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Gary Schocker’s poetic and virtuosic flute playing has brought him great critical acclaim. An unusually versatile musician, he is also a first-rate composer, and while he offers the standard repertoire, he often performs his own compositions as well. Among other internationally renowned orchestras, Schocker has performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony, the West German Sinfonia, and I Solsti Italiani.
“…fine silvery flute tone, dazzling technique and, above all, a wonderful feeling for lyric line.”
– The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Concert Program:
Gary Schocker, flute
Dennis Helmrich, piano
Musique Française…Gary Schocker (b.1959)
café music
chanson
dans le pays
Sonata for Flute and Keyboard in B minor BWV 1030…Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)
Andante
Largo e dolce
Presto
Intermission
Syrinx…Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918)
Flute Forest…Gary Schocker (b. 1959)
schizo cuckoo
alpine frolic
by the hearth in the hut
above the treeline
Sonata No.2 in D Major, Op. 94…Sergei Prokofiev (1891 – 1953)
Moderato
Allegretto scherzando
Andante
Allegro con Brio
Program Notes:
Musique Francaise…Gary Schocker
(born 1959)
Flutist Gary Schocker is a versatile musician whose many compositions have attracted a wide audience and several awards. In addition to performing widely as a concert soloist, he has composed music ranging from solo material for the flute to musical theater. One of his two musicals, Far From the Madding Crowd, based on Thomas Hardy’s novel, was presented in the first New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2004. The work has also been produced by the National Alliance for Music Theatre at their annual festival. The show received its first full production in Christchurch, New Zealand at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art.
Schocker’s Clarinet Sonata and Two Clarinet Sonata have won successive competitions held by the International Clarinet Association, and he won the National Flute Association’s Competition for newly published works with his Bach Partita Ghost as well as Obbligato to the Unaccompanied Partita in A Minor and his Three Dances For Two Flutes, which has been performed widely by many flutists, including James Galway.
Schocker composed Musique Francaise for flute and piano in 1997 and dedicated it to Julius Baker. This work is a favorite of flutist James Galway, who performed it throughout his United States recital tour in 2002. Schocker has commented that he wrote the first movement knowing he “was writing a sonata but as it unfolded I found myself fighting a certain je ne sais quoiI or shall I say, I thought: ‘this is too French!’ Then I realized it would be more fun to give in and let it be what it was. The piece wrote itself.” Schocker labels this appealing and direct work a sonata, and it feels quite traditional in its form and style. The first movement, “café music” has the feel of more modern sounding effects that Schocker introduces in the development section. The composer comments, “The humorous pleasantries of “café music” contrast a torchy “chanson.” The slower tempo of the “chanson,” by far the longest movement, features a scalar flute theme with a supportive but fairly unobtrusive piano accompaniment throughout. The quick-paced last movement, “dans le pays” (“in the country”), is, says Schocker “a flippant excursion of say, naughty children on a school bus.” It is certainly more energy driven and more vivacious as well as technically more demanding than what preceded it, set much higher in register and featuring virtuosic ruins.
--Susan Halpern 2005
Sonata for Flute and Keyboard, B minor, BWV 1030…Johann Sebastian Bach
(Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenbach; died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig)
In the late twentieth century, scholars came to the conclusion that at least two of the flute sonatas that had been accepted as part of the Back canon were actually composed by some other, still unidentified composer. Concensus has not changed, however, concerning the B-minor Sonata, acknowledged generally to be the greatest of the five that Bach definitely wrote. In the 1870s, when Philipp Spitta wrote the first comprehensive book on Bach’s life and work, he had only superlatives to describe this work which he called “the best sonata for the flute that has ever existed.” Many flutists would still agree with that statement.
Bach wrote most of his chamber music to suit the taste of Prince Leopold, ruler of the tiny principality of Anhalt-Cothen, his employer from 1717 to 1723. Leopold so loved instrumental music that as soon as he came of age he hired an orchestra of seventeen musicians, no small number at the time at even larger, more prosperous courts than his. Back composed this sonata around 1720. Although he may have composed it in G minor originally, around 1730, he revised it and transposed it to B minor. In the new key, which had worked so well in his Suite for Flute and Strings, the sonata lay in a better, brighter register of the flute.
Bach had moved to Leipzig by then and had taken over the direction of one of the earliest incarnations of the public concert as we know it today, a series of weekly events at Zimmermann’s Coffee House that Telemann had begun there in 1702. Bach played many of his early instrumental works at Zimmerman’s, often in revised versions.
The sonata is, in fact, almost a concerto, with a seamless, fluent polyphonic accompaniment outlined by the harpsichord. It has four movements, although Bach composed most of his sonatas in three movements. This sonata is sometimes ambiguously and confusingly called a “trio sonata” because the two instruments are given three independent contrapuntal voices: one in the flute part and one in each hand of the obbligato cembalo. An extended Andante aria on two beautiful themes, richly and continuously developed, open the work. It is contrapuntal and sometimes even shifts from the three voices to four that give the movement great density. The brief slow movement, Largo e dolce, features the flute predominantly and contains long lined themes in a pastoral dance much like a Siciliano. The third movement starts as a lively three-part fugue, Presto and then changes suddenly to a gigue-like Allegro that is based on a variant of the fugue subject.
