NEXTET Virko Baley, music director and conductor

College of Fine Arts presents
NEXTET
The New Music Ensemble for the 21st Century
Virko Baley, music director and conductor
An Evening of Ukrainian & Ukrainian-American Piano Music II
Timothy Hoft, piano
PROGRAM
Valentin Bibik
(1940–2003)
From 34 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 16 (1973-78)
Preludes and Fugues Nos. 2, 5, 7, 12
Valentin Bibik
Sonata No. 4, Op. 41 (1981)
Virko Baley
(b. 1938)
Nocturnal No. 6 (1988)
INTERMISSION
Valentin Bibik
From 34 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 16 (1973-78)
Preludes and Fugues Nos. 28, 19, 31, 32
Vitaly Hodzyatsky
(b. 1936)
Raptures of Flatnesses (1963)
Valentin Silvestrov
(b. 1937)
The Messenger - 1996 (1996-97)
Virko Baley
Nocturnal No. 3, for three pianos (1970; rev. 2000)
Jae Ahn-Benton, piano
Otto Ehling, piano
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
7:30 p.m.
Dr. Arturo Rando-Grill Recital Hall
Lee and Thomas Beam Music Center
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
PROGRAM NOTES AND BIOGRAPHIES
A pianist of unique versatility, Timothy Hoft is in demand as a soloist and chamber
musician. In recent years, Hoft has given performances in the concert halls of France, Italy, Czech
Republic, England, Scotland, and the U.S., including Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington D.C.), the Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.),
the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts (Houston), the Piano Salon at Yamaha Artist Services (New
York), and the Smith Center-Cabaret Jazz (Las Vegas). He has performed as a concerto soloist with
the Detroit Civic Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Peter by the Sea, the Peabody Camerata,
the Peabody Wind Ensemble, the UNLV Wind Orchestra, and the Henderson Symphony Orchestra.
An active accompanist and chamber musician, Hoft has collaborated in chamber
performances with members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra,
National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Las Vegas Philharmonic. Hoft
frequently performs with virtuoso flutist, Anastasia Petanova, having given performances in numerous
venues such as The Phillips Collection, the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, l'Hotel d'Assezat in
Toulouse, France and The New York University in Florence, Italy.
Hoft earned a Bachelor's of Music Degree in piano performance from the University of
Michigan, as well as Master's of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts Degrees from the Peabody
Conservatory of Music. His primary interests include collaborating with composers and performing
unfamiliar repertoire. Current projects include performing and recording the music of Ukrainian
composers Boris Lyatoshynsky, Valentin Silvestrov, Valentin Bibik, and Virko Baley.
In 2012, Hoft joined the music faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as Assistant
Professor of Piano and Accompanying. Previous to his appointment at UNLV, he was a visiting
assistant professor at SUNY-Fredonia. Timothy Hoft is very grateful for the mentorship of his
wonderful teachers - Logan Skelton and Benjamin Pasternack.
Jae Ahn-Benton is an active collaborative pianist and composer in Las Vegas, Nevada. He
has studied with Mr. Roger Bushell and Dr. Mykola Suk. He is currently employed at the Little Church
of the West to play for weddings, as well as Nevada School of the Arts and the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas as a collaborative pianist for various individual music students and music classes. Jae
keeps a busy schedule by also teaching piano to young students and frequently makes time to many
types of gigs around town.
Otto Ehling began classical training at two years old. Born and raised in Los Angeles as a
Brazilian-American, he performed numerous events in his youth to raise money for Brazilian
orphanages. In 2002, Otto had won first prize in the NAACP national classical division. Shortly
thereafter, he began studying Jazz music in addition to his classical playing. This led to his full
scholarship at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he achieved his Bachelors degree in both
Classical and Jazz Performance as well as his Master’s degree in Jazz Performance. Among Ehling’s
many performances, he made his debut in 2011 with the Long Beach Symphony in a Pops concert
featuring Ben Vereen, where he performed Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Concerto. Recently, Otto began his
Doctoral degree at UNLV in Classical performance. In addition to his schooling, he performs at shows
on the Las Vegas Strip such as Pop Evolution, MJ live, and Cirque du Soleil’s “O”.
