SKU: PR.114417610

ISBN 9781491107904. UPC: 680160636051. 9x12 inches.

SONATA CHO-CHO-SAN(Based on themes from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly)In the spirit of the great 19th-century opera fantasies for woodwinds, Michael Webster has created a concert trio on the many great arias from Puccini's Madama Butterfly. However, as its name implies, Sonata Cho-Cho-San is not the typical virtuosic operatic potpourri. Rather, it follows the plot, resembling a sonata mirroring Puccini's use of recurring and developing themes. Webster makes the most of the winds as versatile performers - equally suited to deliver Puccini's beautiful vocal writing, and to ornament and embroider the poignant themes in symphonic style. For advanced performers.______________ _________________________ Text from the scanned back cover:Born in 1944, Michael Webster made his New York recital debutat Town Hall in 1968 with his eminent father, Beveridge Webster, as pianist. In the same year, he won the Young Concert Artists International Competition and succeeded his teacher, Stanley Hasty, as Principal Clarinet in the Rochester Philharmonic, a position he held for twenty years. Webster has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, with the Tokyo, Cleveland, Muir, Ying, Enso, and Dover String Quartets, and with the festivals of Marlboro, Santa Fe, Norfolk, Chamber Music Northwest, Angel Fire, Steamboat Springs, Park City, Sitka, Kapalua, Bowdoin, Orcas Island, Skaneateles, La Musica di Asolo, Stratford, Victoria, and Domaine Forget.As soloist he has appeared with many orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra under Aaron Copland and the Boston Pops under John Williams. His travels have taken him as performer and teacher to most of the 50 states, as well as Canada, Mexico,Puerto Rico, Central and South America, Europe, Japan, China, Australia, and New Zealand. Webster was Acting Principal Clarinet of the San Francisco Symphony, and has served on the clarinet and/or conducting faculties of New England Conservatory, Boston University, University of Michigan, and the Eastman School, from which he earned his three degrees. Currently he is Professor of Music at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and Artistic Director of the Houston Youth Symphony, which has won multiple first prizes in national performance competitions.With his wife, flutist Leone Buyse, and pianist Robert Moeling, he plays in the Webster Trio, which has recorded his arrangements on Tour de France and World Wide Webster for Crystal Records. Otherarrangements were recorded for Nami and Camerata Tokyo in Japan with pianist Chizuko Sawa. Webster has also recorded for Albany, Arabesque, Beaumont, Bridge, Centaur, CRI, and New World. He has played at many ClarinetFests for the International Clarinet Association and written a column entitled “TeachingClarinetâ € in The Clarinet Magazine since 1998. Michael Webster is a Buffet artist-clinician, performing on Buffet clarinets exclusively.

SKU: HL.277282

UPC: 840126915006. 6.75x10.5 inches.

Program note:

Looking Up is a piece for large chorus and orchestra, and is in three sections, played without pause. In the 16th century, a variety of psalters in meter were printed in England, with the idea of making psalm-singing something that could happen easily at home, with the rhyming meter being an aid to memorization. These translations are wonderful exercises in brevity and sometimes clumsy rhymemaking, and were usually prefaced by a lengthy explanation as to their merits; the title of one of the first such volumes in English is: The Psalter of Dauid newely translated into Englysh metre in such sort that it maye the more decently, and wyth more delyte of the mynde, be reade and songe of al men. I thought it would be appropriate to set one of these introductions, and the first section of Looking Up sets the preface to Thomas Ravenscroft's psalter (1621), in which he writes: “The singing of Psalmes (assay the Doctors) comforteth the sorrowfull, pacifieth the angry, strengtheneth the weake, humbleth the proud, gladdeth the humble, stirres up the slow, reconcileth enemies, lifteth up the heart to heavenly things, and uniteth the Creature to his Creator.”

It begins meditatively, but eventually grows agitated and fervent, with a vision of the “quire of Angels and Saints” “redoubling anddescanting” - an ecstatic and terrifying vision of the skies opening up. Ravenscroft then encourages the use of instrumental musicfor worship, at which point, a long, acrobatic orchestral interlude with jagged edges antagonizes the choir, who sing a kind of private, anxious meditation on two pitches.

One of the most delicious biblical texts is an Apocryphal prayer known as the Benedicite or the Prayer of the Three Children (the same who were rescued by an angel after King Nebuchadnezzar tried to have them burnt in an oven for not bowing to his image). The text is repetitive, obsessive, and a gift to composers - each line is an invocation of an element of the natural world, followed by the phrase, “blesse ye the Lord, praise him & magnify him for ever.” In Looking Up, the setting begins with three solo voices, and then grows to include the whole choir, itemizing the whole of creation. The idea that these boys are spared from the furnace and then five minutes later are saying, “O ye the fire and warming heate, blesse ye the Lord...” has always felt very loaded to me, and the orchestra plays with this conflict between joyful praise and a more terrible (in the 16th-century sense) awefor the divine.

The text for the third, and shortest, section is taken from Christopher Smart's (1722-1771) A Song to David, purportedly written during his confinement in a mental asylum. This ode to King David points out how David, as the author of some of the Psalms, observes the whole world from the “clustering spheres” to the “nosegay in the vale.&rdquo.