--Susan Alpern 2005
Syrinx, for Unaccompanied Flute…Claude Debussy
(Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye; died March 25, 1918, in Paris)
Syrinx is one of the most well-known and recognizable works written for flute alone. An elegant, touching, little free fantasy in the manner of the famous flute solo Debussy’s orchestral Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,” it also resembles his song from the Chansons de Bilitis cycle, La Flute de Pan (“Pan’s Flute” or “Panpipes”). Debussy originally used that title again for this piece, but the posthumous first edition called it Syrinx, a name taken from the Greek work for panpipes.
The history of the short but memorable work is intriguing. Debussy and his friend Gabriel Mourey, an influential poet, dramatist and critic of the arts, had often discussed the possibility of collaborating on theatrical projects, but they never actually worked together on anything until 1912. At that time, Debussy began to write incidental music for Mourey’s play, Psyche, based on the ancient myth about a girl so beautiful that not only did Cupid fall in love with her, but also even Venus was jealous of her loveliness. Debussy said that Mourey’s play “plucked all the feathers form the wings of love.” He wrote only these brief two and a half minutes of music for a flute, which were played backstage during the death scene of the god Pan, who personified fertility and creation. Louis Fleury, who performed this composition when the play was produced in 1913, kept the manuscript and often played the piece in public, but no other flutist was allowed access to the music until it was published, in 1927, two years after Debussy’s death. Now no flutist’s repertoire would be complete without Syrinx.
--Susan Halpern 2005
Flute Forest…Gary Schocker
Schocker composed Flute Forest for unaccompanied solo flute in 2002, and the composer premiered the work at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, March 9, 2002. He notes, the title is an homage to Debussy’s Syrinx.” The first of the four movements is entitled “Schizo cuckoo” because the cuckoo, whose voice is clearly heard throughout the brief movement, cannot seem to decide if he would rather remain a cuckoo or be a song bird who has more artifice, as well as a more melodic and varied sound. At the culmination of his search for identity, the bird seems to have opted for the melodic when he ends his protracted song with a prolonged trill, but the movement concludes, nevertheless, with a hesitant and shamefaced final ”cuckoo.”
The second movement “alpine frolic” Schocker says, is made up of “a set of variations which climb up and down.” Here the syrinx-like evocation of Debussy is evident in the beginning, although in some sense, a full-fledged yodel also does not seem distant. No longer bird-like, the character of this movement metamorphoses in the middle but then resumes its syrinx-like melody in the final portion.
“By hearth in the hut”, the composer asserts “is self-explanatory.” In a similar tempo and vein as the second movement, this more thoroughly comforting movement again has a legato finish.
The final movement. “above the tree line” is a sprightly, cavorting and energetic conclusion, communicating the flights of birds again with some urgency.
--Susan Halpern 2005
Sonata No. 2 in D Major, Op. 94…Sergei Prokofiev
(Born April 27, 2891, in Sontsovka; died March 5, 1953, in Moscow)
When Sergei Prokofiev began his Sonata for Flute and Piano in D Major in 1942, it made a cheerful and welcome respite from feverish hours spent on his opera based War and Peace. Commissioned by the Committee on Artists Affairs, the new Conata was intended; Prokofiev said, “to sound bright and transparent Classical tones,” presumably the same tones that inhabited his very accessible and popular “Classical” Symphony, also in D major, and his first Violin Concerto.
Leaving the town of Alma-Ata, where Prokofiev had begun sketches for the Sonata, under the protection of the Bolshoi Theater officials, Prokofiev and his common-law wife Mira Mendelson – (they were not married until 1948) – fled to Molotov, two thousand miles across Kazakhstan and up the Volga. Though they were safe there from the threat if the lat major German military campaign, conditions were widely unsettled. For two years, Prokofiev could hardly be sure of a room to live in or a bed to lay his head on. In this hectic haven, Prokofiev somehow finished not only the Flute Sonata but his full-length ballet Cinderella. Creating a purely abstract and apolitical work was “perhaps inappropriate at the moment,” he confessed to his friend Nicolas Miaskovsky, “but pleasant.”
The Sonata’s themes, like those of the ballet, are simple and engaging, its rhythms uncomplicated, its emotions direct and resolutely optimistic. Only in the final Rondo does the aggressive tone of Prokofiev’s other “war works” rise its martial head.
As soon as the D major Sonata had been played for the first time anywhere, by flutist Nicolai Kharkovsky and pianist Sviatoslav Richter on December 7, 1943, in Moscow, violinists recognized its possibilities for their instrument, and David Oistrakh, in particular, suggested to the composer that it would “enjoy a more full-blooded life on the stage” if arranged for violin and piano. Prokofiev made such a version without delay, and Oistrakh, as well as nearly every other leading violinist in the world, programmed it frequently.
The Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Szigeti played its American premiere in Boston in 1944 from a manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
--Clair W. Van Ausdall
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All concerts are free and open to the public — no tickets or reservations are required. Doors to the auditorium open 30 minutes prior to the performance.
Directions to the National Academy of Sciences Auditorium
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