Valentin Bibik was a leading figure in the musical life of Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he was born and educated
and taught at the Kharkiv Conservatory. In the post-Soviet period he taught in St. Petersburg, then emigrated
to Israel, where he died at the age of 63 in 2003. Valentin Bibik's art is one that attempts to maximize the
coloristic and formal dimensions of each musical gesture being portrayed; it makes use of a wide range of
techniques, including massive canons, tone clusters and simultaneous employment of multiple tempi, as
exemplified in two of his best known large scale works, Symphony No. 4 (1976) and Symphony No. 7 (1982).
The result is a style that exhibits the contrasting of immobility and motion, of quietude and tempestuous
outbreaks, of contemplation and activity. The effects are often achieved with the principal of continual
variation -- of troping -- which is applied in a slow and inexorable manner that gives his music both weight
and a feeling of suspension, as if one were listening in a giant aquarium.
In this evening’s concert, Timothy Hoft continues his eventual transversal of the complete 34 Preludes
and Fugues (1973-1978) by Bibik, one of the few great cycles that attempts to take Bach on with
considerable success. In his notes to Bibik’s Piano Sonata No. 4, Joel Sachs wrote:
The Sonata Op. 41 (1981), the fourth of Bibik’s ten piano sonatas, is cast as a single
movement shaped like an arch. Ideas reveal their potential at a leisurely pace, gradually
transforming one level of energy into another – the meditative grows into explosive, whose
energy dissipates in the touching, wistful, Schubertian coda. The Sonata is expressive in its
extreme simplicity. The entire first section is based upon the three-note idea heard in the first
four measures; the “Allegro animato” in the middle derives from an equally simple twomeasure idea. The coda is a synthesis and variation of the two ideas, now transformed into a
long-lined melody.
Virko Baley’s Nocturnal No. 6 is a work in three parts that delineate the following plan: a
dramatization of a single monodic line by means of continual variation and troping. The melodic
material is derived from isolated elements that are found in Ukrainian folklore and were tied in my
mind very closely to visual patterns and colors. Some of the principal melodic material comes from an
old work for piano "Kaleidoscope" which I discarded (although some of the material of that suite found
its way into Nocturnal Nos. 1 and 2). Here, as in the middle part of Nocturnal No. 4, the single line
unfolds through different sections (or verses), each with its own climax and repose, each an attempt
to find the correct inward sensibility, and each followed by its own resonance into silence. The first two
sections (verse 1 and verse 2) last about eight and a half minutes and are dominated by a single
theme that is not heard in a complete, unadorned way until the end of section two. The third section,
the envoy, is a sort of highly melismatic “adieu” and a memory from childhood that comes to one just
before sleep descends. In 1990, Nocturnal No. 6 became the basis of the second movement of my
Piano Concerto No. 1.
Hodzyatsky [Godziatsky], Vitaliy (born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1936) received his earliest musical education at
home. While attending middle school, Hodzyatsky took private lessons in piano and theory (1954). In 1956
he entered the Kiev Conservatory and in 1961 graduated from the composition class of B. Lyatoshynsky, who
played a major part in his creative development. After teaching music theory in Vinnytsya (1961-63)
Hodzyatsky returned to Kiev as a teacher in children's music schools. The “recognition of the new” began
with the influence of Stravinsky (1960), and then again in 1962, when together with other members of the
“Kiev Avant-Garde” (such as L. Hrabovsky, V. Silvestrov and the conductor I. Blazhkov), he began to
experiment with 12-tone techniques, spurred on by Hrabovsky’s translations, first into Russian and then into
Ukrainian of Hans Jelineck’s “Anleitung zur Zwolftonkomposition” and Ernst Krenek’s “Lessons in TwelveTone Counterpoint.” Works by Anton Webern, Edgard Varese, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and
also Pierre Schaeffer and other composers of concrete music, played a decisive role for hi development.
That same year the new Poland was “opened" to Soviet artists, where the new horizons for musical
development were being realized. The results were immediately apparent by 1963 in two works written for the
piano: Rozlyvy ploshchyn (Raptures of Flatnesses) and a collection of miniatures Avtohrafy (Autographs). In
them, Hodszyatsky’s style of aggressive athleticism, rhythmic elasticity and emotional intensity are mixed with
sudden and resplendent means. It’s as if Prokofiev went on to become a 12-tone (or freely atonal) composer.
