFFERING (1959)

TANTS UN MAYSELE (1981)

Prominent contemporary American composer Yehudi Wyner has produced a diverse array of orchestral, chamber, choral, theatrical, vocal and solo instrumental works, among them many commissions from prestigious organizations including Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Koussevitzky and Ford Foundations.� Many of his major works have been informed by the Judaic heritage--particularly the vibrant Yiddish culture--that was his birthright and pervaded his experience from earliest childhood.� His father was conductor and composer Lazar Weiner (1897-1982), the leading exponent of Yiddish high musical culture and the acknowledged master of the Yiddish art song.

Reflecting on the role of Jewish musical idioms in his compositions, Yehudi Wyner has remarked:

I sought to synthesize a contemporary aesthetic and technical thought with musical elements of clearly definable Jewish character.

Turns of melody, dance rhythms, cadential figures, typical sonorities of an instrumental or ensemble nature--emerging from a body of various musics historically connected with Jewish life--were important elements in those pieces I intended to be characteristically Jewish."

The first work on this Milken CD is a suite from Wyner's incidental music to The Mirror, a play by Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the greatest writers of Yiddish fiction in the modern era.� As Neil Levin, the Milken Archive's artistic director points out, The Mirror "concerns religious life among small-town Jewry in eastern Europe; the sexual frustrations often produced by communally and religiously institutionalized sexual repressions and inhibitions; and the road to fantasy from those frustrations, which could lead to mystical and even satanic alliances with demons and with evil."� In his musical treatment of this tale of a pious woman who succumbs to temptation, if only in her imagination, Yehudi Wyner clearly recognized Singer's preoccupation with revealing a consciousness of sexuality within that insular world, as well as his passionate condemnation of superstition and hypocrisy.

The composer described this concert suite as "functionally after the manner of Stravinsky's L'Histoire de Soldat, but without narration."� He acknowledged the importance of several Jewish musical sources with which he had long been familiar: secular folk and religious song, the music of klezmer bands, the monophonic modes of the Near East, and music of the Sephardi Jews of the Mediterranean basin."� He also noted his use of musical parody and stylistic distortion, which echoes Singer's employment of those same devices in prose.� The instrumental ensemble simulates an eastern European klezmer band.� This work is performed here by Richard Stoltzman, clarinet; Daniel Stepner, violin; Robert Shulz, percussion; James Guttman, double bass; Carol Meyer, soprano; Judi Brown Kirchner, mezzo-soprano; Matthew Kirchner, tenor; and Richard Lalli, baritone, joined by the composer as speaker.

Using these small forces and working in a concentrated, highly idiomatic musical language that is both evocative and arresting, the composer employs an economy of musical means to achieve his expressive goals.� He is more concerned with capturing the play's atmosphere and mood than underlining the details of the drama itself; in effect interpreting an emotional rather than a narrative journey.

In his chamber work Passover Offering, Wyner sought, in his own words, "to evoke the drama and sentiment of some aspects of this legendary [biblical] history."� Despite the subtitles given to the five movements, which delineate the basic elements of the Passover story--from slavery and plagues to exodus, desert wandering and hope for the promised land--the composer viewed this work not as a literal musical narrative, but rather as "reflections and meditations on certain situations."� The instrumentation was carefully chosen: the trombone represents the signaling character of the shofar (ram's horn), and the flute evokes biblical cantillation motifs.� Wyner acknowledged his use of certain Eastern European Jewish folkloric musical idioms in this work, but described it as "a mixture of a type of Stravinsky's neo-classicism with the approach of Alban Berg."� Passover Offering is performed on this recording by Richard Stoltzman, clarinet; Carol Wincenc, flute; Ronald Thomas, cello; and David Taylor, bass trombone.�

Tants un Maysele (Dance and Little Story), scored for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, has deep personal significance for the composer, who was inspired by two virtuoso piano pieces based on eastern European folk themes written by his father and dedicated to him as a child.� Shortly before his father's death, Wyner was able to present him with his own new composition based on those original works.� The first section, Dance, features Hassidic-type dance rhythms, but is also, in the composer's words, "infused with a kind of violence and peremptory rage...and a sense of extreme mystery and confusion."� The contrasting second movement, Little Story, has a less frenzied, mystical quality, and is based on a slower, tranquil folk like theme of Wyner's own composition.� This movement has distinct Brahmsian overtones, and features an effective use of instrumental color.� On this recording, the composer is at the piano, with violinist Daniel Stepner, clarinetist Bruce Creditor, and cellist Jennifer Langham.

A student of Paul Hindemith at Yale and Randall Thompson and Walter Piston at Harvard, Yehudi Wyner has earned numerous honors, including the Rome Prize in composition; two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Elise Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.� Since 1990, he has held the Naumburg Chair in Composition at Brandeis University.� Previously he was head of the composition faculty at Yale University, dean of music at the Purchase campus of the State University of New York, a member of the chamber music faculty of the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood, and a visiting professor at Cornell and Harvard universities.� Wyner is also a highly respected pianist and conductor.

Disc 1

The Mirror

(more info)

Composed by: Yehudi Wyner
Yehudi Wyner, narrator
Carol Meyer, soprano
Richard Lalli, baritone
Judi Brown Kirchner, mezzo-soprano
Matthew Kirchner, tenor
James Guttmann, double bass
Richard Stoltzman, clarinet
Robert Schulz, percussion
Daniel Stepner, violin
Recording date: December 1999
Produced by: Frost, David

Demon's Welcome - 1:15
Home Variations - 3:21
Wedding Dances - 4:39
Reading the K'tuba - 2:09
Incantation - 2:54
Asmodeus' Court - 1:19
Invocation of the Jew of Babylon - 0:36
The Jew of Babylon Appears - 0:41
Processional: The Jew of Babylon's Mystic Circle - 1:26
Yenta's Fantasy: Trying On Her Wedding Dress - 0:45
Yenta's Fantasy: The Wedding Celebration - 3:22
Flight - 1:43
March: Wolf and Sheep - 2:01

Passover Offering

(more info)

Composed by: Yehudi Wyner
Ronald Thomas, cello
Richard Stoltzman, clarinet
David Taylor, trombone
Carol Wincenc, flute
Recording date: December 1999
Produced by: Frost, David

Lento - 3:58
Energico - 5:26
Alla Marcia - 3:03
Grave - 4:06
Quieto - 1:44

Tants un Maysele

(more info)

Composed by: Yehudi Wyner
Bruce Creditor, clarinet
Jennifer Langham, cello
Yehudi Wyner, piano
Daniel Stepner, violin
Recording date: April 1992
Produced by: Isaacson, Michael

Tants - 5:25
Maysele - 8:09

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Composer(s):
Wyner, Yehudi

Artist(s):
Brown Kirchner, Judi; Creditor, Bruce; Guttmann, James; Kirchner, Matthew; Lalli, Richard; Langham, Jennifer; Meyer, Carol; Schulz, Robert; Stepner, Daniel; Stoltzman, Richard; Taylor, David; Thomas, Ronald; Wincenc, Carol; Wyner, Yehudi; Wyner, Yehudi

Label: Naxos Milken Archives/American
UPC: 636943942321
Item Number: 8559423
Release Date: May 1, 2004