The New York Woodwind Quintet (Carol Wincenc, flute; Stephen Taylor, oboe; Charles Neidich, clarinet; Marc Goldberg, bassoon; William Purvis, French horn) perform the world premiere of Charles Neidich’s And Then There Were…(2014); the New York premiere of John Steinmetz’s Three Pieces for ten winds (2013); Irving Fine’s Partita for Wind Quintet; and Mendelssohn’s (arr. Purvis) Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13, No. 2 on their Daniel Saidenberg Faculty Recital on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 at 8 PM in Juilliard’s Paul Hall.

           Irving Fine’s Partita for wind quintet, in five movements, was completed in 1948 and had its premiere by the New Art Wind Quintet in New York City. The work won the New York Music Critic’s Circle Award that year. Irving Fine studied composition at Harvard with Walter Piston and with Nadia Boulanger. He also studied conducting and composing with Serge Koussevitzky. Fine taught at Harvard from 1939 until 1950 and at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. He was the Walter Naumburg Professor of Music and founder and chairman of the School of Creative Arts at Brandeis University. Among his many honors and fellowships were a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, and an award from the National Institute of the Arts.

          John Steinmetz’s Three Pieces for Ten Winds (2013) has its New York premiere on this program. The work was written for the NYWQ and Consortium. Steinmetz writes this note about the work: “Three Pieces lasts about 17 minutes. The second movement runs directly into the third. There’s no story or program, but I had lots of different things in mind: sounds, moods, energy patterns, and especially visionaries’ experiences of spaciousness, of feeling part of a vast pattern, of connectedness with everybody and everything.” The three movements are: 1. What the Birds Said; 2. Visions; and 3. Dance. The work was commissioned by a consortium of ensembles, organizations, and individuals. Bassoonist and composer John Steinmetz is a native of Fresno, California and moved to Southern California to attend the California Institute of the Arts. He teaches bassoon at UCLA and serves on the board of Renaissance Arts Academy, a public school offering intensive arts training regardless of background or experience. He frequently writes for various publications, including Chamber Music magazine.

          Charles Neidich’s world premiere work, And Then There Were…(2014) is his third woodwind quintet, the previous two also written for the New York Woodwind Quintet. The first, Sound and Fury, was composed in 2001 in memory of two NYWQ colleagues, flutist Samuel Baron and oboist Ronald Roseman. His second quintet, La Mano Sinistra, was written in 2008 and revised in 2009. He writes: “In the present quintet as in my past two, I have endeavored to break the traditional limitations of the woodwind quintet. Of course, writing for my colleagues in the New York Woodwind Quintet, each a virtuoso and instrumental pathbreaker and collectively the leading wind chamber musicians in the United States today, has allowed me the freedom to write for extreme virtuosity and extreme drama. It is based on a five note chord – Bb, B-natural, C, C-sharp, E and its inversion creating an eight-note chord: B-flat, B-natural, C, C-sharp, E, F, F-sharp, G, and is in five interconnected sections and like many of my works will incorporate changes of lighting and theatrical elements.” Charles Neidich regularly appears as soloist and collaborator in chamber music programs with leading ensembles including the Saint Louis Symphony, Minneapolis Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, I Musici de Montréal, Tafelmusik, Handel and Haydn Society, Royal Philharmonic, Deutsches Philharmonic, MDR Symphony, Yomiuri Symphony, National Symphony of Taiwan and the Juilliard, Guarneri, Brentano, American, Mendelssohn, Carmina, Colorado, and Cavani string quartets. He has performed throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States, and is a sought-after participant at many summer festivals. Mr. Neidich is on the faculties of Juilliard, Queens College of the City University of New York, Manhattan School of Music, and Mannes College and has held visiting positions at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, at Yale, and Michigan State University. Last spring, he was the recipient of the William Schuman Award given by Juilliard for outstanding performance and scholarship.

        Mendelssohn wrote his String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 13 in 1827 when he was 18. The work was arranged by New York Woodwind Quintet member, William Purvis.

About the New York Woodwind Quintet

         Now in its seventh decade, the New York Woodwind Quintet has maintained an active performance schedule in the United States and abroad while also teaching the next generation of woodwind performers. The Quintet has commissioned and premiered more than 20 compositions, some of which have become classics of the woodwind repertoire. They include quintets by William Bergsma, Jon Deak, Ezra Laderman, Evis Sammoutis, Gunther Schuller, William Sydeman, Wallingford Riegger, Alec Wilder, and Yehudi Wyner. The Quintet has featured many of these in recordings for such labels as Boston Skyline, Bridge, New World Records, and Nonesuch, and released Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet on the Naxos label. Elliott Carter’s work, Nine by Five, was commissioned by Juilliard for the New York Woodwind Quintet in honor of the 25th anniversary of Joseph W. Polisi’s tenure as president of the School. The work remains a staple in the woodwind quintet repertory, as does Carter’s 1948 woodwind quintet.

         The Quintet’s members also honor the legacy of departed members, including the late Samuel Baron, by continuing to perform his transcriptions of works such as Bach’s Art of the Fugue and the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the late Ronald Roseman, by performing his Wind Quintet No. 2 and Sextet for Piano and Winds which was dedicated to the New York Woodwind Quintet and completed just before he died. Continuing that tradition, the group regularly performs numerous transcriptions by William Purvis and several compositions of Charles Neidich. Current NYWQ members are flutist Carol Wincenc, oboist Stephen Taylor, clarinetist Charles Neidich, bassoonist Marc Goldberg, and French hornist William Purvis. The New York Woodwind Quintet has been an ensemble-in-residence of Juilliard since 1989 where they teach individually, as well as coach and administer the woodwind chamber music seminar and program.