In 1964 he created four hilariously witty magnetic-tape musique concrete pieces titled simply Four Electronic
Studies: Nyuansi (Nuances), Emansipirovannyi chemodan (The Emancipated Suitcase), Realizatiya 29/1 and
Antifortepiano. Different objects were used as sound sources, from kitchen utensils to different parts of the
piano. The pieces have tremendous energy and a good deal of humor, especially the two middle movements.
These were also the first pieces by a Ukrainian composer, and one of the first by a Soviet, to work with
electronic means. Since then, Hodzyatsky has worked slowly but steadily, producing works of individuated
originality, from the 1974 Piano Sonata, through the 1990 revision of Stabilis for chamber orchestra and the
Woodwind Quintet (1996). As his art matured it placed greater emphasis on the long line, emotional stability
and attractive colors. He is a composer who never abandoned his basic modernist aesthetic.
– Virko Baley, THE NEW GROVES DICTIONARY OF MUSIC (2000)
Valentin Silvestrov’s The Messenger was originally written for piano and then expanded for piano,
strings and a synthesizer (wind sounds); composed soon after the death of his wife, the musicologist
Larysa Bondarenko, the music reflects on Mozart who hovers over the piece “as a symbol of ageless
perfection.” This music is like a dream in which familiar phrases appear in unusual juxtapositions. As
Bob Gilmore wrote in 2001, “…It is composed of nothing but authentic or pastiche Mozart-materials,
but with strange disturbances: melodies appear and fade away incomplete, chord progressions do not
lead where we expect or resolve conventionally… The mood of otherworldliness seems to convey the
tragedy at the loss of a loved one, the evocation of Mozart’s day offering peace and consolation in the
face of loss, of the unbearable present.” Silvestrov himself wrote, “It is as if a visitor from some other
dimension of time came to us with a message…The Messenger is perhaps Larysa herself, perhaps
some distant muse speaking in the language of the late 18th century.”
The composer Virko Baley writes: Nocturnal No. 3 for three pianos was triggered by a piece I heard at Cal
Arts (California Institute of the Arts) in the Fall of 1969: Harold Budd's "November Steps" for contrabass and
tape -- the tape part consisting of two prerecorded bass parts. The notation was simply a set of directions for
the bass player, who had to realize the two channels of the tape as well. I was fascinated by the idea of
creating a piece in which each part was an independent event that could be "performed" without listening to
the other two voices. That accidental simultaneity played an important part in the aesthetic of the piece. I
composed a version of the piece and notated it down in a series of extended cues of various degrees of
exactness -- from fairly precise to completely improvised. I wanted to write a piece that could be improvised
and yet remain sounding almost the same in some mysterious way.
Nocturnal No. 3 originally was conceived to be played in one of the following three ways:
1. Any 2 of the 3 parts are realized on separate channels of the tape recorder, DAT or CD, the remaining
played "live" & simultaneously with the pre-recorded realization.
2. Any one page pre-recorded, the remaining two played "live". In this version the single speaker should be
placed between the two pianos.
3. All 3 parts realized live. This is the preferred version -- but not often possible.
4. The piece consists of five events of approximately 30 second duration and the sixth and final of
approximately one minute. All six events are in all three of the piano parts. But the order of the events, as
well as specific notes and patterns, are varied and appear at different times.
The NEXTET Spring 2015 Season:
February 12, 2015 Music of Diego Vega, a concert devoted to works chosen for this event by the
composer.
March 24, 2015 Folk Songs, a new work by Pulitzer Prize winning composer Bernard Rands with
Julia Bentley as soloist, plus a work by Italian composer Sciarrino.
April 13, 2015 Composer-in-residence Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, the Duo-Damiana (Molly Alice
Barth, flute, and Dieter Hennings, guitar) and UNLV alumni and winner of the ASCAP Morton Gould
award for 2014, Jason Buchanan.
April 18, 2015 Timothy Hoft, pianist performing the third in his series devoted to Ukrainian and
Ukrainian-American compositions.
May 4, 2015 Michael Hersch, composer-in-residence and guest violoncellist Daniel Gaisford. Final
concert of the season.